As you might have heard, Ali and I just recently headed off to a 10-day Vipassana meditation course at a meditation center in scenic Jesup, Georgia. Feel free to think "retreat", which is pretty much what they are, there's just a lot of guided meditation and they like to call them "courses" instead of retreats. I've taken a couple of these courses before: my first in India in January, 2010, and the second almost exactly two years ago outside Chicago. Ali had also taken one of these courses in 2010, outside Dallas, so we've both been through them before and know generally what to expect.
These courses are all run almost exactly the same, and you can find more basic information, from the organization which runs the courses at http://www.dhamma.org/. The instruction is almost entirely via audio recordings dating from 20+ years ago, and nightly video discourses about the technique and its background. These recordings and videos are all of S. N. Goenka, and there is more information on how the courses and the meditation technique functions, while more general information about modern Vipassana can also be found on Wikipedia: Vipassana movement.
I'm writing here because I came home early from the course and wanted to have a place to send people who wondered why. To understand, let me put it in the context of the past two courses.
When I went to my first course I had been "meditating" for a few months, by which I mean that I would find some quiet place from time to time and sit for 10 minutes or so and get really distracted. Sometimes I would try 12 minutes or 15 or even 20, but I was always distracted. I invented my own meditation plans from bits and pieces of things I read -- maybe 5 minutes of loving kindness meditation, and 4 minutes of watching the breath, and 5 minutes of some other random thing. I ended up going to that first course because I wanted to go see a talk by the Dalai Lama, but the talk was 3 days' train ride across India, and Ali noticed this "10 day Vipassana meditation course" a few hours bus ride away from where we were going to be in Gujarat, so I went. That is, I had no idea what it was going to be like.
So, I went there, got a free room with a roommate, checked in anything that might be a distraction (phone, computer, books, pens and paper, etc.), and then spent the next 3 and a half days sitting in a meditation hall for a little more than 10 hours a day, listening to tapes of a guy speaking first in Hindi, then in English, telling me to sit there and follow my breath. Feel the sensations of the breath in this whole area of my face, and then a smaller area just under the nose and above the lip, then finally a tiny little area between the nose and the lip. Also, not talking to anyone but occasionally the teacher at the site, when he would bring everyone one up about once a day for 5 minutes and ask them how it was going ("Do you have a distinct awareness of the subtle sensations of the breath in this tiny little area? How long can you stay aware of it without distraction? How long do you stay distracted? Good, good. Now you 5 (or 6 or 8, whatever it was that day in this little interview group) practice with me for a few minutes. OK, good, now go back and practice."
Everything else was actually pretty normal -- I ate 3 times a day, good, free, vegetarian Indian food. I got up a bit earlier than normal (4am, first sitting was at 4:30am) and went to bed earlier than usual (9pm is the end of the last sitting, and 9:30pm is lights out), slept all night, watched a movie of the main teacher guy every night at 7pm for an hour or a little more. My back and legs hurt a lot of the time, and towards the end of the third day I couldn't find any place to sit on the cushion in the meditation hall that didn't hurt like hell. I was like the princess with the pea.
Sometime late in the morning on Day 4 of this, they switched the game and taught us another technique. While the breathing technique was actually called "Anapana", this was the "Vipassana" technique, which involved just going from head to toe observing the various sensations in the body in a systematic manner. We would be doing this until Day 10, basically, though the technique was refined periodically: it started top down, then became top-down + bottom-up, then at some point we saw the difference between "gross sensations" and "subtle sensations" and could move quickly or slowly, at some point we began to go inside the body instead of outside, and then there was a point when the solidity of the body actually dissolved and we would just move the awareness through the body like a wave, and then things might solidify again. All amazing and new and strange and very cool.
The Anapana had calmed and quieted my mind down so much that there was very little which would arise in my head. And I had a very calm and objective feeling about everything I observed (which is what they mean, I understand now, when they talk about "being equanimous"). So, when Vipassana was going on for a while it became really clear that if I focused on the sensations in, say, my arm, I would notice, say, a tingling, and then I would suddenly feel other sensations arise along with a feeling, say of happiness, or anger, then the feelings would subside and the sensations would subside and I would move on to the next part of the body. So it became really clear that (a) the connection between thought, bodily sensation and emotions is very tight, (b) all these things subside after they arise, and (c) sensations, emotions, thoughts, and the chain of events from a sensation through all of these were slower, clearer, more visible, more spaced-out in time, etc.
