You Gave Me A Mountain

"This time, Lord, You gave me a mountain, a mountain you know I might never climb. It isn't just a hill any longer -- You gave me a mountain this time."  - "You Gave Me A Mountain," lyrics by Marty Robbins, sung by Elvis Presley

"There is sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and fragility, out of whose depths emerges strength." - Rashini

I have had a lot of reproductive disappointments lately. It feels unbearable to write about them, but when I realized I haven't posted anything in almost a month, I knew why: this is what is going on, and I'm not in the mood to talk about it. Yet, this topic feels like a blockage, and until I write about it, I can't write about anything else. This sucks unlike anything else I've ever been through. I don't want to make it sound like I've been on death marches, sex trafficked, or anything else truly horrific, but for a privileged white girl, I have had my share of genuine tragedy and heartbreak, and infertility (IF) exceeds it all. Perhaps it's because IF touches on such deep, personal longing: religiously and culturally, most people have been inculcated with a deep desire to have children. Hell, if you are from a Judeo-Christian background, it's the first frigging commandment. If I were inclined, I could write a separate post about what IF has done to my spirituality and relationship with God. It aint pretty. Add to that the intense biological drive to propagate, and you have a potent mix for being really fucked up if things aren't working in the reproduction department.

When I had my miscarriages, I was shocked at the insensitivity of other infertile women who said, "Well, at least you can get pregnant.  I haven't been able to do that." I still stand by the insensitivity of expressing that comment to someone who has lost three babies, but from where I sit now, I agree. For unknown reasons, I have gone from the camp of the super-fertile to the "...and to think, I wasted all that birth control!" camp. When you can get pregnant, there is still hope that this pregnancy will turn out ok. Now, I understand the frustration of getting yet another period when you don't want one. This is worse.

That leads me to another point: I have had to eat some real humble pie. My IF journey has led me to feelings and behaviors that I thought I was above, and I find myself experiencing many of the things I judged other infertile women for. For example, I used to think it was strange when someone told me she couldn't be at synagogue with all the kids. Now, I totally get it. Not wanting to be around pregnant women? Check! Not wanting to be around babies? Double check! Feeling like a playground or Facebook is an emotional minefield (especially around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade)? Check! I actually hid a new parent's Facebook feed recently because all she posts about is her new baby (kudos and thanks to my other friends who are new parents who do a great job balancing info about parenthood with other things! I love you!) In a strange way, I feel like the Universe is giving me a dose of all the things I used to be judgmental of. I assure you, I'm not anymore. I have also learned that the IF drugs, with the intense bloating they cause, make you look pregnant, so I shouldn't assume anyone is.

Maintaining perspective on this problem of IF is not for the faint of heart. It is easy to let it consume you. One of the common ways to try to balance the pain is to look at what is going right in my life, which, thank God, is a lot! Most importantly, I get to wake up every day next to my best friend and partner, whom I'm still madly in love with. I think marriages like ours are rare. My life is full of blessings! Yet, I have to be careful with this tack, because I also use it as a way to negate my feelings of intense sadness. Yes, life is beautiful, but it still feels for both of us like our family is incomplete. For these reasons, it feels like this method of focusing on the positive isn't an authentic or truly useful way in and of itself for me to work through this problem.

I did have some relief this morning when I did a guided tonglen practice led by my meditation teacher, Tara Brach. This is a powerful practice that helps us connect with the suffering of ourselves and others in a meaningful, compassionate way. I found it very calming to view IF as a wave held in the greater awareness of my life as an ocean. To paraphrase Tara, when you're aware you're the ocean, you're not as afraid of the waves. I also like the tonglen practice because an integral part of it is focusing on the suffering of others, and in doing so, it feels like offering a prayer on their behalf.

Ok. I have been sitting on this post for a week, and can't think of anything else I'm willing to commit to the Internet, so here it is for now.

True Refuges

"Your lost Joseph will return to Canaan, do not grieve
This house of sorrows will become a garden, do not grieve

Oh grieving heart, you will mend do not despair
This frenzied mind will return to calm, do not grieve

When the spring of life sets again in the meadows
A crown of flowers you will bear, singing bird, do not grieve

If these turning epochs do not move with our will today
The spheres of time are not constant, do not grieve

Don’t lose hope, for awareness cannot perceive the concealed
Behind the curtains hidden scenes play, do not grieve."  -- Hafez, "The Lost Joseph" (full poem here)


"I'm here without you baby, but you're still on my lonely mind
I think about you baby, and I dream about you all the time." - Three Doors Down, "Here Without You"



