Written following the 7-week silent retreat.
Joy and heartfulness
After the vibrancy, richness, and active connectedness of time in India with new friends (some of whom felt like very old friends), the retreat center felt… well… a little dead.
This, of course, was what I had wanted when I booked the self-retreat: a quiet, undisturbed place where the mind could seriously settle, uninterrupted by conversation, meal preparation, or internet.
Yet the contrast to India was a shock to the system. For the first time in my life, I was truly homesick, reflected in my journal entry:
I love the practice, I love the teachers, I love satsangi friends. So ❤️ full. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
So why not bring that joy and heartfulness into the silence? And so I did — and it catapulted me into the second jhāna.
I had known intellectually that mettā can be a wonderful, reliable entry into the second jhana, but I had never personally experienced it. Now it became a reliable entry path. It was exquisitely beautiful.
Open the body, open the heart, open the mind
Another theme of these early weeks was the physical opening of the body. The phrase Open the body, open the heart, open the mind arose spontaneously and became an anchor for practice. This seemed a natural continuation of the month-long yoga intensive that had opened my eyes to the interconnection of mind, heart, and body.
I’ve done so much work over decades on the mind and heart. And yes, a fair bit with the body through taiji, qigong, and forestry work, which was intensely physical. But many life traumas had left the body in protective postures. There was clearly more work to be done, more to release.
Letting go of the defensive postures, feeling the fear around physical opening and letting that fear move through, ‘completing the circuit’, felt like the wisdom of the body shining through.
And this work was not limited to my personal morning yoga practice. At night, I found myself moving into postures that encouraged the shoulders to drop and the heart area to open, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively. It felt as though I was practicing all day and all night.
Praṇa flowed, and I used mudras recently learned in India to strengthen or calm the energies. At times, the currents were so strong that my body shook. It felt cleansing, supportive, and wholesome.
In the yoga room was a book titled The Poetry of the Body. This title resonated deeply, as I was learning my own body’s poetry, what it wanted me to understand, feel, and let go of. And I knew that was not only supportive, but required, for the heart’s continued openness and for the mind’s deep settling into greater and greater quietude.
The challenge
The primary challenge was that the pathways of practicing kriyā yoga had become so strong that they would activate when I tried to practice jhānas. I found myself primarily doing kriyā practice and feeling quite uneasy about it — torn between two paths.
But this is the beginning of the next post.
January/February 2025 — Barre, MA
Stops since the last entry: Chowdapalle, India → Boston, MA → Barre, MA