Day Eight of 2010 Retreat

Sunday, 10 January 2010 14:47 Written by Lezlie Laws

--written January 9, 2010

I thought yesterday would be the last day of my retreat, and at Mary Ann's suggestion, dinner tonight at Seasons 52 sounded great.  Good food with good friends, a chance to ease back into the world and reflect upon my days of silence and retreat, my time in the dark night.  But yesterday evening I began feeling a slight shifting, a reorganizing of the feelings I've had most of the week, and I decided to push through another day of silence.

     In fact, the week has been pretty miserable.  Hard to meditate.  Hard to sleep.  Not much writing happening.  And me mostly in a fog of uncertainty.  Yesterday afternoon, late, I tried to meditate and kept dozing off, so I gave in to it and curled up under my grandmother's quilt around 4:30.  I fell in and out of sleep several times, each time waking to a sense of something coming, some sort of clarity or difference--or maybe resignation--on its way.  I couldn't put words to this feeling, but I knew I needed to watch carefully.

     At 6:00 I woke to a very strange light in my room.  No lights were on in the house, and I thought maybe it was simply the early night sky still holding memory of the sun.  But soon, my eyes discerned a pattern of light on the ceiling--it was being thrown from the landscape lighting beneath the Chinese elm just outside the bedroom window and filtered by the partially opened vertical blinds.  Not fully awake yet, I tried to close my eyes for more sleep, but kept returning to that pattern of slats.  It was so soothing.

     As I woke up a bit more, I relished my coziness under the warm quilt, my willingness to stay in the afterglow of my nap, and the odd pleasure of the geometrical pattern of light on my ceiling.  And then, something began to ease open, like a knot in a muscle that was being skillfully massaged allowing blocked energy to flow.  But this wasn't a bodily opening.  It felt more like an expanding of the energy field around the body, or maybe the prana inside the body.  I don't know, so rare was this feeling for me.  That's about as much as I can say right now.  Here at the end of the retreat, I would like to say something cracked open, insight flooded the room, and I was filled with peace.  But that's not what happened; it wasn't dramatic at all, and in fact, could easily have been missed if the light pattern hadn't held me still a while after waking.  There, curled in the middle of my bed, I felt some tiny shift, some bit of easefulness.  I was momentarily free of resistance to anything, and I clung to those slats of light as if they were my ladder to more of this state.

     Eventually, I rose, ate a bowl of soup, and read more of Thomas More.  But the word resistance kept coming to mind.  Having experienced the one pure moment of non-resistance, I began to think about the myriad ways I respond to experience with resistance.  I say "see" because this understanding wasn't really cognitive, but more sensory.  The word resistance would come to my mind, and then I would hear very clearly the rhythmical thumping of tires on I-4.  I stood at the back door, worrying about how the cold was affecting my plants and was drawn to the wad of black, decaying leaves in the fountain.  In the kitchen, waiting for tea to steep, I examined an amaryllis bud that has been very slow to break through the bulb; it holds tight to its inner mystery, resists coming forth, even though I've kept it in a sunny window for weeks.  It has a fierce claim on its dark and silent gestation.  Stop resisting, I heard.  Stop resisting.

     I was awake a lot of the night, entangled in this feeling and these images, and got up early this morning to do another meditation.  I've rarely had direct insight out of my meditation practice, but this morning, I knew the week of retreat had finally brought me to this:  stop resisting.  I made a list of the ways I resist and the controlling behavior that grows out of resistance to what is.  It was astonishing. 

     A firm believer in making clear intentions, I see how my intentions have often grown out of resistance to what is or have created a block to what might be.  Make intentions, set goals, be disciplined, be volitional--all of this good in some ways, but not if it leads to resisting what is.  Acceptance is the opposite of resistance, and acceptance frees up the innate energy, wisdom, and creativity that rises up when we stop contracting around an event.  The muscles have much to teach us; the body has its own expertise.

     So, on the eighth and last day of my annual retreat, I went downstairs and stood at the back window to check the early morning garden, seeking its steadfast calm and beauty as initiation into the day, into the new year, the new decade.  It had been an unusually cold night in Central Florida, and to my surprise I found the deck covered with tiny pellets of ice, the garden, usually a crucible of aliveness, a soggy winter mess.  I smiled.  "Resist nothing, accept everything," I said as I turned to make coffee.