I don't know how much more I have to say about the horrors of miscarriage, except to say that they seem to get exponentially worse. With one miscarriage, it's like, "Well, this sucks, but 25 percent of all pregnancies end this way, so we'll grieve, hope and proceed forward." With two in a row, it's like, "Uh-oh, I hope this doesn't indicate a trend. Just bad luck." With three in a row, you become a "serial miscarrier" and the stakes change. Our most recent miscarriage is like a gigantic hole in my heart. It feels like more of a profound loss, in part because it's our third blow of this kind in a year, and I think in part because we felt some relief that we heard and saw our baby's heart beat. Even though I still worried, that gave me some hope that things could be ok. Nevertheless, it turns out our daughter had an extra thirteenth chromosome, which is incompatible with life. Knowing this was a little girl, and not an anonymous "it" makes this even more personal and painful.

One thing this year-long curriculum in grief has taught me is how much of a precious gift it would be for all of us to give each other the gift of mindful listening. In our culture, "help" has become synonymous with "fix": people see David and me hurting and want to relieve us of our suffering, so they make offers of "help" from the reasonable to the sublime to the ridiculous. The people who have been the greatest help to me have been those who say, "This sucks. You are in the middle of something awful and unfair, and I am so sorry for you." Bless you. One of the reasons that you don't say anything when you enter a Jewish house of mourning is that there is nothing to say. Loss is ineffable.

All of my old complaints about the hurtful things people say and do in their attempts to "help" still stand, though I have some new complaints too. The primary one is women offering me advice for their fertility problems, which are not our fertility problems. There are many stages where reproduction can fail, and I find myself exasperated with advice (again, well-meant) from people who have a totally different problem we do. They don't realize that their suggestions are equivalent to suggesting Lupron, a prostate cancer drug, for a breast cancer patient. But hey, they're both cancer! To all you progesterone pushers: all the hormones in the world would not have negated an extra chromosome, but that will be a later post. I am not immune to this desire to "help"; God help you if you ask me about Lyme Disease, because you will get an hour lecture full of strong opinions! Then again, in my defense, Lyme and co-infections have one cause, though many presentations of the diseases. Infertility is quite a bit more complex since it can have different causes, many causes, or be completely idiopathic.

I am all about care right now for David and me. Frankly, right now, other people's needs come significantly below ours. In trying to determine how to best care for myself, I keep asking myself, "What and who are true refuges for me?" This has guided how I am spending my time and who I am spending it with. No refuge for Sarah, no Sarah. This means a lot of calls to me are not being returned, and that's totally as it should be.

To my great surprise, one of my most helpful refuges has been meditation. It is surprising because my meditation cushion is kinda the loudest place in the house nowadays. You wake up to what is when you meditate, and if what you're waking up to sucks, it really hurts! I listened to a dharma talk today by Sylvia Boorstein titled "May I Meet This Moment Fully, May I Meet It As A Friend." I've been repeating that throughout the day. Some days, like this morning, I was able to compassionately touch my grief in my meditation; other days, it is too intense, and I return to the traditional metta (loving-kindness/blessing) practice.

Loving, compassionate, close friends and family members have also been a true refuge, as have both of my spiritual communities: my Jewish one and my meditation one. I found out last Wednesday that our baby died, yet I couldn't imagine being anywhere other than with my sangha (meditation community). I was hugged by so many people, and got kind follow-up emails from people sending me metta and checking on me.

Little Kacy, our dog, is a true refuge, as always. And on a different wavelength, good TV, in moderation, provides much-needed distraction. What are your true refuges?

Shared Sorrow, Shared Joy

"You have the pain, the sorrow, the fear within yourself; don't keep it for you alone. Allow the sangha, allow the community to embrace it for you. Allow the collective energy to help you to embrace it, because alone, you are not strong enough to embrace your pain, your sorrow ... If we allow the community to embrace us, then we will not sink into the ocean of suffering." -- Thich Nhat Hanh

May 17 was one of the most nerve-wracking days of my life. I was heading in for my third prenatal sonogram ever; the first two revealed that our embryos didn't take off, the cells never differentiating enough to create organs. I was expecting the worst at this one. My anxiety was palpable; I even sobbed in a public restroom the night before. I just needed an outlet for that anxiety to leave my body, and that night, it was in tears. I was looking for a way to process this anxiety, and one of my mindfulness teachers gave me a good suggestion: to tap into collective suffering as a way of making the container for my own suffering bigger. I think this is akin to Tara Brach's oft-quoted metaphor that if you are in touch with the whole ocean, you are less afraid of the waves.

