Fredonia, NY — Joel Madison was practically bursting at the seams when he returned from a silent meditation retreat geared to bring about inner transformation and awareness.
Many retreat practitioners return to their normal lives with a sense of calm they didn’t previously have.
For Madison, that sense of calm was channeled into an intense need to let everyone know immediately what happened to him on a day-by-day basis. As soon as he pulled out of the parking lot when the retreat let out he called his friend, Kevin, to give him the lowdown.
“He was all revved up, talking a mile a minute, I couldn’t make out all of the words because they started to glue together,” said Kevin. “He seemed very excited to talk again, that much was clear. He seemed more hyper than when he left. I asked him if he’d do it again and he screamed ‘OF COURSE!’ at me.”
“I was really worried about Joel,” when he came home, said Madison’s girlfriend, Katie.
“He was pacing everywhere, telling me every single detail about the retreat; the retreat this, the retreat that. It was overwhelmingly boring so I asked him to leave some things out. Then I got worried when I looked at the call history on his phone. Since he had left the retreat he had called literally every single contact in his phone and each call was approximately one hour.”
Madison says his eagerness to tell friends and family about his retreat came from a place of compassion. He simply wanted to help them so that they might choose to go on a retreat too someday.
If so, he wanted to let them know about the benefits, what they’ll eat, the daily schedule, the silent connections you make with others, how you get to know someone better through silence than you do with talking, the blessings from the teacher, the deep sleep each night, the inner awakening, the mental clarity…
…the heart expansion, the bliss from meditation, the realization that we live in too loud of a society, everyone talks just for the sake of talking, how we’re all a mirror, aligning speech with the mind and heart, generosity, kindness, consideration, and most importantly how to truly listen to others.
