2022
I went on my first vipassana meditation retreat this summer, and turns out it wasn't a cult (or an escape, or a cure-all, or a Buddhist conversion camp) but it was a painful, gratifying, and eye-opening journey of reconnecting with my own mind and body. For ten days, we abandoned all technology, talking and gesturing, reading and writing, music, alcohol, snacks, dinner... really anything that might protect or distract us from the unfamiliar itch of boredom or the heat of the midsummer desert. It was fascinating to slowly remove all the layers of social, conversational, capitalist armor that shield us from ourselves; to observe the mind in its natural non-striving state; to see what's left after whittling down the verbal and mental chatter that chaperone us through our days and nights.
I'll start with some background (skip to part III below if you just want to read about my suffering).
I. the what & why of vipassana meditation
Vipassana is a Pali term best translated as "insight" or "clear-seeing" and is one of the world's oldest meditation techniques. Unlike other forms of meditation that may rely on visualizations or verbalizations, vipassana is a nonsectarian approach that seeks deep awareness of the true and present reality, exactly as it presents itself in its natural state. In practice, this translates to training the mind's attention muscle by focusing first on the breath and eventually broadening to full body scans.
The purpose of vipassana meditation is self-transformation through self-observation: first to develop an experiential understanding of deep mind-body interconnectivity through self-exploration, then to observe in action certain natural laws of the universe (three in particular, all Pali terms: anicca or impermanence, dukkha or suffering, anatta or egolessness) and over time to purify the mind from attachment and judgment in order to work toward an inner life of greater awareness, discipline, equanimity, peace, and compassion.
II. the 10-day retreat
Vipassana is said to have been discovered by Gotama Buddha (the OG) 2500+ years ago and taught since then in its original form by a continuous lineage of instructors. One recent and prolific teacher was S.N. Goenka, who learned the technique in Myanmar and began teaching it in India in 1969, eventually pioneering the 10-day introductory course and teaching it worldwide until his death in 2013. His legacy lives on in the now-foundational 10-day intensive that is taught at centers all over the world with Goenka's original instructions. Amazingly, these courses remain !!! entirely free !!! for any new or returning student, including lodging and freshly prepared food. In fact, you can't even donate to Goenka's organization until you've completed ten days, so everything is paid forward at will by past students.
The ten days are guided by Goenka's voice and video recordings that combine Pali invocations with English instructions, changing daily as the technique deepens and grows. Days 1-3 teach anapana meditation, or observation of the breath, with the goal of quieting the mind and training it to become aware of subtle physical sensations. These lay the groundwork for days 4-9 that teach the vipassana technique, which centers around body scans that start piecemeal and progress to holding in focused awareness the entire body at once, training the mind to observe the subtle, impermanent sensations of aliveness—heat, pain, pleasant vibrations, itches, aches, everything—from head to toe in a single breath. The final day is focused on metta bhavana, or loving-kindness meditation, and the silence is broken to begin releasing and reintegrating back into the world.
Today, there are many derivatives of the vipassana technique that are labeled and taught as "insight meditation" all over the world (you may have heard of Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, or Jack Kornfield, who together founded Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in 1974; the latter founded Spirit Rock in 1987); not to say that any one form is better than the other, but Goenka's courses and instructions are in some ways the most original, consistent, immersive, and accessible format, with retreat centers teaching the same exact 10-day intensive all over the world, so not a bad place to start.
I have been an amateur meditator for the last five years and looking to deepen my practice after noticing some occasional relief from an over-active mind. At a transition time between cities and chapters, this summer was my best chance to find ten uninterrupted days, so I snagged a spot and dove in with the encouragement of a few experienced friends.
N.B. if you're at all considering one of these retreats, I'd recommend just signing up for one, maybe instead of reading about my experience below—it will be a challenging, rewarding, and perspective-shifting ten days that aren't necessarily made better by specific anticipation of the schedule or by the lens of someone else's experience.
