"Why did I decide to come to this eight day silent meditation retreat?"

I asked myself as the bats dive bombed my head

Ecomaste Retreat Center, Costa Rica

I lay in bed unable to sleep the first night of the retreat as I asked myself the all important question: “Why did I decide to come here?” My brain was coming up with an exit strategy for the next morning as I tried to console myself over the amount of money I paid that I didn’t expect to be refunded.

My main problem was I was tired and it’s always hard to make big decisions when I’m tired. I know that. So I told myself that if I could just sleep, I would figure things out from a much clearer place in the morning.

But that was my big problem. I couldn’t sleep and it wasn’t for lack of trying. I took my herbal tinctures to help me sleep and have lucid dreams, and then I took them again. I had yet to have a lucid dream and since I purchased it, I figured I would just keep going with it along with the other things to help me relax and it seemed good to take it at night.

I showered and washed off the dust and energy from a day of flying followed by a three hour taxi ride on a winding road through beautiful mountain scenery that left me teetering for a short moment on the brink of car sickness. I was happy to be sitting in the front seat next to the driver, Jonathan, who loved a diverse array of music and chatted with me in English. Then I had turned off the light and tucked myself into a twin bed under two fleece blankets.

The problem was that I was in a private room with ensuite bath, which I booked because it felt kinder than the other option of a shared room with bunk beds. I applied what I had learned about self care and spent a little extra money to do what I thought would feel supportive for my nervous system while test driving my first eight days of silent meditation retreat. I figured I would want to decompress at night and the uncertainty of night noises from others, even if the noises were not in words, sounded less than appealing. That is a round about way of saying that snoring and restless noises from others can keep me awake. My own moments of sleep noises didn’t worry me, but might have bothered them as well if I was having a disrupted night. I have been told I snore quietly sometimes and that it is cute. But that is always subjective isn’t it? Unfortunately for me, my upgraded private room was missing windows with screens and was more of a bed tucked into a open crawl space below an actual private room. You know, with full walls, windows, and screens. The room up above was made out of shiny wood and had a peaked roof. It looked lovely from the outside as I strolled by. My room was tucked underneath, had a composting toilet in the outdoor, open air bathroom, which was really a large white bucket with a toilet seat and lid and I was told, had an aversion to urine. After my path to nature was blocked by a wheelbarrow, I took to urinating in a glass jar and pouring it down the shower drain. I am very sure that is too much information and I want you to know what I was dealing with upon arrival and why I was feeling a bit tender and concerned about eight days of jungle living that first night.

And all those things were not my main issue upon arrival, although they were issues for me. My immediate concern that night had to do with the bats that began to fly around inches from my face and head after I turned out the light. I couldn’t see them of course and as the air from their wings whooshed erratically around my cheeks, I felt pretty sure I was dealing with little black creatures with fur, not feathers.

My mind got busy trying to keep me safe by also reminding me that I am afraid of snakes and brought the image back of a green viper which had joined me on a yoga platform on a previous trip to Costa Rica one day and slithered around my mat and yoga blocks as I sat about six feet away watching. I didn’t learn until later when a wide eyed listener told me the slender, five foot long emerald being was deadly and I needed to keep my distance in the future. My mind reminded me that I was only a forty five minute drive away from that yoga platform, in the jungle of an ecolodge, at night, with no windows or screens. Every five or ten minutes, another bat flew by my face. It was clear to me that my abode would appeal to more creatures than just me; the bats were a testament to that. The owner hadn’t helped things as she mentioned on my first late night tour of the lodge, to be cautious of poisonous snakes near the waterfall, if we wanted to go there for swimming. She assured me and others on the tour that they tended to leave people alone. But I wasn’t so sure. I had seen the viper and it seemed to be attracted to my yoga things.

I imagined some of them might like to tuck into the crevice in the wall above the shelf with some wooden ladder-like steps leading up to it that held my mattress. I just couldn’t get the green viper out of my head. My creative mind continued to try to help me and reminded me of the one time I crawled through a bat cave in Malaysia thirty years ago while a local tour guide turned his small flashlight to spotlight a little snake tucked in a nearby crevice, happily eating the blind bats for dinner. After that, he tossed my new husband and I into a river in separate inner tubes to experience “white water rafting.”

There were a lot of bats over my bed in the crawl space. I wondered if bat eating snakes were poisonous too?

I flicked on the small reading light I brought with me in hopes I could see how big the bats were, but they were good at disappearing. It took a few attempts interspersed with moments of deceptive stillness in the air before I confirmed things. A small, black, flapping creature fluttered in the small space about six feet away from me, seemingly disoriented. But later I realized they knew what they were doing because after dragging my mattress a few feet away from an electrical panel situated close to my head, that I also discovered with the reading light, and pulling the fleece blankets back up under my chin, one of them came and took some time to really check me out. I could feel it a few inches from my head coming at me with innocent curiosity using its bat radar to approach me from different angles to help it discern who this new creature was in its jungle.

