Green Tara at Altitude
"23,500!" I collapsed into the front seat of our Prius, which had no business driving up that long pocked mountain road to our trailhead in the Glacier Peaks Wilderness. I'd just completed five vigorous days in the back-country, and doubled the amount of mantras I'd previously uttered in my life to date.
Most who know me would not be surprised that going on a longer backpacking trip once a year has become an important ritual in my relationship with my husband, but few in my life would peg me as the mantra-saying type. "Why?" my more blunt friends ask with a blank stare. Let me share how I came to combine the practices of backpacking and mantra recitation, and why I will definitely be doing this again.
It all began in the summer of 2020 when the air was hot with the stress of Coronavirus. My husband and I were working in understaffed "helping professions" at the time, and the pace of responding to the crisis was frenetic. We'd been chained to our desks not just for months, but for what felt like years before that. It was a lot to be sleighing for the cause while also volunteering to build our community, Haystack Heights Cohousing. It was time for a change. We needed to hit the "cause pause button" with a new family tradition. Que: The annual Jim and Mariah week-long backpacking trip.
How to Become "Outdoorsy"
But where to go? It is ironic that right when you are most in need of a vacation, making all the executive decisions to plan one is the last thing one feels like doing. Not only this, but we were out of shape from over-efforting through the Trump years, and we needed to come up with a training plan to survive our own recuperation. I had idyllic pictures from a family camping trip to the Wallowas in a childhood photo box, so we started with the end goal in mind: Five days in the Wallowa Wilderness.
From there we counted our weekends and got started. First was simply taking our housemate's dog around the Liberty Lake loop trail. Then we did a day trip to the gorgeous Sacred Grove of Cedars outside Sandpoint, Idaho. This wet our appetite for an overnight trip. Friends recommended the Upper Salmo-Priest Wilderness loop trail as an excellent weekend outing, and so Jim got to work procuring all the latest ultra-light gear that our upcoming excursions could justify. We were, after all, "outdoorsy types," and we had some catching up to do!
Our first night in the Wallowas we took a side trip off the main trail to a location called Ice Lake. Of course with a name like that, an alpine storm kicked up out of nowhere and it felt like the hand of God itself was beating down on our tiny tent. I was terrified. "What the hell have I signed up for?" I thought. "So much for the idyllic getaway, I will be thankful to live through this week!" In the morning, it was gone without a trace. Just like our mind states fluctuating through meditation, all the bad weather had evaporated into humidity. We teamed up with a couple of nurses whose water purifiers broke on their first day, and we ended up hiking our whole loop together. We shared our entire life stories, philosophies and opinions about everything. This was the hiking trip of external talking.
Progressing from Talking to Walking
The following summer we returned to Jim's old stomping grounds on the Olympic Peninsula to hike the Hoh River Valley trail up to the Mt. Olympus glacier. The trees and moss are epically enigmatic in this part of the world, and so I silently entertained myself with imagined stories of dwarfs and faeries and all number of wondrous creatures occupying every nook and cranny of the forest. I'd imagine what modern society could look like living in harmony with the old growth we had the wisdom to not previously mow down while Jim was rehearsing his own silent meditations. This was the hiking trip of internal talking (and blisters, ouch!).
In 2022 a pair of intrepid lesbian friends recommended the incredible Rock Wall trail in Kootenay National Park when I was crowdsourcing for our annual hiking destination, and so off we went! By this time I had my trail feet (and much lighter shoes) with me and I was in need of a deeper experience beyond the confidence of knowing I could make a physical journey by taking a thousand simple steps. I really wanted to be in my body and get out of my brain. I tuned into the sensation of my overly-tight hip flexors slowly releasing, and try to hypnotize myself with the 'Left, Right, Left, Right' motion of walking throughout my body. But try as I might, the broken record of work thoughts and ego musings and questions about plant and insect names and lifestyles kept interrupting my meditative flow. I was engaging in some deep therapy work at the time, and one evening I woke up in the middle of the night in our tent reliving some incredibly difficult moments as if they'd happened yesterday. It was an emotional memory storm that shook me on the inside. This was the hiking trip of trying and failing to cease internal talking.
Frustrated and still overworked, my spiritual appetite was growing. In mid-summer of 2023, we traveled to Vermont to spend a week at the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE), where we were inspired to see what an intentional community with a shared developmental framework and spiritual practice felt like. Time with Jim's family followed, and with limited vacation and absolute insanity at work, this was a sacrifice summer.
Things came to a head and Jim and I were finally able to transition out of our former career roles. With the Spokane Independent Metro Business Alliance, an organization I had started and led for nearly six years in good hands, Jim and I were able to begin to recenter ourselves through travel to South America and elsewhere. In July I got to be at the Clear Sky Meditation and Study Center for three weeks, including a Breathing Meditation training and service program. Here I had the cultural experience of undergoing a Green Tara ceremony, and was introduced to mantra practice.
Positive Brainwashing?
When you have a stain on your shirt you want to get out, you don't just pour soap and water on the spot and walk away. Typically there is a lot of rubbing involved. These repeated motions are called scrubbing, and seem to be an essential part of the process of cleaning up. Similarly when you have unwanted thoughts in your mind or reflexive feelings in your body that you want to "clean up," might some form of positive "brainwashing" then be logically called for?
On a coarse and overly-simplistic level, this is one way to understand beginning mantra practice. It's not the creepy brainwashing of a manipulative cult leader training you to worship him, rather it is the reverse: washing out your mind so you have the clarity and presence to think the thoughts YOU want and need to think again. Not your parents voice in your head, not a television set, and certainly not the thousands of dizzying blips on your social media feeds. When you feed your spirit a different kind of positive aspirational fuel, you get different and better results.
So here we are in the summer of 2024. It was time for our annual nature pilgrimage and we had no federal grant deadlines, political crises, staffing shortages or other reasons to stop us from going. Over an intimate dinner with cohousing neighbors in Spokane's first Zero Net Carbon (ZNC) home, we set our sights on the Glacier Peaks Wilderness and drove across a prettier part of the scrub land in the middle of our bioregion. We had perfect weather and Jim smartly chose our route to avoid any over-long days. We enjoyed alpine lakes and old growth and giant mushrooms, everything epic you might expect from a backpacking trip in the Great Northwest. This was the hiking trip of supplantation: replacing unwillful thoughts with purposeful mantra recitation.
This may sound like some kind of arrival, but really it is just the beginning of a much longer inward journey. There are good reasons why spiritual practice and study are called "the path." The metaphor is so helpful at making what seems esoteric and unachievable more concrete. While at first I had to use my fingers to count mantras, now my mind is able to remember my count as I complete everyday tasks. As without, so within. I hope you will join me on this renewed journey of sharing and reflection!
