Notes on Sixteen Days of Silent Meditation
What I was doing
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been at back-to-back intensive silent meditation retreats. The first was a 10-day Vipassana course (10 full days, plus a few hours the day before and after). These courses are offered at meditation centers (basically, informal monasteries) throughout the US and a number of other countries. They’re open to total first-timers like me or to repeat students, and despite including room and board they’re totally free, with donations appreciated but not required. They’re rooted in a pretty ecumenical strain of Burmese Buddhism, and every evening there’s an 80-minute video discourse by an Indian/Burmese teacher named S.N. Goenka about meditative practice and some of the teachings and principles behind it. But ecumenical does not in this case mean undisciplined: there’s a complete ban on electronics or reading/writing materials, a 4am wakeup, total silence at all times, no meals after noon, and specific hour-long meditation periods during which no movement or shifting is allowed. It’s beginner-friendly in the sense that you’re given ground-up instructions (with breath meditation for the first three days, body scan for the remainder), but as an introduction it’s quite intensive.
The weeklong Zen Sesshin, on the other hand, is not intended for beginners at all: most attendees are longstanding members of the community, and there aren’t really any explanations or instructions given. I’d done one weekend Zen meditation retreat about six weeks prior, so the folks at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate NY were kind enough to let me join, once I convinced them I was serious enough in my intentions and motivation. The schedule was similar to the Vipassana course, but there was the significant difference of formality: robes, complex series of bows and prostrations, formal choreographed meals, etc. (The constant fear of messing up was distracting at first, but faded with time.) This meditation tradition focuses solely on the breath, with no body scanning involved.
Why I was doing this
The biggest reason I wanted to undertake this hopefully-productive-but-not-even-imaginably-fun process has to do with my work as a writer, and my relationship to aspirations/ambitions more broadly. Over the past three years of writing very intently for my graduate program, I’ve improved considerably in many regards. But I haven’t learned to enjoy the work consistently. The project still feels deeply meaningful to me, but the process is often unpleasant and prone to induce angst and self-criticism. And - what may be a consequence, or a cause, or both - I feel that I’ve only been writing to about 40% of my capacity, in quality and in volume.
What am I hoping meditation can do for this? I think it has the potential to intervene in two stages of the dissatisfaction-->self-criticism-->unhappiness cycle. First, the dissatisfaction: meditation has been shown to increase concentration and mental discipline (no surprise there) - and with writing, that’s half the battle. So I’m hoping it may alleviate the output-dissatisfaction-->self-criticism-->unhappiness cycle by increasing my output and giving me more reason for satisfaction / less for self-criticism. Second, and probably more fundamentally, meditation may help me displace self-criticism as my first response to not meeting my self-conjured expectations - for writing, or for other aspirations. I know that this response is unhealthy and counterproductive, but head-knowledge can’t preempt such a deeply engrained pattern. (A pattern, note, that’s broader than just self-criticism: when our hopes aren’t realized, we instinctively dislike whoever or whatever seems to be the limiting factor. It’s just that with self-directed pursuits, that factor is you.) Meditation goes beyond head-knowledge and actually trains your mind through practice to recognize and step outside of patterns like this. Part of this is the self-awareness you build, but a lot of it comes from repetitions of failure and acceptance: by kindly and equanimously returning your lapsed attention to your breath over and over again, you learn to be kind and patient with yourself.
There are other circumstantial changes (e.g., having completed my grad program and taking some pressure off writing) that I hope may also contribute to being happier with myself and my output. But increased focus and improved self-relation seem like necessary core shifts, and meditation is a powerful and well-documented tool for those changes.
What the experience was actually like
To begin with, you get up very early. The wakeup bell (a handheld gong) sounds at 4am. Which isn’t the hard part, getting up - you get used to that soon enough - it’s staying awake during the 4:30-6:30 meditation period before breakfast that's the struggle. My personal solution: a sequence of squats, jumps, and planks that left me sweaty but awake.
