The structure of the quest is broken into 4, 7, 9 and 13 days.  You complete one and move onto the next the following year.  The 13 day being the quest that integrates the entire process. You go through all previous quests and then add another 4 days on just to make sure you get it.  What is one getting? many possibilities but for me the most pressing, I need a lot less than I think I do. In fact needing nothing at all can produce the most ecstatic states.

When I first heard about a vision quest, I was young. It sounded like a terrible idea even though I knew it was a respectable thing to do. I mostly feared that I wasn’t  made out of the right stuff to undertake such a journey. In the end, it took me 13 years to complete a series of 4 quests.  I had to redo my first and then took space between quests to build up  my will.

It's this seemingly paradoxical idea that the world  we are accustomed to  characterised  by polarity (no one thing can exist without its opposite)  also contains a non-polarised dimension - an absolute truth or Big mind as Wilber likes to say that has not been split.

It’s the same mind I take with me so perhaps the most important moment in meditation is the last one, getting up. It can be a moment to continue to receive things  as they are. That way we don’t  leave our sit with a story already about how it should be. Rather we can relax into this magnificent freedom that lets us move with life as it is.

Before you turn on the world, make sure  you are ready. I had this thought after an hour or so of readying myself this morning. I got ready for the world with a little movement, writing and sitting and noticed even then, an apprehension to turn my phone on because I knew in doing so the world would come flooding in.