Sharing Is Shifting

       When I was a kid, I went to camp out in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, not far from Kripalu. In my series of posts from years ago, called Concentration:Camp (Parts 1 & 2), I detailed my five year summer camp experience. I’ll sum it up for you here: It Sucked. Royal.
       Since then, however, I have actually enjoyed going back to Camp Becket several times over the years to visit. It’s a beautiful place, and I do have some powerfully good memories there. I’ve been able to put the whole experience in perspective. Overall, I have, as one woman at Kripalu put it, “turned poison into medicine”. I love the Berkshires these days, and take advantage of my opportunities to spend time in this magical part of the country.
       For the first twenty-four hours of practicing social silence at Kripalu, however, whatever medicine I had created was stuck in a child proof bottle. And I was the child. I felt ten years old again, stuck at a place in the Berkshires. Sad. Depressed. Lonely. Full of self doubt. Feeling like I was a defective model in a place full of well functioning ones. And I couldn’t tell anybody. Yup. This was a reliving of summer camp.
       In truth, however, my inner experience would have been similar no matter where I did this course. If I had been at a retreat center in California instead of The Berkshires, I would have felt the same internal strife. The fact that as a kid I had a similar experience, at a similar place not far from where I was now, just made it all a bit more uncomfortable, a bit more surreal.
       By design, when you do this kind of work, your stuff comes up. By design, not talking about it and being alone with it, thus removing distractions, forces you to look at it longer, and go into it deeper. The meditation, yoga, and environment provide new ways to frame your experience, new opportunities for learning and growth, and new possibilities for raising consciousness.
       But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m good at that. Sometimes I’m so far ahead of myself that I don’t know who I am; like driving too far in front of somebody you’re supposed to be sticking with. You turn around and they’re gone.
       Alone with all my own muck, I decided to share my experience during our  afternoon course session on Tuesday, just twenty four hours into my own social silence. Everybody else had been doing it a half a day longer, because I joined the course late. So I took the microphone and let it all hang out, getting really vulnerable and sharing how awful I felt. Looking at our instructor whilst speaking, I could nonetheless feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me as I articulated my painful inner experience.
       Then, something remarkable happened. Everyone’s head started bobbing up and down. They knew exactly what I was going through. They were all having a similar experience. I opened up. They felt me. And I felt them.
       Suddenly, I didn’t feel alone anymore. I felt part of a community. Part of a tribe. Part of a common experience. Part of something bigger than myself.
       That’s when things started to shift.
       More next week.

©2013 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

Social Fucking Silence

       I had never heard the term “social silence” before, but I immediately didn’t like it. I was at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, taking a course on meditation. Social silence meant that, outside of our scheduled class, I wasn’t suppose to talk. To anyone. About anything. The phrase actually scared me. Within a microsecond of hearing it, my mind projected isolation, loneliness, depression, and despair. Plus, it had a bad ring to it, like the word “rash”. And it sounded like an oxymoron.
       After hearing that they strongly recommend I practice social silence for the first few days of this new course I had just switched into, something inside of me got triggered. I wasn’t completely aware of what, but I suddenly became incredibly uneasy. All of a sudden, I completely regretted my decision to join this class.
       In the confines of my own mind, I reduced the term “social silence” to the acronym “SS” and began internally calling it that. Fully aware of the Nazi reference, it felt appropriate, considering the amount of fear and dread I was experiencing from hearing it.
       Moments before, I felt great about my decision to switch into this new course, believing I had landed just where I needed to be. Now, I literally wanted to bolt. Out the door. Out the class. Out of Kripalu. Out of what now felt like an insane asylum.
       Over the next few days, what started off as a fear became a reality. And an even bigger reality than I had first feared. I experienced not only loneliness and isolation and depression, but lots of other great stuff too. Self doubt. Self judgment. Self criticism. Pain. Self flagellation. What the hell had I gotten myself into? I didn’t need to come to Kripalu to experience that. I’m perfectly capable of creating that on my own, back home.
       Not only that, but because I couldn’t talk about how I felt with anyone, it was getting worse. I have always processed things through talking. The more I talk, and listen, and converse, the more able I am to move through stuff. And the more I’m able to connect. Now I wasn’t moving through anything, and I wasn’t connecting. At least it didn’t feel like I was. So I’m not only stuck, I’m lonely. All this shit is coming up, and I’m unable to tell anyone, save for my time in class, which offered relatively little room for that. I just had to sit with it. To be with it. To experience it. To allow it.
       And it was precisely in the being with it, in the allowing of it, that I got what I needed.
       Please stay tuned.


©2013 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.