I started being less hungry. My back and legs and various other muscles stopped hurting almost immediately, and I began to be more flexible, and my joints looser. I was, by the night of Day 4 completely quiet in the department of sexual attraction, which was a pretty stark change.
But, by Day 6 other things started to happen. I've long had problems with acid reflux. I've had gastric scopes, been on medication, and have had varying degrees of success with getting more exercise and not having caffeine, chocolate, peppermint, and a few other things. By varying degrees of success I mean, if I get exercise and control my diet and take a pill daily I don't have any problems. Problem was, in India there is amazing chai everywhere that costs between $0.06 and $0.10 a cup and I was drinking a bunch of it because I loved it and I was an idiot. Anyway, by Day 6 a feeling of burning in my throat and chest was coming up, I was belching and having reflux, and that night I found that when I went to sleep at night, when I would "fall asleep" I would immediately wake up. I was basically awake almost the whole night in a state of "I'm tired... start falling asleep... jerk a bit, eyes open, UGH. ... I'm tired ..."
I kept relaxing myself and basically meditating, which helped me get through the night, and I realized, by letting myself relax slowly, almost to the point of sleeping that as I fall asleep something relaxes in my throat, and the burning place that I could feel there was moving somehow, and the sudden pain of it was causing me to wake up. I started getting freaked out and anxious and fearful, thinking things like "I need medical attention, something is wrong. Ali is out there in India somewhere and she won't even know what's going on, oh shit." I think I ended up getting about 2 hours of sleep that night, which was better than nothing -- so somehow I got exhausted enough to fall asleep eventually.
The next day I met with the teacher for the course and he talked me down, and said something which comes up later in the night-time videos but which I needed to hear that day: "You do not need nearly as much sleep while meditating as you are used to. If you let the body rest, lie down, and then focus on the breath as you do in Anapana, and then focus on the subtle sensations in the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, you will find that you can pass the night. Your body will get the sleep it needs when it must, and in the morning you fill find yourself refreshed."
Which sounded like a pretty far-fetched strategy to me.
Anyway, the next night was much of the same, but I tried what he said. It helped me get through a few of the hours, but I would occasionally get tired and frustrated, then scared, then start thinking lots of crazy things and then be up worrying for an hour, then try again and be ok. At some point I did get a couple of hours of sleep but was really like "F this." I went again in the morning and the main teacher at the center and a few other people who seemed to live / work there were around while I met. He talked me down again and convinced me to stay at the course, gave me a sleeping pill in case I really needed it, and I was back meditating again.
Basically, that pattern, in some form or another, repeated for the remainder of the course. I was getting more tired in a way (my body needed rest more often, and cognitively I was slow), but still actually able to be awake and meditating all day. The nights sucked, but I was getting through them and I was actually experiencing what he said about the meditation and sleep tradeoff and the ways of getting through the night.
On Day 10 we learned a final meditation, the Metta meditation, so sending out loving-kindness and compassion to all beings. If Vipassana is a surgery on the mind (which the course sometimes describes it as), then Metta is one of the "healing balms" that helps one recover and return back to the crazy world from this calm and silent place that you've been for what seems like a month.
Then immediately, you can go outside in the bright sun and start talking to everyone you've been sitting with in the course for 10 days. I learned that my roommate couldn't speak English at all, and spoke Gujarati, which I didn't speak at all either. I felt so light, and so connected to everyone and everything, and in love with the world and all the people around me. I also occasionally felt afraid, the fear of the long nights still with me, and I was weak about it and still worried about it.
Longest-story-every a tiny bit shorter -- I had another rough night that night. I tried to take the sleeping pill, finally, because I wanted it all to be over -- and the pill just made me more tired and I still couldn't sleep. A new friend played me Ethiopian jazz music from his phone, which was the sweetest and best music I'd ever heard, and I finally went to sleep. The next day I made my way back to Ali (imagine for a moment going from that straight back into the madness that is India... It's actually impossible to explain how both jarring that is, and how everything was going to be fine as well...), and we found a beautiful hotel near the beach and shipyards in Mandvi and rested for 3 or 4 days until I was strong enough to be back in the world. Also, I'd lost 10 pounds and grown a hobo beard. I could travel all night on a train in India with loud-ass people banging around and talking at high volume by just lying back and meditating.
