The Retreat

by Jacci Turner

  “What do you think you’ll take home with you from here, Amy?”

  Amy had to think about that as she picked at her salad. “I feel like I’ll need more time to process. I’ve met such amazing people and learned so many things. But … one thing is … I feel like God hasn’t given up on me and I haven’t given up on him. Our relationship has changed, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

  “Actually, I think it’s a very good thing. Worth the price of admission, if you ask me!”

  Amy smiled at that. She would miss Celeste. “Do you ever meet with people—you know, long distance? Like maybe on Skype or something?”

  Celeste smiled. “As a spiritual director, I do.”

  “What is a spiritual director exactly?”

  “A spiritual director is someone trained to sit with someone and companion their spiritual journey. Generally, we’d talk monthly for an hour, over Skype, but it’s more about listening to God together.”

  “Oh my gosh!” said Amy. “Would you be willing to do that for me?”

  Celeste laughed. “I have to tell you that spiritual direction generally costs a little money. I usually charge forty dollars a session and I’d feel weird bringing money into our friendship.”

  “No way,” said Amy. “It would be so worth it to get some direction spiritually. You’ve already helped me so much. But … I don’t exactly have a job.”

  “How about this,” said Celeste. “We’ll start meeting monthly from now until you get your next job. Then we’ll see what you can afford. Would that work out for you?”

  “Would it ever! Thank you so much!” Hope surged through Amy like fire. She wouldn’t be alone in this journey. There were her new friends and Celeste to guide her and keep her moving forward.

  “Are you going to the special session after lunch?” asked Celeste.

  “Yes; are you?”

  “No, I’m giving myself a break to pack. I have to leave very early and I tend to poop out right after the examen. I might take a nap if I get packed up quick enough. But I’m glad you’re going. SoulCollage is one of my favorite spiritual exercises.”

  “Wow, we’ve learned so many,” said Amy. “I definitely want to keep trying Lectio and the examen. Today I was even able to rest during the centering prayer, though I doubt I’ll be trying that on my own yet. It did help, though, when Tom said the goal was to ‘rest in the love of God.’”

  “That helped me too! And when Felicia added that we are to ‘ever so gently’ bring ourselves back to our sacred word or picture. I think I was trying to swat the thoughts away like flies.”

  Amy giggled. “I think I was karate chopping them!”

  “Well, you’d better run along to the session.”

  Amy started gathering up her dishes. “I’m so glad I don’t have to really say good-bye to you, Celeste.”

  “I’m glad too, Amy.”

  Amy remembered how she’d almost missed meeting Celeste because of her sandals. What a jerk, she chided herself. Look what I almost missed out on because of my shallow, judgmental attitude. She mentally added a number to her thirty-things-to-do list: Twelve: meet with a spiritual director. I need one, she thought, nodding.

  17

  Amy walked into the main meeting room. The lights were low and a smaller circle of chairs had been set up on the left side of the room where Tom and Felicia were already seated. The other half of the room was full of tables. Some were heaped with papers and others looked bare except for scissors and glue. The session was entitled “Healing of the Trauma Brain,” and Amy, who had signed up for pretty much everything, wasn’t sure what the title referred to or what Celeste had meant by SoulCollage.

  When the circle was full, Felicia nodded. “Unfortunately, being an activist exposes us to trauma. Not always directly, but even being exposed to secondhand trauma daily can give us some of the same symptoms as those who were directly exposed, especially when the people are as loving and caring as you all.”

  Amy wondered if she had been exposed to trauma. Seeing and hearing what the bar girls had been through was certainly traumatic, but had it affected her?

  Tom held up his phone. “I’m going to time you for one minute and I just want you to breathe normally and count your breaths.” He looked at his phone. “Ready, go.”

  Amy started counting. By the time Tom said, “Time,” she’d counted eighteen.