III. a chronicle of my own experience
Day 0
I arrived at the Southern California Vipassana Center, an unassuming desert oasis 150 miles east of LA, in peak mid-afternoon July heat. The center was clean and simple, with dedicated halls for dining and meditating, half a dozen small buildings to house 60 or 70 meditation students and staff, all landscaped thoughtfully with native cacti and trees along a dirt path.
The returning students who checked me in were surprisingly normal, though they did sequester my phone, only allow me to interact with women, hand me a horrifying schedule, and send me to my room without a key. I felt like a college freshman carrying my bags and rotating a paper map to find my room, where I found a twin bed with a thin white mattress, a nightstand with a digital clock that would become my muse, a smooth pale concrete floor that would become my confidante, a small window, a noisy ceiling fan, and thank the lord (or whoever presides over nonsectarian meditation centers), air conditioning.
We were given a pamphlet detailing a code of discipline to be followed for the next ten days, summarized below (it took me a while to appreciate that these rules were less to be cursed and more to be thanked for cultivating the uniquely intense, solitary, peaceful lifestyle that laid the groundwork for a new kind of relationship with my own mind).
First off, there was "noble silence" (silence of body, speech, and mind) meaning no gestures, eye contact, whispers, notes, or physical touch at all; this also includes suspension of (digital) contact with the outside world and all technology. Next, a few moral precepts—no killing, stealing, lying, drinking, etc—which seem nominal given the circumstances until you begin to notice massive desert red ants all up in your everywhere (there were laminated sheets kindly labeled "bug relocator" in every room as a reminder of this one). There was also complete separation of men and women, combined with a strictly enforced "modest" dress code, presumably to prevent distraction and sexual activity (I take issue with the heteronormativity and conservative undertones here, but this is one of very few qualms overall). Finally, suspension of all religious activity, prayer, and objects as well as physical exercise, music, reading, writing, or any personal items or food (really anything that could possibly protect or distract you from meditating) in order to fully lean into the vipassana technique.
I'm able to notice only now how ingrained American individualism had become in my own head as I entered this new world: I hesitated at hitching a ride with a stranger for the two-hour drive from LA to Joshua Tree, suspiciously noted the absence of locks on any of our building or room doors, and was confused by the assortment of volunteers—not monks by any stretch, but adults from LA with lives of their own—who kept us fed and on-schedule without any kind of compensation. This was about to be a different kind of life, free not only from conversation and capitalism and social norms, but also from the unrelenting private escape of technology; built instead on communal trust, selfless service, and deep self-reliance.
We were assigned spots in the meditation hall that evening: a small 3'x3' space to be customized with cushions and blankets of our own (I left mine as is, a standard square cushion with a small beanbag for my butt, but I seemed to have missed the memo on bringing a closet full of personal padding for body and brain). There were two teachers, one male and one female, presiding at the front of the hall on elevated cushions; both looked at least 60, moving slowly and gracefully through the stillness as we fumbled around awkwardly on the floor.
My gratitude for the crisp new silence of the meditation hall was quickly interrupted by the loud, throaty groans of an old Indian man chanting in Pali. By the time he thankfully switched to English, I realized it was the voice of the late S.N. Goenka himself that was booming through the loudspeakers, instructing us to begin focusing on our breath. This first hour of meditation felt doable in its novelty, and I whiled it away breathing and daydreaming before filing out of the meditation hall, through the hazy desert sunset, and off to bed at 9:15.
Day 1
The schedule is pretty much the same for days 1-10:
4:00 wake up gong
4:30 meditate
6:30 breakfast break
8:00 group sit #1
9:00 meditate
11:00 lunch break
12:00 optional 5-min 1:1 Q&A with teachers, or rest
1:00 meditate
2:30 group sit #2
3:30 meditate
5:00 tea & fruit break
6:00 group sit #3
7:00 Goenka's video discourse
8:30 group sit #4
10:00 lights out
The sound of the gong is piercing and metallic, with the annoying habit of getting louder and more insistent until your light is on or your curtain is open. I tumbled out of bed, barely noticing a sky full of stars on my way to the meditation hall, and gratefully wrapped myself in a fleece blanket as I tried not to fall asleep.