You get used to the mandated silence. You come to enjoy it, in a way. There's no social pressure, which is sort of a relief. But you also find you’re locked in a psychological room with yourself for the next ten days. This means you have to figure out how to get along with yourself, which proves to be both more difficult and more productive than you imagined.
You’re quickly reminded that despite your ambitions there are limits to your attention capacity. The first hour of the day you can lock in and focus, as long as you can stay awake. But there are upwards of ten hours of meditation in the schedule, interspersed with meals and breaks and the evening discourse. At least three of these you lose to daydreaming, and then to the instinctive self-criticism that follows, and then to bitter skepticism about the usefulness of the whole enterprise - a spiral that’s all too familiar. It doesn’t feel like you can do anything about the focus, so you start working on the self-criticism. This turns out to be important.
You remember things. Deprived of external tasks, your mind starts turning up memories from high school, college, early childhood - unpacking the cluttered attic of your frontal cortex and finding stuff you didn’t know you still had around. You choose to believe this is some kind of useful processing and not just boredom. Either way, it’s interesting.
You learn good and bad ways of dealing with your own cynicism toward the meditation instructions and their Buddhist roots, a cynicism which on some level you recognize is just a displacement of your cynicism toward yourself. Sometimes you get angry, which just eggs that part of you on. Sometimes you try to suppress that anger, which is even more derailing. At one point you narrate an entire body scan meditation to yourself in the voice of Rick Sanchez (“And whoop-de-fucking-do, looks like we’re back at the scalp, aka meaningless-itch-land. I mean, why do you even have nerves up there? What’re they going to tell you, that your haircut sucks? Nature is an idiot, Morty. Remember that.”) This actually turns out to be sort of helpful, apparently, because by the end you’re feeling better and ready to focus again for real.
You sit down again and give it another try.
The discourses turn out to be surprisingly useful. You know that the practice is the point, and not the theory, but you’re an overthinker and it’s nice to have some theory to fall back on. The basic explanation you’re given is that by paying attention to every tiny body sensation and remaining equanimous - no scratching itches, no complaining about knee aches - you’re retraining your mind away from the constant cravings (facebook) and aversions (grading) that can otherwise keep it bouncing around aimlessly over the course of a day. It’s supposed to train your unconscious mind as much as your conscious, because it’s the unconscious that usually handles body sensations, breath, scratching itches, etc. And as you get better at observing your body sensations, you notice which ones arise in association with any given craving or aversion throughout your day, which lends you a certain power over it.
This seems like as good an explanation as any. When it feels like you’re not accomplishing anything, you remind yourself of it.
You talk to yourself a lot. On breaks, and despite your efforts otherwise, during meditation periods too. You talk yourself up for heading into meditation, into getting out of bed, out of eating a third helping you know will make you fall asleep during afternoon meditation, down from the cliff of self-criticism when you fall asleep anyway. (Wierdly, I found my interior dialogue constantly lapsing into German. It’s unclear why.)
Eventually, you start talking back. Once I invited myself gently to be here and now, with myself, to focus on the breath and settle into meditation. I tried to be very kind and gentle. The response: “You mean you don’t hate me?” *Gulp.* I’d known that the past years of self-conflict over writing and productivity had been bad for my self-relationship, but I didn’t realize things had deteriorated that far. But this was valuable. It was a starting point. I was back on speaking terms with myself.
You sit down again and give it another try.
You develop nicknames for a few of your fellow meditators, whom you’re supposed to be ignoring entirely. Mostly you name them after people they resemble, except for one you nickname Arshloch based on his remarks on the shuttle from NYC that you were both on. You grow fond of the nicknames and then of their referents (even Arschloch, who turned out to be a nice guy when the silence lifted on Day 10).
You discover that the woods on the edge of the compound have an almost magically silencing effect on your mind. You start going there more often, even for the ten minute breaks. At one point a huge tree branch falls right across the trail, which should seem ominous but somehow doesn’t.