So, I stopped looking at Wednesday's appointment as "my" ultrasound, and started thinking of all the women who have been on that same table I was going to be lying on. I broadened the thought to all the women having fertility issues everywhere, and more broadly, every expectant mom praying that everything would be ok with her sonogram. The exercise didn't stop there: I was able to relate my worry about the sonogram to all the suffering of the world, and I thought in particular about a dear friend of mine right now who is very sick. I can't explain why this helped ease my anxiety, but it did. It took me out of myself, and made me a part of something bigger, which, of course, I am.

Before David and I got out of the car to head up to the clinic, we prayed together, asking God for a favorable outcome to the sonogram, or the strength to get through this together if it was not a favorable outcome. I don't think anyone was more surprised than I was to hear our doctor say, "So, there's the baby, and you can see it's heart beating." Hearing that heart beat* was magical, though I could barely hear it through my tears of joy (and shock!)

The concept of sharing sorrow doesn't just exist in the narrow way I describe it above. It has helped me more than once to share my sorrows with all of the communities I'm blessed to be a part of. One of the starkest contrasts David and I noticed was the aftermath of my father's death vs. our first miscarriage a few weeks later. After my dad's death, there were about 70 people here a day to sit shiva with me. I found their presence comforting. We largely faced the miscarriage silent and alone, except for the few friends we notified. Several of them came to hang out and talk. Suffering of this magnitude is too big to be handled alone, and I am often saddened by the many women who tell me they have had serious fertility problems, miscarriages, and ectopic pregnancies and told no one other than their doctors. I am including women whom I know who are extremely close to their mothers, yet never tell their moms about these events. This kind of extreme secrecy only harms, in my opinion, never heals.

The concept of shared joy is as powerful as shared sorrow. In my immediate circumstance, experiencing my wider social circle's joy at our pregnancy is infectious and exciting. In a broader context, this is a skill I have had to work to cultivate over the past few years. My disability from Lyme Disease has meant the end to many professional and social opportunities that I used to enjoy. When you encounter that, your choice is to withdraw and become closed off and contracted, or to learn to cultivate joy from others' happiness. At times, it was very hard to hold this joy as most of my friends expanded their families as I was struggling with first having to delay childbearing because of my infections, and later, my inability to stay pregnant. Nevertheless, I have always found this goal worth pursuing to the best of my ability.

=======
* Seeing the six week-old on this sonogram was powerful for me in another context: seeing and hearing that little heart beating brought me back to when I used to volunteer for Planned Parenthood in what seems like another lifetime. They drilled into us in the clinic where I volunteered that what was being aborted was "just tissue." Seeing the heartbeat in my sonogram reinforced my unease with abortion, and also made me understand why pro-choice advocates are so upset by Christian pregnancy counseling centers using early ultrasound to influence women's decisions about their pregnancies. It also occurred to me, seeing that beating heart, that it was "just tissue" -- the same way my heart, my hands, and my brain are also "just tissue."

Everything Zen? I Don't Think So!

Horatio: "Oh, day and night! But this is wondrous strange!"
Hamlet: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet, Act I, Scene V, 159-167

"And therefore, as a stranger give it welcome." This quote from Hamlet came to me when I was doing my sitting meditation in my mother's garden this morning. I have had mounting anxiety because David and I are approaching our first ultrasound this week. It will be the six week ultrasound, the one where Preston, our reproductive endocrinologist, is looking for what he calls "early cardiac activity" of our embryo. Basically, this is the sonogram where we find out if our pregnancy has a chance. Neither of our others got to the point of having a heartbeat. This is really freaky, because we didn't know until weeks 9 and 11, respectively, that either embryo had died, even though both died around 5-6 weeks. The placenta, not the baby, is what makes most of those lovely pregnancy symptoms, and the placenta continues to grow even sans kid. So, I felt pregnant even though the baby had died. In any case, this is a BFD ultrasound.

I wish I could tell you that I'm all chill about it. That I feel like, "God's will be done," or "It's totally out of my control, so I won't worry." I have moments of grace, but much of the time I feel a knot in my stomach. I recognize that most of it is anticipatory dread: I have had two ultrasounds with disastrous results. As my friend said, "This is operative conditioning: of course you're scared! You've had two terrible experiences." I am definitely remembering "real but not true," though it doesn't always tame the anxiety.

