It has been a while. I've now been here for over two months, which feels alternately like two days and two years, depending on which mood you catch me in.

I meant to write sooner, but I've been busy. Busy, you ask? With what? Moving to an ashram isn't exactly designed to leave you with an action-packed schedule. And that's true, to an extent, but the trouble with clearing space in your life is that it leaves you with an awful lot of time to yourself. Time... with yourself. To sit, and think, and contemplate, and stew, and pretty soon all of that stuff you've been avoiding and bludgeoning into submission with appointments and obligations and to-do lists comes straight to the surface, or perhaps more accurately comes tumbling down on your head like an icy waterfall filled with piranhas. And because I like frameworks (and not just odd and graphic metaphors), I'll summarize the last month or so with a process usually applied to the loss of a loved one -- which I guess this is, if you think about how attached we get to the stories of ourselves -- the expanded/adapted for ashram life Kübler-Ross model for stages of grief, or

7 Stages of Growth

SHOCK
You set up your room in 36 hours. You start tracking the number of days you've been here in your gratitude journal, prisoner-wall-tickmarks-style. Giddy with the newness of your surroundings, you make a bunch of new friends, throw yourself headlong into programming and practices, and get unreasonably excited at the breakfast schedule (two oatmeal days each week! Four if you get there early enough for leftovers!!).
DENIAL
You begin to miss things, people, donuts. Subconsciously, you begin to fashion a life for yourself in the image of your old life. You bake cake for everyone. You stomp the halls in your sassiest shoes. You maintain a stash of your favorite ice cream. You start online shopping again. You enthusiastically accept consulting work from your old company. None of this helps, and you realize you are missing the point; since your old life was what drove you here in the first place, modeling your new life in a carbon copy of it won't get you anywhere. Anytime someone asks how you're doing, you say everything is going great.
GUILT
Quiet time for contemplation gives you ample opportunities to examine everything you have ever done wrong in your life, including interrupting that guy at lunch today. Fully cognizant of the fact that you chose to come here, you fixate on what you have done to deserve such a miserable, solitary existence. You attend a Bhagavad Gita workshop. You are sure that your dharma is to be forever alone. Your meditation practice becomes a form of atonement.
ANGER
Having exhausted the path of self-flagellation, your attention turns outward. You pick a fight with your new friends. Your grandmother comes to visit, and you spend the weekend responding to her curiosity with defensiveness, up to and including defending the very things that have bothered you for weeks. You get mad when there are guests here for the weekend because it means the yoga rooms are occupied by paying customers.
BARGAINING
Somewhat inexplicably since you've never been into astrology before, you begin to follow your daily horoscope in an attempt to figure out why everything feels so off. Mercury is in retrograde, though this knowledge doesn't help. You ask people who have been here longer than you if and how they have grown, and are somewhat heartened to learn that the process is more facing difficult things, then reflecting some time later that your negative patterns have changed, and less bright-lights-big-revelations. You tell people you are in your "awkward phase" of spiritual development.
DEPRESSION
You mope around the halls like a yogi Eeyore. You do your practices with a mechanical and defeated resignation, and eventually miss a couple of days here and there. You learn to knit. You spend time making, and then unraveling, messy creations. Everything is a metaphor. You feel simultaneously trapped in your mind and overwhelmed by the freedom of your new life. You bake another cake; it turns out too sour for your tastes.
ACCEPTANCE
You remember, eventually, that the reason you came here in the first place was to sit with the discomfort of your inner self. You realize that pretty much everyone around you is in the same boat. You make amends with the old new friends, and make some new new friends. The sun comes out for a day, which helps with all of this a great deal. There are no earth-shattering breakthroughs, but you realize you are, above all, perfectly okay.