Seclusion Stories: Renouncing Time, Following Guidance, and Trick Trails

I was really ready to go on seclusion. (And I’m beginning to think I’ll always begin my seclusion stories this way.) It had been almost two years since the last one, and it turned out to be an interesting followup to what happened that last time.

One of the themes from my 2014 seclusion was learning not to just blindly charge ahead with whatever I want to do (even if it seems like a good idea at the time), but to deliberately involve God and Master in the process, and ask what He would like to do with me in our time together. So my overall goal for this time was to figure out how to do that. I ended up with three main tricks:

#1: Renouncing Time. (Or trying to, at least. Time’s not so keen on renouncing me.) The evening I arrived at the meditation retreat, I turned my phone completely off and disabled the clock in my computer’s menu bar (I still wanted my computer available for writing). I hadn’t brought a watch, and the cabin had no clock, which left me completely free to have no idea what time it was. There’s still the sun, of course, but I didn’t know exactly when sunrise/sunset was up there, and I didn’t think about it too hard.

This had a few benefits. One is that clocks like to tell us what to do, what with things like “lunchtime” and “bedtime,” especially for someone like myself who’s very schedule-conscious. This shuts them up. Then if a clock isn’t telling you when to do these things, you get to (a) decide yourself or (b) practice using your intuition. (Hint: (b) is a good choice.)

Additionally, it was really nice to completely let go of questions like “am I sleeping in too late?” or “how long am I meditating?” or other things that are more judgey than useful.

#2: The Guidance Log. The next thing I did was to take a small notebook and start a list for each day. Any time during the day that I had a question or a choice, and remembered to ask Master about it instead of simply deciding on my own, I would enter it in the log. This is both helpful as a reminder to keep doing this, and as a motivational game (trying to top the score from each previous day).

This also results in the notebook getting filled with a fair amount of pretty dumb questions. But that’s okay. The number of times in my life that Master will actually care what kind of tea I drink in the morning is probably a bit south of one. But he does like to be asked. It’s keeping the conversation going that’s important.

#3: The Activities Bowl. This was the final piece of my “system” for the week. I always head into a seclusion with a huge list of projects and activities that I don’t have enough time to do at home, and this isn’t nearly as helpful as it is tempting. In this particular case, I wanted to practice guitar, recorder, and singing, I wanted to work on a couple different choir arrangements, I wanted to do some writing, I wanted to prep for the next class I’m teaching, and more. All good stuff, yes, but with the danger that seclusion will simply turn into more busy-time.

So what I did was to write everything I thought I might possibly want to do on scraps of paper, fold them up, and put them in a bowl. (I also included sadhana activities, like meditation, energization, yoga, etc.) Then whenever I felt like I really needed to do something, I would go to the bowl and ask Master to help me pick.

Putting It All Together. Well, the first two days were mostly rest and recuperation time, with lots of sleeping and reading. This was something else I’d learned from the previous seclusion: that it’s not worth trying to push yourself if what you really just need is to recover for a bit. So just let that happen until you’re ready to start putting out more energy.

I also didn’t use the activities bowl much during those first two days. I felt that, if I were going to draw something blind, then I wanted to feel absolutely open and ready to do whatever it would turn out to be, no backing out. Which is a good attitude to cultivate, but took me a little while to work up to. And when I did start using it, I found myself getting a lot of things like meditation and energization and reading Whispers from Eternity, and not working on my “projects” much at all. But just as well, since it was supposed to be a seclusion, after all.

As for the guidance log, what I noticed was that, after a few days, I was less inclined to be asking so many questions as deliberately or writing it all down. Not in a bad way, but more because I began to feel like I was in a better overall flow and could simply see the next thing I was going to do at any given moment, rather than needing to make a deliberate decision. I did still keep taking some notes, of course, because it doesn’t do to get too complacent, but I could tell that the process had already gotten me into a different sort of state.

Also by now I was finding myself really wanting to meditate more, and I figure when that happens I shouldn’t worry too much but just go do it, which I did. Since I’m not big on endurance but focus better for short periods of time, I started getting into a system of multiple short-to-medium meditations throughout the day, alternating with other things, instead of trying to do long sessions. If I’d had more time there (the trip was only 4 full days this time), I think my eating schedule would have shifted from three small meals a day to four snacks, which would also have been helpful for throughout-the-day meditations.

It would be nice to do this for a longer seclusion sometime. As it was, I only had two really good days, and on the second of them I was already thinking about having to go home the next day. But it was all very definitely worthwhile, even for just this short amount of time.

More Games on the Hill. I wrote last time about the games God was playing with me up on the Bald Mountain trail, trying to get me to pay attention and listen. And I continue to be impressed with how amusingly tricky He can be up there on that small hill with so few passable trails. This week I had been happily visiting all my usual places up there, but on the last day I noticed something new.

At a bend in the trail, I saw a gap in the trees that I hadn’t noticed before. This was on my best “flow” day, and I just felt that it was obviously there for me to go explore, so I did. A short way into the undergrowth, I came upon a trail completely covered with dead manzanita branches, like a river of bleached wood. It seemed deliberately created, but also odd, since it doesn’t make for a particularly walkable trail. I followed it for a while, wondering how far down the other side of the mountain we were getting, or if I’d ever be able to find a trail all the way down to the river. After various twists and turns, the trail petered out, but I managed to continue a bit farther through various openings in the shrubbery.