The electrical panel so near my head concerned me, as I had used a meter to measure the unhealthy frequencies the things emit in my old house and the meter would make a horrible shrieking sound if I held it within a few feet. Definitely, my head was in the shrieking range. The EMF specialist I hired back then, used meters to teach me how important it is to keep one’s distance from such things. I was certain this thing was also not going to be good for my sleep and that is how I found myself crawling out from hiding under the blankets so I could push my mattress further down the shelf and closer to where the bat had been hovering.

Moving my mattress was not helping the herbal tinctures one bit and I knew I needed a second dose soon.

Things were not going well for me.

My mind happily continued its quest to keep me safe and help me by reminding me of the young witchy neighbor I had once at around the same time I met the viper. She liked to keep her screens open and made herbal tinctures. One morning her watery eyes and swollen leg spoke to her suffering; it seems her open armed proximity to nature had allowed a scorpion to creep into her sheets and it must have felt threatened or squashed a bit as it had given her a good and painful sting.

I wondered if I should shake mine out a bit before I tried harder to sleep. Again, I asked myself why I had come? Loud insect sounds flowed around me as I lay in bed, along with the new sound of the feet of something pattering through my outdoor bathroom. I had almost reconsidered and canceled my flight before booking this private room.

My uncertainty led me to do some guided writing to clarify if this trip was really for me. The question that came from the subtle beings I chat with was, “Why did you sign up?” And the words that flowed into my brain in response were: “I want to be quiet.” It seemed like eight days of silent meditation in the jungle would be pretty quiet, it was over New Years, and it also felt like a good way to start things off. So I decided to give it a shot and move forward with booking things.

I lay tired and grumpy that first night and scowled at my intuition. “I came to be quiet?” I said to it, sarcastically. “And this is what I am getting?”

I had been asked to turn in my cell phone the following morning. The retreat included a full respite from technology. That night I decided to keep mine. I was not going to lose access to calling a taxi, which was what I planned to do if they did not solve this problem for me.

The next morning, after breakfast, I dropped a note into a bowl where I was told the assistant, Tim, would address any issues people were having. I mentioned my bat problem and asked if they had a tent I could set up in the middle of my room, or something or somewhere that would be bat free.

On the break when I came back to my lodging, there was a tent in a bag, and a large plastic net nailed to a beam near my mattress. They didn’t nail it to the ceiling, but it covered most of my bed.

I decided to give myself another night. The bats still came in, but not as much or as many and I learned to relax a bit with their company. When feces appeared on the ledge at the end of my bed, I worried a bit. And by then it was around Day 6 and I was committed. I stayed anyway. I think a rat had come visiting. It left a few droppings near my clothes as well the next day.

The jungle did like to visit me sometimes.

Which brings me to why I really think I came, and what I got out of the whole thing. As I imagine you may be wondering.

You see, I really haven’t had a good relationship with meditation techniques. Over twenty five years of yoga and yoga retreats and a couple spiritual gurus I cycled through from India, I definitely had tried a few. I even signed up for weekly lessons, delivered to me from the Self Realization Fellowship. I finally quit in the middle of the night. That night, in the midst of practicing while my four year old son was asleep, I felt the density of my body so strongly, I started to feel really ill. That was it for me. I hadn’t found enlightenment or bliss. I couldn’t see the light in my third eye. Well, I saw it once, but that was it and I couldn’t see it again despite my efforts. So I was done. Meditation was making me sick.

Eventually, in Switzerland, I found my own, open eyed technique that I find enjoyable and serves me well. I have written about it here. I was happy staring at the light on water, or a leaf on a tree and going into an altered and expanded state. Doing my own thing was the answer for sure.

But then my friend from Sedona I touch in with every year or two, told me she was coming to El Salvador for about a week and asked if I wanted to meet for breakfast?

I sat in Soya with her, with an asparagus omelette and peanut butter smoothie in front of me, while she told me she was fresh out of two months spent in silent meditation. She stayed alone in a small, wood cabin for about $35 a night. The fee included two daily meals prepared and delivered to her along with some firewood. (I guess even by the beach in Mexico, it got cold at night). After those two months, she decided her current plan to build a retreat center in Sedona was causing her stress that was not serving her, so she let go of it all. Now she was headed to teach a meditation retreat, which she offered for free, at a place in Costa Rica. She had other plans as well and in general, I could tell she was really listening and trusting the unfoldment of her life journey. After Costa Rica, she mentioned she would do another two months of silent mediation in that cabin. At one point she looked at me and said, “Aren’t we lucky we can do these things?” Which for me was more about living the way I want and less about spending months in a little cabin sitting for hours in silent meditation in a humid place in Mexico. I wasn’t so sure it sounded lucky. More like determined or on a serious spiritual quest I wasn’t so sure sounded very fun, if it were me… Last time I had tried something slightly close to that, it had made me sick.

