The Inward Retreat

When I shut my eyes, I don’t recede into myself, into my depths. I don’t find a place of pure thoughts or feelings. But I try. Maybe I should try harder. All I experience is a heightened awareness of my physical surroundings; of my muscles, of the sounds my roommate makes as she moves around in the space connecting our bedrooms, of my eyes twitching to stay closed.

I want to reflect on trials. They come in by weeks it seems like. That is a manageable length of a problem. Some people’s trials come in daily, others come in yearly shifts. They are not what I would consider to be external trials, though that’s the only way I have been able to deal with them so far.

I would like to learn how to focus my thoughts on one thing. I suppose this is what meditation is? That sounds so Zen…I don’t like it. But then again I didn’t like the name Yahweh before I found out its layered significance. And I don’t mean meditation, Buddhist style – as in focusing on a word, like “Ohm” until I am blue in the face and have voided my mind of all thought. No, not like that.

I mean on a certain idea, on a certain trial. To be able to slowly drift through the ins and outs of it, thoughtfully, and to come to an end, with peace and assurance. That’s what I mean. Discursively or not, though the use of words and images would be helpful at first.

Not to knock the focused meditation of a word, but perhaps that seemingly simple level of meditation isn’t so simple, that it should come later, once the overall meanings on the focused subject are understood.

Metaphors, too, may be useful for this task. As in the visualization of something in place of the trial at hand. St. Teresa of Avila, in her early days, visualized the soul as a garden, needing water and nourishment to survive – and in her later days, as a series of mansions within a castle, necessary to pass through to become closer to God. A wise woman. I wonder which mansion I am in right now? Probably the first of many.