Image: Keegan Houser on Unsplash
I spent weeks and even months after doing a silent meditation retreat trying to put the experience and anything I learned from it into words. The results were a load of half-finished drafts of Buzz Feed-style “Top 5 Things a Meditation Retreat Teaches You” articles, never published as I never quite felt like I was able to capture my experience, and at times I really wasn’t sure if I’d actually learned anything from it.
Then I got frustrated and went on a bit of a rant, which probably captures at least some of what it was about better than articles I’d read with vague references to “clearer thinking” and “appreciation for impermanence”.
Eventually I gave up.
It’s only lately I’ve felt some things ‘click’, after months of practical application and real-world experience.
Only then could I take a look back and really articulate what my experience of it was.
And a lot of it can’t really be put into words, but I’ll try as always.
Here’s a non-specific number of things (I think) I learned from doing a Vipassana meditation retreat – and not talking to anyone, for ten days.
The effects of loneliness and social isolation
The rule of Noble Silence is the most eye-catching aspect of a Vipassana retreat, and the thing that puts most people off it. Obviously the retreat isn’t something that’s going to jump out at you as a pleasant way to use up half your annual leave if you’re not familiar with meditation, but even experienced and curious meditators are generally terrified and appalled by the thought of not being able to speak for a week and a half.
Not me though. I thought it’d be easy.
And it turns out, I was wrong. It is hard. Not in the doing, but in what it does to you.
Let’s start from the end: On Day 9 – the last day of the Noble Silence – this worry that I’d been “doing it wrong” started to gnaw at me. All this progress that I’d felt I was making, was it for nothing? Had the course ‘worked’? What did that even mean? Did I even know what a meditation retreat was supposed to achieve?! Maybe I’d done the wrong course?! And so on.
I’d also started to worry that the retreat was only solving problems that it had created itself through forcing me into asceticism and silence – hadn’t I been fine before I joined it?!
I barely slept that last night. Panic stricken.
On the final day students are allowed to speak to each other; in fact it’s an important part of the process of integrating everything you went through and preparing for re-entry to the ‘real world’ outside of the centre.
The effects were immediate and remarkable. All it took was the initial forays into awkward small talk for every worry and anxiety to evaporate into the cool spring air around us. Around the middle of the course I’d felt progress with the practice and like the feeling of positivity it gave made the whole world seem like it was passing from black and white into full technicolour; now it was like moving into HD, 3-D, surround sound, the whole lot.
It was jarring, but in a wonderful way.
Speaking was actually physically difficult at first, like there was a disconnect between your lungs and voice and mouth.
The talk was small at first. “Where are you from”, “What’s your name”, “How’re ya now” kind of stuff. This moved onto deeper discussions of our experiences of the retreat, with all of the comparing of notes that’s purposely forbidden throughout the course lest it interfere with everyone’s own practice. There are plenty of instructions, but part of the process I felt was dealing with the doubt of “Am I doing it right??”
Immediately it became apparent just how heavy an effect the inability to communicate – to say anything, verbally or otherwise – had on me, and everyone else. A lot of what comes to the fore is deep personal stuff, worries and fears and anxieties and anything else that could bother you. It’s often dressed in things that are relevant to your current situation but may represent a deeper emotionally affecting issue. If there are serious worries in your life, having a serious or tough conversation can save you. It can help by working through problems or just by giving you a much-needed outlet for bottled-up emotions.
But what amazed me was the effect that the small talk had. Just talking to someone else about anything, no matter how small, keeps us sane. It’s humans’ evolved way of reminding ourselves that we’re normal.
Just saying hello to someone or talking about the weather or the football or whatever else. Having at one time in my life been aloof about small talk, it’s made me think about it in a different way having experienced such a long period with absolutely none of it.
It’s definitely possible to think too much, and it’s important to have people to share heavy and serious and personal things with. But it’s just as important to just check in with the people around you, strangers as well as friends, just to keep yourself steady throughout the day. Less talk, more interaction.
As the day went on, with introductions out of the way, the conversation with my fellow students evolved to learn more about each other’s lives and situations and histories, why we did the course and how we had found the whole thing.
The talk got bigger and deeper as we shared our experiences and difficulties – it turned out I wasn’t the only one with last-minute anxieties about whether it had “worked” or whether I’d “done it right” or not. And nobody had even noticed me constantly readjusting and shuffling my legs as I desperately tried to maintain a comfortable seated position.
No-one cared.
The openness, eagerness to listen and to learn and to speak and to laugh and to joke around the site that day was both touching and inspiring. The meditation sessions became easy that day. Looking back now it feels like that half the retreat was made up of that one day, the other with silent meditation, silent meals and silent shuffling between meditation, meals and the showers.