So I asked her a bit about her experience.

She mentioned something about finding stuck energy in her body and moving it to her heart where it was transformed from density into light. She said the heart is like a fire and the process seemed to feed it and left her feeling more light, open, and free.

I was a tiny bit intrigued.

That was when she hooked me with her next story.

You see, my friend was raised by Sufi parents in South Africa, who had her sitting and meditating at the age of three. Sounds good doesn’t it? Or at least, it makes sense that she was rather adept at all these techniques.

Her parents were Sufi teachers.

Still sounds good, right?

But then she mentioned some details about the stuck energy she had transformed and told me it had to do with her father. It seems that growing up, the Sufi teacher had a propensity to break her bones, including her skull, which at times, had sent her to the hospital.

This left her with some physical pain which made it hard to sit comfortably for hours in meditation, as she liked to do. She tried healers. Lots of them. Good ones she said. None of them could do anything, so she realized she needed to heal herself.

And somehow, during those two months, she took that tension and restriction in her body, and moved it to her heart where it was transformed into light. She said it was a very tangible experience.

She followed that little story by mentioning that the next time she saw her father, and he became angry, she viewed him as a beautiful soul, with a wound. And she saw the wound separately from him.

She watched him rant and sputter in front of her and observed the two things, calmly. Her beautiful father and the unconscious wound he was expressing. As she stayed calm, his wound stopped talking. The same thing happed a few times more. By the fourth time, she told me he seemed to relax in front of her like a young child. The wound had simply melted away, at least when it came to facing her.

I was impressed by this. I recently visited family over Thanksgiving and there were a few times I felt I took a hit, when a couple of them acted out and sent some angry energy my way. I was tired when I got back to El Salvador and needed some time for recovery.

My friend had a ninja trick up her sleeve and I wished I could really understand this new dojo move in the few minutes she told the story. But I didn’t quite get it. There was a specific point in the heart she spoke of. And how did she stay calm and unaffected by the energy?

We said goodbye and agreed to keep in touch. And I kept wondering about it all.

On Christmas Day, which I was spending blissfully alone, family-free while my sister hosted what seemed to be a rather challenging group of elderly people lacking hearing aids, my friend texted me. She said had had an impulse to reach out and see if perhaps, I might enjoy coming to her retreat? Still intrigued, I considered it despite my general aversion to meditation techniques, and I checked the dates on my calendar. It was ten days long and I had an event scheduled here in El Salvador that conflicted. I would only be able to stay for eight. “No problem,” she responded. “We can make it work.” “It’s ok if you leave early.”

“But what about my blog?'“ I said. “I don’t know if I can write two posts in the next few days, and you said no technology.”

“We can figure that out,” she responded again. “You can use your computer for a few hours if you need to.”

So, a few days later, I had a ticket, my “private” room booked, a taxi for the three hour taxi ride set up, and two blog posts finished and scheduled to post on Thursdays. I decided to leave my computer at home. I really didn’t want to come home to what I imagined to be five hundred emails if I didn’t address it for eight days, so I started unsubscribing from almost everything.

It is strange now that I am back, to get so few things in my inbox. And nice. I feel like I can breathe…or have time, sometimes strangely uncomfortable non-distracted time and space, to do other things.

In the end, I found my friend to be an incredibly articulate and inspiring teacher. She guided me through techniques I had tried in the past, and this time, they worked better for me. I counted from one to seven with each breath, then from one to fourteen, then from one to twenty one…until she offered the next technique.

She had us listen to the pause when our inhale and exhale changed and speak the word, “stillness” internally, when we noticed a tiny pause in our breathing. She pointed out that words evoke states. As I did this, stillness began to vibrate in me more deeply.

She had us ask, “Who Am I?”, as we sat after warming up with those techniques while we waited to see what our mind came up with. The mind can’t answer the question.

We practiced noticing our thoughts and observing things.

We practiced sitting. And sitting. And some of us, like the lady next to me, were adept at squirming and adjusting their cushions every few minutes. At times, I found it physically excruciating. But I played with observing that too. A few days before I had been mountain biking for a day and fantasized about shoving a bag of frozen peas between my legs when I got home as my seat was so sore. I think that was God’s way of preparing me for this. Mountain biking with a rock hard seat, was way easier than six and a half hours of trying to sit still on my cushion day after day.

