The sign on the bank marquee said 112 degrees as I was driving to the retreat center. We were packed in a round room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Santa Cruz mountains, sweating just from sitting. Is it hard to be still and silent when we’re so hot? Or is it easier to surrender all physical and mental effort in the stifling heat? I was about to find out.
We had just embarked upon a 5-night silent meditation retreat. Our teacher, Adyashanti, had instructed us to question our beliefs and thoughts and ask, “What’s really true?” The focused inquiry felt permission-giving. With fascination, I was able to recognize small and large assumptions I had been living with, many of which weren’t necessarily true. One by one, I popped these ideas and assumptions like soap bubbles we used to blow as kids. It was satisfying and incredibly liberating.
I can’t remember all the numerous belief bubbles I popped on that and subsequent retreats. But I remember the ground-shaking ones, the ones that broke open my reality and shook down my walls.
One of those earthquakes happened when I had a vision of my birth. When I looked at my mother for the first time, I had an experience of “self” and “other”, and that was the first seed for the belief that I was separate from Life, Creation, God. I saw how that little crevice of confusion grew into a canyon over time. I saw how so many of my actions, insecurities, fears, and wounds were fueled by one belief – I am separate from Source, and I am alone. It was the Mother of All Bubbles to pop.
Even though I was so hot that my clothes were pasted to my skin, I expanded beyond that physical experience and felt how I have always been One with all of creation. I witnessed with wonder the paradox of being in a unique body-mind and part of the vast universal ecosystem at the same time. How could I ever be truly alone with all the mysteries of life pulsing through my veins?
This became the new orientation and grounding for my sense of self and life. In the same way a powerful earthquake can reshape a whole landscape, the landscape of my inner world was forever changed.
What happens when an earthquake of self occurs and your whole inner landscape changes? Well, at least for me, I forgot how to drive. When the retreat was complete, I got in my car, sat in the driver’s seat, and… did nothing. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t remember. I knew that this vehicle-thing was important for me to get home, but I couldn’t recall what to do with it. I wondered if I needed to ask someone to drive me home.
Eventually, it occurred to me to put the key in the ignition. A few minutes later, I remembered enough to put the car in reverse, back out of my parking spot, and shift the car into drive. Wow, gears! What a discovery! Normally, I would have been freaked out, but I was too relaxed to have that much energy about anything.
So I started cruising down the long retreat center driveway. Oh! Braking! Oh shit. I almost sailed through a stop sign. Phew. Thank goodness for muscle memory.
Thankfully, the next part of the ride was coasting downhill on a quiet, wooded, two-lane road. I remember feeling grateful that there were no other cars on the road, and I had a long trip downhill to remember fully how to drive. I eventually made it home.
But for the next month, I noticed that my mental maps of my town had somehow disappeared. Since I was 16 years old, I relied upon mental maps to get where I needed to go, and now they were all gone! As this was before the days of a GPS in your pocket, I would sit at stop lights and work hard to pull up memories of street names and directions. I got lost and eventually found my way again. Even more disorienting, everything looked different, like I had just moved to a new place that morning. In reality, a new awareness and consciousness had moved into me. I had to build new mental maps of the world around me, both literally and figuratively. How I responded to everything in life began to change. The end of separation meant the beginning of a whole new way of discovering life in a body as part of Creation.