This morning, I tried some of the other techniques I've written about, but none of them were hitting the spot. Then I remembered Tara Brach's "Power of Yes" meditation that she writes about in her book "Radical Acceptance." Basically, instead of doing what I (and most others) usually do -- direct a steady stream of "No, go away!" to anything I have aversion to -- I decided to say "yes" to it. I literally put my right hand on my pounding heart to soothe it, and my left hand on my solar plexus, which is where I seem to most keenly feel anxiety in my body. I said to my anxiety, "Yes, I see you. I understand why you are here." I directed a steady stream of "yes" to it: "Yes, it's ok that you are here. Stay a while, if you need to. I can handle you. Yep, I see you and I feel you." It really took the edge off of the anxiety: I'd say it lowered it from a 7 to a 3, which is a big improvement. Even thinking about this experience now is comforting to me. I instinctively want to run from the sensations of my worry and anxiety; it feels so uncomfortable to me. Spending just 15 minutes dwelling with it today -- welcoming the stranger, to paraphrase Shakespeare (or Rumi!) -- reminded me that I can handle it. I may not like the feeling, but I can be with it, and be ok.  

I will also give a nod to the power of positive distraction when you are worried about something you cannot change. I am losing myself in my knitting and Downton Abbey, and those activities soothe me and distract me in healthy ways. However, these types of distractions feel much more wholesome to me when held in the larger context of awareness; it feels good to pay my seemingly unwelcome  "strangers" a little mindful attention, too.

Anxiety and Meditation

"Anything can happen
From the point of conception, to the moment of truth
At the point of surrender, to the burden of proof
From the point of ignition, to the final drive
the point of the journey, is not to arrive." -- Rush "Prime Mover"

My anxiety about losing this pregnancy was extremely high yesterday morning. I was catastrophizing things, envisioning our first sonogram ending up just like the previous ones: no baby, two broken-hearted parents. I was really lost in my stories about this, and boy was I suffering! I tried a few tactics to manage this. One, intellectualizing it: "Worrying isn't going to help, so stop. You can't control it." Two, praying for God to remove my anxiety. This technique rarely helps me and it didn't help now. Three, applying "real but not true." That took the edge off, but I remained restless and discontent.

I sat down for my morning seated meditation, and Tara Brach's voice came into my head, with one of her catch-phrases: "What is asking for attention?" I got in touch with what was behind my anxiety, which was the intense longing to be a parent, and for this baby to thrive. Instead of getting lost in what that "meant," which would be more stories, I focused on the sensations of that in my body. The longing manifested clearly in my heart area, and had a distinct color, sensation, texture. I just paid attention to those sensations for about ten minutes, noting them, and not either grasping for them or pushing them away. Just holding them lightly with a tender quality. Evidently, that is what was asking for attention, because my anxiety evaporated, and I was able to stay in the present moment and out of anxious obsession for the rest of the day. What sweet relief!

I have a belief that we all need tool kits for different situations. I don't have one pain management strategy to manage my chronic pain; if I did, I'd be up a creek. This is why people who rely only on pain medications for pain relief rarely find any relief. My pain tool kit includes: warm baths, meditation, exercise, sleep, massage, Feldenkrais, and other techniques, in addition to medication, which I use too. I am coming to understand the same principle applies to my anxiety: I can't have only one tool for it (i.e. Xanax) either, nor can I apply just one meditation technique to it. The technique described above worked yesterday. Sometimes, I need to focus on my anchors (breath, sounds, or bodily sensation) to ease my anxiety -- I literally need to distance myself from it in this way. Sometimes I use a "titrating" technique taught to me by some of my teachers: I pay attention to the bodily manifestation for anxiety, usually in my chest and throat, for a few moments. Then I titrate my attention and apply it to a neutral place in my body, like my thigh, where my anxiety doesn't manifest. Sometimes, my anxiety is too severe for seated meditation at all, and I need to do more walking meditation or mindful movement.  I'm grateful to be developing my tool kit, but it felt like a huge victory yesterday to get such dramatic relief from just opening to what was legitimately asking for my attention.

A Heart That's Ready for Anything

"We do this practice to have a heart that's ready for anything." -- Eric Kolvig, to me, about why we cultivate a mindfulness practice

"Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, and lightness has a call that's hard to hear." -- The Indigo Girls, in "Closer To Fine"

This is my third pregnancy in a year. To our great joy, David and I found out that eight weeks after my D&C for a miscarriage, I am pregnant again. In the past, we only told people whom we'd lean on "if something happened." Both times, something happened. This time, we're trying a different approach: We are embracing that we are just very public people. We don't care if you know we're pregnant, even if things go wrong. In fact, especially if things, God forbid, go wrong. The feedback David and I have  gotten on our blog posts about our miscarriage posts have been overwhelmingly positive; many people said they helped them or helped their friends. We hope that by sharing our experience with this pregnancy, however it turns out, it's helpful. Emboldened by posts such as this one, I want to be upfront this time. I want you to know why I'm overly sensitive, why I'm flaking on commitments (nausea and extreme exhaustion) and that I don't think Sea Bands are fashionable.