The attendees did not speak. But my friend did. In the evening, she spent an hour answering people’s questions, written on little slips of paper they left in a tiny metal bowl. She gave two spiritual talks a day, for an hour each, and included many beautiful quotes from spiritual teachers. And she, and sometimes her assistant, taught a one and half hour daily yoga class that included long holds, and positions that were new to me. The yoga poses, in this particular style of Hridaya yoga, were intended to open energy channels in the body and prepare us for meditative states and the long periods of sitting. I found them quite effective and was intrigued. The instructors referred to each one as a “performance” and it felt like that after holding it until parts of my body started to scream. But when I came out of the pose, I felt an openness and a flow of energy that delighted me.

I found that after a few days, as I moved into the second hour of sitting, I did start to drift into an altered state and information, or thoughts that were not just “busy” but helpful, would drift into my mind. Things my friend would have said were arising for processing.

She taught us how to imagine coals in our heart area and to breathe into them just like you would blow air onto a fire with a bellows. Then she spoke of the tiny area of the heart on the right side of the sternum, where the first heartbeat of a fetus begins. We often were asked to bring our awareness there and to move dense energy we found in our bodies into that light for transformation.

Sometimes, it felt like it was working.

I noticed tension in my body I didn’t realize I was holding. It seemed to be a little soup made up of righteous anger, betrayal, and a little dusting of victim energy. That tension was painful and I could feel how it took energy to hold onto it. It was hiding high in the back of my neck, and in my shoulder. Frustrating knots my mind had justified for a long time.

I don’t want to discount things that have happened to me, or to you. Painful things. Things that it makes sense to feel angry about. But the energy of it all felt stuck. And I was clear that as I craft this final version of my book, I wish to present it to people without those unprocessed frequencies in it.

As I listened to her and sat quietly, I practiced separating people from their wounds and seeing them differently. I am still practicing.

One day she asked us to imagine putting someone we felt loving towards and who felt supportive for us into the area of our hearts. Four people came to mind and I put them each into my heart. I didn’t feel much. I wasn’t sure if I was really getting it, since nothing much seemed to be happening. Then she asked us to put a challenging person there and my chest clinched up into a knot. So I got it.

She mentioned that children tend to close their hearts when faced with challenges and that true protection comes from an open heart as darkness, is always dispelled by the light. She wanted to show us how to shift the strategy I imagine many if not all of us, carried from childhood.

I got curious about that too, and I play with my heart and its energy more now. I think of the little spot, a little to the right of the sternum, where a tiny bit of the heart resides.

She reminded us that things take time and change is a process. Clearly, she was living what she was teaching.

I like to remind myself what she repeated a few times: all souls are on their own journey and the only one I can control or am responsible for is my own.

My journey. Your journey. My kids, and their journeys.

“Arigato gozaimasu,”…thank you…bats, teacher, Costa Rica, and challenging people who all help me add tools to the belt strapped around the waist of this butterfly. It is good I have strong wings to carry them all and I am greatful.

I know it is a process to learn how to use them with grace and ease.

I will likely attend my friend’s silent retreat in Boulder when she offers it in July. She hasn’t sent me information yet.

She mentioned her teacher at Hridaya does not like psychedelics. Just meditation.

I differ on that.

That’s ok too.

I am finishing a three day juice cleanse and will likely dive into things with my mushroom companions to see what they might teach me. It is the start of a New Year and I desire to savor and utilize it as best I can, in my own way.

And we all have our own way. I hope this little vignette of my test drive is useful to you in some way. I don’t believe there is one correct way to do things. In fact, both my grandmother and Sitara, my friend, have mentioned that to me. You don’t have to go to a silent meditation retreat. You don’t have to take psychedelic mushrooms. The main suggestion I have is to trust your heart, how you feel drawn, and to stay curious about things and feel as best you can, that you are loved. I am sure, despite the pain many of us experience that it is all intended to help us experience more love, regardless of how we go about doing so.

I wish you blessings with your path, however it leads you. We will all meet at the same place regardless of how we get there.

Sitara studies mediation and yoga at Hridaya Yoga, in Mazunte, Mexico.

On the way to the airport after the retreat, with a cup of cacao and turmeric tea in me from a local cafe

You don’t have to talk to swing, and it soothes the nervous system. This one would go high and I loved it.

*Also, a shout out to you paid subscribers. Thanks. Your support touches me. And no pressure on the rest of you. Right now, this is my offering and I am happy to keep it free. But please share it if you like and let me know how it is landing for you and how you are doing.

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