Sacred Remission

The puja started with three pieces of sweet fruit and six flowers. But really, it started before that. It started with a longing for a spiritual practice that had been absent since I’d tiptoed away from Catholicism years earlier.

My meditation teacher placed the pears and gerbera daisies on her altar. A stick of incense burned, the thin trail of smoke disappearing as it rose.

“I will call in the names of the teachers of this lineage of meditation and offer the gifts of fruit and flowers. Then I will share the heart mantra with you. Then we will sit in silent meditation together for five minutes.”

I didn’t feel any different after receiving the mantra. I heard every creak of the house, every car door slam on the street outside. My hands tingled. My teacher had mentioned that thoughts and sensations were normal, but that I should simply note them and let them pass without hooking onto them. Surely five minutes was almost up. I heard the soft pad of a cat crossing the wood floor. My nose was itchy. I wanted a drink of water. Even after all my childhood hours trying to pay attention during Mass, I had never imagined sitting in quiet with myself could be so hard.

I’d understood that time was elastic, operating under its own set of laws: an afternoon with friends raced by while an hour of loneliness made me fear eternity. Meditation now manipulated time, stretching it to its limit, loading it with potential energy.

My teacher told me to begin the process of coming out of the meditation with eyes closed, the tautness of stretched time releasing. What relief. Now I could engage with my kinetic thoughts.

After nearly two decades of rules-based Catholic practice, I appreciated the permissiveness of mantra meditation. I simply had to show up, just as I was. Practice soon became part of my daily life. I tried for twice a day but there was no need to flagellate myself when I only sat in stillness once a day. I cracked open one eye to check my watch less and less. Rather than focus on the passage of time, which made practice feel like a life sentence, I was learning to relish the silky stillness of my body, the way my cats gravitated toward my lap to join me.

Within weeks my husband referred to my practice as “medication” for the way it middled my moods, smoothing over life’s rough edges. He wasn’t wrong. I had been medicated for depression since before meeting him. I had on occasion let my prescription lapse, too distracted or lazy to make an appointment with the doctor. I would be fine for a while, but I’d always get sucked back into darkness.

It was gradual, the loss of lucidity that came with depression. Negative, shaming thoughts would silently proliferate like invasive wild grapevine, sending out tendrils of destruction to every corner of my consciousness. My internal voice might register something innocuous like, “You screwed up.” But the thought would twist itself in my mind, mutating into the endless bullying of, “You are a screw up.” That distorted thinking might lay dormant through a season of my life, but its roots appeared to run thick and deep.

Unchecked, the depression would choke out any happiness or light as the structure of my life crumbled until all that remained was the message: “You are a waste of space.” I wanted to cut the darkness back, had tried to bleed it dry without taking me with it, but it was relentless. The suffering appeared endless. Death seemed to promise the only true escape.

At age twenty, my stash of razor blades was never far away, reassuring me like a talisman, a salve. I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t know how much longer I could live with the vicious recording of my inner voice. Sleep became my preferred anesthetic. When that didn’t work, cutting temporarily took the edge off, making my inner pain manifest. Cutting acted as a release valve for the self-loathing, a short-term stay against suicide.

The day after I added red tally marks to the backside of my forearm, a friend suggested we go to the emergency room so a doctor could look at my wounds. Fragile and empty, I relented.

The memory of that February evening is hazy. Time faded the hard specifics into soft edges. A wait. An exam room. Gauze unwound from my arm. Someone in scrubs examining the skin, splayed open and vulnerable. The words, “It’s too late for stitches.” Butterfly bandages and gauze. Another wait.

A stocky man entered the room, introduced himself as the social worker. He was dressed in the nonthreatening uniform of business casual: khakis and a sweater. The kind of guy who would get lost in a crowd of other white midwestern men. His plainness comforted me. Here was a normal, functioning person.

After his intake, he set his pen down and gazed at me. “I suggest you admit yourself for a rest.”

