How a meditation retreat made me less afraid of people
Mindful Malcontents! Graham here.
It's been a wild last couple of weeks. I spent the first half ensconced in a forest in total silence, touching into one of the most profound, life-changing experiences of my life (more on that below!).
Then this past week has been the complete mirror image. Honor and I got dolled up in our finest office drag, to meet with various politicians and other influential types. All part of our ongoing quest to put the Big Feels Club approach on the map as Victoria seeks to overhaul its mental health system.
What do we want? A response to crisis and distress that recognises our common humanity! When do we want it? Um, now???!
We had a great meeting with Minister for Mental Health Martin Foley, and meanwhile Honor continues her tireless work in her role advising the Royal Commission into Mental Health. (Interim findings from that will be out later this year - stay tuned.)
It's been a particularly vivid version of the 'double life' you can so often experience as a sensitive cat. One week wearing Ugg Boots and a rug, the next week wearing fancy shoes that don't quite fit and talking policy, funding, and system change.
The powers that be are making the right noises about potential future changes, but for now we'll continue to push things along ourselves with this tender little club. As always, it remains largely a labour of love (we don't fit any of the funding boxes in this current system) so if you like the idea of having two fellow travellers in there showing the mental health system a better way, consider throwing a few bucks our way by becoming a card-carrying member.
Okay, on with today's issue. Meditation retreat you say? What! Why would I want to spend four days alone with my thoughts???
The day-to-day fear of life with other humans
I spend a lot of my time trying to avoid other people.
Walking the trail by my house each morning, my sincere hope is that I won’t see another soul. Every stranger on the path is a dilemma. Do I say hello, despite everything in my body tensing against it? Or do I look down at the ground as I pass, and lean into that cold drip of shame in my stomach?
‘What, you can’t even say hello? What kind of person are you anyway?’
It’s not that I don’t like people. I’m a busy, sociable person. My job involves regular public speaking. But I’ve always found other people complicated.
It’s one thing to want to hide from people in the unpopulated expanse of a nature walk. But this pattern holds true in busier settings too - sidewalks, supermarkets, open plan offices. Every new person appearing around a corner prompts a startled jolt, a moment of full-bodied fear. What am I afraid of exactly? I couldn’t even tell you.
Well, I couldn’t until last week that is.
Into the forest we go...
Four days of complete silence
I’ve just come off a four-day silent meditation retreat in the forest – something I’ve wanted to do for years. I’ve had this theory that it might somehow help me sort out this whole ‘fear of the world’ thing.
Turns out it I was right, but not in the ways I expected.
There was plenty of sitting meditation - time alone with my thoughts (my many, many thoughts) which I found less challenging than I thought I would, given I am far from a regular meditator.
But the truly profound experience happened in the in-between moments. The movements between sitting and dharma talks and meal times. A constant stream of micro-interactions with thirty strangers negotiating this shared space in complete silence.
I would find this kind of extended time with strangers challenging at the best of times. To make things worse, no chance to speak meant no chance to deploy my finely-honed people-pleasing skills to defuse any potential discomfort or awkwardness.
Terrifying.
A hundred judgemental voices
In this quiet, miniaturised setting, my fear of people latched onto the smallest things.
‘Did I close the door to the meditation room too loudly? Am I standing in the way too long as I take off my shoes? Did I take too much food at dinner time, and did everybody notice??’
The silence of thirty strangers was far from peaceful in my head. It was a silence in which I suddenly had space to hear what was really going on in there.
It turns out I don’t have a judgemental voice in my head. I have hundreds. Many and varied judgements projected onto each new person I meet. And all these judgements really all boil down to one single question hammering like a drumbeat in my heart.
‘Am I doing it right??’
Not quite the inner peace I signed up for hey?
No. It was something considerably more useful. Something that, in the Insight Meditation tradition, they call ‘clear seeing’. What I usually experience as a kind of vague cloud of fear became crystallised into these clear and specific judgements, woven right through my inner monologue. So this is where all that fear is coming from.
