My unhappy mind was a battlefield of conflicted demons. As I made my decision to spend ten days alone and in silence in the middle of exactly nowhere, I told all my warring and confused parts the same thing: “We’re all here together now, guys, all alone. And we’re going to have to work out some kind of deal for how to get along, or else everybody is going to die together, sooner or later.”
I hadn’t even brought any books to read, nothing to distract me. Just me and my mind, about to face each other on an empty field. I remember that my legs were visibly shaking with fear. Then I quoted to myself one of my favorite lines ever from my Guru: “Fear—who cares?” and I disembarked alone.
Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my emotions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . .) and we become monuments
to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of
words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I’d stopped talking, I found that I was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech—brain, throat, chest, back of the neck—vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I’d stopped making sounds.
Then everything started coming up. In that state of silence, there was room now for everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in detox, convulsing with the poison of what emerged.
I went into meditation one evening on the beach as the sun was going down and I didn’t stand up again until after midnight. I remember thinking, “This is
it.” I said to my mind, “This is your chance. Show me everything that is causing you sorrow. Let me see all of it. Don’t hold anything back.” One by one, the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked at each thought, at each unit of sorrow, and I acknowledged its existence and felt (without trying to protect myself from it) its horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, “It’s OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. It’s over.” I would actually feel the sorrow (as if it were a living thing) enter my heart (as if it were an actual room). Then I would say, “Next?” and the next bit of grief would surface. I would regard it, experience it, bless it, and invite it into my heart, too. I did this with every sorrowful thought I’d ever had—reaching back into years of memory—until nothing was left.
Then I said to my mind, “Show me your anger now.” One by one, my life’s every incident of anger rose and made itself known. Every injustice, every betrayal, every loss, every rage. I saw them all, one by one, and I acknowledged their existence. I felt each piece of anger completely, as if it were happening for the first time, and then I would say, “Come into my heart now. You can rest there. It’s safe now. It’s over. I love you.” This went on for hours, and I
swung between these mighty poles of opposite feelings—experiencing the anger thoroughly for one bone-rattling moment, and then experiencing a total coolness, as the anger entered my heart as if through a door, laid itself down, curled up against its brothers and gave up fighting.
Then came the most difficult part. “Show me your shame,” I asked my mind. Dear God, the horrors that I saw then. A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance. I didn’t blink from any of it, though. “Show me your worst,” I said. When I tried to invite these units of shame into my heart, they each hesitated at the door, saying, “No—you don’t want me in there . . . don’t you know what I did?” and I would say, “I do want you. Even you. I do. Even you are welcome here. It’s OK. You are forgiven. You are part of me. You can rest now. It’s over.”
When all this was finished, I was empty. Nothing was fighting in my mind anymore. I looked into my heart, at my own goodness, and I saw its capacity. I saw that my heart was not even nearly full, not even after having taken in and tended to all those calamitous urchins of sorrow and anger and shame; my heart could easily have received and forgiven even more. Its love was infinite.
I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine—just imagine!—what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.
I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart, and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: “I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of
you.” That promise floated up out of my heart and I caught it in my mouth and held it there.
