More tidbits from meditation course
May. 11th, 2018 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aroraborealisNow that I'm a few days out from the end of the course, the pieces of the experience are coming a bit more to rest in my mind.
Going in, I had been thinking to myself that I usually spend about 10 days at Burning Man, so was mentally drawing a bit of a parallel, which turned out largely to be not particularly useful, except that: It's true, I can survive 10 days doing something that's uncomfortable, and even get good value out of it for myself. AND -- and this was super super helpful in the moment -- when I was having such a hard time on the first day of the retreat, I had a lightbulb moment from the miserable first days each trip to the playa: The first day always sucks. You're not settled in, yet, and it's a new routine, and everything's strange and discombobulated ... that was great.
Getting so familiar with the small walking loop right as spring was really developing a head of steam was magical. We could practically see the leaves unfurling in front of our eyes!
There was some magic to being safely ensconced in the privacy of my own mind, even though I was surrounded by people a lot of the time, and I discovered on Day 6 that a lot of my emotional shields had dissolved when I saw a bunny out the window, just sitting there, looking SO DARN CUTE that I just started crying -- not upset! Just, you know, full of emotion and it spilled out. And similarly, the morning of day 10, I went out for an early walk at dawn, which was one of the most breathtaking dawns I've seen, and just had tears streaming down my face for the beauty of it all. It was nice and interesting to have shed some emotional skin and be able to have more direct access to my inner world.
One day during one of the "strong determination" group sits, one of the other people in the room got the giggles. I could hear him trying (and increasingly failing) to hold it in, and I -- susceptible under any circumstances to contagious giggles -- was nearly done in, myself. The AT asked a course manager to encourage the person to leave the room to get himself together, which he did. I think it would have been pretty amazing to be in a meditation hall with 100+ people with the giggles, and that's something that, if this were MY meditation course, I would have let happen. It's still fun to imagine!
Going in, I had been thinking to myself that I usually spend about 10 days at Burning Man, so was mentally drawing a bit of a parallel, which turned out largely to be not particularly useful, except that: It's true, I can survive 10 days doing something that's uncomfortable, and even get good value out of it for myself. AND -- and this was super super helpful in the moment -- when I was having such a hard time on the first day of the retreat, I had a lightbulb moment from the miserable first days each trip to the playa: The first day always sucks. You're not settled in, yet, and it's a new routine, and everything's strange and discombobulated ... that was great.
Getting so familiar with the small walking loop right as spring was really developing a head of steam was magical. We could practically see the leaves unfurling in front of our eyes!
There was some magic to being safely ensconced in the privacy of my own mind, even though I was surrounded by people a lot of the time, and I discovered on Day 6 that a lot of my emotional shields had dissolved when I saw a bunny out the window, just sitting there, looking SO DARN CUTE that I just started crying -- not upset! Just, you know, full of emotion and it spilled out. And similarly, the morning of day 10, I went out for an early walk at dawn, which was one of the most breathtaking dawns I've seen, and just had tears streaming down my face for the beauty of it all. It was nice and interesting to have shed some emotional skin and be able to have more direct access to my inner world.
One day during one of the "strong determination" group sits, one of the other people in the room got the giggles. I could hear him trying (and increasingly failing) to hold it in, and I -- susceptible under any circumstances to contagious giggles -- was nearly done in, myself. The AT asked a course manager to encourage the person to leave the room to get himself together, which he did. I think it would have been pretty amazing to be in a meditation hall with 100+ people with the giggles, and that's something that, if this were MY meditation course, I would have let happen. It's still fun to imagine!
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Date: 2018-05-11 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-13 06:02 am (UTC)