Goenka's loud, gutteral voice was here to stay. Today's instructions were deceptively simple: focus on the breath, specifically on the flow of air in and out of the nostrils; when thoughts inevitably stray, calmly bring the attention back to the breath, without judgment.
Day 1, I told myself, was just about survival: take it one hour at a time, savor the new stillness, try to ignore the distressing reality of skipping dinner for ten days. I thought about my breath for a moment, then wondered where a low humming sound was coming from, then scratched an itch on my hand, then recalled with dread all the tales of sleeplessness and agitation and hunger that I had been warned about. Back to the breath for a moment. Immediately distracted by a cough next to me. How many people were in this hall, anyway? Had it been ten minutes yet? What was for breakfast? I fidgeted on my cushion, eventually dropping my head onto my knees in surrender when my back started to ache thirty minutes in. In total, I probably didn't spend more than twenty consecutive breaths actually being aware of my breathing, let alone the pleasant stillness of the present moment: dawn in the desert, with nothing to do and nowhere to be. The silence was soothing to help soften the death-trap of comparison: we were not competing against each other, or even against our own prior selves, but instead just observing, neutrally and choicelessly, whatever arose in the present moment: inhale, exhale, attention, distraction, pain, relief, deep breath, shallow breath, all impermanent.
The silence felt much more jarring at mealtimes, when I felt the most primed to instinctual patterns of social convention around strangers. I politely and awkwardly avoided eye contact with my new freshman classmates—who I couldn't speak to, but I could craft elaborate stories about in my head to pass the time—as we cautiously navigated around each other to serve ourselves food and stack our own dishes in silence.
I was impressed by the food: flavorful but not indulgent, plant-based and pretty much all made in-house. Breakfast was a buffet of oatmeal, stewed and fresh fruit, yogurt, granola, cereal, nut butters, jams, and an inclusive selection of milks and breads that might, to an outsider, be the only indication that we were in the 21st century. Lunch was different every day, from taco bar to glass noodle stir fry; always a fresh salad bar, occasionally dessert.
Painfully aware that I was about to eat my last meal of the day around the time I would usually sit down for my first (11am), I served myself a big plate of salad and clumsily wielded a fork with my non-dominate hand in an effort to squander as much time as possible. I strolled back to my room to see the clock at 11:26. Unbelievable. I had more than 90 minutes to kill before the next activity on the schedule—a milestone that, even if I survived to witness, would provide me with zero additional entertainment. How was I supposed to waste time without anything or anyone to waste it with? My brain was screaming for stimulation: distraction, human interaction, sensory change, anything to avoid what was true and present.
When I came up short on dopamine, my mind easily started entertaining itself by replaying the past and inventing the future. I reran entire episodes of The West Wing in my head. Dreamed up hundreds of possible furniture configurations for a new apartment that I hadn't found yet. Replayed scenes from my summer travels or from the emotionally-charged end of grad school. Scripted fictional addendums to those conversations and fast-forwarded three decades to extrapolate the effects. Replaced people from those scenes with my favorite characters from The West Wing. Replaced Josh and CJ with the faces of my new meditation pals. 11:53. Fuck.
Daydreaming allowed me to pass the meal and rest periods easily enough, but the same patterns of a wandering mind felt way worse when I was actually trying to concentrate. After many minutes of floating in a fantasy world on my meditation cushion, my thoughts would inevitably jolt back to a distressing reminder that I was stuck inside my own relentless, meandering, imperfect mind for another week and a half.
This destructive cycle—distracting myself, getting frustrated with my own mind, becoming preoccupied with future hardship—was causing me way more suffering than was actually necessary to face the present moment: sitting silently in the middle of an air-conditioned meditation hall in a beautiful desert with no responsibilities. That was my only reality, but I barely noticed it.