  “Now, what kind of numbers did you get?” asked Tom. Amy was surprised to hear the variety of numbers: twelve, eight, eighteen. What was the point and why were the numbers so variable?

  Tom explained, “When we are in trauma, it actually changes the structure of our brains. Trauma brain is putting us in our lower, more animalistic brains where we are hypervigilant for attack.” His hand swept the base of his skull. “We live in the ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ zone and our breathing becomes shallow and rapid in order to prepare us for survival.”

  Shock filled Amy. She’d had eighteen breaths in a minute, the largest number she’d heard. Was she living in constant fear?

  Felicia said, “The good news is that our brains can be rewired. Trauma can be healed and we can function once again in our higher brain, where our logic center lies.” She touched her forehead as she spoke. “We can do this by learning to breathe. That’s why we have been starting each morning with a breathing exercise. It only takes three conscious gut breaths to balance our parasympathetic nervous system, and spiritual practices like the ones we’ve been teaching you can really help. Of course, if you’re having nightmares and other debilitating stress symptoms, you should absolutely seek the help of a counselor who is familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “PTSD is formed when three things happen at once. First, you are in a situation that feels safe and turns unsafe. Second, you are startled or surprised by something, and third, at some point, you feel like you might die.” Felicia stopped, as if she knew they’d need time to absorb her last words.

  “You can see why soldiers get PTSD,” she said. “They are constantly in situations that turn dangerous, they get startled a lot, and they frequently feel that they might die.”

  Amy felt relieved to hear that. She wasn’t having nightmares and no one was trying to kill her or anything—maybe she didn’t have PTSD.

  “So, let’s start with some breathing exercises. You can basically Google ‘breathing exercises’ and find some that work for you. And there are a lot of great apps out there. We use one called the Insight Timer for centering prayer. It also comes with guided meditations.”

  Amy jotted down the name of the app and settled into her seat for the breathing exercises.

  Tom began, “The goal is that your exhale would be longer than your inhale. Exhale through your pursed lips, like through a straw, to draw it out. This will help you slow down your breaths. Count the length of your inhales and exhales to see if you can make the length of your exhales longer than the length of your inhales. Let’s do that for a few minutes.”

  Amy tried. She had a hard time getting her inhale past four beats and couldn’t seem to get her exhale to last any longer. At the end of the exercise, she felt defeated.

  “Don’t worry if this is hard,” said Felicia. “The key is to keep working at it. If you have a chance today, try walking around the lake. Take a step for each beat of your inhale and try to add an extra step to the exhale. It’s part of retraining your brain and your lungs and takes time.” They did two more breathing exercises. One that seemed beautiful, almost like a dance, which Felicia led them in, and one that Tom led that had them saying loud, silly syllables. She thought how funny they would look if a stranger walked in.

  After all the breathing, they counted again, and Amy was surprised that she only took twelve breaths in a minute. It was working!

  “Now,” said Felicia, “we will be experiencing SoulCollage. Has anyone tried it before?”

  Several people raised their hands. Amy noticed that none of her friends were in the session today, except
Hasmita and Connie from her triad.

  “Each of you will have a small piece of poster board,” Felicia said, holding up an example the size of a half sheet of printer paper. “You’ll walk around and look at the magazine pictures you find on the table and see what draws you. You might be drawn to a picture because it’s beautiful, but you also might be drawn to a picture because it is ugly or disturbing to you in some way. It’s okay—just notice which ones draw you. When you find five or six pictures, go to one of the tables and arrange them to fit on the half page. You may need to trim them or let go of a picture at this point. There are scissors and glue at each table. Do this first; then we’ll give more directions.”

  People slowly got up and headed to the tables. There were pictures spread out all over the tables, some whole pages, some ripped to just one photo. Extra National Geographic magazines were piled on a table.

