Mindfulness Meditation Retreat at Home Part II

One more snowy weekend in New England allowed me to have another mindfulness retreat in the (dis)comfort of my own home with a 5 year-old who is crawling the walls with cabin fever and a 15 month-old who is now getting in to everything within her reach, and a few things that are not which she doesn’t realize until the fall comes. I guess Mother Nature has determined that I am need of back to back to back retreats where I must confront my urge to escape discomfort head on.  She’s hard core I’ll tell you...

I’ve found though, each time has been a little bit different, and I attribute that to two things. 

One, I try my best, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, to practice the power of now in order to notice the nuance that makes this moment truly unique and therefore never to pass this way again.  This allows me to experience each moment with my children (the good, the bad and the ugly- I mean me of course!) while holding reverence for the brevity of it all.  It allows me to try to live the words my auntie spoke at the time of her passing from colon cancer: “I’ve had a good life. I’ve had a hard life. I’ve enjoyed it all.”  So perfectly dialectical which is the nature of parenthood I believe- the trick is holding the tension between the poles without falling on your face, especially when trapped inside a 1000 foot ranch house with 2 children, 2 cats and a dog in the middle of a snow storm!

The second piece that has begun to shift the way I experience my escape urge that seems to rise up in moments of mindfulness retreat, is to say to myself: “it’s totally okay. That’s just what happens for me. I don’t know if it always will, but for now it is what it is, so how can I work with it?”

If you have read my blog, you know I find the words and lives of others to be extraordinarily helpful in navigating this spiritual unfolding, and what I’m describing above is no exception.

Let’s take poet Mary Oliver.  I once heard Mary Oliver described in a Unitarian Universalist sermon with humor as the patron saint of UU’s, and personally, I have found this to be true.  Hearing or reading her poetry, especially to us who find great serenity and comfort in the natural world, allows me to let out a long and necessary exhale. But recently I learned more biographic details about the poet herself that have stayed with me as they validated my own experience, which is to say, I didn’t feel as separate and alone. 

In an interview, which as I understand is quite rare for this poet who has largely stayed out of the press by choice, Ms. Oliver shared that she has always had difficulty with what she called “enclosures” and has maintained a preference for staying in motion.

You know when you hear something that strikes a cord inside of you so perfectly that goose bumps spring up all over you? That’s exactly what I felt when I learned of Ms. Oliver’s difficulty and preference because I have the same ones.  But I have always deemed them to be a fault of mine- something that needed fixing or repairing, something I must improve about myself, which I of course aimed to do through mindfulness meditation.  Imagine my surprise to be able to instead say “me too,” and begin to accept this piece of myself as perfect just the way it is.  Or in other words, it is absolutely fine that I have trouble being enclosed in my little house with little possibility for motion during a snow storm.  The great Mary Oliver might have difficulty with that too!

To me, her now very famous poem “Wild Geese” captures the essence of this acceptance of self.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Around 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon the snow finally stopped and the temperature at long last reached above the freezing mark so me and the kids were able to venture outside.  So I packed them up (no small task in and of itself), and drove them over to the local park that has a fantastic hill for sledding.  By the time we got there the sky was this gorgeous light blue, the sun was bright, and enough kids had already been sledding to make for the perfect paths to go down at top speed.  Filled with gratitude, I put my daughter in the carrier on my back and walked by son to the top of the hill thrilled (and relieved) to be outside and moving again.  Mary Oliver might have been too.

How about you? What aspects of yourself have you encountered in the mirror of  mindfulness meditation? Were you able to accept them?