I went to a powerful meditation retreat last week, and really connected with teacher Eric Kolvig. I talked with him openly about my grief, and how to apply a mindful and compassionate presence to it. Have you ever had someone say something to you that seemingly went straight through your chest and tattooed itself on your heart? I've had it happen three times; one is too personal to recount here. The second was when my first OA sponsor suggested, "Nothing else you've done to control your food addiction has helped. Why don't you try something different and just trust?" The third was Eric's statement to me that we do our mindfulness practice to have "a heart that's ready for anything." It was clear to me that after a lifetime of feeling blown about by my outside life circumstances, that is my deepest longing: to have a heart that's ready for anything.

If you know me you know that I am anxious by nature, and in fact have a severe anxiety disorder. So, I don't have unrealistic expectations that I'm going to be all Zen about this pregnancy. Every pregnant woman I've asked worries through her pregnancy.  After all, the stakes could not be higher, and we all desperately want to control the uncontrollable. What I am aiming for is to bring a mindful and compassionate awareness to my experiences, and not over-identify with them or become lost in my stories. For example, the other night I was brushing my teeth and thought, "I wonder if I'll have an ectopic pregnancy." I have no signs of an ectopic and no reason to think I'd have one. Instead of beating myself up for the "stupid" thought, I said to myself, "Sarah, brush your teeth. You're pregnant right now." I kindly acknowledged to myself that my brain is looking for ways to predict danger so it can protect itself. It's what brains do, the same way that hearts beat. That doesn't mean I have to buy into every thought my brain comes up with.

Another example of what I'm trying to achieve with this pregnancy is this: yesterday I became gripped with fears that we will lose this baby. Instead of my usual coping mechanisms, like telling myself that the doctors said we have a 70 percent chance of having a live birth eventually, or saying to myself, "don't worry," I took the advice of my teacher Tara Brach. She told me to greet the fear with compassion. So I put my hand on my heart and said, "Of course you're scared. It's ok." I then reconnected with my body and breath. This felt much better than pushing away what is desperately seeking my attention. This process about applying mindfulness to a pregnancy that has some anxiety coming up is what I hope to share on my blog.

So here I sit, full of anticipation about our pregnancy. Hope and optimism that things will go well, but the life experience to know that things might not. Yet, I truly feel like my heart is ready for anything. Bring it.

Retreat Morning Schedule

So, how did I spend my semi-silent retreat? This one was a little unusual in that usually retreats either allow speaking, or they're conducted in silence. In this one, we were in silence from 9 p.m.- lunch the next day, with silence always maintained in the dormitories. Most people spoke during the non-silent times, but a few retreatants chose to maintain their silence and the group respected that. Here was our weekday schedule through lunch, with some explanation. The afternoon and evening schedule will be my next post.

6:00 a.m. Wake up: Because I was fighting for a spot amongst eight other women in a tiny bathroom, I roused myself around 5:45 a.m. to allow adequate time to use the bathroom, wash my face, and brush my teeth. I'd dress and mosey over to the main lodge, where all of our retreat activities took place. I had a couple of glasses of water and a cup of coffee, in silence, before I settled on my meditation cushion.

6:30 a.m.  Meditation (aka "Sit"): This was seated meditation. Some people sat on cushions that they brought. Others fashioned impromptu meditation seating with pillows, blankets, towels and yoga mats. Some people always sat on chairs, and people who spoke with instructors about it first were allowed to meditate laying down, if appropriate. I had to do this, especially by the end of the day: my back isn't strong to begin with, and the 3-4 hours of seated meditation we did every day really took its toll on me. The first night I was there, I needed a narcotic to calm my pain enough to sleep. The original purpose of yoga asana, poses, is to give yogis the strength they need to sit in meditation for hours. I never really understood that until this retreat!

At one point I asked an instructor when would be a good time to leave programming to lay down on my heating pad to soothe my back and neck pain. He said, "What would keep you from bringing your heating pad to meditation and laying on your back?" I said, "Nothing!" As someone who has chronic pain, I have learned how to meditate laying down. I have tricks to ensure I don't fall asleep, like not practicing this way when I'm too sleepy, keeping my eyes only 3/4 of the way shut, putting my knees together, or holding my hands in such a way that if I fell asleep I would jerk to attention. I think I only came close to falling asleep once in this position. My preference is to sit on a meditation cushion with blankets supporting my knees, but I utilized the cushion, a chair, and laying on my yoga mat at different points in the day, depending on what my body needed. Usually, I started the day upright and ended up laying down late afternoon before returning to a chair or cushion again.

