21-Day Silent Meditation

It would start with me getting the feeling I wanted to lay on my back, which isn't my normal sleeping position. I'm a side sleeper, but the feeling to be on my back would persist until I would assume that position. Then I would feel the presence of two people over my bed. one male, one female. What I experienced next was different from anything I'd experienced before. From my various night visitors.

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I had been doing guided meditations since high school, got more into them after college when I discovered Hay House. I think I owned most all of the ones Hay House had released, which at the time were just a few more than a handful. So when my spiritual teacher suggested I consider joining him as one of a very small number of students who immerse themselves in the jungle for most of the month of December and meditate. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. 12 of us arrived at a seemingly deserted resort deep in the jungles of Costa Rica. It was rainy season, and there were huge puddles of water along the muddy dirt road. I was grateful I brought rubber rain boots, a raincoat with a hood, and an umbrella. It turns out we were the only group at the resort. And it was planned that way. A woman collected our electronics phone, iPads and computers all went into their safe, we would get them back once the retreat ended. I recall next we have lunch and it was a delicious spread. Juicy local fruits, fresh guacamole. Real minced garlic spread a natural way to keep the mosquitoes away from you. With these amazing roles and colorful salads. It would be our last full meal before going into the 21 days.

After lunch, we settled into our rooms. We each had our own room, which also meant we had our own bath. But the rooms had been stripped down to a bed only. No phone, no TV, no alarm clock, no pictures, no photos, nothing but a bed with white linens, and a bathroom with white towels. We weren't allowed to bring books and we were discouraged from even bringing a journal though I did bring one. If I had some amazing insight I wanted to be able to capture it. I think I only wrote in it once or twice though. Despite typically being a fairly avid journaler. I happen to have a room with two beds on the second floor with two windows. One looked out to the jungle where in the distance I could see another dirt road that led to some kind of light blue building. The other window faced another resort lodging unit. We were told to bring all white clothing, white underwear, white tops, white shirts, white skirts, PJs, everything white. So I use the time to take a quick shower, which I always like to do after traveling and then I unpacked all the white clothing into the cubby holes and closet. Didn't take long time pack.

So I headed over to the meditation room where I knew the teacher and his assistant were setting up the mosquito nets and assigning places. I wanted to know where I'd be sitting for the next 21 days. White cards were placed in front of each mosquito net with a nickname of who was to sit in it. I have not been given a nickname yet. So I walked around looking for my name on a card but didn't see it. I walked around again matching all the names with the people I knew were here with me. That's when I realized the only card not belonging to someone else Red Lotus. In that moment I received After my spiritual name, I felt honored to be given the name Lotus for several reasons, the first being the meaning of the lotus flower. It represents purity, compassion, transformation, fertility, and spiritual enlightenment. And think I was pure or spiritually enlightened, I took it to mean I was committed to my spiritual journey. The second reason was because this teacher called Women flowers, but that I recall, he hadn't given any of the other women flower nicknames. It felt as though this was a message to me that I had transformed into being much more feminine as I was really operating in my masculine energy. When I first began working with this teacher. The third reason was, I just liked it. The Lotus is a beautiful flower, and it's able to create and maintain its beauty. Despite living in the dirtiest of conditions. The mud.

Walking into the dining room that night was a shock. It had been transformed. The tables had all been split apart, the buffet table that had been overflowing with food at lunch set empty. Off to the side of the room was a little table with hot water and a selection of tea. Dinner, as it was was tea, hot tea, and we were informed that would be dinner until we had completed the 21 days. I had fasted before with a spiritual teacher, so it wasn't too surprised that he'd have us do some fasting with our meditating here. I just didn't realize how much fasting we'd be doing. Besides hot tea for dinner every night. Week one we had just two meals. Breakfast consisted of a variety of fresh fruit juices, and if I recall, I think it also had cut up fruit. While in week two, breakfast was fruit juice only. And in week three, the teacher told me to have just tea for breakfast. Week one lunch was a modest spread of salads and fruits all vegetarian and made from local produce. Week to lunch was pretty much the same. Each lunch had a different soup served with it if you if you chose to eat that.

