Finding Calm in the Midst of Chaos
During an evening on the deck with my housemates, I could feel myself becoming irritated quickly over tiny things that normally would not bother me or could be easily ignored.
A suggestion to add a standing mat in front of the kitchen sink was seen as a suggestion to add one more obstacle to trip over and clean around.
Connection attempts from my partners were requests for me to behave in a specific way.
Tropes about Harry Potter and related tales were a hat tip to my inability to remember details of books I had read and movies I had seen.
So I decided over the course of the conversation, which I did not participate in, that I ought to get away somehow. Any time I start to experience excessive annoyance and the desire to not talk, I know it’s time to go solo for a while. To get away from the social obligations of interaction and emotional stability. I had been fantasizing about attending another meditative retreat, and wondered longingly if I could pull one off at home. I couldn’t go to an actual retreat center — most of them were closed due to COVID anyway, and even if they weren’t I wouldn’t have wanted to put my self and housemates at risk by being in close contact with so many other random people for so long. But within the confines of our home, it might be doable.
My experience at home would be different in many ways:
- I still had to work
- We had a house meeting scheduled that I could not miss
- There were chores to be done around the house
- Home contained a lot more distractions than a retreat center
I knew up front it would be different and that was ok. I generally enjoy trying new things, or old things in new contexts, without having any idea how it will turn out. And attempting a meditation retreat at home was just a very specific form of practicing that.
6:00 am: Wake up and get dressed
6:30 am: Make tea and breakfast while listening to a dharma talk
7:30 am: Do a chore (clean up something around the house, gardening, sweep trash from garage/side of house, etc)
8:00 am: Meditate
9:00 am: Work
12:00 pm: Lunch
1:00pm: Work
4:30pm: Light exercise and shower (optional)
5:30 pm: Dharma talk
6:30 pm: Do a chore (including a house meeting)
??? pm (varied by day): Meditate
9:00 pm: Sleep
Even though an at home retreat wasn’t the same environment as a retreat at a dedicated center, I still benefitted from it tremendously. I felt more able to relax, and to let go of the things that had been grating on me.
For example, cleaning has been a long standing strain on me since moving into this house. It’s challenging for me to see a mess and leave it where it is instead of cleaning it up immediately! But it’s been even more challenging because a much larger fraction of the time than before, the mess would not be mine. During my week on retreat, I committed to letting dirt and spills be where they were, despite a strong urge to clean them.
To worsen this, we had a fruit fly explosion/infestation the week of the retreat. On the first day, we collected over a hundred flies in our apple cider vinegar & soap traps. No one seemed to have any idea where they all came from, and it began very suddenly. Initially, I felt annoyance and a righteous sense of “I told you so”, as I had brought up kitchen cleanliness in the contexts of pests, even fruit flies specifically, in previous house meetings. But my house mates seemed unfazed and unconvinced that it would become a problem. The annoyance and righteousness soon gave way to anger and frustration of having to now live in this reality that I had so desperately wanted to avoid.
Yet an interesting thing happened. After those initial feelings retreated, I was actually able to sit in the common areas and eat, despite all the flies. While my housemates were changing the traps often, trying to crush the tiny creatures between their hands, creating a score chart to keep track of who had intentionally killed the most, and groaning about how disgusting and awful it was, I was oddly at peace with the situation. Of course it was not my most preferred environment, and it was disheartening to see so many creatures die, but on some level I had a deep sense of
This is just what my reality is right now. And that’s fine. It won’t be like this forever, and honestly this moment isn’t really that bad.
Even though I was the one who had dreaded this possibility the most, it also seemed, through the cultivation of a temporarily more peaceful mind, I was the most able to manage my feelings about it and exist without suffering through it.
The first few days of the retreat were the most powerful. But I noticed as the week wore on that I felt I was getting fewer benefits. Pepper was out of the house Monday and Tuesday, and this contributed to my ability to relax into the mental container I set. But as soon as something came up that I had to take care of, it seemed challenging to maintain the purposefully mindful attitude I had set out to achieve while also constantly tracking what she needed.
This came as a disappointment at first: I wanted to maintain my calm mind and graceful, easy existence. But after sitting with the disappointment for a while, it faded. In some ways it was a metaphor for life. As far as I can tell, it isn’t possible for most people to be calm and graceful 100% of the time in conventional every day life.
And there was something more. By continuing with the steps I could manage after Pepper came home …
- by continuing my breakfast ritual,
- by continuing to meditate,
- by continuing to do chores without accepting acknowledgement,
- by continuing to listen to talks online,
- by continuing with my intention,
… I was moved closer to that state of calm than if I had done nothing at all or if I had given up on the retreat halfway through the week. So I chose to persist. I didn’t know how the last few days of the week would go, but I knew it would be better than nothing.
One of the most interesting experiences I had during my week was the sensation of my own expressions of care manifesting as strong sexual sensations. Though these feelings felt almost physically indistinguishable from the way I might feel about someone to whom I was intimately attracted, they existed inside a completely different mental space where the intent or desire was not physical or emotional connection with another person.
