Next week, I’ll attend a Vipassana retreat. It’s ten days of silence with no access to technology. That’s all I really know about it. I didn’t research, I didn’t overthink, I just signed up. Something in me wanted to shut out the world and be with just myself.
When I started telling people where I was going, I began hearing two kinds of reactions: the fear from those who’d never gone, and the criticism from those who had.
“You’re sitting for 14 hours a day. It’s going to hurt your body.”
“It’s just the same videos over and over again. You’ll get bored.”
My instinct was to stop talking about it altogether, to protect the purity of my own curiosity. The easiest way for me to do something is to know nothing and just dive in. I trust myself to find the light when I’m blind. What I don’t trust, always, is my ability to stay unswayed by the opinions of others. If I did, I could hear people’s fears without carrying them. I could listen without letting their words become my behavior.
Today, I realized I’d done exactly what I was trying to avoid. I told my trainer that I needed a flow sequence before I left. I was concerned that sitting for so long might aggravate my hip, the old injury that still hums when I’m tired or tense. He nodded, of course, and then said what I actually needed to hear:
“Listen to your body when you’re there, Rocky. Pause in a position and let it speak to you. Then look inward for how to release that tension. You hold the answer.”
He’s right. He said exactly what I’d tell anyone I love.
My fear isn’t that I won’t be able to take care of myself if I’m in pain.
My fear is that I won’t choose to.
That I’ll reach for old habits of performance rather than presence.
The truth is, I can take care of myself. I just need to pause long enough to listen, to guide, to love.
So here I am, preparing for what sounds like heaven: ten days alone with myself. And yet, I’ve never actually spent ten days with just me–my thoughts, my needs, my pain, my joy, my fears, my entire inner world. There’s a layer of hell in that, too.
But through fire comes transformation, and I’m doing this not just for the beauty of what I’ll feel while I’m there, but also for the beauty that comes after, when I’ve burned and softened and grown in ways only silence could teach me.