I’ll never complain about small talk again.
Learning isn’t information, it’s experience
“You’re learning at the experiential level, not the intellectual level.”
This point was hammered home to us every evening in the instructional lectures. In a way even writing this violates its principles, as the Vipassana teacher Goenka would dismiss an article about meditation as nothing but “intellectual entertainment”. Interesting, yes, and useful as a guide, but you won’t really learn anything from it.
You learn by doing.
Learning’s not in the information but in the practical application of the teaching and your own interpretation of it. Look at the news and you see how you can skew any set of facts to mean anything you want.
The same applies for everything I learned about from meditation. Although I don’t do a huge amount of structured meditation, I do apply the practices in a lot of things I do. Things like running are great for deliberate focus on the breath and endurance of pain and effort. What we know as meditation is just sitting quietly and observing your thoughts, but you can apply the practice to everything you do. Wash the dishes mindfully to meditate on the dishes. Cook your dinner mindfully to meditate on food. When you go for a run, pay attention to every breath you take and focus on what you’re doing. Allow every pain, every sharp breath, every ache in your legs to just sit there.
Push yourself past where you thought you could go and your whole view of the world might change.
I’m sure a lot of people do this naturally and don’t have to be taught. The more you practice the more of the benefits of meditation you’ll see across your life.
It goes back to why you do the thing in the first place.
Having long been overcome with what is surely a common modern anxiety over productivity and learning, it’s been dawning on me a lot lately that the secret isn’t to try to absorb more information, but less. For years I’ve felt like I had to always be consuming and absorbing podcasts, Youtube videos, books, articles and the fucking news just to try to accumulate as much information as possible, and to get ‘smarter’ as a result.
Most people (i.e. everyone who isn’t a genius or has serious learning difficulties) know enough to get by in their lives just fine, and even to work out a way to thrive. Learning is important but it’s pointless without putting into practice.
You learn more from switching off your phone and going for a walk for an hour than you do from an hour of scrolling through Twitter, listening to a podcast, or even (and this one might be controversial) from reading a book. That’s if you really let go and just take in everything you come across. Your brain still works in this state, and that’s when real learning comes from within. It’s like Plato’s “learning is remembering”. There are things we know deep inside of us, and many of them are already learned through your own lived experience but are covered up in layers of negative conditioning and noise.
Meditation is about accepting the noise and letting it move on.
The a-ha moments come when your mind is free from its own worries, the body’s experiences and awareness do the learning from within. The rest is just ‘intellectual entertainment’ as the fella said. It’s just memorisation. Guide yourself with the knowledge of others, but the real learning comes when you start to see how that knowledge is acted out or occurs in real life. This is real learning.
Even now I have a better understanding of how to take a break from intensive study and just go for a walk or do something different. I’m still learning and practicing but the compulsion to always be switched on and trying to absorb information from podcasts, books, and twitter rabbit holes is lessening. Instead, I’ll find that just going to bed or going for a walk, exercising or even cooking with no distractions is where I get not just the ideas, but the motivation, to get back to work and continue with what I’m doing.
It’s only when you free your mind from its thoughts and worries that the real you, including everything you know (which is a lot more than most of us are aware of) are able to come to the fore. The next step is to think less, trust your instincts more. Thinking too much doesn’t make the future easier to predict.
So think of this as a guide, get out there and do something, and see what you learn from it.
Your body = your mind
At first I found it excruciating just sitting on the ground cross-legged for more than a couple of minutes. I also found it excruciating trying to sit quietly with my thoughts for more than a couple of minutes.
The sitting got easier, and it felt like my joints and muscles loosened up a bit. The meditating also got easier, and it felt like my brain was relaxing a little bit.
And so on.
Eventually it occurred to me that individual thoughts were actually more closely associated with individual aches, pains, itches, sweats, pleasures and buzzes than I’d ever really considered before.
Vipassana is a body scanning meditation and part of the results come from accepting the sensations of your body, which inevitably come and go. And through paying close attention to this coming and going in your body you realise – on a deep rather than intellectual level – that your thoughts come and go. In doing so, your mind frees itself from its pains.
And that’s my rough understanding of the whole thing so far.
But the main thing I took from it was this new appreciation for the mind-body relationship. It’s a two-way thing. Take care of your body to take care of your mind. And take care of your mind to take care of your body.
If you’re sick, pay attention to your body. It’s trying to tell you something. The difference in my thinking these days when I’m feeling rested and healthy versus when I’m stressed, tired or sick is incredible.
Moving your body is also a great way to move your mind.
And internal motivation is a great way to get your body moving – not just for exercise but for taking any action that’ll move you along in life.