It was the desire to sustain. To create or add a source of nourishment for others, especially as it relates to food, but also metaphorically and emotionally. There was a longing to care for. It was a yearning for something like the deep delight in bringing happiness and comfort to someone else, the want to be half of two hearts that light up together. There was also a want to share my inner world in some way — a thing I sometimes hesitate to do (and due to lack of practice, sometimes fail to do, even when I explicitly intend to).
But more than that, I didn’t want those things. I was those things. Every wisp of my soul became those things and nothing else.
Yet it was distinctly sexual. It maintained the qualities of all-encompassing intensity so strong I wanted to scream and the deep want for connection on some non-existent ethereal plane.
One of the ways I was able to tap into the mindful spirit was by consuming recorded media that mimicked Dharma talks I would have listened to on retreat. Spirit Rock and the Be Here Now Network both have a tremendous amount of free resources online for anyone interested in Insight meditation and mindfulness talks.
During my previous retreat experience, I listened to two one-hour talks per day, so that was the same schedule I set for myself at home.
The very first talk I listened to was one on embracing the dharmic path, given by Ram Dass. This was my first time listening to or reading anything by Ram Dass. He had a gentle, funny personality and spun rich stories that blended dharma and real life in a way that was easy to understand.
The content of the lecture was thought provoking, but somehow that was not the part that really stuck with me. Dass’ energy came through on recording from the very first sentence. It was a placating mixture of sincere, calm, honest, and supportive. He maintained a perfectly tuned amount of tension, pushing each idea or story just enough for the listener to take it, but never pushing so hard as to force.
For a while I worried I was getting too much of my content from a single source (Alan Watts). I wanted to diversify, but found many talks and podcasts to be “too [something]” and I wouldn’t stick with them. They weren’t as engaging; they weren’t casual enough. Some were too academic or religious, some were too woo, others were delivered in a conversational tone I couldn’t relate to or understand. And so I just continued listening to the one source that worked for me. I was interested, after all, to know more about eastern philosophy, and I loved the playful energy. But I also wanted more ideas from different perspectives.
I am thrilled to have found another lecturer that I like as much as Alan Watts. Especially after listening to this talk, out of all the ones I enjoyed during my week-long engagement with mindful content, I can finally feel the possibility of immersion in content from various sources opening up. I am hopeful this implies a more rich and well-rounded future for my practice in mindfulness, insight meditation, and eastern philosophy at large.
One thing I have often struggled with in my life is expressing myself in certain cases where I worry the people around me will perceive me as being insincere, pretentious, and attention seeking. This particularly affects my ability to discuss my spirituality with people I know.
I‘m not clear on whether this is different from imposter syndrome. I don’t fear that I have people fooled into thinking I know more than I really do, worrying they will find out and know I’m a sham. Rather, I don’t want to give the impression I know more than I really do, meaning they could never be fooled in the first place. I want to be precise in communicating how much I know. I’m not exactly sure where this comes from, perhaps I have a few memories stuffed way down in my subconscious somewhere when another person perceived me as knowing a lot about a topic, but upon pressing me for specific details of that topic found I could not produce them which led to disappointment for them, but did not light up fight or flight systems in my brain.
Still, for topics I explore in a non-academic, non-scientific, non-rigorous way, I have historically tended to avoid sharing.
Enter: Krishna Das his podcast episode on Polishing the Mirror.
He talks about ways he avoids feeling like a fraud for not expressing himself the way many mindfulness guides do, and exploring the many mindfulness personalities that have arisen in him over time.
Through the talk I found I had been violating one of my core principles for living my life: being and expressing in a completely authentic way. Although I had not recently explicitly expressed myself in a way that was inconsistent with what I felt or who I was, the repression of certain parts of me was an inauthentic act that shielded me from imagined criticism or other negative social consequences. Instead of being able to share myself as I really was with the people I loved, I was driven to hide parts of myself and only show the parts that felt fully formed and acceptable. This force in me claimed there was no value in exploration or the personal growth that comes from beginning something new.
When I came to this realization, I was a bit sad. My spirituality is not something I speak about often, even with close friends, but it is something I lean on as a way to explore my own thoughts and feelings about what happens to and around me. I started playing with it as a way to help me limit the imposition of a tightly restrictive identity (and, as a result, it’s not strictly core to my identity). Despite this, it is something I spend a fair amount of time thinking about, allowing it to influence my thoughts and behaviors at times, taking and keeping the pieces that work for me and leaving the rest behind.
But I am also very happy to have seen this, as I now feel I am equipped with an awareness of this old pattern of interacting and a new frame that allows me to see my sharing as what it is: an expression of something that is deeply interesting, enjoyable, and important to me.
One mindfulness teacher I had heard about at Spirit Rock, Joseph Goldstein, has a channel on the Be Here Now Network, and I chose to listen to a talk called Reflections on Non-Self. This talk was deeply satisfying. I felt it adequately supported me as I existed in my regular, every day life. It gave practical advice and a variety of novel exercises to try on my own, delivered in timing and tone that allowed the listener to experiment in real time.
