Marcy Crawford
Editor’s Note: An experienced practitioner attended a three-day silent retreat during which she experienced a series of profound transcendental mind states. After returning home, initially she continued to feel intense flow and spaciousness which soon, frustratingly, began to fade. She asked Marcy for guidance on how to integrate her peak experiences into daily life.
The fading away of peak experiences is not only natural, it needs to happen, it’s a good thing. When you continue to have peak experiences coming off a strong retreat, with tons of energy and feeling like you could climb Mount Everest, it’s captivating, it’s wonderful, but it’s not a place from which we can skillfully be in the world; the peak experience has to go. We can look at it as our work, then, knowing that the peak experience will and must go, to make that our new focus. Instead of being sad or trying not to be sad, ask yourself “Okay, as this fades, how open can I be? Can I notice what it’s like for it to fade? If there’s sadness, can I turn toward the sadness? How intimate can I be with where sadness is felt in my body?” In that way you can make good use of the manner in which your attentional skills got so amplified on the retreat.
Your sensory clarity, I guarantee you, is so much higher now than it was a week ago, before the retreat, so when you lean into the feelings, you will quickly recognize “Oh my gosh, that’s sadness.” Then, instantly what seemed like a problem becomes a reward. But you know the myth of pandora’s box, right? When you open to deep experiences, everything is released, not just the good stuff. There may feelings of joy and profound presence, but there’s also insecurity and fear and pain and grief. If we try to stuff all those back in the box, this is resistance, this is pain. But we can do a lot to make it not so hard by taking the perspective that “This is good, this is a natural part of the process. Things are getting released and worked through.”
Still, it’s intense. I know it’s hard work, but it’s such admirable work. You can see at a time like this why everyone doesn’t do this, it’s hard. It’s hard to go have a peak experience and then come back to face the other side of it. But we don’t get to do just one side, we have to do the whole thing. We get both the peak experience and the pain, but it’s so worth it from my perspective because it’s not that we’re going to be emotional yo-yos forever. This is healing, this is growth, and this evens out over time so that the rollercoaster gets less severe as we work through the garbage that’s coming up to be released.