Today, I want to share a personal story with you that I rarely share with anyone. It’s about a powerful spiritual experience I had that showed me, once and for all, that stories shape your reality. They shape who you were, who you are, and who you can become next, and with that kind of understanding comes power over your own story.
About four years ago, I did a 10-day meditation retreat where things got seriously dark.
During the retreat, I had the utterly inconvenient realization that I needed to get divorced from my then-best friend. I can only explain it as a download.
The thoughts appeared: “You have to let him go. He needs to travel the world alone,” followed by me bawling my eyes out for two hours.
When I sat to meditate again, more thoughts downloaded: “You have been deeply lonely. You need more than this. You’re going to meet someone who’s a better match for you.” And another hour of tears, because these thoughts reflected feelings I’d been actively ignoring.
Marriage as Sangha
We were best friends and we loved each other, but we had never been “in love”. We married by choice into what we called a “spiritual partnership”—our own mini-sangha of two. We meditated together daily, and went to retreats and 4-day intensive workshops where we broke through limiting beliefs. We co-founded a charity that helped over 400 children in Laos and India by building schools and toilets and creating food programs. We founded an indie music festival to raise money for it all, where we got artists featured on TV and in the papers.
We had transformed ourselves and the world together, and now we were graduating to the next level, which required us to go our separate ways. That was the message, but it was terrifying.
The Pit of Fear
What would he say when I told him? What would our families say? And what would happen to me? Would I lose myself in pursuit of the “in-love” rush again, an old addiction of mine? Would I have the strength to avoid chasing that feeling of being “enough”, being “special”, too emotionally caught in it all to live my purpose—everyone’s purpose—of contributing to the whole?
It looked likely. To avoid this pit of fear, I grew increasingly obsessed with a compassionate young guy at the retreat—a common problem at retreats, because it’s more fun to project fantasies onto someone than to deal with your own shit.
On top of that, a contingent of Thai girls kept giggling and talking to each other all throughout our so-called “silent retreat”. Even though they’d been nothing but sweet to me, I kept replaying a scene in my head where I’d march over, smile kindly then ask them to “Please go play somewhere else, thank you very much, so us serious meditators can do our work.” (Yes, of course I knew that my annoyance at them was just a mirror showing me where I still needed to work on myself, but I was too pissed off to act like the enlightened being I wasn’t.)
The Even Deeper Pit of Self Loathing
And all this mess was just the surface waves. Lurking under the ocean of my discontent was a current of self hatred like I had never experienced before. At dinner, I could only eat one grain of rice at a time, because intense hopelessness and self loathing had permeated my whole being.
“Why not just die?” it implored. “Give up now and you won’t have to suffer anymore.”
But, because I’ve been through numerous retreats where old, unprocessed pain has bubbled up to be processed, and because I’d also been living with the barely explainable madness of a kundalini awakening that began during a Vipassana retreat in 2004, I wasn’t too alarmed by this turn of events. After all, the only way to let the light into those dark places is to open those damn doors. So, I sat and walked with this darkness, observed it from every angle—this intense lobbying by my False Self for “us” to die.
But it scared the shit out the other meditators, and the instructor, too, who was a seasoned monk from Thailand. He told me to meditate in shorter cycles, so I wouldn’t get too deep. He had no problem helping numerous other meditators, like the 17-year-old who kept seeing dead people whenever she meditated (they were apparently hanging around the temple begging for help), but, strangely enough, the all-consuming hatred of the false self was unnerving for him. That said, he had at least heard about it from others.
While I found it hard to believe this was a fabulous breakthrough, my False Self loved that I was experiencing something important that my teacher hadn’t experienced yet. “Hey, check it out. I’m a spiritual rock star. Uhuh uhuh.”
But even that was cold comfort as it got darker and darker inside Planet Shawn. It had reached the point where I was mostly just doing walking meditation, back and forth, back and forth across the room, feeling doomed, wondering if that impulse for self-annhilation might actually be problematic if I didn’t fix it before leaving. And all the while, I steadfastly alternated between ignoring and indulging my various obsessions with the said guy and the annoying talking meditators.
The Feeling of Being “Enough”
And then it happened. I turned around slowly, feeling the movement of my body, observing my breath, my foot lifting, moving, placing and… Noticing. Noticing.
Something is different. What?
It wasn’t euphoria. There were no explosions of light. No obliteration of being. Just peace. Delicious, simple peace like your first bite of a freshly picked tomato in July. So good, so surprisingly good, and yet you can’t explain it in a way that others can truly understand. They have to taste it for themselves.
