The Creative's Confessional
PSA: Healing is still slow. New software updates have not gotten more linear.
A few weekends ago, I walked out of a meditation retreat for the first time.
For those of you who don’t frequent silent meditation retreats—this is not only considered fairly rude, but also taboo enough where I’ve never seen anyone else do it.1
The teacher, who I don’t care to name2, went on a shocking side tangent in the middle of his morning dharma talk about how spiritual abuse is equally the product of a “bad teacher and bad students,” emphasizing the ‘and’ fairly deliberately in a way that made my stomach drop. He even used a high-pitched, baby voice to mimic a few sentences of what ‘bad students’ might say as they blame the person spiritually abusing them. Then saying something about them being complicit in the teachings by continuing to show up.
At the end of his talk I stood up, gathered my bench, cushion, and journal and excused myself before the post-talk sit that was about to start—not wanting to be in compliance with the ‘bad’ teachings and all, as per his own words.
I went home, lie in bed until I ironically, went to go teach mindfulness to a bunch of high school students3. On my way home from teaching I stopped by the grocery store. When I got home I ate a whole pint of lavender flavored ice cream in bed, polished off a bag of tortilla chips, and watched cult documentaries drifting in and out of sleep until the tears finally came.
I don’t have days like this often anymore.
The things that trigger my body to the point of overwhelm are fewer and farther in between. The rest I need to take to communicate to my body that I’m safe enough to emote is shorter and shorter all of the time. I’m learning repeatedly, that we don’t really get to move past grief, but instead that grief is just something we learn how to carry in our satchel. Some days we carry it gracefully around our necks. Other days it wears our skin raw from the extra friction.
I wish I wasn’t still processing the recovery from my abusive relationship through writing about it—but I am, so here we are—raw, grief satchel grinding away pieces of me like sandpaper.
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