The Overcoming Process is the Becoming Process

Lessons learned from a 7-day meditation retreat

The last two months have been some of the most difficult I’ve experienced for quite a while. The last two weeks have been especially challenging as I moved from a house I lived in for 14 years in just 5 days and then headed into a weeklong meditation experience, thinking it would be a timely reset. As grueling as the move was, sitting still was equally formidable.

I’m not a meditator. I don’t even like to meditate, but this was a week with Dr. Joe Dispenza, whom I have followed for years. I became especially interested in his work when I lost hearing in my left ear. People who go to his retreats often heal themselves of various ailments from cancer, to Parkinsons, to deafness and blindness. By tuning into the quantum field where all possibilities exist, people are able to access their innate ability to heal.

Over the past four years, I’ve been willing to try anything that might help me restore my hearing. I was on the waitlist for the Dallas retreat, and when I found out I got in, I didn’t hesitate.

For seven days, I meditated anywhere from 3-8 hours/day. I sat with 2000 other people from all over the world in an attempt to break the habit of being me, trust the unknown, tune in to the mystical, and create a mindful heart and a heartful mind.

We did walking meditations, sitting meditations, standing meditations, and lying down meditations. We learned the science behind everything we were doing and worked on healing ourselves and others. Although my hearing didn’t spontaneously return after 7 days, I now have the tools to keep practicing and seeing myself as whole and not lacking in anything.

I have to admit, after the first meditation, I felt nauseous and was not sure I’d make it through the week. It was like boot camp for the brain and the body and neither my brain nor my body wanted any part of it.

Some people had come to this retreat several times and seemed to love every minute of it. I could not fathom what made these people so giddy about coming up against themselves over and over again and loving it.

Dr. Joe would say it’s in the overcoming process - getting over our fears, limitations, ourselves - that we become more of who we really are - love, presence, awareness.

Just staying in the room required me to overcome my monkey mind and my body’s insistence on twitching, itching, aching, and complaining. After a week of doing this, I have become someone who knows I can do hard things - like wake up at 4am to meditate for 5 hours! Trust me, you don’t want to know at the beginning of the week that you’ll be expected to do this by the end of the week.

As Dr. Joe likes to say, we’re all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. These are the challenges and problems in our lives, which feel like obstacles – but are actually here to help us evolve.

While the past couple of months have felt more like a dumpster fire than an “evolution opportunity” to me, they have absolutely stretched me, helped me find my voice, clarify my values, and forced me to act in my own best interest.

These issues and problems have been created from a certain level of consciousness – or, as is more likely the case, unconsciousness. And so, to resolve these problems, I have to move to a greater level of consciousness than the consciousness – or unconsciousness – that created them. I needed help doing that, and the meditation retreat helped get me there.

I also learned how to manifest things in a new way. One meditation was about drawing things to us through an open heart. We were asking for the best opportunities to find us. When I went back to my room that evening, I got a text from someone in Santa Fe inviting me to come to a retreat for creatives. While the times were in May, I realized going to Santa Fe from Dallas would be an excellent way to decompress before going back to whatever awaits me now.

So I’m writing this from a gorgeous casita in Santa Fe (the home of my heart) and still a bit shell-shocked by how quickly my life has become unrecognizable to me.

Yet somehow, by sitting with myself for 7 days and being present for my life, I now trust the unknown. Before, I could have told you what my predictable future looked like based on my past. Now it’s a mystery, an adventure in the making, a field of possibilities I get to choose from.

While I wouldn’t wish for you the “evolutionary opportunities” I’ve experienced lately, I invite you to consider whatever you might be struggling with as a chance to change the energy around whatever is not working for you. Because the truth is, none of us changes unless we’re challenged. And in the overcoming of these challenges, you become who you really are - a beautiful soul worthy of all your heart desires.

---

Join me this Friday, April 25th at 2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, 12pm Mountain, 11am Pacific for Write Your Way Out where we do a deep dive into the idea of overcoming as a way of becoming. These classes are included as part of your paid subscription or you can sign up here for a one-time workshop.