Overcoming Yourself - Lesson 2

Metamorphosis (Part 3)

I arrived in Nashville, Tennessee on a Monday afternoon. My 7-Day Meditation retreat started that evening.

I was excited. But not like a 5-year-old, jumping on the bed excited. There was a sense of calm along with that bubble of excitement.

People come to this event with a lot of expectations. Some want to be healed, some want to have an out-of-body mystical experience.

A guy I met from California told me he was there for the brain orgasm.

I knew what he was talking about and I really hope he got one!

Me? I did not have any expectations. I was fully surrendered to what was about to come. This isn’t because I am some enlightened spiritual guru who just came out of her cave after 40 years.

Far from it. 

The last time I was at this retreat, I had all the experiences people talk about. 

I had many mystical experiences where I left my body and traveled dimensions, to the past where I was able to see a certain event in my life from a different perspective. I had full-blown heart expansions (I call them heart gasms) wherein I felt every cell of my body jiggle with electricity. That feeling lasted 4 days.

But I was only able to have these experiences once I had fully surrendered. So this time, I wanted to start my retreat with that same surrender.

I knew if I fully opened my heart and let go, those life-changing mystical moments will come to me.

You can’t trick your mind though.

You can say all you want “Oh me? I don’t have any expectations. I am just here to fully soak in this energy.”

“Bull Shit,” my brain said.

From the get-go, I felt that crap smeared all over me.

Now listen I won’t call myself an advanced meditator but I have been meditating for years. I can sit still for hours and empty my mind. 

Not this time.

Every time I sat in meditation, my nose twitched, my body ached, my bladder filled up.

And then she’d come. My nemesis. Miranda is her name. The non-stop chatter head who lives inside my brain.

She would be in my ear the entire meditation. 

“This is not how you do it”

What’s wrong with you?”

“You aren’t good enough to have any aha moments in your meditation”

“You shouldn’t even be here”

“You wasted so much money coming here, you shameless bitch”

“You can’t even get your mind to be quiet”

“You will never get it”

“Leave. Leave now”

This happened on Day 1 continued on Day 2 and then on Day 3.

Now we were 3 days in, only 4 days left, and forget surrender, forget mystical moments, I wasn’t even able to get my mind to be quiet for one second.

And just so you know, our days are long at this retreat. We don’t do 20-minute meditations.

We do 2 hr meditations, 3 times a day. Sometimes longer.

So that’s close to 6 hrs of listening to her non-stop. 

End of Day 3, I am feeling horrible. I want to leave. I want to go back to Jersey to my kids, my dog, and my husband.

I sit down on my bed before sleeping, dejected. I had no enthusiasm and no energy. If I didn’t show up the next day no one was gonna come looking for me. I could just prepone my flight and leave the next morning. It’d be less torturous than listening to this voice in my head berating me all day long.

I took my journal out and started to write. 

I quote from my journal

“I get it. I get the theory but even after doing this work for so long, I feel like I am a novice. I don’t know what to do differently tomorrow or the day after tomorrow………

My writing trails off here and I don’t quite remember what happened. Maybe I shed a tear or two. Maybe I paused but the next thing on the page gave me hope.

Written in all caps:

I WILL NEVER GIVE UP ON ME

The next day same thing. I am in meditation and my chatter is loud. Too loud. Then something shifts.

It was almost like my higher self came and sat next to me. She said  “It’s alright. Let her come in. Give her a seat next to you too. She can sit down here. She can talk. You look at me and just breathe. Breathe”

I stopped resisting the noise and started to breathe in harmony with my higher self. I can’t quite explain it but it felt like I was breathing in a rhythmic harmonic with the trees, with the earth, with the entire Universe.

Silence. 

Finally, my mind relaxed. Miranda slipped away into oblivion. I floated away in my inner thoughtless world.

Day 4 gave me my next lesson.

This journey is not about an exciting out-of-body past life experience.

It isn’t about the Kundalini awakening.

It isn’t about the heart, the brain, and the full-body orgasms either.

All of the above feel awesome and are transformational in one way or the other

But the journey is about one thing.

OVERCOMING YOURSELF.

We have access, a pathway to the Divine in Us. 

The Universe, your Higher Self, your Soul. Whatever you call it. It’s always there. It’s Omnipresent and Omniscient. 

The journey then isn’t about what you receive but what you leave on it. 

We have to overcome the limited parts of us that fool us into the illusion that we are not whole. Not worthy. Not enough.

That is the whole game.

To meet the Divine in us, we have to emulate the Divine. Not just one day. But every day, every moment. 

And every time we forget, we climb the ladder again. 

I laughed. I legit laughed. My Higher Self sure has a sense of humor. Because at that moment, I knew. That this lesson, this was why Miranda had been conjured. So I see it for myself. I remember it. And so I can no longer forget it.

Pic via Unsplash