The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Meditation

  • My first 10 day silent meditation retreat

    Preface

    I wrote this article about three years ago, when I was planning on attending another retreat. I didn’t end up going as I still had concerns about my mental health and the possibility of slipping into psychosis again, so I didn’t post this either. But I just found it again and thought it was a good summary of my first experience.

    Here it is…

    I’ve recently booked in for another 10-day silent retreat through the S. N. Goenka school of vipassana, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on and write about my first experience at one of these retreats, dating back about 6 years now.

    I’ve spoken about this in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, but I had first heard about these type of retreats through a favourite writer of mine, Robert Wright, who writes a lot on science and religion. He said he had a profound experience at one he attended and came home with a radically changed outlook and appreciation for life. When I read the article he wrote on this, it was as if something hit a switch in my head, and I immediately thought, “that’s what I have to do” (meaning I have to meditate, and I have to get enlightened).

    At the time of attending, I thought I had found my true path. I was a 100% dedicated meditator, and I was going to go at it gung-ho until I got enlightened. Everything else in my life took a back seat – career, relationships, everything. I just knew that my path was one where I had to get enlightened, and that I’d do whatever it took to get there.

    So I went in pretty seriously. Not the ideal way to go into a meditation retreat, but it was where I was at at the time.

    The retreat was held in the beautiful Blue Mountains of New South Wales in Australia, with views over the treed canyons below.

    I knew it was going to be difficult, but I was prepared. I meditated in the days and months leading up to the retreat in order to get myself ready for it, and attended every session without fail from 4:30 in the morning until 6pm at supper time.

    At this point, I had so much faith in meditation being the true way to enlightenment that even though it was tough, I pushed on through the pain and mental anguish I experienced at times.

    Sometimes this pain and mental anguish was almost unbearable. Now I know why they’ve done studies and people have reported preferring to be given electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for 10 minutes.

    The first few days were tough. Trying to focus your attention solely on the breath is a very difficult challenge, and one everyone is bound to fail at to a large degree.

    Not only that, I had someone next to me who was constantly cracking his knuckles, and someone on the other side of me with a very bad cold who was sniffling non-stop through almost the entire retreat.

    “Great,” I thought. “I’ve put in so much effort into making this a good meditation retreat and they stuck me next to Tweedledum and Tweedledee!!!”

    I started to feel intense amounts of anger about this. I felt this was my one good shot to really make some progress, and I couldn’t concentrate because of these people beside me.

    The anger welled up inside of me like a hot furnace, ready to boil over.

    Then suddenly, it did. A massive explosion happened within me. It felt like the whole top of my body was ripped open and all the pent up anger and rage surged upwards out of my body. My heart was beating a million times per second, I was breathing very heavily, my body was losing control of itself – or I was losing control of it. I saw with my mind’s eye a coloured spiral of emotion which began flowing out the top half of my body. I saw this. It obviously wasn’t in physical reality, but it wasn’t just imagination either. It was somewhere in-between.

    And then it died down. I was completely relaxed, albeit a bit shaken. Then a bit of embarrassment crept in. “Far out, how much noise was I making? I hope I didn’t disturb the other people around me.”

    Over the next two days I began to experience states of intense euphoria. But it still didn’t feel quite right. It felt like, yes, there’s a lot of euphoria here, but I still felt like I was grasping at it, hoping it will last, wondering if I could make it even more euphoric. And this grasping led to unpleasant feelings in the body. I knew there was more to this than just euphoria.

    I kept trying to re-induce these euphoric states for a while, because it was what I felt was the most profound thing that had happened so far, but the harder I pushed, the further it eluded me. It got to the point where I was actually trying to cause pain to my body by overstretching my legs, because I felt somehow the pain had been a catalyst for the euphoria in the first place. I still have pain in my hip sometimes from doing that 6 years later.

    I was devastated that I couldn’t make these experiences last. It seemed like they were there just to tease me.

    This led to me one night walking off by myself into the bush and sitting there, crying, totally dejected and totally despairing. I saw what Buddhists call the “wheel of samsara” or the wheel of illusion.

    I thought, “What the hell is the point of all this? What’s the point of trying to get to a happy state if it’s just going to be followed by an unhappy state sooner or later? For 15 minutes, I sat in total and utter despair, as though there was nothing I could do to change this. It was the most hopeless I had ever felt.

