Dancing in an ice house

Why I signed up for ten days of silence when movement is all I know

“When it feels like you’re locked inside an ice house, the emphasis should be less on the specific dance steps you’re doing to stay alive and more on the fact that you’re dancing at all because movement is what’s going to generate heat, heat is what’s going to get the ice house walls melting, and melting is what’s going to keep you alive. It might be a while of just doing weird random dances, watching diligently for the walls to start sweating, and relentlessly praying that a patch of sky will poke through. A degree of faith in the unseen is needed” –– Jessica Dore

It’s spring, and I’m melting my ice walls.

My faith in the unknown had me sign up for a ten-day silent meditation retreat in Switzerland a couple of months ago, and then, to my absolute surprise, actually follow through instead of chickening out at the last minute. It’s supposed to be pretty hardcore: 4AM wake-up, 11 hours of meditation a day, no speaking, no writing, no reading, no distractions of any kind.

I’m there right now, and this is a post I scheduled before I got on the train north and surrendered all tech devices at the entrance. I am four days in, which, according to my conservative estimates, means I must be losing my fucking mind.

But: a degree of faith in the unknown is needed.

I needed to know if I could do it, if I could melt the ice walls even if through weirder and weirder dance moves. I needed to break my brain apart and then put it back together — a hardware reset, so to speak.

I needed to stop believing that a future, or different version of me, could do hard things, but the me that I am today simply had no power to change her circumstances.

I needed to start believing in the goodness of the world again, and I guess I thought a sort-of-ashram would be as good a place as any to start.

I needed to remember why I keep crying out for gravity to keep me where the light is, when the only one who gets to decide how much light to let in is me.

What I’m trying to say is that I know what it’s like to live inside an ice house, and I understand how breaking up stagnation by any means necessary isn’t always the answer. I’m trying to get better at telling whether I’m running toward something specific or simply on the run, and I’m heading north to be with my own mind for ten days because I don’t want to get so good at generating heat through constant motion that I cant’t tell when I’m no longer in an ice house but simply standing in a room with walls that aren’t closing in.

Rooms need walls, and that’s okay.

Heat melts ice, and spring will come again.

My faith in the unknown tells me it’s time to stop running.

Which isn’t the same thing as stopping movement entirely, but learning the difference between dancing because you’re trapped in an ice house and dancing because you’re alive. Between generating heat to survive and generating heat because warmth is what happens when you stay long enough to feel it.

The day I left for Switzerland, I wrote down: heat isn’t just generated through panic, but also devotion. Through showing up. Through saying yes, I’m here, I’m still here, even when it would be easier to float away.

I tried floating away, and it didn’t exactly help, so I’m trying out devotion instead.

Devotion to stillness, which isn’t the same as stagnation.

Devotion to letting something hold you without it becoming a cage.

Devotion to breaking up our old, old patterns, and the soft, soft chains that never really kept us caged in in the first place.

Devotion to the very act of doing hard things, and the rewards that may follow.