The Dogs Won't Stop Barking

"How do I get out of this car?" was all I could think to myself. I'd decided to carpool up to the retreat, so I had unintentionally given up my escape hatch. Seven days of sitting in silence? What kind of idiot would volunteer for something like that?

Maybe you've had that moment too—when you've signed up for something that seemed like a good idea at the time and now you're wondering what the hell you were thinking. A marathon. A blind date. That 5 am Fitness Bootcamp.

It turned out that there was one thing more powerful than my wish to escape and return home: my pride. Wait, if these other people can do it, then I can do it too.

A few hours later, we pulled into the retreat center, a beautiful set of buildings in a rural, idyllic town in central Vermont. If everyone else was as anxious as I was, they weren't letting on. Some of the staff came out to welcome us with quiet smiles. Check-in. Orientation. First meditation at 5:30, then dinner, then a short talk. An easy appetizer before what was surely to be seven days of utter torture ahead.

It was already disrupting my fantasy, you know the one, that there’s some place we can go, some thing we can do, some switch we can flip that will make the hard stuff go away?

Here's what I was hoping for: that somehow, in all that silence and sitting, the anxiety that I was so expert at medicating would go away. That the heaviness of life would dissolve, permanently. That was my fantasy of what enlightenment was going to be. Let's call it beginner's mind.

I'd started meditating a few months before, with the help of a psychologist I was seeing and a handful of books on insight meditation. At the start, I couldn't sit still for two minutes. But gradually, I worked up to a daily morning practice, 20 minutes while my coffee machine did its thing. I wasn't married at the time, no kids, firmly planted in a phase of urban, workaholic, something-is-definitely-wrong-but-I-am-definitely-not-going-to-stop-to-figure-it-out.

I had my little green cushion that I would pull out from under the bed, set my timer, and do my best. Of course, I thought I was "bad at it" because I couldn't stop my thoughts, not knowing anything about anything at the time. But I knew that no matter how much my mind would torture me with fantasies or fears, no matter how much my knees would hurt, the timer wasn’t too far away.

But this? Doing that for seven days? Where the only thing you do when you're not meditating on the cushion is meditating while you're walking? And meditating while you're doing chores? What kind of vacation is this, where you pay them to give you work to do?

I fell asleep hard the first night. The amount of anxiety and planning and strategizing on how I was going to make it through the week had thoroughly exhausted me. Ever notice how exhausting it is to be anxious? It's like running a marathon while sitting still.

I woke up the next morning for the real day one. It went. I sat. I walked. I did my chores. I ate my meal. All in silence. Trying as best I could, 90% of the time distracted and wandering in my mind, being anything but mindful, to follow the instructions to be present. To follow my breath. To notice, that's all, just notice, when my mind had wandered off and bring myself back.

Like all meaningful change, the shift happened when I wasn’t looking.

It’s like when you've had a cold for a few days and then at some point you're walking around and realize, oh wait, I'm not sick anymore. The thing you were seeking has been seeking you, and operating on its own timeline. For me, that was somewhere towards the end of day two. I'd calmed down a bit. The peaks and valleys of my emotions were softening. Whatever crazy thought my mind came up with, whatever feeling of loneliness emerged, wasn’t throwing me around in the same way. This was getting interesting.

It wasn’t that things had gotten quieter. It’s that my angle of perspective on whatever would come up, started to shift. The anxiety was still there, but now I could feel it in my body instead of just thinking about it. The heaviness wasn't gone, but I could start to sense its weight, its texture, its particular flavor of emptiness. It was like someone had turned up the resolution on my emotions just as I was hoping to change the channel!

There are many different Buddhist traditions and schools. In the particular one that was running this retreat center, they combined Buddhist meditation with some Japanese/Zen practices. Specifically, there was a ritualistic form of communal eating. All of the participants sat in long rows on the floor. We each brought our bowls and utensils, wrapped in a cloth napkin. We did each step together as a group, 50 or 60 of us, the staff bringing us each bit of the meal, all in silence, with hand signals to gesture if we wanted more or less of something.

We were all pretty clunky at first, but by day three, we'd gotten the hang of it. And it was beautiful. No talking. No eye contact. Nobody special. Just each person with themselves. All of us in a flow together.

I would have these occassional moments, the most delicious moments, when I felt part of something larger. I wasn’t gone or disassociated, just no longer separate.

And then it happened. We were in one of our longer sits of the day, maybe 45 minutes, when the dogs across the valley started barking again. It had been happening every day, and it was incredibly distracting. You could feel everyone in the meditation hall sigh when those annoying dogs would start their howling, probably a mile away, but with the still Spring air, it was like they were right outside the room.

For two days, I and I presume my fellow travelers had tried to block the sound out. You know that thing you do when someone's playing music too loud on the beach, or when your neighbor's leaf blower is going at 7 am? You tense up, you resist, you wish it would just stop, you rehearse what you’re going to say to this rude and inconsiderate person. It wasn't working.

It wasn't a conscious decision. I didn't know how to do what I was about to do. It was the result of practice. For the last three days, I had been practicing the simplest and most powerful skill there is as a human being: the skill of letting go. But the words are just stupid. Actual letting go, at the level of consciousness, is something entirely different than the words we try to use to describe it.

The dogs kept barking. And somehow, using a muscle that I didn't have or know how to access up to that moment in my life, I let go. I surrendered. I stopped wishing for them to stop. I stopped trying to ignore the sound. I stopped my virtual argument with their owner, who refused to bring them inside. I just stopped.

And in that moment, it was as if the magnetic poles of my being reversed. My jaw relaxed. My back softened. I let out a deep exhale. The sound of the barking penetrated my being. I gave no resistance. A soft thought of pure curiosity entered my mind: "What is happening?" And then a new awareness. A completion of the merge.

The barking is not coming from outside of me. The dogs are not over there. I am not over here. There is no separation between me and the sound, between me and anything. And, then, the kicker, the awareness that this ‘me’ thing is seriously questionable.

If you've ever had an experience of oneness like this, you know what I am about to say. It was the most joyous and illuminating experience I had ever had in my life up to that point. It was not a thought or an emotion; it was a knowing that there was a reality available to us, in any moment, that sits waiting beneath all our pain, all our trauma, all our hopes and dreams. The peak of that feeling lasted for maybe a minute. I told myself, “don’t move”, “don’t touch anything!”, but at some point my mind tried to grab on, and it was gone.

That day in Vermont was 27 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday.

Not because it was the end of a journey or because I felt like I had accomplished something. That would be too ironic for words. But what it was for me, with the benefit of hindsight, was that it helped me start to develop a strength that I had zero of, the strength to sit with myself. And as cheesy as it sounds, it’s like layers of an onion; the more you develop that muscle, the deeper the layers of wounding and false identities you will find, and there is seemingly no end to the layers.

I went to that retreat hoping to escape my inner turmoil. Instead, it’s where I started to develop the strength to face it.

Maybe right now you’re in a simmering argument with your partner, your parents are driving you crazy, you’re dreading going to work tomorrow, or drowning in debt. Or maybe everything in your life is ‘fine’, but you keep hearing that voice coming from somewhere that isn’t fooled by all your strategies and manipulations, and is harassing you into paying attention to it.

The dogs are barking.

They won’t stop.

You don’t need them to.

Just let them in.