It also changed my life. I could meditate a couple of hours a day, easily. If I wanted to I could sit for 4 hours on a weekend morning. My reactions to things were completely different now -- something that would cause me to become angry and just react before would now cause me to see physical sensations arising, without the overpowering anger, and I could look at them and decide if maybe there was a new way to react. I could be in a one-sided argument, where the other person was acting out the old patterns that used to cause things to escalate and end up hurting both our feelings, and I would just not escalate, would find a way to de-escalate, and the arguments would fizzle out and things would be different. I was doing different things in my life and my life was so much better.
We got back home and eventually I went down to Dallas and served as a volunteer on a course where Ali and her two sisters were sitting -- I think largely because Ali could see the real changes that had happened with me, and maybe her sisters were interested as well for similar reasons? One sister ended up staying through Anapana but left on the day of Vipassana, but when I talked to her on the phone on her way home she sounded really calm and at peace. Ali and her other sister ended up finishing the course, and they seemed to really get a lot out of it (and didn't have the various problems I'd had).
I learned a lot of things while serving -- some of the knowledge about the dynamics of the course, the patterns that meditators exhibit. One of the things I learned about was "storms". So, as you do Vipassana meditation, you essentially "release" the emotional energy tied up in the body/mind when you observe sensations on the body with equanimity. The course teachings call these "sankharas". When they "come to the surface" you feel the sensation, you feel an emotion, and you move on. But from time to time you encounter various big "sankharas". The teaching also talks about these as "deep complexes". When these come up, you get hit with a wave of emotion, and that wave may overpower you. So you go back to observing your breath, rebuilding attention and equanimity, and then the wave passes. Looking back today, it seems to me that most "storms" are a minute, or 5 minutes, or up to about 20 minutes, maybe some of the big ones can be longer: one of my later teachers talked about flying to Japan to take a "long course" (i.e., a course of 20, 30 or 45 days that only long-time students on the sort of teacher track are likely to take), and when he got on the plane he started having a storm of anxiety that lasted the duration of the flight.
The worst thing about "storms", and the big lesson from them, is that they present themselves as just pure emotion -- fear, with all the physical symptoms; anger with all the physical symptoms, etc. The mind, then, uses whatever thoughts are nearest, and applies them to the emotion, and our logical engine starts constructing arguments and cases for them. So, if I suddenly have a storm of fear, and I've been thinking at some point that maybe I'm not healthy, then I begin to think that I'm realllly not healthy, and in that case I should talk to the teacher to see about leaving and going to the doctor, and all the responsibilities I have, and oh am I going to have to have surgery or something, ... So, being equanimous, that state of having a distanced objective mind, makes it less likely to have something at hand to attach to the storm's emotions, and makes it more clear that, well, this is just a storm that arose from observing sensations that are attached to buried emotional experiences. So then you go and observe your breath for a while until it goes away, and then you do more Vipassana. That's basically the battle.
The nice thing about storms is that you realize that what's "coming up" is actually "coming out" -- you are releasing the bound up emotional stress in the body in a permanent way. It hurts to come out, but it's better out than in. It's why you feel light at the end, and why you don't have the same patterns of reaction, it's why your physical inflammation goes way down by the end of the course (Ali said I looked years younger when I got out of my first course, and I believe it) -- it's why your joints move more easily and lots of your pains go away. At least this is what I think, what I've taken home from my experience.
I had been "storming" in the nights when I couldn't sleep. The problem was that I was basically observing lots of sensations inside my body, in the inflamed area of pain tied into lots of complexes about fear and anxiety. So, the more I observed the worse the storms got, and every night I'd be in a panic and still going in to the teacher in the morning with that. Over the day the regular meditations would calm me down and I'd do it again at night. I probably covered a lot of ground in working through some deep emotional shit, but because I was going deep in a way that I probably shouldn't be. Of course, I didn't know this yet, really, even when I went back for a second course, at a center outside Chicago.
I don't recall all the details of how I felt when I went in for that course, but I know that my daily practice was getting weaker, and I had been through some pretty heavy emotional things a few months earlier, and I felt like I actually could really use another course to get clarity, to jump-start my practice, and to move forward again. Some of the emotional things came out of work with important people in my life that was only made possible by having gone to the course back in 2010. Meditation makes you see some of your baggage and it makes you talk with people about things in a more constructive way. Sometimes that opens the doors to real problems in your relationships, and sometimes that means that things "come up" and out into the open in powerful ways that take a lot of work and communication to deal with. So, it starts a fire, and that fire catches lots of things in your life, and it makes it possible to change things for the better, and that can also be really painful.
