When I Stopped Running Away: My Five-Month Solitary Meditation Retreat
In 2010, I left my life in New York City as a social entrepreneur and ex-aspiring actress, producer and director to move to Colorado’s San Juan Mountains for a solitary five-month meditation retreat. I shaved my head, buzzing my long, blonde, wavy hair down to the scalp. I sold, stored, and gave away all my belongings and set out on this journey in hopes of finding relief from seemingly never-ending inner turmoil and a source of true happiness — a happiness not dependent on external circumstances, but one that came from within. I set out on the journey unaware I would experience deeper healing and awakening than at any other time in my short twenty-six years on this planet. Was this my quarter-life crisis? Was it a reaction to it? The solution? Whatever it was became one of those “before and after” life moments. A dividing line, who I was and how I saw the world “before retreat,” and the woman who emerged “after retreat.”
The internal changes were revolutionary, but their depth and ever changing state was only truly known to me. Words and language cannot fully capture the essence of deep shifts of the soul or the profound changes I experienced in how I viewed myself and the world. This is something that must be experienced and felt. It is something you feel in your bones. Externally however, friends and family saw a stark difference between the “before retreat” and “after retreat” me. The girl who entered retreat was a curvy, voluptuous blonde. Big hair, big boobs, big personality. The woman who emerged after retreat couldn’t have differed more: I was forty pounds lighter and sported short, brown pixie cut hair and a bra, two cup sizes smaller. I wore less make up and more smiles. I listened more deeply. I had less frantic energy, and was more grounded and self-assured. Most important of all, I had connected to a joy and source of self-love within me I had not known before. As it goes in our society, what seemed to stand out most to folks was how much weight I lost. How did you do it? What diet are you on? What’s your exercise routine? Little did everyone know, my weight loss and outer transformation came from doing deep inner work and was not some external, temporary fix. It came from making friends with myself, from being kind and curious with my inner “little Bridget,” and healing the most fundamental of relationships: the one with myself. All of the physical changes were simply a reflection of the hard-won, free inner world that had revealed itself through the challenges and trials of spending five months alone, meditating twelve hours a day. The thinner body was a mirror of what had been shed within.
Everyone was interested in my retreat. Why would you do that? Why did you go? What made you do that? There were both left-brain and right-brain reasons, heart and logic. In the core of my heart, I felt a yearning to connect with a deeper, more authentic version of myself. I didn’t yet understand, but could sense, that all of my external-focused need for approval — the partying, the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the status, the guys, the clubs, the lists, the galas, the striving — was distracting me from a deeper truth inside. It was distracting me from a more vibrant, real, connected, and ecstatic experience of life, one that sets the soul free instead of keeping her confined in a world of external-based “shoulds.” This yearning was like a siren song but not a deceptive one — a mysterious and beautiful song you hear but can’t quite grasp.
When I connect with this feeling and the journey of my retreat, I picture the story of a young Irish girl who spends her days on the green, foggy Irish moorlands — the high cliffs overlooking the sea. She walks amidst the deep green bushes, the heather and rolling, damp, misty hills. Each day she goes to the cliffs to hear the waves and look out at the sea. One day, between the sounds of the crashing waves below, she hears a beautiful melody, a song riding the wind. She looks to find who is singing, but there is no one there. Each day she returns to hear the song. She follows the sound to find it comes from the hills in the North where no one goes. She follows it one day, getting closer but not venturing into the hills. She feels the song calling her to discover something unknown, something beyond. The song feels as if it comes from another world — a world too beautiful and true for this one. To find its source, she must venture away from her family and home, from the green Irish cliffs, and head into the foggy, cold, rock mountains alone.
Eventually she finds a cave where a young goddess woman stands singing alone. Dressed in white flowing garments, flowers and thistle from the mountain adorning her long and wind-blown, blondish hair — her body like a mirage, shimmering as if made of light. She sings a love song for the world. It is a beautiful yet eerie song that sends love to the hearts of women everywhere but that also laments and grieves their pain. The song grieves the pain that comes from women not seeing or feeling their own power and loving themselves fully. The goddess cries as she sings. Her tears spring from compassion for the suffering of women and all people who do not see their own beauty and their own worth. Who do not know that a source of undying, infinite love and wisdom lives within them at all times. This vibrant wisdom is there, if they would only stop, turn inward, and look. She sings the beautiful melody, tears running; a prayer, a practice, her blessings sent out to heal the world.
