(1) Birds
During my Jhourney retreat, I had an experience where I was meditating outside in a field, and a little songbird landed on my head. So light! But I was startled and moved, so it flew away.
During my Mahamudra retreat, I also took a moment to meditate in some grass, looking out over the fields of Texas. I started to hear some rustling behind me. At first I thought other meditators had decided to join in and were settling down in the grass. But the sounds continued, so eventually I stopped the meditation to look over my shoulder. I found that the temple's peacock flock had snuck up and surrounded me. They were only a few feet away. Some other retreat members were standing by observing. I decided to get up and leave (do peacocks peck humans? I don't know!), and my fellow attendees all sighed with disappointment; they wanted to witness some more climactic ending to the beautiful birds approaching the beautiful meditating girl.
I had a friend who once got hit in the face with a dragonfly during a big meditation for him. He decided that dragonflies were an animal of significance.
The birds are not significant yet, but this feels like a story not yet complete.
(2) Listening
We did a listening exchange practice at some point during the retreat. Someone speaks for 5 minutes about their challenges while the other person just listens with the intention of being open, accepting, compassionate. You then exchange.
I love this exercise. I always forget how much I love it until I do it. If we're ever hanging and you want to do a listening exchange with me, please don't hesitate to suggest.
(3) Shame
There was some other exercise where you take some negative emotion, you try to give space to feel it, and then you... meditate on it? While holding it within the large empty field of awareness? I genuinely forget what we did, but it was something that was supposed to transmute the emotion. E.g., anger often transmutes into a clarity about a boundary, etc.
I chose to focus on shame I was feeling around interactions with a colleague. I wasn't really expecting much to happen. But as I sat there reflecting on this colleague, apologizing to her in my mind for how much I projected onto her, a sentence arose: I want to love you, and I want you to love me. It hit.
Later, when we were debriefing the exercise, another participant shared that they had focused on shame as their emotion, and that it had transmuted into... a sense that they just wanted to love and be loved. I was surprised — exactly the same! Damn. Perhaps I have simply not worked with shame as much as I have anger, so I'm not as used to the common patterns behind it. But I'm excited to look for this more — when I feel small, embarrassed, anxious around someone, can I instead notice how much I just want there to be mutual love flowing back and forth? This seems helpful.