In an environment so engineered for focus, you grow to cherish distractions. For instance, the occasional breaks in the Noble Silence (as it’s called in the Buddhist tradition): when you take 120-odd Americans, switch them onto a high-fiber vegetarian diet, and put them in a quiet room together to meditate, there are certain gastrointestinal effects that are neither silent nor noble. Your inner middle schooler emerges to find great amusement in this. Eventually, though, you learn to use the errant fart or cough or sneeze as a handhold when your concentration has slipped: the fact that it is a distraction reminds you of the task it is distracting you from, and pulls your lapsed attention back.
You sit down again and give it another try.
Your cynicism flares up a lot less often toward the end of the course. For one thing, you’ve learned to gently set aside the more metaphysically charged parts of the discourses, which you don’t think hold up. (In one of the discourses, the teacher told a Buddhist parable comparing emotional reactions to gifts that the prompting circumstances bring you: if you choose not to accept the gifts, they pass by along with the circumstances. I learned to agreeably decline the cynicism and frustration that certain teachings offered.)
For another thing, though, you become more concerned with working through your own inner bullshit than with caring about anyone else’s. Which you can say with nearly no animosity: minds just produce bullshit - disingenuous objections and hemming and hawing and excuses - because that’s just part of what minds do. You’re training yourself to recognize the difference between that and the stuff that matters. And to be patient.
The self-criticism cycles don’t go away, but they get smaller. You learn to notice them more quickly. You learn to treat yourself with decency and kindness, because you have to. You think maybe this, and not the increased focus or inner silence or whatever else, is the point of the whole thing. You start to feel better, most of the time.
On the last day, they let you talk again. I found I didn’t really want to. Maybe I’d said everything I’d needed to say.
Reflections, and how to explore this
I don’t know that I got any single big epiphany out of this experience, but it feels like I made some important strides toward a healthier (and presumably more productive) relationship with writing, and with myself. And it gave me some improved tools to keep working on all of that. For those reasons, I think the experience was pretty productive and, ultimately, worth it - but of course, only time will tell. For now, I’m planning to meditate for about an hour each morning. We’ll see how the writing goes when I get to it, after the present travels and family time and weddings.
I did come up with a three-pronged approach to ambitions/aspirations in general. These emerged from the meditation, from reflection between and after the courses, and from talking to the guiding teachers during the occasional 5-minute interview slots:
- Be kind to yourself. Always.
- Remove ego. I think a lot of my writing ends up being motivated by wanting my readers to think I’m smart. I want acknowledgement and affirmation. That’s fine, I guess, but trying to leverage that for motivation is going to warp not just my writing but myself. Instead I need to focus on what I’m contributing - in the specific case of writing, what I want to give the reader, what I want them to walk away having that they didn’t have when they sat down to read the piece. As long as it’s about me, I’m going to be frustrated and dissatisfied.
- Don’t envision the endpoint. I sometimes tend to daydream about what it will be like to have finished and published the story / article / book I’m working on, which turns into extrinsic motivation, then impatience, then frustration. Instead, I should stay mostly in the present. When I do think about the future, I should think about the process, and how I would like it to go, the satisfaction I would like to derive from the work. The endpoint, if it does come, almost certainly won’t be as I imagine it, and regardless will be just a brief flare of happiness in a life that is quite long. The work itself is where I need to find my satisfaction. If I can’t see myself finding that in my work, I should work on something else.
All told, I’m glad I tried this - even if none of the long-term changes were to stick, which I think is unlikely, it was an interesting and enlightening (lower-case e) experience. If you want to explore something like this, I’d recommend checking out the Vipassana website - they have centers around the country, and the course is totally free (the hard part for most people will be getting 12 days off work/school). If you want to try something shorter, try googling zen meditation centers near you and see if they offer weekend retreats or at least occasional sessions. I've also heard good things about Insight Meditation; their website offers a fairly broad list of meditation centers. And, of course, feel free to contact me if you have more specific questions.