In his book Snow LeopardPeter Mathiesen says he has “come down” from a literal high: a two-month pilgrimage deep in the Tibetan Himalayas. But as he gets lower in altitude and closer to a remote world, he becomes increasingly frustrated.
In other words, he experienced what all seekers before him and since must ultimately reach: the challenge of bringing expanded mental states into everyday life, anchoring them there, integrating and sustaining what psychologist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences. These are spiritual awakenings, epiphanies, revelations, encounters with transcendence or awe, even engrossment, and all kinds of highs, whether mystical or mycological. “After enlightenment,” as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield put it, “is laundry.”
Anyone can get high, but applying the wisdom of getting high to the everyday life of Mulberry Street creates a real effort at growth and evolution. Here we encounter the usual tools of decline and distraction: habits, routines, mindsets, ego stubbornness — all of which relentlessly conspire to break the magic spell.
These agents don’t just wait for us when we get home: we take them to the mountaintop. Emerson once said about travel:
“At home, I dream of being intoxicated by beauty in Naples or Rome, where I can forget my sorrows. I pack my trunks, embrace my friends, set sail, and finally wake up in Naples, only to find that the harsh reality I fled from, my sad self, is there, mercilessly, the same. My giant is with me wherever I go.”
I once attended a weekend trapeze class at a retreat center in Texas. The class, like the firewalking workshop, was designed as a tool to combat fear: “If you can do this, you can do anything.” On the last day, I overheard one of the participants tell one of my classmates, “Let’s be fearless for a week” (and, of course, that week was just the right week for some long-needed risk-taking).
Similarly, during the pandemic, I heard people talk about awakenings and revelations about interconnectedness, work-life balance, and parts of themselves that normally remain in the shadows but have suddenly been given a chance to emerge. But as the pandemic began to recede, I wondered how they were able to reconnect. last Their new daily life.
It’s one thing to pull back the curtains and see the truth about the grand scheme of things and what really matters and is possible, but it’s another to make it happen. stickKeep your vision and awakening in mind at all times and let it truly transform who you are and how you live.
Consider this advice from Hasidic Rabbi Abraham Heschel:
“We are trained to maintain a sense of wonder by saying a prayer before enjoying a meal. Daily wonder requires daily prayer. Three times a day we say, ‘I thank you for your miracles and your constant wonders that occur to us each day.'”
And I think this is the crux of it: We maintain our wonder and our wonder through regular discipline and worship, just as we maintain our spiritual traditions. So maybe we’re going to need some kind of habit to maintain that and remind ourselves of that.
Some suggestions:
- Allow yourself some quiet time after waking to rest and appreciate the sensations, without the usual busyness and distractions (which means to be drawn away).
- Focus on things that help you remember, such as rereading the journal you wrote during your retreat or vision quest, or reciting your new intention regularly.
- Do not reject any resistance that arises in the face of a new truth, respect it, accept it and dialogue with it: resistance is part of the path, not against it.
- Collaborate with like-minded people and you are strong in numbers.After a particularly transformative workshop I attended a few years ago, the facilitator encouraged me to join an “I-Group,” a monthly integration group that helped us absorb what we had learned.
And this is a powerful insight I got from a man named Robert Greenway, who taught ecopsychology at Sonoma State University (SSU) in the 1960s (he actually coined the term) and developed the first graduate program of “wilderness therapy” training in the U.S. In his 22 years at SSU, he took more than 1,500 students into the wilderness for two to four weeks at a time, sometimes staying there alone for up to three months.
Similar to what has been revealed in studies of meditation and psychedelic experiences, Greenway has found that the “wilderness effect” involves a deeper experience that transcends cultural thinking, an awareness that is not goal-oriented, and that many forms of pleasure (physical, sensory, aesthetic, spiritual) that tend to be numb in urban life are revived in natural environments and tend to contribute to an expansion of self-consciousness.
But the wilderness effect he found tends to either disappear upon returning to the everyday world, or to come into direct conflict with it. More than half of his students report becoming depressed within two days of returning home. “I think the depression is an important clue. Connecting with nature boosts our energy levels so much, but clearly this connection has been broken or blocked in the human-made world to which we return – the world that separated us from nature in the first place. And it’s painful to feel that open self closing again. I began to realize that I was unconsciously creating serious conflict dramas.”
For example, he was once called in by the manager of a local supermarket to conduct an “intervention” with one of his students, who, a few days after returning from a Greenway wilderness trip, had been discovered collapsed on the floor of the paper products section, rambling incoherently about the numerous brands of toilet paper available, the vast amounts of them consumed, and the terrible economic inequality they represent in the world.
Observing that people often return to the world with intense emotions that persist even when they’re gone, Greenway began requiring his students to practice yoga and meditation not just in preparation for their wilderness experiences, but during and after, resulting in an almost complete elimination of depression on the return trip. He believes these regimens help stabilize the wilderness’ effects of expanded, aimless consciousness and a “nondual mindset,” making people feel less split.
Yoga, after all, means integration.