7:15 a.m. Chanting: One of the most amazing gifts that came to me from this retreat is the knowledge of how much chanting moves me. This is a common Eastern spiritual practice, but instead of Sanskrit, we chanted Hebrew. We did three chants from the morning blessings in the schacharit service (see below) every morning, and then did a few other chants based on other Jewish sources. There was something tremendously powerful about living in an intentional, albeit temporary, community, our voices joining together in praise of God. Four things resonated with me: the meaning of words we were chanting, the beautiful tones of the chants we were singing, the group nature of the activity, and the vibration of my voice inside my body. All of those elements combined to make it a powerful spiritual technique for me.

At home, I have continued my chanting practice after my morning meditation, and although it's not as potent as it is in a group, it's still useful. It's a meaningful way for me to give thanks to God and to set my intention for the day, and the verses have become mantras for me. Sometimes I'll find myself humming them throughout the day, which of course reminds me of their meaning. Verses from schacharit like, "My God, the soul You placed within me is pure," are things I need to remember, especially when I get drawn into the Trance of Unworthiness. Reminding myself that God made me in God's image is one antidote to the Trance.

7:30 a.m.  Shacharit: This is the Jewish morning service. Other than on shabbat [sabbath], all of the prayer services were silent, so people could pray in the style most appropriate for them. We had a huge range of religiosity from people completely a-religious and Jewishly uneducated, to people who were Orthodox and had learned in yeshivot for years. I think it was easier to have unstructured prayer time than to try and conduct a service to make everyone happy, and that kept us in our silence, which was particularly nice after a night of silence and 30-45 minutes of seated meditation. During prayer time, some people prayed, some went to get cups of coffee, and others did yoga or meditated.

8:00  a.m.  Breakfast (silent)

9:15 a.m.  Sit & Instruction: The instruction was basically Vipassana (insight) meditation 101, where the instructors explained the basics of meditation. The first day they gave instructions on posture and using the breath as an anchor. Other days they talked about using alternate anchors (like sounds or sensations), how to handle emotions that came up during meditation, etc. We also had instruction on topics like the five hindrances to meditation, which will certainly come up in most people's meditation, and some of the antidotes to those hindrances. We covered the traditional Buddhist lovingkindness (metta) meditation; I didn't love the way the teachers taught that one, but since I was already familiar with it, I just practiced the form I'm more comfortable with.

When I went to Tara Brach's talk and guided meditation class the other night, I loved that she led us in a body scan and relaxation exercise before we started to meditate. It really provides a nice transition from "up and active, engaging with the world," to "on my cushion now, settle down." I need to start incorporating this in my home practice, and if I had experienced it before the retreat, I would've let the leaders know on my evaluation form that this would've been awesome.

9:45 a.m. Walk: this was walking meditation performed in the room we were using. It's just another form of mindfulness where instead of using breath or something else as an anchor, you are very focused on your feet hitting the floor. After 45 minutes on my butt on a cushion, I was always very eager to walk. I really zoned out and got into this, and I could see why Thich Nhat Hanh encourages this so enthusiastically (there are videos on You Tube of Hanh and others teaching this). I have tried to make one of my daily dog walks one where I practice walking meditation.

10:00    Sit

10:45    Yoga: The daily asana practice was so amazing it's getting it's own post later.

11:45    Sit + Group Interview: For more details on what transpires in group interviews, please see my earlier post.

12:30    Eating Instructions: This was only on the first day of retreat, but it was instruction in mindful eating. The teachers passed around a bowl of different foods, including different types of nuts, raisins, and granola. The guy with major food allergies practiced this with an apple. We were instructed to first smell the food; touch it to the lips; put it in our mouths and slowly move it around, seeing how it tastes and feels in different regions of our mouth. It was really enlightening for me to see how mindless my impulse to swallow is: the teacher said, "notice the impulse to swallow," after I had already swallowed my raisin. Oops! After mindful, deliberate chewing and experiencing all these bites of food had to offer, we were instructed to swallow in our own time.

I had heard of this "raisin meditation," and after hearing a friend's jeering review of it, I was skeptical. However, I liked it and found it put me in the right head space to both of my daily silent meals in mindfulness. After all, that was the point: not just not talking for the sake of not talking.

12:45    Lunch (silent)


After leaving dining hall, continue silence or enter speech.

