La version en français c’est par ICI
When I posted about my upcoming 7 days of silent meditation retreat, many people asked that I share back my experience afterwards.
As I shared back then, this retreat is part of a two year program with Thomas Hübl, The Timeless Wisdom Training, when we get to explore ourselves, beginning to see through, and process our individual, transgenerational and collective trauma (more on that will come on other posts).
I have thus been sitting for a full week with 200 hundred other people from the European cohort of the program (200 more gather in the US for the in person retreats).
It has been over a week now since I came back, and I am still processing what surfaced in me during that time.
My first reaction when thinking about writing and sharing openly was : “It’s too intimate.”
What it comes down to, as many shared with me after the week, is more intimacy with oneself.
I could see so many patterns in me, I could see how I tend to react to what happens to me, and how much of it are stories, reactions fueled by past experiences.
Usually a week of retreat with Thomas Hübl I experience as a week of intense group therapy. I am put in a shaker, experiencing many triggers, learning to be with, accept and slowly evolve from (“heal”), relying on the ability to let it be seen in a relationship to help to integrate.
It was very interesting, but not surprising, to acknowledge that I don’t require interactions with other people to be triggered. Or only the slightest of them : crossing path with someone, and either locking or not locking eyes, hearing some other one make a sound, feeling another person’s energy, that I interpreted as anger, fear, love…
I had plenty to work with during the week, simply by being with myself and such basic relational input.
Again confirming that most of the time others simply play a role in my internal personal theater play.
I could discern more clearly some of my survival strategies. For example, how to feel safe in a large group, my strategy is to make connections with as many people as possible - and seeing that for others, it can be the contrary. Some will create distance with the group to feel protected. Or some will stick to a small number of people they know and feel comfortable with.
Seeing also how this is at the same time a curse (not feeling safe) and a blessing (being able to connect deeply with many people), that contributes to my being me, unique in a way.
My best moments, though, were attending the night meditation.
My room was in another building 15 min walk away from the main building.Before the retreat started, I wondered if it would be worth it to wake up in the night, and walk 15 min in the dark countryside, just to sit for one hour with a handful of other people, in a space that holds 200 sitting together in daytime?
The first night, I just decided that I would let my sleep decide : if I woke up in the middle of the night, as I often do, I would rather go there than lie awake in my bed.
So I went. And it was beautiful.
Simply beautiful, first to walk on the road in the moonlight, and then, sitting, and feeling such peace, deep peace that I couldn’t feel during the day.
Because the days were challenging for me.
Stretches of 40 min sitting meditation, 20 min walking meditation, and again 40 min meditation. A 20 min break, then start again, if it’s not time for a meal.
I could not stay with myself for such a « long » time in peace.
I felt pain in my body.
I felt despair.
I felt at some point lost in unbearable feelings.
To make it clear, I have a personal history of trauma that most probably happened to me when I was very young, as I was left alone with no one teaching me how to regulate my nervous system.
As newborns, our parents teach us to sleep, to eat and to digest (remember those first 3 months of your child if you ever were a parent ?). Then they teach us to walk and to talk.
Very importantly, parents also teach us how to regulate our nervous system when feeling intense emotions. See that mother picking up a wailing baby, and soothing her with her voice, with movement, her whole body contact, her love ? That’s how a baby learns to regulate emotions.
When that support is not fully available, whatever the reason for it, the baby will learn to hold her emotions, stop feeling them because they are too painful. If no one is there to help you soothe from intense distress, you just stop feeling it.
But the feeling is stored in your body, and will get released when you have grown the ability to feel through it and integrate it. That is most probably what happened to me, as I experienced discomfort in my body, that translated into despair stories in my mind.
It was only in the evening that some peace started to come back to me, culminating in those magical moments in the middle of the night.
And it also dawned on me at that some point that some of my stress was not just mine, but belonged to the room, or, as we can put it, to the « field ».It’s only when some of that stress started to lift up after a few days, with some people accessing a deeper space of silence, that I realized how much stress was actually present in the room in the beginning, feeding a feeling of oppression and kind of despair and loneliness in me.
All of this took place in surreal weather. It was the beginning of April in the north of Germany, and I am not entirely sure whether it was normal for that time of year in that geography. But, as we sat lost in time, we found ourselves in the middle of a snow storm that lasted for a couple days, leading to a white landscape of clarity, with 15 cms of snow holding for a full bright day. It then it started to thaw, and the entire landscape started to melt, reflecting the changes in my internal landscape.
It all somehow culminated in me in a realization that a part of me could never relax entirely, and was preventing me from feeling fully at peace, from letting love fully in.
That clarity has been with me since, knowing this is what I have to face to keep growing.
But that is the start of another story. And this one, I am not fully ready to share here yet.
We allow the perma-frost to melt in its own time with the beauty of our awareness. Thank you for your lovely sharing Claude- I feel this!💕🙌