UnMoored

After about two years of practicing at home, I attended my first seven-day meditation retreat in 2014. It was a positive experience. I recall that much of my energy was directed towards acclimating to the demanding schedule and the norms of the retreat center, but still, I was astounded by the experience and by beauty of the forms. My mother’s death, and the breakup of a major relationship, were still relatively recent when I attended the retreat, but I did not experience “negative side effects” afterward.

I decided to attend a ten-day retreat seven months later. There, I sank into the practices much more deeply and experienced profound states of concentration for the first time. However, I also began to experience phenomena which I had not seen explained or described anywhere in my studies. I awoke at four in the morning, feeling like electricity was running through my veins. I perceived a very loud, clear ringing in my ears which would start and stop suddenly.

My visual reality had a startlingly clear quality, which I experienced as frightening and almost panic-inducing.

On this retreat, I also “saw” images which seemed to represent deeply tormented parts of my psyche—for instance, a trapped animal who was clawing at its cage to the point of bleeding. I had little frame of reference for any of these sensory or psychological experiences, although one of the retreat teachers did counsel me to back off the disturbing images rather than “plunging” into them, which I think was good advice.

When my partner picked me up from the airport after the retreat, she remarked that I was acting strangely, almost as if I were high. While I cannot recall the post-retreat “re-entry” period very clearly now, I know that I described my state to friends as having had surgery “without getting stitched back up.”

“I felt psychologically and existentially disorganized, unmoored. ”

My perspective had been shifted so dramatically that I could not look at anything the same way, and began to shake up my life in response to what I understood as spiritual imperatives. In retrospect, I think I was so overwhelmed by the material that had been dredged up by the retreat that I shut down, sinking into a deep depression for several months.

Did meditation retreat “cause” my depression, or did the retreat simply give me access to feelings that had been there all along? In the process of meaning-making, of course I wondered this. I was ambivalent about practice, and about ever returning to retreat. Did I need to keep going, to “play through the pain” to get to the other side of what I was experiencing? Or did I need something different altogether? Eventually, I reached out to a therapist. While this was stabilizing and helpful, I still longed to find a practitioner who could understand the depths of what I had experienced on retreat.

A year after the retreat, I emailed one of the retreat teachers (who lived in another city) to share my difficult experience and get her counsel. “In certain ways, I feel I still have not gotten my bearings back after the last retreat,” I wrote her. When we spoke by phone weeks later, she responded that sometimes these things just happened on retreat. She asked if I was scared to go on retreat again, and I said that I was.

Ultimately, I did return to retreat twice more, and I will go again this summer. Thus far, retreats have not triggered deep depression, as my second one did. I have learned a great deal about pacing myself, and about grounding. The work of Willoughby Britton, David Treleaven, Daniel Ingram, and others have validated my experiences, which is healing in itself. I have also come to understand the importance of developing safe relationships—with both “helping professionals” and spiritual friends—who have walked these paths and who can help digest the insights, experiences, and transformations that arise on retreat. I believe my isolation as a practitioner, and the lack of support I had in integrating my retreat experience, was a major factor in the depression.