    Then a realization came to me: Enlightenment is not about states of consciousness, enlightenment is about getting off the wheel of samsara and seeing it for what it is – ultimately a play of illusion, of duality. This was met with great relief – I didn’t need to spend the rest of my life on this pointless rollercoaster ride if I didn’t choose to. I could just get off. So that’s what I did at that retreat. I got off. Not entirely, I later found out, but to a degree. I had at least unbuckled my seatbelt.

    This led to the rest of the retreat being one of great calm and peace. Peace, I found, was the biggest surprise. Most people would think they’d prefer to experience euphoria rather than peace, but the ironic thing is that the peace actually felt better than the euphoria. With the euphoria there was grasping and “wanting more”. With peace, there was utter contentment, no pulling, no pushing, just a total and deep relaxation into the moment without desiring anything to change. No desire = pure bliss.

    To this day, I describe the happiest moment of my life as being when I was doing my laundry there, washing my clothes by hand in a bucket outside. Not something someone usually equates to ultimate joy, but that’s what I experienced.

    I’m now going on my second one of these retreats, a full 6 years later, and I’m not sure what to expect. The only thing I’m expecting is that it probably won’t be like what I expect.

    Time will tell…

    In love and light!

    Will

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Embodying the Divine Feminine

    In some spiritual circles, there is often a distinction made between what is called “The Divine Masculine” and “The Divine Feminine”. In Hinduism these are called Shiva and Shakti respectively.

    There is a lot written about these two principles, and I’m not here to write an intellectual rundown on these two ideas, not least of all because I’m not an expert in this field. Instead, I want to give a very simple rundown of how I see these two ideas relate to spiritual awakening.

    Shiva, the divine masculine, is often said to represent the absolute reality or consciousness; that which is beyond all form. Shakti, on the other hand, is often said to represent the manifest world, the life-giving energy of the universe, in all her beauty and horror.

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed since my spiritual journey began 8 years ago is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, literally meaning “not-two”.

    The basic premise of this school of thought is that all is ultimately consciousness, there is no true separation, and thus the separate self is ultimately illusory too.

    These teachings are really fantastic for those interested in ultimate truth and enlightenment. However, like all teachings relating to the nature of reality, they have their limitations. As far as I see it, the world is much more nuanced than can be simplistically put down into absolute statements about its nature, and too much emphasis on these teachings can lead to someone rejecting or neglecting the phenomenal world as merely “illusory”.

    As I see it, the world is only illusory in one sense – that is, its nature is very different than how most humans usually think it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s “not real”. If a magician performs an illusion, we don’t afterwards say “nothing happened”, we say “what we thought was happening was not what was actually happening.”

    This is the sense in which I see the world as illusory: It is made out of consciousness, not matter. The world is very much real as consciousness, but very much unreal as matter.

    That’s not to say we should disregard the idea of matter altogether – it is still the way consciousness is appearing so should still be taken seriously. I wouldn’t step in front of a bus just because I think matter is ultimately illusory. Illusory me would still die, and all the spiritual excuses in the world wouldn’t change that.

    So to just dismiss the world as illusory is to neglect the relative reality of the world, and often leaves people in an intellectual framework without embodying their awakening, or otherwise engaging in “spiritual bypassing”, which is using spiritual teachings as a way to avoid dealing with their issues.

    I recently came across a great spiritual teacher called Louise Kay, who I think embodies the balance between “masculine” and “feminine” perfectly. She is in part a nondual teacher, and simultaneously helps people come to terms with and embrace their emotions.

    A lot of nondual teachers reject the usefulness of meditation practise. They say, “you already are what you seek, all you need to do is recognise this.” And this is true at an absolute level, and in my opinion can even be a useful teaching at a relative level, but it often leaves people sitting around “waiting for enlightenment”, with no change in their everyday life.

    It is a paradox as far as I see it. Yes, you already are what you seek, and yes all you need to do is recognise this, but at the same time practises may be useful in helping you see this. I say “may be” because in my estimation there are no rules for awakening. Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie both woke up in the midst of severe depression, without any previous spiritual path.

    The way I approach it now is to keep reminding myself that I already am what I seek, but at the same time, I’m going to do the practises because I feel they help my relative life, and who am I to say that helping my relative life won’t help wake me up? Anybody who says they have a simple answer to that question I think is deceiving themselves.

