Getting Laid Off on Retreat
Recibir un despido durante un retiro
A student shares their experience at a silent meditation retreat, where they encountered deeper presence, watched emotions arise and pass, and received the news of being laid off mid-retreat.
Getting Laid Off on Retreat
A student shares their experience at a silent meditation retreat, where they encountered deeper presence, watched emotions arise and pass, and received the news of being laid off mid-retreat.
I just got back from retreat. I went to a retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. Those mountains are ancient, worn-down mountains that are uniformly beautiful. There's not a lot of dramatic change, but it's extraordinarily beautiful. It was also cold as hell because of the altitude.
Right off the bat in the retreat, the teacher gave some instructions. I had been able to get into the present moment, into what is already here, in and out during my practice, but I would always get bounced out. He gave some suggestions on seeking, managing, and doubt that really dropped me in further and solved a lot of problems for me. My edge just moved. I was spending a lot of time in the present, or in a highly present state. Maybe it wasn't a hundred percent, but it was close, and that was really good.
I was starting to see how the weather just changes. People give this analogy all the time, the famous Zen image of being the mountain while weather passes over you. I was sitting there noticing waves of things that were really beautiful, and then there was difficult stuff you just had to be there for, and then odd sensations. I was getting a lot of twitching, and areas of the body that, if I noticed them, would produce an activation. Sometimes during sits I would yawn thirty times in thirty minutes.
A lot of your pointers today land better for me than they have in the past. That was really cool.
Then on Tuesday night, the coldest night, somebody called me twice and texted me toward the end of the last sit around 9:30. It was someone from work who's an ally. I went out to talk to her in about nine-degree weather, totally underdressed. That's around negative ten Celsius. She told me I was getting laid off.
Oh, no.
I talked to her about it for a while, and at some point I said, "Listen, I grew up in Michigan, and the first digit of each of my fingers and toes are frozen. That means go inside." I couldn't talk inside because it was a silent retreat.
So I went in, and there was a lot of trouble sleeping. I was doing some distracted stuff, getting on my phone. Then I would go to the sits and slide back into presence, but you could see the process, the way it took time to settle again.
The weather of experience
I got to see the weather again. There was this experience where I was noticing it but wasn't intellectualizing about it yet. I was internalizing it: there's just this weather, and I don't really know how much control I have over it. At one point, things suddenly got more beautiful, and a thought popped in that said, "That happened because you moved your head." And I was like, "You're full of it. You're making up a story." I saw that thought as PR for the ego, just explaining the experience. I'd read about this in books, heard about it from people, had a conceptual idea that thoughts do this. But to have the actual experience of seeing the thought as a bullshit artist trying to explain experience was something else entirely.
There were a lot of little moments like that, which were validating. I'm a big doubter and super avoidant, so it was confirming to see: oh, this is real. These strange experiences are real.
From avoidance to willingness
At some point in my life, I've done a ton of avoidance of the present. And during the retreat, there was a whole class of feelings that I went from wanting to avoid to actively wanting: "Give them to me. Let's experience this." That was so cool. Then the challenge became: okay, I'm managing this process of experiencing this stuff, and now I need to drop the management. That's hard, because if I think, "I need to drop the management because the management is the most disruptive thing," that's a very managerial thought as well.
The teacher did this incredibly artful pointer on Tuesday that just wrecked everybody. He built up to it, and toward the end of the talk I could see what he was about to do. It was like watching a punch come at you and knowing you can't get out of the way. That was really something.
Meeting anger fully
Then on Friday my boss called to lay me off, and I don't like that guy. We have a history. I was sitting meditating in my room, and I have certain people who can call through Do Not Disturb because I need to hear from them in emergencies. I saw the call and thought, "I'm not going to answer it. Leave me alone. Fire me when I get back to the office on Monday." And my whole body just went up in flames.
It was really uncomfortable. I didn't want to be in that state. I've been angry in life, but I've never actually felt it.
Right.
I put on my jacket and walked around the campus, just following the feeling. Over about forty-five minutes it started to step down. The level of agitation had been all the way up, and then it stepped down to about two percent of its peak and just hovered there the rest of the day. There were little moments when I'd drop out into rumination, yelling in my head, but I'd come back. It was amazing to watch the whole thing pass through. Afterward I felt way calmer for a while.
Then you get home and it's not fun re-entering. It's shocking, because in that retreat environment everything is taken care of. The planning mind has no excuse. Then you get home and there are a thousand reasons to plan, so the planning part feels much more legitimate. It's difficult. But it was a really good experience, and I highly recommend it.
Your pointers land better for me now because I've had a lot more contact with the "already here" quality. Today when you were saying "it's already here," I thought, "Yeah, I know what he means."
That's great. That's beautiful.
That's my report.
I'm really glad. And I'm sorry about the layoff.
Yeah. But it means I can be here.
Trusting the unfolding
There's a Zen story. It's actually quite long, but the summary is: whether something is good or bad, I don't know.
I know the story. There are different versions. In one, a man gets a wild horse, and then it brings back more wild horses, and then there's a war, and at each turn he just says, "Is that so?"
There is something like that emerging for me over the last six months. Sometimes there's a trust in the unfolding of life. A big story for me in meditation has been "I can't withstand this." It's kind of ridiculous. I'll get a tiny itch, one of these pointed little itches that are some of the hardest things for me to sit with, and it pulls up this "I can't withstand this" story, which is just seeking and struggle. Somehow addressing that, being willing to sit with it, has also helped me trust life's events.
It sounds like you've had a taste of fully meeting some very uncomfortable emotions and feelings, and the energy of that. You realize there's actually a lot more energy to it than you're normally in touch with. It's a kind of vitality that becomes available, because in the avoidance you're describing, there is also the suppression of vitality. That leads to a suboptimal way of functioning, even if you're in the managerial strategy part of your thinking and working. There's often a sense that doing this work will make you function less well, but it's actually the opposite.
That's a hundred percent clear to me now. There was doubt before, for sure.
Thank you for sharing. If you have any questions, you're welcome.
Just a funny thing: I'm the second person I've heard of who went to that retreat and got laid off during it.
Someone else got laid off at the same retreat?
No, a friend of mine. He was at a different retreat and works for a company that laid off about a thousand people this week. He got the news during the retreat too. He'd already been talking about feeling a movement toward changing jobs, like something wasn't clicking. And then: well, the universe took care of it. I told him, "Allow yourself to feel how it feels, because it feels how it feels." But yeah, it's funny. You go to a retreat, you get straight with life, and you get laid off.
Out of 250 people at a retreat, two get laid off. That's surprising. I like that your friend trusted it, that he was okay with it.
He's processing it too. But yeah, a strange coincidence.