And then suddenly—a path! An honest-to-goodness, perfectly clear trail. I set a branch next to the trail pointing the way I had come, in case I needed to find my way back. Then I asked Master which way to go, and headed left.

Then within 20 yards I came to the trail sign at the entrance I had come in every morning. I had just completely not recognized it coming from a different angle, and had gotten so turned around I assumed I was on the other side of the mountain.

No major lesson here, except that God likes to find ways to make me laugh.

Three and a Half Lessons from a Nine-Day Seclusion

I was really ready to go on seclusion. I’d been looking forward to it for ages. I had my days all planned out: plenty of meditation, extra energization exercises, starting a yoga habit again, spiritual reading, the works. I did that on my seclusion last year, and loved it. So when I arrived at the Ananda Meditation Retreat a week and a half ago, I just hit the ground running. Or so I thought.

I stepped right into my routine on day 1. It feels so easy to arrive at the Retreat and just leave everything else behind. That’s part of the blessing of having meditating devotees on that land for over four decades. But after a few days, I found myself feeling more and more confused. I was doing everything right, but I wasn’t feeling right. And I kept spiraling down into an ever-deepening malaise with no clear cause.

Lesson #1: “It takes money to make money” applies metaphysically. By Wednesday, the exact middle of the trip, I was in such a funk that I spent most of the afternoon just slumping around going “blahhhhh.” I realized I had to do something, but couldn’t think what, since I felt like I was already doing everything I should, or at least could. But if I wasn’t feeling right, I had to somehow fix my mood first. As Swami Kriyananda says, if we want to feel joy in meditation, we should meditate with as much joy as we can muster right from the start. My problem was that what I could muster wasn’t cutting it.

This brings me to Unofficial Lesson #1.5: Never leave home without a book of P.G. Wodehouse stories. Luckily, I keep a well-stocked ereader to aid in all manner of book-related emergencies. But I still struggled with it for a bit. I had specifically wanted to focus on reading spiritual books during my seclusion. But I finally reminded myself that (1) Swamiji also enjoyed Wodehouse, (2) I was coming up with no other options, and (3) if God wanted me to spend my seclusion reading Jeeves and Wooster stories instead of, say, the Bhagavad Gita, then so be it. They were hilarious.

My overall mood started improving from that moment, and my meditations stated getting better that evening. I also cut back on the number of kriyas I was trying to do, skipped a couple rounds of yoga, and just generally relaxed a bit more.

Lesson #2: The attitude of nishkam karma applies even to seclusions. We do our best at all times, but leave the results to God. If I hand over 9 days of my life as a free gift to Him, they are now His to do with as He pleases. As soon as I lightened up about what I thought was supposed to be happening, things started getting better.

This was rubbed in just a bit more a couple days later. The day after my Wodehouse-assisted mood change, water from the hot water taps in my cabin started coming out all brown and icky. I ran lots of water all day to flush it out, with no result. Only the one cold water tap in the kitchen was crystal clear (turns out it’s on a different filter).

I didn’t particularly want to go find someone to notify about this, because it was a seclusion after all, and I was really perfectly happy being alone for a week, not talking to anyone, and I didn’t want to break the thread. I figured I’d just deal with having only cold water for two more days until I left. But the next morning I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable about it, until I realized something just had to be done. So I flung up my hands, called “nishkam karma” on the whole seclusion again, and went to the office to give them a friendly alert about it. By the time I’d walked back to the cabin, Brannon had already gotten there in his truck and was running the tap saying “it just does this sometimes and goes away if you flush it out enough. Look, it’s clear again already.” And it was.

That was just one of those moments I had to laugh and tell God, “okay, I got the joke.”

Lesson #3: Asking for guidance. While all this was going on, there was a parallel story playing itself out. I like to hike up the Bald Mountain trail in the morning, sit on a rock to eat my breakfast, and get back before the day gets too hot. The first morning there, I went and tried to find my favorite breakfast spot from last year. It had been slightly non-obvious to find, but not that bad, since there’s only so much of the mountain that’s actually accessible, not totally overgrown. But that day I just couldn’t find it for the life of me. So I went down another nice trail and had breakfast there. But it still struck me as very unusual, and very much as though I’d been somehow kept from where I’d wanted to go.

So I made a new habit, which was that every morning, when I reached the first fork in the trail, I’d stop and ask God which way to go. I should really do this more in general, in all contexts, so it was fun just to have a clear practice point. If I didn’t feel any actual guidance to turn right and look for the old spot again, I’d just go off to the left, to my new spot.

It was the day after my mood change that I just knew it was okay now to turn right. And I did, and I found the place I was looking for. I would say “right where I left it,” except that it wasn’t. I had actually written down how to get to it last year, and when I went back and checked what I’d quite clearly written, it was quite clearly wrong.

And I realized that this little theme ties in with all the rest of it. I had jumped into the whole trip with my own plan, which I just assumed was good because, well, it sure seemed good. But what do I know? I never actually stopped to ask God what should actually be happening. Until I came about it all the long way around.

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For those of you who read this all the way to the end, your reward is my favorite passage from that first Jeeves story I read:

"Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.