Surprised, I looked around at the other meditators. First stop, the guy I’d been been obsessing over. The obsession was gone—zero interest. I felt a deep love for him, but no attraction, and definitely no “wanting”. I needed nothing from him at all. I was enough without him, without anyone.
“I am enough.”
It was a feeling, not a thought, like that tasty tomato bursting in my mouth: “I am enough. I am enough.”
Actually, my mind was mercifully free of thoughts—and I didn’t miss them one bit. It was as though I’d always been that way—totally happy and needing nothing from anyone. And, yet, I was still excited to be alive; I wanted to create things and help people, if I could. This was huge, because I’d always feared that enlightenment or whatever you want to call it would be like being a happy zombie…I wouldn’t want to do anything but sit on a bench all day.
Nope. I was still me, just a hell of a lot happier. There was no need to compete. No wanting. No self hatred. No panic. No anxiety.
Fucking A. As someone with PTSD, I couldn’t remember a single moment of my life without a background buzz of panic and anxiety—and it didn’t take much to wind that up into a screaming siren.
I turned my attention to the giggly women. I felt no anger, no judgment. Only love. I didn’t need them to be anything other than what they were so that I could be happy. I didn’t need them to be quiet. They could talk all they wanted. My happiness did not depend on their actions.
I had been rendered incapable of judging them or anyone. I could only love them because it was the only possible emotion inside of me; in the same way I had been permeated with the darkness of self loathing, I was now permeated by the light of unconditional love.
It was the best feeling I’ve ever had, and the greatest gift I’ve been given. For years I’d struggled with a “story” that I would find life boring without my rollercoasters of emotion. And I had also been terribly guilty of judging others for being less kind or less committed to kindness than me (yes, I see the hypocrisy in that), and now it was clear that real spiritual evolution has zero judgment in it, with no exceptions. All judgment and pointing fingers at others is the False Self attempting to feel superior. Period.
I felt schooled. I felt awed.
And then… Shit. No. No!
Back to Reality: With Fringe Benefits
All the desires and judgments came crashing back into my awareness, a waterfall of bullshit that I no longer identified with or saw as “mine”.
They were just stories from the character that was “Shawn”—a temporary character that would eventually disappear, and transform into something else, something even more interesting, perhaps. Like the small star that eventually transformed into our beautiful, life-giving Sun. Other stars have transformed into mysterious black holes, that probably do cool stuff we don’t even know about yet. We are like those stars—our story never ends, it just keeps transforming.
Though I did not become enlightened that day, I had a taste of it and was transformed by the experience. I, the committed story spinner, experienced the truth of something I’d been reading about for years in books written by actual enlightened people, such as Adyashanti and Byron Katy (Who would you be without your story?): that no stories are true.
All stories are creations.
This understanding led to a series of life experiments, which are still unfolding today, along with an ever-deepening desire to share what I’ve learned with others.
Stories are Optional
The core of it is that our True Self has no need for stories. Just like when you were a child playing in the park all day, and it felt like forever, because you were just there, flying up on that swing, laughing and breathing and tasting the deliciousness of pure experience. It’s why we love activities like skiing and riding on rollercoasters–it can take us back to what it feels like to be our True Selves.
But we also love stories and the experiences they create, and that’s totally fine. Personally, I’ve been in love with stories all my life; they’re my passion. They’re a great tool to enhance our lives, as long as we don’t get lost in them. Because then we become their bitch.
The trick is to understand every inch of our own story, plus get acquainted with our True Self, so we can become the proud author of what happens next. That’s when life starts actually being fun. That’s what I help people do now.
What Happened Next: The Rest of the Story
You’re probably wondering what happened after that retreat, right? I’m writing a book about that, and this is one chapter. But here’s a snapshot.
All those thoughts that “downloaded” were dead on. It led to the friendliest divorce ever. Then, my ex went on to travel the world, eventually settling down in the country where he was born (but left as a small child, due to war), to start a business. I ended up meeting someone (whom I’d known from a distance for a while, but never would have imagined us in a relationship) and our relationship turned out better than my wildest expectations. Happily, it’s a drama-free zone (that’s not to say we always agree on shit, though). And, after almost three years of living and working together in a 600 sq foot condo, I still think he’s the best thing since sticky toffee pudding (and I’m mad for that stuff).
My story continues unfolding, as all stories do.
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