Retreat Logistics

Most of my friends haven't been on meditation retreat, so I'm getting a lot of questions about logistics that I wanted to address.  I attended Pardes' "Awakening to the Divine" retreat. They first hosted this in 2011 for college students. The 2012 one was broadened to include "young adults," but apparently the scale has shifted: the retreatants this year were between 20-40. There were 21 women and five men.

Location: I was retreating at Pearlstone Retreat Center in Reisterstown, Md., outside of Baltimore. This is a really lovely, hilly, wooded property with lots of places to duck away and take walks. There is a central housing unit that has has single, double and six-bed dormitory style rooms. All of the activities took place in the central lodge, or outside. Kayam, an educational farm, is connected to this facility, so every day I tried to spend some time hanging out with the goats and chickens.

Food: Luckily for me, Pearlstone has a strictly kosher kitchen under the supervision of the Star-K supervising agency of Baltimore. They are so strict that they don't allow in any outside water bottles into the lodge building. Small amounts of food can be kept and consumed in your bedroom. I was a basket case about this part of the retreat: I follow a strict food plan that eliminates gluten and sugar, and requires that I separately weigh everything that I put in my mouth. That means foods like casseroles don't work so well for me. Most of the time, I handle this by bringing my own food, but Pearlstone's strict kosher standards meant I couldn't do that.

I had to contact the dining coordinator and tell him all about my restrictions. I called, emailed, and even sent him a copy of my food plan. He assured me everything would be ok, but didn't actually provide answers to specific questions I asked, like, "When you serve pasta with cheese at lunch, what protein could I get at that meal?" Ultimately, I had to just jump in and know that I did my best to get my dietary needs met, and that I would have to turn the results over to God. I knew I wouldn't eat compulsively, which is the reason I am so guarded with my food in the first place. To my delight, everything worked out beautifully and deliciously! They had separate foods for me that I could weigh at any meal like chickpeas, tofu, hard boiled eggs and plain tuna fish. We had three scheduled meals a day. Every night I eat one protein and one fruit serving as a snack, so I always grabbed a hard boiled egg and fruit for later before I exited the dining hall after dinner.

Every meal had a large garden salad and fresh fruit. They even got us gluten-free and sugar-free challah for shabbat [our Sabbath observance]. Typical entrees included hearty bean soups, stir-frys or acorn squashes stuffed with quinoa and tofu. We had fish twice. No meal except Shabbat dinner had meat, and when there was meat or fish there were always vegetarian entrees. They made delicious veggie side dishes like eggplant salads and ratatouille, and one lunch was falaffel, homemade hummus (to die for!) and Israeli salad.

Everyone was surprised at how awesome the food was. Pearlstone puts a lot of emphasis on fresh, healthy meals. They try to use seasonal produce when available. Furthermore, there is always hot coffee, a tea station, and a basket of fresh fruit in the lobby. I loved that the dining hall is green: they provide compostable to-go containers if you request them, but otherwise we ate on real dishes.

Accommodations: I was expecting to share a room with one other woman. As it turns out, I had four other roommates. I have to say, I'm glad I didn't know that ahead of time; if I had, I probably wouldn't have gone, and thus would've cheated myself out of an awesome experience. When I realized I had four other roommates, I initially freaked out: I'm 35 and used to doing things my way, turning out the lights when I want to, etc. I took a deep breath and realized that this would be a good opportunity to stretch my comfort zone and prove I can be flexible when circumstances require it. It turns out my roommates were really cool, nice women; if anything, I inconvenienced them more than they bothered me, because I was usually last to sleep and first to wake up.

Sharing a bathroom was probably the hardest part of the accommodations. There were 9 women sharing one primary bathroom; you could duck into others on the floor if they were empty, but each small bathroom -- containing one sink, toilet, and shower -- was basically shared between one or two rooms. I have big issues around bathroom cleanliness to begin with; if nothing else in my house is clean, the toilet is. People were slovenly in the bathroom, leading me to tape a little note to the mirror kindly asking people to clean up after themselves to make the experience of sharing a bathroom as pleasant as possible. That made an immediate difference.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I was inordinately proud of myself for handling the shared space issue so well. Before I left for the retreat, someone told me, "I'm very set in my ways; I wouldn't be willing to share a room." I decided I didn't want to be that way, personally. I didn't like sharing a room, but I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it if I wanted to. That said, if I go to another retreat at Pearlstone, which I hope to do, I would spring for a private room if I had an option to do so. It would be much easier to maintain silence in solitude at night. Having my own room would be essential for my Sabbath observance in a group setting, but on the Pardes retreat, everyone agreed to be Shabbat-observant in public spaces and in dwelling quarters.

