Flying The Starship Together
Why I can't wait to start an eight-day silent retreat.
Resonant World #20
It was my first breakthrough in understanding trauma.
It was October, 2011, and for the past eight days I’d been sat cross-legged at a retreat centre in the foothills of the Himalayas, in northern India.
At four o’clock each morning, the tinkling of a bell roused myself and the other participants in the 10-day Vipassana meditation bootcamp for the predawn practice session.
I can still remember the chorus of birds and insects that exploded into life as the sun crested the mountains — and the stiffness, aches and volcanic anger that were my constant companions for the first, grueling days.
Upwelling Of Grief
I’d been living in Pakistan at the time, and had made the two-day drive to the Dhamma Sikhara meditation centre, outside the Indian city of Dharamshala, because I wanted to change.
Earlier that year, I’d suffered a bout of depression that had knocked me out from work for 10 weeks. Though I was outwardly functioning by the time of the retreat, I knew I needed something more than all the talk therapy I’d done, or the anti-depressants I’d taken. And Vipassana promised no less than complete liberation from suffering.
As anyone who’s done a silent retreat will attest, the first days can be particularly challenging. Thoughts race, the body complains, and layers of uncomfortable emotion you’d stashed away at some point in the past begin to make their presence felt. But as we neared the finish line, I felt sublime. Sitting for an hour was no longer a painful ordeal. I rejoiced in the silence, observing the thought: “I could stay here forever.”
It was then — when I’d thought I was on the home stretch — that it hit me: An upwelling of grief so powerful that it made my body shiver and shake. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and I felt compelled to flee the hall for the shelter of my cell-like room. There I lay on the simple wooden bed, my face tingling with energy, my body shuddering and wracked with sobs.
I was experiencing something entirely outside my control. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it felt like I was undergoing some kind of exorcism.
“Psychic Sludge”
I’ve since learned enough about trauma to make more sense of what was going on.
The emotional impact of traumatic experiences lives on in our bodies — in our very cells. My friend Lisa Schwarz, developer of the Comprehensive Resource Model for treating trauma, calls this residue “psychic sludge.” It lives beneath the level of our conscious awareness, so no amount of talking will bring it to light — it’s buried too deep.
The good news is that our body wants to release these old emotions — but only when it’s absolutely certain that it’s safe to do so. It’s a measure of how tightly defended I must have been that it took eight days of intensive, all-day meditation practice to reach a point where I could finally allow myself to feel those emotions fully — and let them go.
It wasn’t just the intensity of the physical sensations that accompanied this release that was so striking: It was the fact that there was absolutely no story attached. I had no idea why I was crying, or what the grief was all about.
New Understanding
After what seemed like about 30 minutes, the trembling, weeping and tingling faded. I felt clearer, lighter — even more at ease. The next day, something similar occurred — at about the same time in the morning — though that release was markedly less intense. After the final retreat day, I left feeling better than I could remember, and some part of me knew I’d crossed a threshold into a new phase of my life.
The impact of the retreat was so profound that I began to practice for an hour or so most days, and kept that up for a couple of years. I also gave up alcohol: I’d only been a social drinker, but I valued the newfound sense of clarity I’d established so much that the thought of clouding it with even a sip of beer or wine suddenly seemed anathema.
I’ve often wondered what lay at the root of the all the shaking and sobbing that had erupted in my system — seemingly out of nowhere — that morning in the Himalayas. I suspect it might have been linked to trauma that occurred during my birth, but I have no conscious memory of that — and so that’s only a guess. Whatever it was, the release gave me a first-hand experience of the kind of processes I’d later read about in books by Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk and many others, who argue that we need to work through the body to heal.
“Global Acupuncture”
When it came to writing Aftershock, my book about British military veterans struggling to find new ways to recover from psychological injuries, what I’d learned through Vipassana proved pivotal. My own embodied experience of releasing trauma gave me the confidence to question the limits of the talk therapies still standardly offered to veterans and other trauma survivors. I became an advocate of “bottom-up” interventions — ranging from Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR); to equine therapy; and Lisa Schwarz’s work — to name a few. I knew that if I was going to deepen my own journey of integration, it would have to be through my whole mind-body-spirit complex. Though talk therapy could be enormously valuable, it could only ever be a first step.
That’s a long preamble to explain why I’m so excited to start eight days of silent meditation in Germany on Sunday — the latest installment of the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training on individual, ancestral and collective trauma I’m undertaking with the facilitator Thomas Hübl.
I’m not necessarily expecting another release as potent as the one I experienced in India (though I’d welcome such if it came: Nothing beats a good bit of deep processing). I am, however, intending to work at a subtler level — setting aside the lump hammer for the sandpaper, if that’s not stretching an analogy too far.
I’ve noticed lately an uncomfortable energy lingering in my system that I can’t name with the precision I’d like. The closest I can get is “disappointment energy” — a greyish, filmy form of “psychic sludge” that feels denser first thing after I wake up, but can constellate into the familiar features of a dreary inner critic when old triggers arise — particularly related to my sense self-worth, and old patterns of competition, comparison and not feeling good enough (my fractal of a collective modern disease). I aim to give this dreary domain of my inner architecture some quiet, loving, patient attention, and see what I might learn.
What’s so exciting about the retreat is the fact that the 200 participants have already done a year of intensive inner work together, establishing a field of coherence that I suspect will be highly supportive of a truly galactic inner journey. We will, I have no doubt, be “flying the starship together.” I’m ready for a trip into hyperspace.
If I was to set my intentions for the week, they would include — but not be limited to — the following:
Rest: I want to give my system some deep downtime.
Release: Establish the depth of inner coherence my body needs to spit out more fragments of whatever psychic shrapnel is still stuck in my system — individual, ancestral or collective (if indeed such sharply-drawn distinctions make sense).
Receive: I’m inviting deeper levels of inspiration and sychronisation with calling, including in the form of clear visions and plans. I want to develop more reliable contact with the subtle, embodied experience of “purpose” I wrote about in Resonant World #15 (with a cameo appearance by 7th century Chinese poet Tu Fu).
Support: Through my personal practice, I intend to play my part in evoking the collective intelligence that will no doubt begin to do its healing work within and through all participants as we move into deeper resonance.
Service: I believe that when a group comes together with this kind of committed, conscious intent, the impact will be felt beyond the individuals directly taking part. Thomas likens collective trauma work to “global acupuncture.” Next week, I suspect we’ll be carefully inserting another well-placed needle.
Last but not least, I do enjoy the retreat centre food.
This is work I’m doing for myself, for the generations standing behind me, and for the generations still to come.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Further Resources:
I wrote an in-depth account of my experiences with Vipassana meditation for the Financial Times weekend section. You can read it here.
Thomas’s new Point of Relation podcast: Unpacking Legacy Burdens through Collective Spaces, with Deran Young & Dr. Richard Schwartz.
I write Resonant World in my spare time from my job as an editor at DeSmog, a nonprofit climate news service. Though I’ve sworn off coffee this month as a kind of micro-fast ahead of the retreat, I will be back to guzzling it afterwards — so down payments are welcome. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who supports this newsletter with whatever currency — whether it be attention; intention or caffeine. Thank you!
Fascinating.