My first-rate tracker
Two straight days of this was horrible. Then it shifted.
I had a one-on-one with the teacher - 15 minutes that gave me more hope for the future than I’ve had in years.
“You have a first rate tracker,” she said, referring to my busy mind. “That will help you enormously in life. But it will also get you into trouble.”
“Tracker” was the perfect term, I thought. I told her about my constant feeling of alertness to the movements (and possible judgements) of others. The feeling of being ‘always on’ and eager to please.
And I told her about the fear. How it has become my ever present companion. The feeling in my heart - like my chest and upper back are a clenched fist, tensing against the world.
“It sounds like you need to know you’re safe,” she said simply.
Yep. That’s about the size of it.
I left her interview room with a lightness I hadn’t touched in ages. And a simple phrase she gave me to repeat to myself whenever I felt awkward, stared-at, exposed.
“It’s okay. It’s safe to relax.”
This guy gets it. Every day is a forest retreat for him.
Finding my playful self
That phrase carried me through the final day and a half of the retreat. I’d repeat it to myself sometimes by the minute.
"It's okay, it's safe to relax."
The effect was extraordinary. My oh-so-serious “must get this right” mindset became far more playful. Each little interaction with the others at the retreat was an opportunity to connect - with a conspiratorial smile, with some half-baked miming joke.
These strangers on the path weren’t problems to be solved anymore, they were simply fellow travellers.
On day four we finally broke the silence and spoke to one another, sharing how we’d each found this whole thing. It was instantly clear how common my experience was. This beautiful, peaceful setting was filled wall-to-wall with the rampant inner critics each one of us carried. We joked they should get together and have their own retreat somewhere.
We all just want to feel safe
So many of us don’t want to be looked at, and yet we desperately want to be seen. We want to see one another. To take ourselves, and our lives, less seriously. (As Alan Watts says, sincere yes, but not so serious.)
It starts with feeling safe. Safe to relax. Safe to be seen.
For whatever reason, for some of us that’s a long-term project. It takes a great deal of patience and self-kindness, so it is immensely helpful even just to know you’re not the only one who feels this way.
In the days after the retreat it’s clear this is no quick fix.
The feeling of safety comes and goes, the fear is still there much of the time. But what I’m left with is a clearer path forward, and a curiosity about who else might be on that path with me, just around the next corner.
Further reading
If you want to share this article, it's also up on ABC Life now, so you can share this link.
If you're suitably intrigued by my experience, you can dip a toe by checking out one of the audio talks over on this page. These are all by Jess Huon, the teacher who led the retreat and who gave me that magic phrase ("it's okay, it's safe to relax.")
I really treasure Jess' mix of deep, existential insights and relaxed, down-to-earth style. Her website has a few other goodies to explore too, including some online courses she's running in a few weeks time, and upcoming retreats.
Finally if you're interested in exploring meditation more - and especially if you're convinced you're a 'bad meditator' - here are a few things I've found encourage me to actually do it:
Finding a regular meditation group to join, even if it's just now and then. There are many of these, but a really accessible tradition is one called "Insight Meditation". There are Insight Meditation groups all over the world. Google "insight meditation + [your town]". Here's Melbourne's one here, who meet weekly.
Tara Brach's guided meditations - available as part of her podcast feed.
A meditation app with guided meditations and a timer. I'm told Insight Timer is a good free one. If like me you think paying a monthly fee will help you actually commit more, I just finished Sam Harris' 50-day guided meditation course and enjoyed it. (It took me about 150 days to do, but that is totally fine.)
I also really want to tell you all about my new found love for walking meditation, which I think is actually kind of perfect for people who have a lot happening in their heads, since it's more about the body and movement. But that's a story for another time (including the unexpected challenges of moving very slowly and mindfully in a public park surrounded by off-leash dogs. BORK! WHY IS THAT MAN MOVING AT SUCH AN UNUSUAL PACE! BORK BORK!!!)