Once there in the cave, the young Irish girl knows she must stay and learn this song. Learn the words so she can heal herself first and then join the goddess woman in singing for the world. Despite being lonely and cold, afraid and physically exhausted, she stays in the cave with the goddess woman learning her song, taking in her wisdom. She hauls water, searches for food in the rocky mountain terrain, and sleeps on the cave’s cold, dusty floor. It is difficult. She cries some days. She wants to leave but knows she must learn this song. As she begins to sing it herself, her heart begins to open and feel a love that has always been present there. One day she knows the song by heart. It is time to leave the cave. She is forever changed and returns to her village always singing the song. Sometimes she sings the song loud, bold and clear and other times soft, under her breath. She travels the world, and many hear the goddess woman’s cave song. The blessings spread out. Some women learn it by heart, others learn only a few words, and some women even travel to the cave themselves to spend months or years with the goddess woman. She is always there, singing her song-blessing for the world.
The Irish girl first healed herself in the cave and then took this wisdom with her in life, to continue her healing and to share that wisdom so others could heal themselves too. And naturally, over time, the world began to change. Slowly more people sang the cave song and turned inward to find happiness and freedom. Personal transformation is what changes the world. We must first learn our own song and heal our own hearts, then live this transformation, to the best of our ability, every day of our lives. When we heal our own suffering, we heal the world. This is how suffering is ended for us all, one song at a time.
The right-brain reason I went into retreat was a logical argument about happiness and its source. I’d begun observing my own mind and moods seriously about a year and a half before the six-month retreat. This self-inquiry emerged after I attended my first group-meditation retreat where we received ancient teachings on Buddhist philosophy and meditation from an amazing Tibetan Lama. After this retreat, I became acutely aware of a pattern to my moods of happiness and unhappiness. I felt amazing, happy and like I had my shit together when: I felt skinny, a guy called me back or wanted to take me on a date, I got a compliment at work, felt successful, got invited to a cool, exclusive party, my skin looked good, I looked good, I stuck to a diet and went to the gym, and on and on. I felt sad, unhappy, depressed, and hopeless when: I felt fat, ugly, a guy stopped talking to me, friends failed to invite me to a party, I got a bunch of zits as a present for my period, had a messy room, I ate “horribly” or over ate, didn’t go the gym, got too hungover, had a set back at work, a frustrating conversation with a friend, or felt like a failure.
The pattern? My inner state of being depended on things outside of me. If life was “going well,” I was okay. If it wasn’t, I wasn’t. So what, right? This dependence, I realized, is precarious. I had no control. My state of being was out of my hands in this set up. And, given life’s unpredictability and the impermanence of all things, this seemed like a bad plan. People in my life will die. They will get sick. I will face disappointments, failures, and setbacks. How would I deal with those things if my happiness depended on everything “out there” going right? One day I just saw it: I thought, “This way of living is fucked.” At this rate, I will never be okay or sustainably happy. I don’t want to depend on trying to make the outer world perfect so I can be happy. That is a losing game. It became clear I would need to develop tools for happiness within myself to be able to traverse life’s difficulties without losing my mind. What if I could instead align my inner world to be balanced regardless of life’s up and downs? I resolved to find a way to cultivate a happiness born from within that does not depend on things outside of me — a self-born joy, like nuclear fusion or a limitless power source in my heart that charged itself. An inner peace that, no matter what happens outside of me, I can return to the warmth and security of that truth and be okay.
This desire for true comfort was born of years-long internal suffering. In my teens and twenties, I struggled deeply with countless afflictions: body image, self-confidence, feelings of being left out and rejected, weight loss, perfectionism, inferiority, anxiety, depression, and failure. The symptoms of this? At times, I was anorexic and bulimic. Sometimes I drank too much and blacked out too much (as if there were an acceptable amount). My need to be loved — or to just be with someone — led me to date assholes. I slept with men I knew didn’t respect me (and did it again). Most of all, I tried so hard to be better. I tried so hard to lose weight, to be successful, to stand up for myself, to be “okay” with the disappointments, break ups, and weight gains. I tried so hard to start over, try again, and be happy. But no matter what I did, I felt I always failed.
At a certain point, I said, “Enough. Let’s try something new.” That something new was my retreat. I decided to stop running away and instead turn inward to face myself — to go on a retreat, to just stop for a moment, and to be present with what was arising and alive within me. It was a bold decision to do a retreat for five months, let alone a solitary one where I would not be speaking to or around any other people for months. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. No idea at all. The idea of “finding yourself” and “connecting with your heart” is one thing. It sounds romantic even. The actual work was something else altogether.
This post is the first in a series about the five-month meditation retreat I did in 2010, the crazy life journey since then of love, loss, far off places, humility, failure, adventure, death and courage, and the continued commitment to healing myself in the hopes of helping to heal the world. One year ago, this month, I left my job at Amazon.com in Brazil to write about this journey and share what I know of the goddess woman’s cave song with the world. It’s really fucking scary. The journey we each walk in life is at once beautiful and tragic, heroic and shameful at times, painful, joyous, secret and public, personal and something we share. This is my piece to share. Thank you for joining me on this journey and in this circle of humanity’s stories.
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