  Amy began to browse. She found a funny picture of a giraffe that looked like it had walked out of the trees and been startled by the photographer. It had a “deer in headlights” look to it. Then she found a beautiful flowered meadow, which she took, and there was this one of a bride in a ridiculously huge dress—it reminded her of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding with all the layers and bows. She passed it by and saw a picture that looked pretty but upon closer inspection was a bubbling swamp that looked like toxic waste. She wanted to pass it by but she was having a strong reaction to it and remembered what Felicia had said, so she grabbed it. A few more passes around the tables and she found a tunnel through a rock mountain that looked like it led somewhere beautiful and a piece of red-hot metal being forged on an anvil. The hands holding the hammer looked strong and she liked that. Then she took one more pass and the bride picture caught her eye again, so she grabbed it.

  Hasmita and Connie were sitting together at a table, so she joined them. The room was quiet as everyone started trying to cut and paste their pictures to fit on the poster board. Amy found the activity rather relaxing. She was almost done when Felicia broke her concentration. “When you’re finished, let yourself gaze at your picture and ponder this statement: ‘I’m the one who …’”

  Amy looked at her collage. From the upper left corner she saw the mucky swamp. The giraffe’s head and torso seemed to float up from the swamp, looking surprised and confused. Her eyes followed down to the left where the metal was being shaped over the anvil; then the bride appeared. There wasn’t room for much of her, so Amy had cut her down to just her torso, but her gaze was toward her beloved, who was out of the frame, and her hand rested lightly on his in a fun, flirty way. The last picture on the right was the tunnel through the rock. She’d put the flowered meadow across the whole page first, so wherever two pictures didn’t meet, little flowers peeked through.

  Amy studied the collage. “I’m the one who …” Then it came to her. She was the one who’d been dragged through the toxic mess at church. She was the giraffe: confused, startled, hurt. She’d thought things were safe, but they weren’t—they’d turned hostile, and she’d been blindsided by the pain and betrayal.

  Her eyes drifted left to the strong hands and the anvil-forged steel. She was being formed by the Father’s hand. Then she saw the bride and her throat constricted. It was one of her favorite biblical images: God as bridegroom, she as bride. This brown-haired beauty sat in the white gown. She was a bride, looking to the left at her beloved, ready to start a new and different kind of relationship. A fun relationship, more free than the last one. There was springtime and hope in the flowers peeking through, and a tunnel that led to new adventure of promise in the lower right-hand corner.

  She sucked in her breath; maybe she did have the three things that caused PTSD. She’d thought she was in a safe place: the church. Then it turned unsafe. She’d been startled twice: once when she’d heard they were firing Joshua and once at the meeting when she was told she’d have to change her mind or leave.

  Did she feel like she might die? She was unsure. She certainly felt depressed, and there was sort of a spiritual death of all she’d come to believe. Then the losses started to pile up in her mind: There were the losses of friendships, the losses of mentors and people she’d admired. There was the loss of her own future wedding and the loss of a secure, predictable future and financial stability. She sat in silence, pondering.

  Finally, she flipped the page over and wrote on the back of the collage. “I’m the one who got dragged through the mud, became suspect and was suddenly dismissed. I am the one who was confused, disoriented, as all I’d ever known turned against me. But I am also the one who is being shaped by the Father’s hand, my beloved bridegroom, and together, we will start a new adventure to something better. The hope of spring is peeking through the cracks in my picture.”

  She wiped at tears and saw that Connie and Hasmita were doing the same.

  18

  After the intensity of the SoulCollage exercise, Amy needed to walk. She decided to skip yoga, put on her tennis shoes, and headed out the side door, hoping not to run into anyone that needed to talk. The day was warm and slightly muggy. Her eyes took in the emerald green of the mowed lawns, the jade green of the shaped bushes, and the forest green of the trees. It wasn’t like this in northern Nevada. Her Opa, a Californian, always joked that they only had one color of green in Nevada: sage green. It seemed true as she wandered the grounds now. She’d never seen so many shades of green—Nebraska was just showing off!

