Coming out to friends and family

ROFL! Keep it up today, apperception, I needed the belly laughs!

This is a great topic, both for serious discussion and for belly laughs.

Until recently, my tactic for answering the "So did you have a nice and relaxing retreat?" question was to flatly deny any hope of relaxation. This was because it was largely true (I have had some very unpleasant retreats) and because people (particularly British people) generally enjoy the invitation to irreverance. Saying "No, I felt like my brain was being rewired" is (oddly) less alienating than "I felt so calm and peaceful". The downside is that my friends now probably think that I go on retreats because I am a masochist or something. One asked me recently: "Why do you still go on these things? You don't like them!" This is now a problem because my last retreat was wonderful, and has resulted in some big chunks of suffering falling away. The "horrible retreat" joke is no longer true!

Along with my teachers and this community, my girlfriend is my main support for practice, even though she doesn't meditate. She has heard the whole story about nyanas, Dark Nights and path moments. It'd be weird not to tell her to be honest. But it's a shame because she has been presented with this balls-to-the-wall hardcore version of the dharma and I am only realising now that this is just one way of approaching the whole conundrum, and one that wouldn't resonate much with her interests and personality. So I feel I've sold her my own favourite brand, without letting her peruse the shelves herself.

Similarly, I can't help but feel that when my friends and family see me meditating two hours a day, giving up drinking and going on retreat every four months, it's not the best advert for meditation. I know I would have been put off by such a hardcore practice when I first started out. As for Villum and Ron, there's a big part of me that wants to share this stuff with those I love.

Were you already dating your girlfriend when you started hardcore practice, or did you meet her after you started? I haven't been in a relationship since starting this practice. It's a frequent source of relief to me that I don't have to explain to anyone why I'm going on a retreat, why I'm noting for an hour, what a jhana is, etc. I feel like it would be easier to lie and say, "There's another woman."

"I feel like it would be easier to lie and say, "There's another woman." "

Ha! We got together when I was meditating, but not yet into hardcore practice. But I think that even though I have shown her the ugly side of all this, she has seen for herself that it's made a huge difference to my overall well-being.

Here's another thing that I find amusing and interesting about meditating in the midst of non-meditators. At the moment, I am staying with my family (parents and sister) for a few months in between moving from one city to another. They see me go off and meditate everyday, but I'm pretty sure they have no idea what "meditating" entails. My dad will, for example, sometimes make light-hearted jokes about what I might have "meditated about". My mum recently went to a "healing day" recommended by a friend, where a dubious woman told the attendees to "meditate" (no instructions given except for "try to get thoughts out of your mind") while she used her "healing powers" to align their chakras or something. Similarly, when I went on a Goenka retreat last year, I met a guy who'd been attracted to meditation because all his friends were into it, but only realised during the first session of the retreat that he had no idea whatsoever what meditation was about, besides sitting down and closing your eyes. I find it helpful to remind myself that because of misconceptions and assumptions like these, or just through lack of any contact with meditation instructions, most people don't even know what I'm doing every day!

When I tell people I just name sensations as they arise, they look at me like I must be crazy. I don't fully doubt their assessment, either. There are plenty of days I wonder what the hell the connection could be between noting, nanas, jhanas, paths, and fruitions on the one hand and well-being on the other.