My Darkest Hour: Realisation from Retreat

In March of 2019 I attended a monthlong silent vipassana retreat at the renowned Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. For a few months prior to this retreat I had been experiencing small flashes of violent imagery in my mind every now and again. They were fast: so fast that it didn’t seem worth worrying about. I had told a few people about it and discussed that it was likely a result of my years as paramedic. I would say I was in denial about having the syptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, something that became clearer to me after this experience. As usually happens on a long retreat anything that needs to come up will most definitely surface: that is the beauty of it. As our darkest most shameful secrets arise we are gifted the capacity to heal. As the weeks of retreat passed the violent imagery began to grow and take over my mind until I felt I was going mad. And then in a spark of great light, a massive healing took place. This is the story of the life changing realisation that came from my darkest moment…

The grounds were empty as I walked down the steep paved path. To my left, inside the meditation hall, I could see the silhouette of yogis resting peacefully upon their chairs.  Of the 90 other retreatants I guessed that most, if not all of them were in that hall, where I was supposed to be. 

I repeated to myself my new mantra of equanimity “this is what is happening now. This is part of the path” to combat the sickening feeling in my belly of missing out. Of expectations not met. I was supposed to be meditating. We were three weeks in to the retreat and this could have been my best week. Yet here I was, still in my pyjamas, incapable of dressing myself or even of closing my eyes. 

Here I was, going crazy. This shouldn’t be happening.

These objections arose momentarily but I didn’t buy in. I repeated my equanimity mantra. While my mind was doing everything it could to terrorise me, I had the beaming light of awareness still shining on it all.  One part of my mind was going wild, while the other was as clear as it had ever been, watching it all. The mantra worked and I softened a millimetre.  This was what was happening. And somehow, through my clenched fingers and short breath, I knew that this was one of the most important things I would ever go through. 

My mind was a place to be treated with great care right now. It was fragile, spasming, glitching and I had to walk slowly, delicately. As if I could hold it just so to prevent it from cracking. For the last 24 hours this mind had been throwing out the most horrific images. Repeatedly. Over and over again, doing it’s best to engage my body with sounds and smells to match. As if it were really happening to me.

The flash of a knife as it slit my throat, and the sound of it too. So much so that I would wince, shudder, block my ears. And yet there my body still was, unharmed, my neck in tact. The images would flash quickly as they played over my body. Cutting off my fingers and toes. My stomach splayed open. The flashes would be so fast there was never enough time to catch them to see what they were, but enough time for my body to react.

I shuddered again as another slicing occurred. And then something new, a hanging. The rope flashed, then the bulging eyes, the dangling legs, but they were my eyes and legs. It came complete with the sound of gurgling and gasping, the way I’d always imagined it could have sounded, if I had caught one of my patients in the act. (After, only ever after). 

Frustrated I shook my head and begged my mind, for the thousandth time, to stop it. I opened my eyes wider. I touched my neck. I stroked my chest and shoulder “I love you, you’re safe, it’s ok”. I took my left fingers in my right and began to squeeze them, one at a time to remind myself that I was right here. 

Entering the dining room I chose the biggest roundest mug from the stack of cups and dropped in a bag of earl grey tea. I pulled the hot water lever and watched steam twirl skyward as the teabag drowned in clear wet heat. I added a dollop of honey, a healthy dash of milk, removed the bag and stirred it all together with a small sliver spoon. I found my favourite bench, wrapped my blanket around my legs and began to sip. Eyes open. Always open now. I stayed with the sensation of heat inside. My warm body. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Only a safe body cries. 

With the cup cold and empty I began to play with my hands, using one to squeeze the other. I pushed into the pad of each finger, one at a time. I had to get out of this untrustworthy mind and into this body. Yet this body felt like a shell of itself. It’s contents removed. It felt un-full. I wanted to be full again. I pushed and I pushed while I rhythmically rocked forward and backward, my spine making contact with the bench behind me. 

I stopped. What the hell was I doing? Rocking? Was I going crazy? Was I going over the edge of something I couldn’t come back from? 

My mantra arose from a place of deep wisdom. Kate, this is what is happening right now. I put a hand on my heart. I knew I had to accept this, exactly as it was. I had to accept me, as I was now, in my most vulnerable. I had given years of my life to being a paramedic, to witnessing horror and this was the consequence. It wasn’t my fault. It just was. It had never felt safe to collapse until now. So if I needed to collapse, let it be. I trusted, accepted. I loved. “ I love you” I said, “even like this”. 

And there I was, inside a memory, standing in a front yard, a young pretty face, barely a paramedic. We’d been called out for a man who had flooded his apartment because he’d been in the shower for two long days. His wife was yelling, tattoos all over her left hand and a cigarette hanging from her right. Her teeth cracked and eyes yellowed she screamed and screamed for him to get out. Eventually he did, running out the front door, wrinkled and puckered from head to toe. His genitals shrunken from the now icy water and flapping as he ran. His eyes were wide and staring. 

We did the only thing we knew how to do back then. We laughed. We laughed and pointed and patted each other on the back for how crazy he was. How glad we were that he wasn’t like us, or us like him. We talked about it for hours after, we told everyone. And what a hoot it was, joking and laughing and covering the discomfort we all felt deep inside. 

I hadn’t thought of this man since then, some fifteen years ago. And now as I realised what I was doing, I realised what he’d been doing too. He’d been trying to get out of his untrustworthy mind. He wanted back in to the shell of his body. Who knows what traumas that man had carried? Who knows what atrocities he’d been through? He was a man afraid of being on the edge of something he couldn’t come back from. He was after all, the same as me. And I am, after all, the same as him. 

My heart shattered open. For a moment my body became safe, filled with the truth of it. I was full again. And in that fullness my tear ducts opened. I wept for him and for us too, the carers that didn’t know how to care for him. 

I wept for how, in my delicate traumatised condition, I needed to be accepted for who I was and for what was happening. I needed to be held tight, stroked, whispered to that it was safe, that I am safe. I needed a deep and unshakable caring. I needed love. We didn’t know how to do that for him. 

I wept for the way I had misunderstood it all my life. How many years I had spent on a spiritual quest to become better, more compassionate, more patient, more understanding. How I thought that I had to learn more. Dissolve all my problems, transcend my negativity and be like Mother Theresa. Then, then I would be compassionate. Then, then I would be able to hold everything in my hands. 

Oh how mistaken I had been. All I had to do was let myself fall apart, and then accept it. All I had to do was love me, even in my darkest, scariest moment. All I had to was wake up and see that I am just like everyone else. No better (no worse). 

This, my dear loved ones, is the real spiritual journey. Nothing else. This is the end of the perpetuation of judgement and violence, and thus the end to suffering. To find yourself in your darkest hour, to lay a hand upon your heart and say,

I love you. 

If you are holding shame about who you are or what you’ve been through, I want to work with you. If you haven’t been able to accept your darkest moments, if you can’t put a hand on your heart and say “I love you”, I want to work with you.

Please don’t suffer alone. Contact me and let’s talk.

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