By our 5pm tea break, I was starving. No room for my dawdling left hand anymore. I smothered an apple and a banana in cinnamon and salt and polished them off. By the middle of the next meditation, I was hungry again.
To find peace, we had to stop craving good outcomes and fighting against bad ones, Goenka told us that night (after my initial skepticism, I found his daily discourses—grainy video monologues from 1991—to be clarifying and motivating; his corny uncle humor uplifting and sometimes even spot-on). We could escape the constant cycle of suffering by learning to calmly observe our own pain, to separate ourselves from the antics of our own minds, to notice emotions arising in both mind and body before we react to them (this sounded suspiciously similar to what the Stoics famously say about separating judgment from reaction). Creating this distance would help bring to light the universality of impermanence, Goenka counseled us: the transience of physical pain and pleasure, of hunger and satiation, of inhale and exhale, of anger and delight, of all things.
9:48. Lights out. I was still starving.
Days 2 & 3
Two more days of nostril exploration. The meditations didn't get any easier or feel any shorter, but I started to settle into the silence a bit more, allowing space for other senses to get louder. The annoying soundtrack of coughs, creaks, and movement in the meditation hall felt sharper, but so did the brilliance of colors at sunset, the delightful creaminess of the same peanut butter and the seedy crunch of the same piece of toast on the third day in a row.
I also noticed that other people's habits—slurping, sighing, plate-scraping, tea-station-cluttering, bathroom-sink-hogging—started to bother me less, because the lack of normal communication de-personalized them into beings who shared my space, but who I didn't have to build a social persona around as humans are used to doing, always existing in relation to one another. It felt relieving and rejuvenating to be around other people and feel in community with them without having to engage in effortful small talk, constantly verbalize my own experience, or make space for their reactions.
I was also slowly learning the way of life: after being politely reprimanded for stretching in front of the meditation hall, and again for wearing shorts on the women's walking path in 100-degree heat (there were no men in sight, since those distracting creatures live, walk, and eat on the other side of the retreat center, so even with the presumed heteronormativity under which these rules were created, I felt like I was in the clear), I learned how to coexist more peacefully with rules that I didn't always agree with, but I understood were intended to minimize disruption to others and allow myself to deepen my own practice.
I found a walking and yoga routine that kept me sane during the hardest hours of the day (for me: the pre-lunch, how-is-it-only-10am agony and the post-lunch, maybe-I-will-just-die-in-this-heat lethargy). I realized that simple fruit sugars from our 5pm tea break were only contributing to my hunger pangs, and soon found I could survive quite tolerably from noon one day until 6:30am the next with nothing but a cup of decaf tea at 5pm.
The five-minute breaks between our back-to-back evening sessions offered a piecemeal timelapse of the desert's stunning sunset as we trooped in and out of the meditation hall. Rich, glowing yellows and oranges danced behind dreamy purple hills, with dark outlines of cacti and joshua trees dotting the foreground. Shoes off. Ten pushups in my room to get the blood flowing. Two wheel poses for my aching back. Quick precautionary pee. Shoes back on. The massive orange cloud looks a smidge deeper now. The warm evening breeze is bathing my skin in the serenity of summer. Shoes off again. Back to my meditation cushion.
The law of impermanence (anicca in Pali, as uncle Goenka reminded us multiple times per day) was starting to come alive for me. We were living in cycles: hunger, fullness, boredom, stimulation, sleep, restlessness, repeat. Starting a new breath, or bite, or meditation, or day, and then finishing it. Daytime heat followed by evening breeze. Debilitating hunger, mellowed hunger, forgotten hunger, newly acute hunger. Even the parts that sucked—brain screaming for stimulation, finding nothing, trying to concentrate, getting lost in the past or future, mind lamenting its own failings—all eventually went away and were replaced with some other reality.
