TREATING COVID-19 AS A RETREAT
True action comes out of silence and stillness, Rev. Ryan Andersen writes.
I was listening to my friends talk about the struggles they saw people having during this COVID-19 pandemic when I realized I was seeing a familiar pattern. It is a pattern that often shows up when people are on a spiritual retreat.
As a community organizer, it is a part of my job to encourage leaders to listen closely to their communities when crisis strikes. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been hearing about the growing mental health issues that are emerging as people have lost jobs, been kept at home and face anxiety caused by uncertainty.
While some of what I have been hearing seems like traditional mental health issues, there has been another pattern which reminds me of what I saw when I lived in a monastery and worked as a parish pastor.
One couple that I was told about lived a typical life before the pandemic. They worked and spent their evenings, weekends and summers playing sports with their kids. Suddenly this all changed. Their work came to a halt. Ball season didn’t start. Suddenly, what filled their life wasn’t there anymore.
At first the intensity of the shift filled their lives. What came next seemed like a bit of a break. Then they began to really struggle. As the person telling me the story said, “Suddenly they don’t have anything to distract them from the problems in their marriage that have always been there.”
It is the same pattern that a priest I work with describes seeing: “Those who struggled before are still struggling, only more so.”
This is the pattern that one typically sees in any sort of extended retreat. First there is the excitement of being somewhere new or somewhere beautiful. This often shifts into a “honeymoon” period where you simply enjoy the space and the open time. Then the work begins.
In the space and silence, all of those things within us that we keep suppressed throughout the busyness and noise of our everyday life begin to surface.
The external silence leads us to face our internal noise. It is often not pretty.
There is a reason so many of us fill our lives with the noise of work, striving, Netflix and a glass of wine. Within most of us, there are emotional pains, spiritual questions and destructive patterns that bring with them a suffering we don’t want to face.
Work, success, entertainment and a drink are all ways that we medicate ourselves to cope with the pain that lurks in all of our lives. We have these coping patterns because they have served us well — until we hit the point that they don’t.
So, why would anyone intentionally choose to put themselves in a position where they experience the mental and emotional challenges that many are facing during this COVID-19 crisis, by going on an extended retreat?
It is because over millennium, people have found these retreats to be profoundly healing and to give them the perspective to live well.
To make this a positive experience, there is some wisdom that is important in making a retreat a healing — and not a destructive — experience.
1. Don’t rush to fill your time. The power of a retreat comes because as we remove the gross noise of our life, we have the opportunity to listen to the more subtle music of our hearts and spirits.
2. Retreats need an intentional structure. Few humans do well with no structure. How will you begin and end your day with preparation and reflection? When will you get outside and exercise? When will you give yourself time for intentional reflection?
3. Reflection needs to be intentional. Even in a retreat, most of us will avoid facing our pain.
So, how will you reflect? Will you write a journal, meditate in silence, have time for conversation, create art or music? 4. Move and care for your body. Feeding our body healthy food and moving it is essential for spiritual healing.
5. You need someone to reflect with. When I lived in a monastery and would spend a week in silence, every day I was expected to go for a walk and talk with my spiritual director for an hour. We need that conversation so that whatever is inside of us can become externalized, and thus be given perspective and be joined with wisdom.
6. You will need to sit with your pain. It is not pleasant, but we need to feel the emotions that we often suppress. This is a gift! When you begin to feel your pain, allow that pain to pass through you. This often needs to happen again and again. Slowly, what begins to happen is we become less controlled by our pain and we discover the possibility of our pain being transformed into our gift.
7. Hold yourself in love and compassion. There is a destructive, popular belief that spirituality is about beating and condemning our darker sides into submission. It is a lie. Spiritual and emotional healing only comes when we allow ourselves to be embraced by love and compassion.
Something else happens on retreats. Our perspective on life begins to change. Slowly we see what is truly important and where we need to go. As a rabbi told me the other day, all true action comes out of stillness and silence.
May we enter this time into the stillness and silence so that we may act in our lives in a way that is true and brings healing, not just for our self, but for our world.