The split second that followed was filled with a complex calculation: how alluring it would be to have someone else take care of me for a few days, to catch a break from the incessant question of whether to end my pain permanently. I needed a rest. Yet once in, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get out. I’d already missed more work and school than I could afford. A large hospital bill would sink me. The psych ward might be more frightening than life on the outside. I had no emotional armor to protect myself from other patients or their problems. Not to mention the stigma of a psych stay on my permanent record.

I shook my head. “No, it would cause problems with my job and making rent. I’m already falling behind in my classes.”

The man sat silently for a moment, maybe hoping I would change my mind. He held my gaze, “You need help.”

Tears blurred my vision.

“I need to know you have a plan before you leave.”

“I’m on my parents’ health insurance. I have no idea what coverage I have.”

The man pointed to a phone hanging on the wall.

I drifted to the phone like the half-ghost that I was. My parents loved me, but since I’d begun to cut my own tenuous path, one that diverged from theirs, I kept them at arms’ distance. I screened their calls and offered little about the lay of my life when I called them back. I dreaded involving them. Shame and guilt had been a feature of my Catholic education, and I had been taught that the despair that led to suicide was a mortal sin. I planned to say as little as possible about my present circumstances, but I knew my life depended on what happened next.

My mom answered. I fixed my gaze at the wall and flatly asked her about their health insurance and the available mental health services.

I remember clearly her silence, followed by her question, “Couldn’t you just talk to a priest?”

I responded with a snide laugh. “No. I’m past that point, mom.”

“I don’t know why you’re so angry at the Church,” she muttered.

I paused, contemplating her opening. But there wasn’t time to explain my inability to conform to Catholicism’s rigid expectations of me. The darkness was blocking out the light. There wasn’t time to rail at its unspoken supremacy as if it were the one and only path. My life was crumbling by the minute. I would always be a failure in the faith. The social worker waited behind me. I wanted the pain to end. There wasn’t time. “Look, are you going to give me the insurance information or not?”

“Yes. Your father’s getting it.”

My mother relayed the details. I wrote them down and I hung up. Notes in hand, I clutched the information like the lifeline it was.

I lucked out: the darkness started to recede after I started treatment. Medication, therapy, and vigilance helped me keep it pruned back. Years later, medicating with stillness became the unexpected gift that allowed me to forgo even those aids. My prescription had run out. I pushed off a refill appointment, watching for an early danger signal that never came.

Stilling time has dispensed not a cure but a reprieve—a sacred remission that continues to this day. Within its safe container, fortified by years of practice, I recognize the business of life, the busyness of mind, are machinations of a small self. I still have thoughts. I still have feelings. But they come with less static and more clarity. In grander moments, I lift out of personality. Up and away from my sorrows, my gripes, my messes, beyond mine versus yours, I float on currents of non-emptiness. I feel my belonging within the universe. A body connected to earth and sky. My heart a lightning rod.

In 2005, I experienced what I can only describe as a heart awakening on a trip to Guatemala. I returned home yearning for a spiritual outlet and began a daily mantra meditation practice. For several years, I studied with shamanic teachers in Guatemala and Minnesota before adding a yoga practice to my life. I’ve found the ancient traditions of shamanism and yoga complementary, and I integrate techniques from both into my personal practice. This includes mantra meditation, grounding-unification meditation, shamanic journeying and yoga nidra. I let intuition guide me as to what I need most on any given day.

Elizabeth Fletcher, MFA, RYT-500, is currently earning her yoga therapy certification from the Kripalu School of Integrative Yoga Therapy. She works to help people cultivate growth and wholeness through the practice of yoga. In 2017, she collaborated with writers Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew and Susan Power on a series called Playing in the Sacred Wilderness: Fiction, Imagination, and Faith. She has recently completed a memoir about her spiritual reconstruction by way of Guatemala. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Bohemian, Sea Stories, Confrontation and more.

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