Meditation

It's been a long time since my last post, mostly because I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat. The experience was transformational and much needed. During my ten days there, I learned a lot about how little I am able to trust my self and yet, on the other hand, I gained a great deal of trust in my ability to cope and handle difficult situations.

The course was incredibly mentally intense: meditation for about ten hours a day, complete silence unless absolutely necessary to speak, and no non verbal communication with your fellow meditators. We worked alone, lost in our own minds. It wasn't until I got there and started meditating that I realized how terrified I had been of my own mind, of spending time alone with myself. I constantly check on my mind, watching out for pitfalls and dangerous patterns, coercing it into helping me get through yet another day, every day. It rebels against me and makes my life hell at times. Imagine my surprise, then, when my mind docilely cooperated with me during these ten days. It felt an exciting, yet not untenable, range of emotions, including humor, and most of all, it quieted itself during those long meditation sessions, and for brief, beautiful moments, both my mind and the rest of me were completely at peace. So maybe it's time to start placing a bit more trust in my mind. Many people without mental illness couldn't survive ten days in silence, and my mind and I handled it without a problem.

Rebuilding a trusting relationship with your own mind is, in my opinion, one of the hardest things on the path to recovery (at least that I've encountered so far). Recovering from mental illness seems mostly about reconciliation: reconciling yourself to your illness, reconciling with friends or family that you have pushed away, reconciling the illness with  your professional and personal hopes, dreams, and aspirations. When these reconciliations go well, you can celebrate, and when they go poorly, you can seek solace elsewhere. But what about the disappointment when you place trust in yourself, and you betray yourself in the most awful and unforgivable ways? What about the pain when you think you've ironed out all the problems in your relationship with yourself and then something seemingly insurmountable appears? During the period of diagnosis and searching for treatment, I treated myself unforgivably. I need to earn my own trust back, and that might be far harder than earning the trust of my family, my friends, and my coworkers. But ten days of blissful silence are a good start.