Day 4
Today was by far the hardest, longest, darkest for me. On day 4, the course transitions from anapana meditation, which focuses attention on the breath, to the vipassana technique, which asks meditators to apply their new skill of focused awareness to the entire body. We were told to observe physical sensation—with neutrality, equanimity, and patience—as we passed awareness through each part of the body, scanning from head to toe and back again, but most of the time I either came up empty or doubled down on whatever ache, pain, or itch was present there. I felt frustrated, unable to stay present, discouraged that I was somehow regressing in my meditation practice, and further annoyed at myself for becoming attached to my own progress.
Today also marked the beginning of "sittings of strong determination" (adhitthana in Pali) where we were instructed not to open our eyes or shift our body position during the three primary 60-minute group sits every day (8am, 2:30pm, 6pm). No scratching an itch, no unraveling the legs to redistribute weight, no adjusting a cushion that's slowly, insufferably sliding away.
There is a fascinating kind of internal war that repeats itself during these hourlong sits, most often in the latter half: the body is aching for relief, but the mind desperately wants to win, wants to hold out a little longer, wants the session to be over (there are no clocks in the meditation hall). My body won every single time today, and my mind was extremely pissed (so much for equanimity and nonattachment).
The vipassana technique required way more concentration than the previous three days' instructions to just concentrate on the breath. It was maddening to try to focus on a particular part of the body—say, my right shoulder—on which I could discern absolutely no physical sensation, when another part of my body—most often one of my legs—was throbbing, begging to be freed, dreaming of the pleasant rush of blood flow and the satisfying departure of pain.
So there I was in another day of the same reality—sitting in the same spot in the same meditation hall in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere—but now my back was aching and my cheek was itching and my legs were constantly falling asleep and my mind was screaming at all of them to shut up. What's more, I couldn't stop imagining a future of relief, which distracted me from observing whatever current reality was actually arising in my body, thereby causing my mind to feel further infuriated by its own failure. The downward spiral continued. I couldn't believe I wasn't even halfway to ten days.
I didn't actively think about leaving, as a couple students did (the teachers constantly discourage it and speak with you 1:1 if you're considering it, but at the end of the day they cannot legally or physically restrain you) but I did wonder to myself—how much of my determination to stay was my own ego at work trying to prove to myself, to the few friends who introduced me to vipassana, to the others who thought I was crazy, to these strangers sitting silently around me, that I was capable enough? To prove that my mind was stronger than my body, stronger than the oppressive desert heat, stronger than the relentless distraction of my own past and future?
9:55. Lights out. Still hungry. Bitter now too. Six more goddamn days. Sweet dreams.
Days 5, 6 & 7
For as long as I can remember, any physical itch on my body has always taken a simple and predictable path: either scratch the itch, or unwittingly forget about it. This week, though, I had an itch that found a third path to resolution, and this little guy changed everything. Midway through our evening group sit on day 6, I noticed a familiar prickling sensation on my left forearm and felt my chest tighten, knowing we were nowhere close to the end of the session. That morning and afternoon, I had finally been able to sit (in extreme discomfort) through a full 60-minute sit without moving my arms or legs, so I was determined to keep this up. I could not, I would not, allow this itch to break my streak.
I took a deep breath and continued my body scan. As I carefully traced attention down my face, I was painfully aware of the itch on my left arm that overpowered any other sensation; it was screaming for relief, begging me to tear attention away from my meditation to address it. The internal war proceeded as usual: I sat in agonizing stillness, fighting to keep my focus on the body scan, to not let the itch win, to battle the clock.
Instead, something fascinating happened. My attention split into two planes: I was acutely aware of the annoying prickle on my arm but also completely absorbed in my continuous body scan, somehow holding both in deep focus at once. I continued on, cautiously aware of this weird split mind situation, and then gradually—over the course of a minute at least—I observed the itch mellow from its urgent screaming state into a soft tug, and then saw it completely dissolve into heat and vibration, fusing with the pleasant tingling on the rest of my arm. The two planes of focus merged back into one.