So I went to Chicago and took a course. I think I was in a better place, health-wise than before. I actually didn't expect to have much of an issue with reflux, etc., and I knew more now about being able to get through sleepless nights. If it was the same as the last course I knew I could do it, so, time to go back for more.
Short version: I go back and forth between whether it was better or worse than the first course.
My teacher was better for me in this course. I think having an American who'd been around Americans was a huge boon to being able to talk with me about how things work, what was going on, and to give me confidence. The teachers in India were probably "better", in general, having had sooooo much experience (not that this teacher didn't have a shit-ton of experience himself), but the cultural gap was pretty big there.
But, I started having basically the same problems that I had in the first course -- only this time, instead of starting on the night after Day 6 they started the night after Day 4. I told the teacher on Day 5 what was going on, and what I knew, and how I'd dealt with it before, and that I was probably going to need help, but I think I could get it. The storms at night were really bad. I told him on Day 6 (iirc), that I could feel this and that in my throat and he was like "oh! Don't do that! Don't dig around in there -- there's so much tied up in that part of the body that you're just releasing all this emotional energy that's really strong and overpowering." I think it was the next night, there was the biggest and longest lightning storm I'd ever seen, and I had still (really, accidentally, deliriously, I still maintain) been thinking about the feelings I was having in my throat and chest and then "storming" myself. I talked to the teacher on Day 7 and said "I'm sorry, I did that, without meaning too, because I'm so tired and I got frustrated, and then I felt all of these little particles of like hot burning burst out of that area in my chest and they ended up all over my body and I could sit there and feel them one by one and they were hot, and it was like that was my feeling of anger, and it took a long time of just observing them for them to gradually dissolve, and each time I'd feel a little bit of anger." And he said something to the effect of "you don't have to apologize to me -- you're the one who is suffering." That was the day where I was like "this may, even though I'm at Day 7, be the point where I can't make it through" and he talked me down, and though it was sometimes hellish, I finished out the course.
I slept a total of 7 hours in the last seven days of that course -- mostly because on the night of Day 7 I collapsed in my bed with earplugs in and fell into basically an exhaustion coma for 4 hours. I didn't expect to sleep more than an hour or so (I might've gotten 2) the night before departure (you still have to stay overnight after you start talking on Day 10) but I expected that. I stayed up much of that night (having gotten my phone and notebook and pens, etc., back) listening to quiet music and making copious journal notes about what I knew then, what to expect if I come back, etc.
I shared a ride with 3 other meditators to a bus stop, where I waited in the surreal world, to ride basically a nice coach bus, where I texted Ali from my phone, and made my way to Chicago Midway airport. It was insane.
I was in a weird state of mind -- boggled at all the noise and people and activity, tired but clear most of the time. When I looked at people I could see that everyone was visibly suffering: no one was in the moment, everyone was sad or anxious or upset, everyone was distracting themselves, everyone was impatient. I went around the entire airport trying to find food that wasn't just blatantly toxic and found one place that had fresh food made out of vegetables. I let a number of people in line in front of me because they were all in a hurry and I didn't care at all. One woman looked at me in surprise, looked in my face, and then smiled and looked kind of happily confused. I think I probably looked like the only lovingly happy person she'd seen in a long time. It was amazing and weird and painful to see how much suffering is piled on top of us.
I did find two groups of people who weren't looking like they were distractedly impatiently anxiously suffering -- I saw some little kids, like 5 or 6 years old, and they were actually happy. And, when I got to my gate to go to Nashville there were a bunch of musicians (there are almost always a bunch of musicians on a flight going back to Nashville), and, while some of them were pretty much the same, there were a couple of them, including one guy who was playing on a practice guitar right at the gate, who were actually just happy. Make a note of it -- I did.
There was an older woman at the gate who was in a wheelchair, and in obvious pain (probably chronic). I looked at her and she was lonely, so I went over and talked to her for a while and she was happy. We ended up sitting on the plane next to each other (Southwest, ftw) and I talked to her about her teaching career, and we talked about meditation, and I think she was happy and not in pain for the duration of the flight.
I got back, dumped my brain with Ali, couldn't sleep and she helped me to be calm, and finally I was lying in bed completely exhausted and I had a little tiny panic attack that I would "never sleep again", right as I busted right through and slept like a rock. I got solid sleep after that.
This is now a complete novella, but I have to finish...