In forthcoming posts, I am going to write more about how we spent our time on retreat.

On Honesty, Openness, and Vulnerability

I just came back from a six day meditation and spirituality retreat. We were silent from 9 p.m.-1 p.m. daily, and during the afternoon we had religious study related to mindfulness and transformation, and were able to engage in mindful speech if we chose to. We had a lot of opportunities to share our personal experiences with the whole group, and I took advantage of that.

If you look at my blog from 2011, you'll see that I have virtually no posts. It was hands-down the worst year of my life. Here's the summary: February, massive pain flare leading to huge setback in physical ability; April, my husband gets very sick with mystery illness I; May, lose my 59 year-old father to cancer; June, lose my nine week old baby to God-knows-what; August, my husband gets terrifyingly sick with mystery illness II; October, major depressive episode; December, husband needs emergency surgery. The whole year, since May, was set against a backdrop of the after-effects of my father's poor estate planning, which left me with a lot of emotional pain, anger and resentment. I was so raw, I didn't want to write about anything going on, and I didn't feel able to write about anything else. I also really struggled with the idea of how open to be on this blog. My readership on my blogs has always been highest when I'm raw, transparent and vulnerable. That's a scary place to be among loved ones, or just yourself, let alone on the void of the Internet where the crazies loom.

Anyway, I decided if I was going to get anything out of the retreat, I had to be honest about where I was. The group of people I retreated with made a really safe space to do that in, but even before I knew them, I took the leap. For example, the first group interview on the second full day of the retreat was a little intense. The background is that six of us were in a circle, and each of us, in turn, had a personal conversation with the meditation instructor about our practice (we had individual interviews at other times) while the others just listened. Most of the other participants said things like, "I can't keep following my breath during seated meditation. What do I do?" or "I get really sleepy." Some delved a little deeper, touching on the general nature of their distractions. Finally, James gets to me and I pour out the following:

"I'm anxious. The focus of that anxiety during my meditation is how many needs I have, and how terrified I am of not having those needs met. I'm scared of there not being food here I can eat, I'm scared I won't be able to sleep with four other women in my room and how badly that will make my pain flare, I'm scared of there not being an available bathroom when I need one. I'm scared of having to wait 25 minutes for a shower! Worse, I hate that I have all these special needs, and I'm just so aware of how fucked up that makes me feel. I feel fundamentally broken, screwed up, weird and unlovable. And I hate it."

Tara Brach, a popular D.C.-based meditation teacher, talks a lot about the "trance of unworthiness" that people, particularly Westerners, feel. This was at the heart of what I was expressing to James in that group interview. I heard this come up in other guises at the retreat, and was shocked to learn that even seemingly perfect people, like Demi Moore, feel this way. In a February interview in Harper's Bazaar magazine, Moore described her greatest fear: "What scares me is that I'm ultimately going to find out at the end of my life that I'm not really loveable, that I'm not worthy of being loved. That there's something fundamentally wrong with me ..."

But back to me. James says in his lovely James-ian voice (now permanently etched in my head), "It's ok to have needs. The first thing I want you to do is acknowledge that you want things: you want to have food to eat. You want to sleep. You want to shower. That's ok. The second thing is, when you encounter this, I want you to say, 'not me.' It's not you. You may have needs and you may have anxieties, but they are not you." I'll have more to say about this in another post about Jan. 6, but in the meantime, I'll leave this with a comic illustration of this proposition.

I felt so odd after I spilled my deepest-held feelings about my trance of unworthiness in front of five strangers. After our interview, two retreatants who were there came up to me and thanked me for sharing so openly. They said it took guts and helped them. Emboldened by the votes of confidence, I started putting out really personal, embarrassing things during our afternoon group discussions if I thought it could help other people, or would otherwise be relevant to our discussion.

At the end of the retreat, when we were saying goodbye to each other, the feedback others' consistently gave to me was how thankful they were that I shared such intimate things. That it helped them immensely, and gave them hope that they could be resilient and make it through some pretty awful times. After about 15 people said that to me, it really reinforced for me that I am most myself when I am open and honest, especially on my blog. I don't do inauthentic well. It's not that I'd share everything (ok, I would share almost everything...), but I am going to just try and be myself and accept the consequences. I also take a lot of inspiration in this from Heather Armstrong, who was so open about her mental health problems, especially as they concerned her second pregnancy, and has taken a huge amount of crap from the true Internet crazies for it.

So, I hope that 2012 is a much more active year for this blog, and that I can be myself, make myself vulnerable, and hopefully enrich someone else's life because of it.