Guides

At the end of January and beginning of February, I completed 10 days of silence. It was an experience that I will never forget, and a place, not physical, but a place internally, in my heart and mind, that I still return to.

I would like to share a journal entry about one of my experiences and learnings while I was there. I hope you enjoy it.

The Mind Plays Tricks

For periods throughout my life, I would find it difficult to sleep due to overthinking. I was sleeping well through my stay at the meditation center until one night I couldn’t.

By this point in my stay at the center, I had come to major realizations, and it seemed that a deeper unconscious pattern chose this particular night to express and reveal itself.

The evening was perfectly cozy. My last meditation of the evening went well. I took a warm shower and hopped in bed. My mind was still, my eyes were closed, and then I thought, “It’s been awhile since I’ve ruminated before bed.”

It was like I said “open sesame” to my rumination brain.

I would spend the next 3 hours ruminating on scenarios that did not exist, and I took every thought as truth and reality, most of them fear-based, to the point I had convinced myself that my marriage was over and that I would be doomed to live an unsatisfactory life no matter how hard I tried.

“Damn, this is exhausting. I don't want to do this anymore. PLEASE. STOP. Go to bed,” I told myself.

I started practicing vipassana. I started to breathe slowly and focused my attention on my head, working my way down section by section until I reached my toes, then working my way back up.

Asking for Help

After that long episode of rumination, I asked source consciousness for help.

“Please, help me stop doing this, ruminating, assuming, gaslighting myself. I’m tired. I’m overwhelmed. I feel like I’m doing everything I can to get better. I’m even here at Vipassana center  and I’m still suffering.”

People practice vipassana to cease suffering. That is the promise of vipassana. I was practicing it and I was still suffering, so it only added to my belief that I was beyond help.

“I feel like I am trying so hard to get better. I really am. Why isn’t anything working? I’ve been at this healing stuff for years, trying to do the right thing, eat right, exercise, meditate, serve others from my heart space, and still I suffer.”

I felt myself sink into heaviness and numbness. My head felt heavy. My ears felt blocked off, where no matter how loud something was, it came through my hearing canal muffled. I wanted out, I was drained, exhausted.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and did what I always do, meditated.

The Moss

My eyelids were heavy, my body already floating since it felt like my muscles had given way from mental exhaustion, and I could do nothing but sink into my bed.

Breath after breath, the weight and heaviness turned into relaxation. A darkness came over my eyes and forehead, and a third-eye movie screen appeared. My body felt distant, almost weightless..

As I allowed my arms and legs to go limp, a green and red, almost neon-colored light started to draw shapes across my third-eye screen. The neon colors pulsed like living veins across the darkness behind my eyes.

The line of light felt alive.

The line started to make a drawing of a bush, the kind you see outlining the front lawns of houses. The spirit of these bushes felt alive and communicative with me.

I could think, but thinking felt hard.

It was a strange feeling because I felt separate from this thought form, yet it was in my head, in my mind. I felt slightly more expansive than usual, and the presence of the plant bush was light and bright.

“What are you?”
“Who are you?”

My third-eye screen shifted to me walking down the gravel path earlier in the day, admiring the greenery on a stick that I used to decorate the fairy house.

It felt like the moss was looking, looking and seeing through my eyes, and I was feeling what they were feeling as the view zoomed in on the greenery.

Then what felt like telepathic communication answered.

It had a voice.

It was high-pitched, friendly, and sunny.

“Hi, we’re moss. We want to be your friend.”

With delight I responded, “Oh wow. Well thank you.”

“Eat us,” it responded. “We will help you with digestion.”

I remember feeling strangely comforted, like something gentle had found me in the middle of my exhaustion.

Before I could ask anything else, they disappeared.

My senses and body sensations came back to normal. Immediately, I felt that I needed to write my experience down because I didn’t want to forget this.

I thought it was a dream. I always forget my dreams, so writing it down would be the best way to record this amazing experience, but then I remembered I did not have access to a pen or paper, as journaling is not allowed during the course.

I was left with hope, hoping I would remember this dream when I left there.

The Deer

Soon, I fell asleep and woke up to the breakfast bell.