So, after that 2nd course I talked a lot with Ali about a lot of things, but primary among them was "I know this is hugely beneficial, but it has also been unbelievably painful for me, and I don't know if I can do this again. There has to be another way, but I don't know of any other practices or organizations that don't seem full of it in some way or another." The organization that runs these courses does basically everything right, but they also really focus on the 10 day courses as a way to get maximum benefit, and while they do run some 1-day and 3-day courses, none of them are anywhere near where I live.
So we set a date 6 months later to revisit it (i.e., why worry about it now? Just live in the moment, which is one of the benefits of meditation). I was experiencing huge benefits from my practice still, and was really glad I'd taken that hard 2nd course. I continued my daily practice, read books about meditation and fear, read other authors, talked to people about other practices, I'd even visited a few local sittings. I ended up sitting a 1-day course out in the south Bay when I was out in San Francisco.
I decided that I would try to do a retreat on my own for maybe 5 days. I booked a week at a monastery in Kentucky in the woods near where I grew up. I went there last October and actually decided to use a book recommended by a friend who is a meditator and who follows a different (Tibetan lineage) tradition. The book looked good and I thought I could practice with it. I wanted to see if I could be disciplined enough to run my own retreat in a controlled environment, and maybe whether one day I could run some out of our meditation space at home or at a friend's house.
I had mixed results -- I ended up using 3 of the days pretty solidly, though more like 4-5 hours meditating and a number of hours walking and pseudo-meditating in the beautiful woods, and some hours reading, and some hours eating and sleeping, and then being lonely and wanting to see friends and family. I got real benefits from it, but not the deep sort of benefits I got from the intensive courses before. I ended up leaving early and going to spend time with family in Kentucky and that was really great. Also, score big happiness and life points for just doing it, getting away from everything, and also seeing family afterwards.
Well, Ali and I are having a baby in late October. I was talking about feeling the need to do some sort of meditation retreat, course, sitting, something, this summer. I was feeling like my daily meditation is slipping (down to an hour), I find myself more stressed and doing more and more things all at once, de-prioritizing friends and family, being in nature, etc. People keep giving me lots of reinforcement about being a wonderful person these days, and I think I'm a lot happier with who I am now, in general, than I ever was. But I'm also prone to spend lots of time and high energy in work and partying with friends and work friends and travel and so many things that are not being at home, working on our home, making things more beautiful and nicer, etc. I looked again at 3-day courses and didn't find things that looked easy to get to so much, and I poked around for other retreats with other people or practices and didn't turn up much that looked compelling, and Ali said she was considering doing another 10-day course, so I looked them up and found one and was like, well, maybe it won't be so bad and I've been through this before and I'm sure I can handle it so let's just do it and we signed up for it.
I felt good-ish about it -- I expected a lot of benefit from it, and I knew it would be hard in one way or another, but I figured I could probably deal with it since I'd been to really hard ones before, and knew more things now. Or something.
Anyway, we went down last week to Jesup, Georgia, where the center is and had a good time traveling and being together and got there and checked in and eventually split up to our separate sides of the place (these things are always gender-segregated, which probably avoids a lot of hard to otherwise remedy problems), and I talked to some of the guys hanging around, etc., then we got our rooms -- mine was a double and I was on the top bunk with another pretty nice and cool guy whose only other course had been in Thailand (which sounded awesome).
I ended up leaving on Day 3.
Why optimize for length now? Well, I'll try anyway:
Basically, as is now obvious to me, every course you sit you get back to your old levels of concentration quicker. You also are more likely to have sankharas arise sooner, to see them for what they are, to have small storms earlier -- to have everything happen sooner every time you go -- on the plus side you have more ability to deal with it, but it'll be harder.
This time I got a storm on Day 0 (reminiscent of the Japan-flight storm my Chicago teacher was talking about, but much much shorter) but saw it for what it was. A couple on Day 1, including one that unleashed some really troubling emotions, which arose and passed away and have already helped me figure out some deep things that I've been struggling with for years now. On Day 2 more storms, deep concentration, lots of physical pain the body from all sorts of things coming up.
I had also stupidly been a very bad patient. I've been drinking caffeine, eating chocolate, etc., over the past year or so. I've been taking medicine but have made retreats instead of progress with reflux. Day 2 was turning up lots of things in that old familiar place and I realized that for some reason I had not been attending to the most important thing to consider when thinking about going in for what could be a hellish retreat. It's stupid, and the storm on Day 1 was illuminating to me as to why I've been reckless like that, but here I was.
I also realized that I was a lot more equanimous and aware at this point in the course than in other courses, which was great, as it was helping me see things, deal with things, move forward, etc.