If you’re feeling down, lazy or like you’re stuck somewhere: get moving. You’d be amazed how you view the world at the end of a long run, or even a walk (something I’ve learned to appreciate more lately).
Which brings me to:
Anything worth doing is hard work
And you can do a lot more than you think you can.
It doesn’t matter what form it takes or what you call it. You can change your life by putting in a bit of effort.
As the guy said to me at the start of the course “Well, it wouldn’t be worth doing if it wasn’t hard.” This stuck in my mind throughout the course, particularly as at times I found it very hard indeed, and it’s one of the things that stuck with me since then.
One thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that happiness doesn’t come from comfort. In fact, I would say that depression comes from stagnation. Whether physical lack of movement or being stuck in one of the many ruts of life, if you want to stay healthy and happy then you need to be constantly challenging yourself.
It doesn’t have to be all meditation retreats or constant grind in the corporate world hoping to one day see some return for all your hustle. But doing little things that push you out of your comfort zone might keep you ticking over. If there’s a flash of creativity or curiosity inside you, follow that. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to do this retreat but when the idea came to me it just wouldn’t go away.
All of my different stints living abroad came from similar whims that I followed through on, sometimes against all sane and well-meaning advice. Sometimes it went well, sometimes not. In retrospect they’re the best decisions I ever made. As another fella once said:
“The bad times are best of times.”
Travelling isn’t for everyone, but I’ve always had a curiosity about the world.
Find what interests you, and make it a bit hard for yourself. If it’s something you’ve never done before, great. And if you find yourself thinking “Oh I wouldn’t know anything about that” or “I’ve never done that” then all the better.
You can learn anything. In fact, you’ll probably get the most reward out of your first couple of years doing something new.
Take up a sport, learn a language, start a dance class, put on your runners and go running without a route in mind. Go too far and crawl back home if you have to. Go jump in the sea, all the better if it’s January in Ireland. Go chat someone up in a bar and make a complete fool of yourself.
We’ve evolved to evolve, and this happens when you push the limits of your abilities. You want to do something just hard enough that you can accomplish it (maybe after a few goes), but not too easy that it’s boring.
The result? You learn. And not the learning you do for the Leaving Cert, acute memorisation which is forgotten by the start of July and of little practical use. The sort of learning that changes how you see the world. It changes how you think the world works. And once you’ve done it enough times, then you start to see how you can do anything, really.
Why bother? Because, funnily enough, this is what will make you happiest. It’s not comfort. It’s not a cushy job. It’s not sitting on the couch watching reality TV. It’s pushing yourself a little bit every day.
It’s not all about work, extreme sports or hobbies either. There are a number of domains in life whereby you can apply this philosophy of pushing yourself a little bit. I’ll do another article on it soon; I might even have a whole section of the website dedicated to it.
But for now, just think: “Is this all too easy?”
Attitude to meditation now
It’s been 9 months since I took part in the retreat and I’m still learning things about the experience. Some things are only falling into place now, the a-ha moments I thought I might get in there.
Much of the benefit from meditation comes in the approach rather than the technique itself:
- Regular practice
- Acceptance of reality as it is, not what you want reality to be
- Heightened awareness and openness to whatever may happen – more acceptance of reality, also the key to proper learning from the world around you
- Pushing your own limits and disregarding negative self-talk
- Living in the moment
- Trusting that positively-directed work will reap benefits in ways you don’t even understand yet
You can apply these to anything for similar benefits.
And it doesn’t take a ten day crash course to learn meditation either. You can do start with a couple of minutes a day.
“Meditation is just turning off society and listening to yourself.” Anything can be done meditatively, what’s known as ‘meditation’ is just sitting quietly and directly meditating.
The things we tell ourselves are in our heads are just things we’ve heard from other people, or our own fears about them.
Don’t be afraid of ‘losing’ the real you by having a good hard look in the mirror. If you change that much from meditation – or practicing anything – then you probably weren’t that good to begin with, and your life will be infinitely better off from going through such a change. It’s painful but so is anything worth doing. Reality with a quieter mind isn’t that much different to anyone else’s reality, you’re just less swayed by what’s going on around you.
Other things I’ve done meditatively in the last while: writing and posting stuff online for people to read and judge and crucify me if they don’t like it; running a marathon; going on motorbike rides; yoga; solo travel; snowboarding; going for walks; going for runs; shopping in Lidl (still my least favourite part of the week); cooking dinner; drinking pints and talking to friends and strangers.
The benefits can be gotten from anywhere if you know how to look.
And once again, the question everyone including myself wants to know: “Has it changed my life?”
Sure how would I know?
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