    I had some sessions with Louise and she actually told me that I’m already awake, just that it hadn’t sunk in fully yet, which was great to hear. I still struggle with a lot of depression and anxiety, largely related to my experiences over the past couple of years, so it’s a bit hard to be excited about while I’m still suffering so much, but it’s nice to think that my path is paying off.

    In conclusion, I think the Buddha’s teaching of “the middle way” is most appropriate here. Don’t get stuck in absolutes, and don’t get stuck in relativity – embrace both and see where it leads you.

    I’m personally excited to see where this path of opening up to my emotions will lead me. I’m only a beginner on this path but I feel it’s perfect for me, as my emotions were what so often made meditation difficult to maintain. A meditation practise that specifically focuses on embracing your emotions in unconditional love feels perfect for me.

    I’ll see how it unfolds from here…

    Much love,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • So… something happened to me

    So… something happened to me.

    About 3 weeks ago, something changed for me. Or didn’t change. Or, the change was that I was no longer looking for a change.

    I realised that what I am – consciousness itself – is already awake.

    The “shift” I have been trying to achieve for 8 years finally happened. Or, again, didn’t happen.

    It’s tough to talk about.

    Around 8 years ago I came across some “enlightenment” teachers, and since then I have been ardently striving to achieve this myself. I’ve been obsessively fixated on achieving this realisation, even to the point of it being detrimental to my regular life.

    Over the past few months, certain teachings had been hitting me more deeply. Then I started to look into the notion of time, and this is what apparently changed things for me. Or, again, didn’t change them.

    I realised that notions of future and past are merely concepts in the mind which occur in the present moment. There is no real “future”. And so my whole house of cards of “I’m going to get enlightened in the future” collapsed. I realised there was only now, and there was only ever going to be now. The “enlightenment in the future” bubble totally popped.

    I didn’t realise it at the time, but things were different after that.

    I went to listen to a meditation recording and despondently thought to myself, “hmm, maybe this will wake me up.” Then I paused, reflected on consciousness, and thought, “What? Wake me up? How could I be any more awake than I am now? How could awakeness be any more itself than it already is?”

    And I suddenly realised, “Oh my God, I’ve stopped seeking.” Consciousness was already conscious. Awakeness was already awake.

    The “shift” I had been striving toward for almost a decade had finally “not occurred”. It was instead to see that there was never going to be any “shift”. That… this was it.

    It no longer feels like I’m trapped inside my mind. It feels much more like I am consciousness itself, and the mind is merely an appearance in this consciousness, made out of this consciousness.

    This is why in Buddhism they often call enlightenment “the gateless gate”. You have an image of this event that will happen to you in the future, some sort of transformation that will occur, but once it “occurs” you realise there was never anything to occur. There was no gate.

    Rumi put it more poetically:

    “I have lived on the lip of insanity,
    wanting to know reasons,
    knocking on a door.
    The door opens.
    I’ve been knocking from the inside.”

    Or, to illustrate the point somewhat humorously: Two Zen monks are standing on either side of a river. The first monk says to the second, “How do I get to the other side?” The second monk yells back, “You are on the other side!”

    This is a humorous little joke, but it also illustrates the point perfectly. In terms of awareness, you already are what you’re seeking. What you’re looking for is what is looking.

    Now, I don’t think I’m totally enlightened. There’s still a hell of a lot of clearing up to do. There’s still suffering, there’s still a lot of mind activity. The only difference is I no longer feel trapped inside of those things. I feel much more now like I am awareness rather than my mind.

    For most of my life, it’s felt like there was an energetic contraction in my head. This fuzziness. This lack of clarity. This blurriness to life.

    I was so much asleep to life that for the majority of my life I didn’t even know there was this contraction – until I started to meditate and began to “wake up” a little.

    But it finally feels like I’m no longer caught.

    I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. “Time” will tell as far as that is concerned. There’s definitely still a lot more to unfold. But this feels like the biggest shift that has occurred since I began this journey 8 years ago.

    I spoke to a friend about this realisation, and he said, “Oh, it’s like you’re finally out of the prison of Will.” And I said, “No, it’s more like someone came and opened the door to my cell, but I’m still just sitting in the same cell, only now just looking around going, “well this is different…”

    I think the process from here on out will be me gradually coming out of my cell. I have no idea how long it will take until I feel like I’m out, but it feels like the door is definitely open now. 🙂

    Thanks for reading,

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

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