My concentration was immediately broken my own incredulous grin. I was sweating in the chilly meditation hall, flooded with the profundity and palpability of impermanence. It was one thing to hear uncle Goenka groan at us daily about the importance and ubiquity of this concept, but something else altogether to experience it myself. I had just witnessed the transience of a tiny little itch on my arm—not just a casual noticing, but rather a focused observation, a painfully mesmerizing stare down of one thing dissolving into another—impermanence, caught in the act.
For these few days, the desert saw swift grey skies and 20-minute flash floods that raged and galloped their way through the dry air. Heavy, deafening rain would pound the roof and the sand until all of a sudden it was gone, dissolved into a trickle and then back into silence, just like my itch. It was surreal to emerge just minutes after one of these storms and see almost nothing changed—the wet sand instantly dried by the sun, a fresh cool humidity in the air for a few precious minutes until it was replaced again by dry heat—nature's impermanence matching the stormy cycles in my own mind and body.
I began to notice other changes in myself outside the meditation hall, too: I was now sleeping only four hours per night (I usually need more than double)—most days having vivid dreams and waking up before the morning gong—but somehow I still felt rested and alert. The mind was accessing a much deeper state of rest through the practice of vipassana during the day, Goenka's voice reminded us (annoyingly, on precisely the day that many of us noticed our compounding insomnia), and this meant we needed less sleep at night.
This deeper state of rest, combined with the sustained lack of stimulation for almost a week now, also worked to tame the chatter in my own mind. I did not achieve the "mental inbox zero" I was hoping to discover, but I did notice a real slowdown of the annoying, relentless voice in my head: I could more freely and fully sustain a train of thought, a daydream, a song stuck in my head, a focused body scan, without getting interrupted by other thoughts.
The slowing of internal dialogue also helped me to stop getting in my own way: instead of constantly wrestling with the number of days left in silent desert prison, I started to pass the time more pleasantly. I found myself staring blithely at the various cacti chilling stoically around me, noting their different shapes and shades of green, not really thinking about anything else; I would sit outside after a meal, deeply absorbed in the hair follicles on my arm or pickings from my nose (not exactly mind-blowing, but much closer to my present reality than my usual daydreams); I had a long staring contest with a fly (their eyes are seriously terrifying); I found myself laying down on the concrete floor of my room, making shapes with my fingers and aimlessly—not enthusiastically, but not tediously either—watching the shadows on the wall.
I saw the most powerful expression of this new kind of quiet during the most mundane moments. Brushing my teeth, for instance—a time I typically use to replay observations from the day, check the weather or furiously respond to texts if I have my phone, anything other than the mindless task at hand—became... just brushing my teeth. I found myself staring into the mirror, not distracted by reliving the past day or planning the next one, and enjoying for the first time the most uninspiring of activities that I'd done thousands of times before without actually noticing it. Momentarily free from my mind's fidgety chatter, I felt a pleasant tingle of aliveness at my new ability to appreciate the ordinary, to bask in the tedium and impermanence of human hygiene, to count how many more times I would brush my teeth in this bathroom before freedom... Damn. Distraction. Future. Back to the present moment. It was already gone.
Days 8 & 9
These were my favorite days: the end was in sight, and the previous week's constant cycles of boredom, distraction, despair, and relief were finally starting to pay dividends. I was starting to understand what it meant to separate suffering from pain, as uncle Goenka had explained to us: I could observe my throbbing leg or growling stomach and choose (sort of) how much suffering I wanted to allow in, backed by a deeper understanding of its impermanence.
My mind still got sidetracked and frustrated; my back still ached, and I couldn't seem to do enough wheel poses to stretch it out properly; I still got bored by day and hungry by night... but I was less miserable now. I started to find that I enjoyed waking up in the morning, moving slowly and serenely through the same spaces and tasks, finding myself back in the meditation hall excited to settle into my cushion, close my eyes, and look around inside myself.
Most days, I was still playing mind games to get through the meditation sessions. Ten slow easy deep breaths, and then back to body scans, I'd tell myself. Two more body scans, then I can let myself daydream, and the floodgates of distraction would open. But in the deepest moments of those meditations, I also discovered a wonderful, unexpected new mind-place that I had never experienced before: a kind of hidden hybrid state between wakefulness and sleep.