Week three, the teacher told me to have soup only for lunch. However, the fasting part wasn't really difficult for me, I had been anorexic at one point in my 20s going so far as to counting calories down to the 18 that were in a stick of gum. To maintain being a size two, I knew how to ignore the pangs of hunger and enjoy the feeling of being empty. As odd as that may sound. A huge benefit to this kind of fasting is that it allows the body and digestive system to repair itself. My skin and hair looked amazing. After the retreat, my eyes were more clear, and I released 12 pounds and tighten that up. Another benefit is that you heighten your senses. With a digestive system not needing as much blood and way fewer toxins going into your body, and nothing to numb you like sugar or caffeine. You start feeling everything. I believe this helps you to develop your intuition and expand your emotional field, which can pick up on a lot of things. More on that in a moment.

That evening, the teacher viewed most of the parameters of the next 21 days with us, we would mainly be engaging in a form of meditation called Vipassana, which is stillness and silence. The silence he said started immediately. We were not to speak to anyone, we weren't to touch anyone. We weren't to make eye contact with anyone for the entire 21 days, we would be meditating many hours of the day together and do a combination of sitting and super slow walking meditation. As well as doing some meditating alone in our rooms. Every evening, there would be a discourse. Every few days, we would do yoga for an hour or so to get some strength movement in. The only break from our silence now would be during our short meetings with a teacher that I think took place every other day or so to make sure that we were okay. And to process anything that might have come up. I only remember one of my meetings clearly. It was maybe three days in and I was all happy going on about how I was writing a screenplay in my head. I could see the characters and watch it played out. And it was such a gift to have so much time to map out these stories in my head, I might even leave with three or four. The teacher stared at me for a moment. And then said, Stop entertaining yourself and dismissed me. I learned a powerful lesson that day about how we use our mind to distract us from being in the moment. My meditations were completely different after that, no more fantasizing, no more imagining, no more entertaining, I would go very deep. And I even experienced no time a few times.

No time is when your consciousness is so in the oneness with everything that you were unaware of the passage of time, but you are not asleep. I would know when this happened because the teacher would tap the singing bowl, he used to begin in our hour of meditation. And when I would experience no time, I would hear the first string. And then a moment later, the second having a knowing that the hour had passed, get not being in the time passing frequency. I would also feel very alert, awake and alive after experiencing no time. I wanted to go there every time. The interesting thing was, if I wanted it and tried to go there, I wouldn't. It was when I was just focused on being in whatever meditative state was going to occur, that I may or may not go into it. This taught me non attachment and how the vibration of wanting is countered to the vibration of having I shared these experiences and learnings with my teacher who was surprised I was able to experience no time when this retreat was my first time doing the pasta meditation. He said it was likely I was a monk in a past life. That resonated with me. Because it turned out I loved meditating. While I could feel others struggling with the silence and sitting completely still for an hour at a time multiple times a day. I absolutely loved it and didn't even want to stop at the end of 21 days.

I was also enjoying the intensified senses that came from not eating and silence and I ended up being able to communicate with insects. It started with a big beetle who is on the outside of the thin fabric covering to the open windows in the meditation room. It wanted me to stroke its belly. So I did. I softly rubbed the underside of this beetle for a little while during a break, he would flex into my thumb if I pet him softer than he wanted. This was this beautiful moment of being connected with nature. Another one of these moments was about halfway through the meditation. It had been heavily raining for days. And walking from our rooms to the meditation hall required my rain boots. Since the water came up around to our mid calves in certain spots. The amount of water on the ground drove all the ants red biting ants to higher ground, which included our meditation space. Now my body does not respond well to bug bites of any kind. I've ended up in the hospital twice from them. We were miles from any hospital anyway. So I decided to communicate with the ants. I concentrated on connecting with the queen and shared with her that I understood their homes were flooding and they needed to share space with us. I welcomed them to be safe with us and promised I would not harm them. In return, I asked that they not come into my mosquito net on my yoga mat in my blankets, or bite me. During the next hour long sit, I did not get fit once, whereas many others did. At the end, I did not even see a single ant anywhere inside my net. The second hour we did walking meditation on our yoga mats, while other people had ants crawling on their mat, and they had to be careful to avoid them. A line of ants could be seen coming to the edge of my map, walking around the edges and then going in a forward line again, none walked on my mat. It felt like a little miracle. I made sure I thanked the ants.

