The Cave is Not the Answer
[Level 1: Transitional] What I learned from my month in Mazunte
Only a couple years ago I thought that if I could just run off to an ashram and away from my daily life, job, and obligations I’d finally find what I needed—peace, wisdom, insight into what my actual life purpose was other than just to survive.
Then I actually went. But it wasn’t what I expected.
The setup
It’s been a while since I last posted—not because I got sick of writing, but because I’ve been on a much-needed 3 month sabbatical. The last 2 months of it I was traveling and away from computers which was refreshing after a full decade in software engineering without a real break, not even between my only 2 jobs since graduating.
I have a lot I want to share, but I’m still processing. What I can share today though is about what I thought was going to be the climax, the grand finale of my sabbatical: a solo trip to Mazunte, Mexico where the main events were a 10-day silent retreat and a 10-day dark retreat that came immediately after. It was my first time doing either.
“You’re doing what?”
I got a lot of bewildered reactions when I told my community, friends, and family why exactly I was going to not be in town and offline for 3 weeks. Many asked why I would do such a thing. I would just say it was an “extreme digital detox,” but that wasn’t the whole truth.
The truth was that I was desperate—for insight, for a revelation, for God. I thought if I could just take away literally everything but my awareness for an extended period of time (or at least the longest amount the meditation center would allow me to do as a first-timer), then I’d get the breakthrough I was looking for.
Originally I wanted to do some kind of hermitage stay—something low-key but that would put me more in touch with the inner guidance I felt like was getting muffled by the noise of daily life. I eventually learned about dark retreats which sounded like the more extreme (which to my mind translated as more “effective”) version of that.
So of course I just had to do it during the sabbatical. I sent out applications, did an interview, and was given the green light for May to June.
Insidious expectations
I tried to read as little about dark retreats as I could in order to not come in with expectations of what “should” happen during the dark retreat. Everyone’s different anyway, but my mind loves to compare.
Yet, I still went in expecting to come away with something. I was expecting an experience of some sort. And expecting an experience is a surefire way to kill it as I’ve written about previously.
I expected psychedelic visuals. I expected my demons to surface. I expected depths I couldn’t reach at home. I expected, eventually—finally—to dissolve.
But honestly? It didn’t feel any more profound than days I’d have the house to myself on weekends. Of course the environment was very different, but there was no magic in the darkness, just a bottomless sea of thoughts that only grew louder when I had utterly nothing to distract myself with—seemingly half of them related to food since I couldn’t tell what time it was for breakfast and dinner.
“Have you achieved enlightenment?”
One of my friends asked me this when I got back. But there is no achieving it and frankly I don’t feel there’s any experience that can be sought out to get closer to it either at this point (though my mind still refuses to rule out psychedelics).
I did have this insight at some point as I clumsily scrawled it blind into the notebook I’d brought along for the trip:
You are not trying to catch the butterfly or even waiting for it to land on you. You ARE the butterfly being invited to rest on the blossom of your own being and to be nourished by it.
I don’t feel like the butterfly yet, but I know I’m too far into the dissolving to climb back into the caterpillar’s skin.
And the “dissolving”? That... fails to describe what happened the last day and a half before I left Mexico. But that deserves its own post as a follow-up.
Until next time.