It was the vipassana technique that guided me there: calmly concentrate on the crown of the head until a pleasant tingling sensation arises, indicating a state of deep awareness. Slowly, without losing focus, broaden attention to the forehead, to the nose, one ear at a time, the cheeks, the chin, the neck; allow the breath to rise and fall naturally throughout. Continue to move the attention sequentially through the body, from head to toe and back up again, until the entire body is amassed in warm, subtle vibrations, all held together in focused awareness.
This full-body sensation was nothing short of magical: I felt so deeply rested—heart rate and breathing slowed, my body enveloped in its own warmth—but also intensely focused, holding my entire physical form in awareness at once. I don't know what to call this sensation other than the feeling of aliveness itself: tiny movements of heat and vibration that naturally arise from the fluid, itinerant composition of the body itself—molecules always in motion, always displacing each other—but also a feeling that is completely imperceptible without pausing (for many days), working to peel back so many layers of distraction and socialization, and really looking inside.
This new dreamlike awareness, when I could achieve it in the second half of a long sit, was also more stable and impervious to distraction. Instead of registering an incoming thought and actively choosing not to follow its windy path, as I was otherwise accustomed to doing while meditating, in this deeper state I often noticed the small tug of an inbound thought, but watched it ricochet away before I even knew what it was. Wild.
Day 10
Just before we were allowed to break "noble silence" mid-morning of the tenth day, we were taught a third and final meditation technique: metta bhavana, as I understood it, is a loving-kindness practice that collects all the gathered awareness and aliveness cultivated by vipassana and projects it out to loved ones, to surrounding community, to all living beings if you can manage it (this requires actively thinking and introducing thoughts during meditation, making it quite different from the purist vipassana technique that asks us to strip away everything but the raw present reality). It was framed as a "healing balm" of sorts to end each meditation practice by sharing our progress and positive energy with others.
This was not my first encounter with metta bhavana, but it was by far the most powerful. To channel love both inward and outward—at the end of a ten-day journey of anapana, vipassana, silence, struggle, self-discovery, and hard-hitting lessons on impermanence and discipline, just minutes before we could finally speak, eat, and interact normally—offered a profound release. The tears came streaming; my mind felt like it was melting into the space around me; my body was enveloped in its own vibrations and buzzing with physical heat. I was overcome with a sense of release, relief, love.
The rest of the day was overwhelming and kind of bizarre. Just sitting around a table, swapping emotions and stories with a few fellow meditators over lunch, gave me the jittery high of several cups of coffee (it turns out dopamine fasting, in this case cold turkey social deprivation for an extrovert, is very real). I also temporarily forgot how to speak normally, and my words couldn't keep pace with my thoughts. The closest comparison I can think of is the kind of delirious jetlag you might feel from a few drinks after a sleepless redeye on your way to see someone you love.
There is an inexplicable closeness derived from sharing an intense silent experience with strangers (especially the women who I shared spaces with every day). And indeed, it is a strange kind of knowing: we were observing one other eat and sit and sigh and struggle and yawn and fidget for so many intense yet empty days, without even knowing each other's names.
The rest of the day's meditation sessions largely sucked. Renewed social stimulation meant the mental chatter came flooding back (the feeling of extreme over-caffeination is not exactly conducive to solitary stillness), and it took me half of each session just to quiet my mind back down to a day 3 or 4 baseline level. It was sobering to realize how easy my mind could snap back to its own chaotic reality, after working so hard and so long to peel back the layers to access the precious quiet underneath.
Day 11+
One last morning gong, a final group meditation at 4:30am, a communal breakfast of leftovers and hugs, cleanup duty, and we were released back into reality.