I also had a conversation with a poisonous little frog. These guys are amazingly cute and have brilliant colors. They're about the size of your thumb. The more colorful though, the more poisonous. After lunch one day I returned to find one on my mosquito net. I had a telepathic conversation with it, about me needing to be in there. And would he mind moving to the wall behind me. I went to the bathroom. And when I came back, he was no longer there. I did check my blankets in the surrounding area. But I never saw him again. Something else happened in my bed. We had lights out at 10pm. And I was so happy to go to sleep then. In fact, I was often in bed. As soon as I got back to my room in the evening, which was about 9:30pm The teacher's assistant would come around ringing the bell to wake us up at 3:30am. So we could be in morning meditation by 4am. So I wanted all the sleep I could get.

several nights I had night visitors. These were not like any of the visitors I described in my previous night visitors podcast. These beings only came to me during my time in Costa Rica. And their visit seemed very intentional. It would start with me getting the feeling I wanted to lay on my back, which isn't my normal sleeping position. I'm a side sleeper. But the feeling to be on my back would persist until I would assume that position, then I would feel the presence of two people over my bed. One was female and one male. Well, I could not see them with my eyes. I internally saw them. They looked like what I would imagine someone practicing voodoo might look like, which at first was a little unnerving, as I wasn't sure if they were there to do me harm. But then they began doing work on me rearranging things in my energy field. One night, their focus was on my solar plexus, another night, my heart, another night my head, and then they went back to my solar plexus and sacral area again. It didn't hurt. It just felt like things were being moved around to function better, like defragmenting a computer, it would last for about five minutes each time, then I'd fall right to sleep. I asked who they were and the only answer I got was ancestors. To this day, I do not know what they did to me or for me.

The final four or five days of the 21 were the most challenging. On top of the fasting and the silence. The teacher increase the number of hours a day we were meditating, so that we were either sitting or doing walking meditation for 18 hours a day. And then he introduced sleep deprivation. Myself and I believe only one other person and the teacher were the ones who made it all the way through the sleep deprivation days. He sent many people back to their rooms to sleep. But I was really loopy by the end. I was amazed not only by what my body was capable of, but by how much rest you could get through meditation. If you could get into the yoga nidra state, which I believe the teacher was attempting to help us achieve, you would emerge from those meditations refreshed. I was able to experience it a few times, but not consistently enough to keep me from being really out of it by the end of our meditation retreat. Interestingly, on the final day when we were done and able to talk and connect, I didn't want to everyone was hanging out together. They were at the pool, they were laughing. And I stayed in my room, missing the silence and the peace of meditating. I made a commitment to wake up at 4am every morning for a year and sit in stillness and silence for an hour a day. And I did it. I actually lasts a little longer than a year waking every morning. That year I wrote one of my fiction books and created it static meditation. I also remember being more peaceful and grounded than any other year of my life.

I also sacrificed most evening activities to be able to do it, which is why I haven't resumed the practice. Though doing this podcast is reminding me of the benefits, so, perhaps I'll take up the practice again. Thank you for tuning in. Next episode, I'll share my adventures of being courted by either an Angels helper or an ET. I'll let you decide. Until then, remember that your spiritual journey is a supernatural adventure in and of itself. Enjoy the unfolding and embrace the unknown.