  She climbed a hill behind the monastery. She hadn’t been to this part of the grounds; it was on the opposite side of the buildings from the lake. Sweat began to trickle down her back and she stripped off her sweatshirt and tied it to her waist. When she crested the hill, the ground leveled out and a dirt road led away from the buildings. It appeared she was on the left edge of the retreat center’s property. On the opposite side of the hill was a tilled, barren landscape. To her right, the retreat center. It felt good to be away from the building and breathe. She stopped, looking down at the center, letting her mind float. The sky was a pale blue with only a few wisps of cloud. Birds crisscrossed the sky.

  Amy turned back up the dirt road. She could see a small bunch of trees and decided to investigate. As she walked, she practiced trying to take one extra step on her exhale than her inhale. The trees were pine trees of some kind but fat and planted close together like a tiny forest. When she got to them, she felt like she was about to enter the land of Narnia from the wardrobe. She practically had to push her way into the trees. Once she was inside, she stopped and felt as if she’d landed in a magical place. They were beautiful, fat, friendly trees. She wished they could talk, and she longed to stay there forever. There were lots of trees in Reno, but not many pines. She had grown up taking trips with her family to Lake Tahoe just to be near the evergreens.

  She inhaled deeply, smelling earth and the spice of the pine. It would be hard to leave this place, but in some ways, she was ready to go home. Ideas about her future were starting to percolate and she couldn’t wait to dig into her thesis about sex trafficking in Nevada.

  She pushed farther into the trees and came out into a clearing. There were three benches bordering what must be the labyrinth that Celeste had told her about. It was large and set into the ground, red bricks on a cement background that wound around an interesting shape within the confines of a perfect circle. What had Celeste said? Pray out your troubles on the way in, stop and be with God in the center, and thank God on the way out?

  She took a step into the labyrinth, feeling like Dorothy, following the Yellow Brick Road. Nervously, she glanced around to see if anyone was watching. She seemed completely alone on the hilltop. As she followed the red bricks, they would take her toward the center, then suddenly turn away, then back toward the center, then away. “Well, that’s like my life with God, for sure,” she said out loud, laughing.

  Then she recounted the things she wanted to let go of as she walked: Thailand and her friend Anong; her almost fiancé, West; her church; all the disappointment
s connected to each thing, including her parents, specifically her father. The faces of all involved floated across her memory as she walked the twisted path of the labyrinth.

  Suddenly she was in the middle, the place where she was supposed to leave everything in God’s hands. She stood in the small circle, staring at the design on the cement center. What was it? A flower? Suddenly the shape clicked in her mind. It was an edelweiss, her grandpa’s favorite flower. It must be important to the German monks who lived here too. She was in awe, looking down. It was as if her grandfather were right here with her, and for the second time since her arrival, the waterworks began in earnest. She sat down inside the center circle and wept. But these were not the tears she’d shed before of bitter disappointment in herself from the study of the Enneagram; these were cleansing tears, letting-go tears, fresh-start tears.

  When the tears slowed, she dug into her sweatshirt pocket to find a tissue. The one she found was partially used, but she was desperate. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Her grandfather. She felt so close to him here. And with an image of him sitting next to her, she pictured placing all of her pain and heartache in the middle of that flower, to leave in this holy place with God. It felt amazing.

  Then she stood, reluctant to leave but knowing that the rest of her day was already spoken for, and if she was going to make her plane by noon tomorrow, she also needed to start packing.

  She walked slowly out of the labyrinth. As she went, she recounted all of the things she had to be thankful for. She was surprised at how many there were: Jennie, for the idea and money to come here, and the other people who’d helped pay her way. The faces of all the people she’d met floated by her now and she cherished each one: Natalie, Brooke, Tom and Felicia, Connie, Hasmita, Stephen, Celeste. Her own parents, who she knew loved her and provided a place for her to live. Joshua and Peter … She was rich—rich in experiences and rich in people—and she was ready to start living that way.