It was around 6 a.m. before daybreak. As I walked the gravel path again, the morning was cold. I could see my breath as I exhaled. It was the kind of cold that makes one conserve their body heat. The gravel beneath my shoes sounded unusually loud against the silence of the morning.

I allowed my mind to go blank on the way up the trail, and out of the bushes, a deer appeared.

My stomach dropped and I froze, standing there speechless.

It reminded me of a deer I saw many years ago on a hiking route back home in Michigan. The deer walked beside me, only two arm lengths away, and it was the most profound experience I had ever had with wildlife up until that point.

That memory flashed, and then I was right back in the present moment thinking, holy crap, a deer is staring at me.

It was not moving. It was about 3 feet away, and I could not see its body, only its head peeking from the forest.

I gathered myself and spoke to it telepathically.

“I won’t hurt you.”

It continued to stare, and I stared back.

It walked out of the forest and stopped in the middle of the path right in front of me, never losing eye contact with me. It took a breath, then another, then a third, and I knew because I could see its breath in the air as I saw my own.

The silence of the forest felt thick, almost sacred.

It looked back to where it had previously been standing, looked forward again, and crossed the path into the other side of the forest.

Before I could move, a second deer followed suit, staring at me, looking back to where it had been standing in the forest, looking forward, and crossing the trail.

Finally, a third deer followed, looking at me before walking forward to follow the others.

I was left alone in silence, continuing my walk to the hall while trying to digest what I had just experienced.

The Art of Letting Things Be

It wouldn’t be until 2 months after the 10-day course that I would really see how often I made assumptions, created narratives, and straight up gaslit myself into believing an opinion or judgment I created about someone or something. I saw how this pattern would ruin experiences and relationships.

At that moment, I started practicing the art of letting things be.

I don’t have to understand everything. I don’t have to make sense of things and happenings. I don’t have to assume the worst or protect myself from people’s judgments.

I am divine. I am experiencing life exactly as it has been intended for me to experience it, and there is nothing that I can do to change the destiny or storyline that was created for me before I was born.

I chose to surrender and trust my fate.

A significant amount of peace flooded my mind as I accepted that I am loved and that no experience that comes into my life is here to hurt me. I am here to love and be loved. My heart believes that, but my ego does not trust it, and that is the nature of being human.

I practice anything that helps me stay in this place of peace.

When my mind begins to make sense of things, justify actions, or create reasons for people’s motives and behaviors, that is my signal that I am slipping into fear, judgment, and criticism, and that is what creates my experiences of anxiety, anger, resentment, and fear.

I didn’t realize this until I felt the shift from peace to ego for myself in a state of awareness as it was happening, and the thing is, this is happening a million times a day.

The Limits of Understanding

The truth is, people are complex. I am complex. We are this way because the universe itself is vast and impossible to fully understand. We are part of it, therefore we too are beyond complete understanding.

Our human brains try endlessly to make sense of everything, people, experiences, suffering, destiny, but sometimes the search for understanding becomes its own form of suffering.

Being is the only thing I can truly do.

Allowing the intelligence of a source to flow through me is all I can do.

We Are Here

I knew deep down that what I had experienced before with the moss and the following morning with the deer, they were guides. They were God, universal consciousness, source energy, all that is, taking shape and form in a way that I could understand.

It was telling me, I am here, we are here, you are not alone.

Conclusion

Looking back, I realize the greatest thing those 10 days of silence gave me was not the absence of suffering, but awareness of it. Awareness of the ways my mind creates fear, stories, assumptions, and distance between myself and the present moment. Somewhere within the exhaustion, the surrender, the moss, the deer, and the silence, I also experienced something else, a quiet intelligence that seemed to exist beneath all the noise of the mind. Something loving, patient, ancient, and deeply connected to everything. Since leaving the meditation center, I still catch myself slipping into fear and overthinking, but now there is also a part of me that remembers. A part of me that returns to that internal place of stillness and trust, remembering that even in moments where I feel disconnected, overwhelmed, or lost, life is constantly communicating with us in ways far beyond what the thinking mind can understand.