I went to bed that night and realized that I was suddenly having the same sleeping problem as in previous courses -- start getting tired, suddenly realized I'd jerked awake when I'd fallen asleep, repeat, and realize that the problem was in the same place in my body. I would observe the feeling of waking up (not in my chest but in my body as a whole, especially feet and hands) and then notice that I had slightly more alertness but that my hands felt like they were on fire. Cool, also, I can do basic arithmetic: 6, 4, 2 is a series, ok; and 5, 7, 9 is another series -- which is how many nights I'd have left in the course.
It didn't necessarily stand to reason that I would have to stay awake for 9 nights, but I pretty much assumed that would be true. I was not storming, I was aware and rational. I was a little disappointed, but I realized I had also been foolish and I also was not as prepared or committed to this course this time as I should be. I wanted Ali to be here, but I wasn't attached to it.
The thing about these courses is that it's jarring to go deep into this sort of meditation and then leave. The longer you're there the more you need to complete the course, and unwind in a quiet and orderly way, and do the metta meditation at the end and gradually reintroduce yourself to society. It can actually be reallly difficult to leave the course early and go back to the world. Once I'd gotten into 5 or 6 days in the course it was much better for me to finish it out than to try to leave (whether I knew it or not). This time I was 2 days into the course. Granted they were a pretty advanced 2 days because things move faster when you've been meditating for longer, but it was still early, and so if I were going to leave the course I should leave it as soon as possible rather than prolonging it.
That night I was keeping my roommate awake by tossing around (it was very quiet in the room, the bed was very creaky, and he appeared to be having his own trouble sleeping), so I spent time going through the decision to leave and the tradeoffs, then contacting the main servers (the volunteers on the course), to discuss things in the middle of the night, then having camomile tea in the dining hall, walking under the stars (lots of this to go over everything in my head, and to give my roommate the chance to sleep), and finally lying down for a few hours of non-sleep, showering, waiting until my roommate got up, then packing, all before meeting with the course teacher at 6:30 in the morning. There were lots of other details that are too mundane to bother with (why stop now? heh) but that's the gist of it.
Unlike in the past where I expressed having trouble and asked for advice, this time I just told the teacher "I need to leave the course" and then gave him the shortened version of the 300 page novel you just read. I told him that I hadn't been able to talk to Ali about it which would need to be sorted out. The teachers in the past had always responded to trouble with various strategies to get me to stay (just sit the morning group sit and then we can talk after lunch), to get me across storms, to give me things to try later in the night, etc. -- after each day you've built up progress and the duration is shorter.
I had never crossed the point with them of finding out whether it was actually possible to leave the course, they always found a way to make me stay. This time it was early in the course and I was already convinced, without being driven by a "storm" that I should go as early as possible. So the conversation was immediately, "You can totally leave and I'll help you to do that. I can also talk with you about anything that will help you." That was amazing because I could talk with him about what he knew, things he'd seen, etc., and have a real conversation and also leave on good terms and sort out how to go, how to make sure Ali could stay, etc.
A bit later he and I and Ali and the women's teacher had a talk and we agreed it was still a great opportunity for Ali (who wasn't having the problems I was having -- certainly in large part because she hadn't caused her own problems like I tend to do :-) and that I could go and come back in 9 days and pick her up. She would be fine, I would be fine, everything would be fiiiine.
So with that and some mundane logistics, I got my stuff and left, and called a dear old friend in Augusta, realized I was still in a weird meditation-center state of mind, and said "I need a big favor" and told him the two sentence version of what happened and that I needed a place to crash, hopefully have the miracle of sleep, and to just be cool and off the grid for an undetermined amount of time, maybe a few days, maybe a week. He, being an incredible human, said that would be wonderful. So I had a crazy 3 hour drive to Augusta that was harder than I expected, hung out and listened to vinyl with him, and eventually went to bed, had trouble sleeping for a bit, and then finally crashed out.
I stayed there another night and drove back to Nashville today and wrote 75,000,000 words of a story to give a "quick explanation" to people of what happened, and now I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things at home.
I want to make everything here beautiful, and to simplify my life, and to have real conversations with people and tell them how much I love and appreciate how they are in life. I think that means I may have even gotten something out of just two real days of meditation. I have lots of plans and questions and doubts and the "night of Day 2" was a huge inflection point for me where I can't tell what the big picture will look like, but I want to continue to better myself and everything and everyone around me and I decided at 2am the other night that I will have to improve and update my strategies for that.
Metta,
Rick
❤️