Goldstein talks about how when you pay a lot of attention to a thought that arises in your mind, it’s like you temporarily fall into a very short dream. You become disconnected from the physical reality around you and think yourself or your experience into existence. So, one exercise that I tried as he described was to change thoughts that contain the phrase “I am” to, instead, contain “there is”. For example, “I am sad” would become “there is sadness”.
It’s a minor grammatical shift but it somehow softens the impact of the statement. It’s less personal. For me it makes it much easier to accept negative feelings, especially self critical ones. Because instead of having a thought like “I am too intense”, it becomes “there is intensity”. And using this framing, thoughts almost always came in pairs. The above phrase, for example, might be followed by something like “there is awareness of intensity”, and sometimes even a third thought “there is awareness of awareness”. By the time the third thought emerges and passes, enough time has gone by that the strength of the initial thought or feeling has diminished and my mind can become calm and quiet again. And as you can imagine, this mode of thinking brought about a very concrete, palpable sensation of “being the awareness” that is often described in Buddhist and mindfulness environments.
Also, because this thought patterns eliminates the use of a word (“I”) to refer to the self, the separation between self and other fades away over time as long as the thought pattern persists. Removing the difference in the way I spoke or thought about myself versus everything else made that divide disappear.
The final, crowning piece of this thought experiment (which makes this exercise a bit of a hat trick, to be honest) is it nicely highlights how the nature of all things that arise is to pass away. Not just in the cliche and often stated high-level sense of all things passing away, but specifically, that desires and impulses arise and pass away, even when not acted upon. By engaging with this experiment, you can watch it happening in real time.
There is desire.
There is awareness of desire.
There is awareness of awareness.
This was so exciting! Being the awareness, realizing the ephemerality of desire, and eliminating sense of divide between self and other were things I had managed to foster for extremely brief moments in the past, but I had not been able to bring to make them front and center of my reality. And yet this very simple exercise managed to demonstrate them so clearly and in a way that was easy to persist for relatively longer periods of time than anything I had tried before. I find this exercise to be an extremely elegant tool that I keep coming back to.
Alan Watts is one of my favorite authors/lecturers when it comes to eastern philosophies. I have spent numerous hours listening to his recorded lectures. One thing that is really beautiful about Watts’ lectures is they move along like a dance. I’ve hardly had a moment to grasp or contemplate an idea before he moves on to the next. Watts has this way of keeping me engaged with every word, so I don’t get stuck contemplating a particular idea; by the end I’m left with a deep impression that feels to have moved and changed me, yet I could hardly tell you what the exact content of the lecture was. As though the real knowledge gained eludes being conveyed in language, except by Watts himself.
But for this retreat, I decided to crack a new book for a slower experience instead of putting in my headphones: The Way of Zen. For the first time, I reread sentences or entire paragraphs five or six times. I took out a pen and underlined the passages that brought about a feeling of connection or resonance — something I previously would have considered to “ruin” to book. The experience was different from listening to Watts’ recordings, though no less enjoyable. Watts’ writing is full of rich metaphors, and reading each page took a few minutes as to give me time to savor and appreciate every thought, turning each one over and over and over to examine the many facets and to see how the lights of harmony and realization refracted from different angles.
One idea that struck me as particularly interesting from the first few pages of the book, was the idea of people and objects as processes instead of permanent “things”. That is, in English, we have a strong conceptual and linguistic distinction between things we consider to be permanent and things we consider to be temporary actions— nouns and verbs. Nouns are things, with defined space or boundaries, and a more or less permanent identity. Verbs indicate something that has happened or is happening, and verbs imply something in motion or something changing in some way. In truth, this distinction isn’t real. All animals die. All structures eventually crumble.
And some other languages, especially in the East, are structured in a way that allows the expression of this because the same word can be used as a noun or verb depending on context.
… objects are also events, [our] world is a collection of processes rather than entities.
Even as a single person lives their life, they change dramatically and continually; from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to seniority. To think of ourselves as having a single, solid persona can be painful, as we are actually part of the larger process of the universe, changing physically, mentally, and emotionally from moment to moment. Forcing ourselves to operate in accordance with a consistent identity can cause us to behave counter to our true nature.
Out of this mini-retreat, one thing stands out to me as a recommendation I want to give to everyone: don’t be afraid to play. I don’t only mean in retreat situations — this applies in almost any context. Whether you’re trying to learn a new skill, deal with a difficult situation, deepen or widen a practice, or experience the present moment… be flexible. Turn ideas on their side and hook them up with other ideas that seem to be completely unrelated. Shedding the rigidity normally used to think about the world and life will give you new perspectives that completely open you up to new ways of existing. Playing with varying mental frames, completing thought exercises, and allowing new ideas to go through me while resisting the urge to make sense of everything was instrumental to the growth I achieved through this endeavor.
In the end, I was pleased with the outcome of the retreat. I didn’t have an idea where I would end up with so many variables changed as compared to my retreat at Spirit Rock, but I also didn’t have any destination in mind besides having some quality time to myself.
If you have any questions about my experience or would like links to the specific talks I mentioned in this article, please reach out! I would be happy to share them with you.