Reintegration in the few days after the retreat was jarring in many ways: small talk with a cashier, the sound of an iPhone alarm, the buzz of urban banter, not to mention facing the unsympathetic notification screen of one's own smartphone. But it was also wonderful, like a sustained-release form of psychedelic afterglow: gratitude, presence, focus, clarity, love. Paradoxically perhaps, I felt overwhelmed by my own sense of peace.
For a few days, I felt like I was observing the same places with a new pair of eyes, a new appreciation for vibrant colors, a new patience not to rage-pass slow drivers on the highway, a new resolve to meditate daily, a new capacity to eat mindfully and speak slowly (I normally bulldoze through both food and words). Regretfully, within a week most of this afterglow had largely dissolved—but happily, I remain not only deeply moved by the vivid highs and lows of those ten days, but also readily able to access them as I continue meditating and moving through the chaos of normal life (and while the first ten days are over, I'm really still at the beginning of the retreat—the real test will be a year from now).
IV. a few things I learned
(my intention in part III above was to mirror form and function, taking you through my empty days in the same slow, deliberate, tedious manner with which I experienced them—and meandering is good for the soul, or something like that—but in the spirit of the TLDR generation, I couldn't skip the takeaways)
- Cultivating a relationship with my own mind, and developing the capacity to observe it objectively, might be one of the most important things I do for myself (maybe Keanu Reeves was onto something when he chose the red pill in The Matrix). Interestingly, I credit the lifestyle that the retreat center creates and enforces, and less the practice of meditation itself, for giving me the space to hone this skill: only once I started to painfully peel back the layers that protect me 24/7 (technology, conversation, distraction, a zillion forms of stimulation available at a moment's notice) could I glimpse my mind in its natural state: its compulsive patterns, its escape routes from pain and discomfort, its tricks and delusions.
- So much of our suffering is self-imposed (and therefore must be surmountable). What does it look like to fully separate the physical sensation of pain from the mental experience of suffering? To dissociate mind from body, and to strengthen both as a result? Could I apply the learnings from the itch-that-changed-everything (observing impermanence & momentarily separating thought from sensation on day 6), to other, bigger, more daunting forms of suffering?
- Observing my mind and reconnecting with my body helped me to see the deep bidirectional connectivity between the two, and brought my physical body into my meditation practice for the first time. I realize now that all the various physical sensations that arise while I meditate are not a hinderance to my practice, but an integral part of it. To perceive the tiniest, faintest expressions of impermanence—the fleeting touch of clothing on the skin, or the slight difference in temperature between an inhale and an exhale—is to train the mind to observe (and therefore experience!) aliveness at subtler and deeper levels. There is always sensation physically present in, on, and around the body—we just have to become aware of it.
- Maybe "being present" is kind of like the adult form of boredom, and should be more accepted and appreciated as a resting state that allows sacred space for self-observation, creativity, and clarity, among other things.
- Meditation is not so much a "workout for the mind" as it is a tool—just like deeper knowledge of a piece of technology allows us to do so much more with it, so too has/can/will meditation help me manage and utilize my mind more effectively.
- It strikes me that there are a lot of parallels between philosophies, from various flavors of Buddhism to classical Stoicism to Sam Harris-ism to insight meditation to plain old mindfulness—all of these guys are kind of saying the same thing: pay attention.
- I still have so many open questions to work through, but the pursuit of a calmer mind and a deeper relationship with myself is going to be a lifelong journey, and there's a kind of comfort in that. Here's a sampling of said questions/paradoxes: how to balance the pursuit of a goal with non-attachment to its success? What is the role of progress in meditation specifically, if making progress will allow me to care less about progress itself, but actively pursuing progress will get in the way of my progress? How to balance meditation's inherent focus on the self—after all, vipassana is all about deep observation of one's own mind and body—with the need to separate from that same self, to search for the "I" behind the eyes, to detach the observer from the observed?
V. materials & thinkers who have influenced me (huzzah for white men!)
Waking Up by Sam Harris
The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth, reflecting on the original works of Seneca et al
Awareness by Anthony de Mello
10% Happier by Dan Harris
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse