Starting The Year With A Week Long Meditation Retreat

What the fuck did you get yourself into?

The thought raced through my mind. I tossed and turned. It was the first of seven nights. Only six more to go.

I had just started my first ever overnight meditation retreat.

The retreat was held at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA — about 40 minutes north of San Francisco.

I signed up because I wanted to deepen my meditation practice. I explained it to a friend using musical instruments as an analogy. If you practice for a couple minutes of day you’ll make incremental improvements. But a week of band camp is a deep dive into practice. It’s the same with meditation.

The retreat was silent, which meant:

• No cell phone or device usage
• No talking
• No reading
• No writing
• No listening to music
• Avoid making eye contact with others

These guidelines may seem strict. But the intent is to create a environment to eliminate as many distractions as possible (including other people) so that everyone can focus on his or her practice.

We followed the same schedule every day, with exceptions for group or individual check-ins and New Years Eve:

05:30A — Wake up
06:00A — Sit
06:45A — Breakfast
08:00A — Work or walk
08:30A — Sit with instruction
09:30A — Walk
10:15A — Sit
11:00A — Walk or yoga
11:45A — Sit
12:30A — Lunch
02:00P —Rest or walk
02:30P — Sit
03:00P — Walk
03:45P — Sit
04:30P — Walk
05:00P — Sit
05:30P — Dinner
06:30P — Work or walk
07:00P — Sit
07:30P — Stretch break
07:40P — Dharma talk
08:30P — Walk
09:00P — Sit
09:30P — Rest

Sit means sitting meditation, while walk refers to walking meditation. During many of the walking periods I went on some beautiful hikes around the 400 acre property.

Work means just that — working meditation. The entire retreat center is run by volunteers and relies on help from the participants on simple tasks like cleaning or chopping vegetables. I was on dishwashing duty which I was not excited about at first, but was actually one of the most fun parts of the experience — perhaps because I was doing something tangible and had limited interaction with other people.

Dharma talks are like lectures given on various Buddhist topics, all pertaining to mindfulness.

The schedule seemed daunting at first. It contributed in part to my sleepless first night.

Fortunately, everything was uphill from there. After a day or two it became easy to get into a rhythm. In fact, by the third day I had a routine going for my hikes, physical therapy exercises and naps.

I learned a lot — most of which I’m still processing and will integrate into future posts.

But for now, here are a couple of takeaways from my experience:

Noble Silence is Pretty Great

The term “noble silence” encompasses the no talking, cell phone usage, reading, writing, and eye contact rules. These are put into place to create an environment to allow everyone to focus inward on their practice and experiences.

Still, the conditions created can feel extreme (many of my colleagues gasped when they found out it was a “silent” retreat). But they serve an important purpose. Meditating and looking inward is difficult. Really difficult. The purpose of a retreat is to create an uninterrupted flow of practice from waking until sleeping, every day. Imagine having to practice, and interact with other people. The social comparing and anxiety that would ensue would make the entire retreat experience even more exhausting than it already is.

The best part about noble silence was not having to be anything to anyone for a whole week. I lived, ate, and practiced with 100 other people who didn’t know my name, where I was from or what I do for a living. I didn’t have to worry about saying the right thing, or making an impression.

I did not miss my iPhone. Only once, after a nap on the first day, did I feel the impulse to reach for it on my nightstand before quickly realizing it was not there. It was freeing to not have to worry about replying to emails, remembering to text that person back, or looking-up-that-random-thing-on-Google-I-forgot-to-do-earlier. Of course I had those moments, but had no choice but to quickly let them go. They weren’t going to happen!

I like writing things down and wish I could have documented more of the retreat in real time. But as one of the teachers reminded us, “if anything important happens, I promise you’ll remember it.” He was right. My memory of the week is really sharp — much more than it is during a typical week.

There Are Many, Many Ways To Meditate

I learned a lot during the Dharma talks. The five teachers, who were outstanding, brought a ton of wisdom into a few short evenings. One big takeaway from the second night’s talk, given by Alexis Santos, was a simple reminder that we experience this thing we call life though our five senses plus one addition:

• Sight
• Sounds
• Taste
• Smell
• Touch and sensations (both internal and external)
• Mind

Meditation does not need to involve sitting down in a quiet room, or walking around slowly like a zombie.

Meditation is simply about bringing awareness to any of these senses for a period of time. Using this definition, we meditate already. Formal meditation practice is about being intentional and nonjudgemental. So, one way to do this is to take an existing practice you probably already do, and just sink into it a little more — make the moment a couple of beats longer than they would normally be. Some examples:

Sight: admiring the view from a hike or at the beach, looking at a piece of art at a museum, or an animal in the wild or at the zoo — without judgement.

Sounds: listening to a piece of music, the sounds in the forest or at the beach, or something as simple as traffic going by on the street — without judgement.

Touch or sensations: feeling your feet on the ground or in your shoes, or your butt in the chair, or the clothes on your skin. Feeling your breath coming in and out of your lungs (one of the more common forms of meditation) — without judgement.

The last part — without judgement — can be difficult. Thoughts may arise (trash on the beach could trigger something, for example). And that’s okay — but the point is to choose whether or not to believe the thought. More on this in the final takeaway below.

Mindful Eating is a Profound Experience

Mindful eating is not a new idea in the West. Many nutritionists have been using it with patients for years, since diet, exercise and other regimens do not seem to be providing sustainable ways keep health and weight in check.

I know that I, as well as many others, have a problem with eating. It’s emotional. I love food, but sometimes I barely taste it because I’m eating so quickly I forget to do so. When time is short, I look as food as simply fuel and shovel a meal down quickly without thinking about how much I’m consuming.

During the retreat, I allowed myself 30–45 minutes to eat my meals, sometimes longer. I did this in part because there wasn’t anything else to do —I wasn’t in a rush to get to the next sitting meditation an hour later. But I also did it because I wanted to see what it would be like to eat an entire meal mindfully.

I really slowed down with chewing. I took smaller bites. Sometimes I closed my eyes to eliminate sight as a distraction.

I found that it’s much easier to notice when you’re full when you eat slowly. And — duh — it’s easier to really taste it!

Another component of mindful eating, which I did only a handful of times, is taking time to appreciate the plate in front of you. Looking at the food before you lift your fork. Thinking about what it took to get every component on your plate to you — from farms, to trucks, to distribution centers, to the places everything was purchased, to the kitchen, where several chefs chopped, steamed, roasted or fried everything. It’s a challenging exercise, especially when you’re starving and just want to dig in. But a little gratitude makes the whole eating-thing more pleasurable.

During a couple of anxiety ridden moments, I found myself eating faster and even going up for seconds. It’s a deeply engrained habit that I can eventually overcome if I continue to eat more of my meals mindfully.

Going on Retreat is Not About Finding Something, But More About Losing Something

Before I arrived at the retreat center, a friend told me he hopes it “delivers what I seek.”

American culture is centered around striving. About finding something we need — the perfect partner, pill, or car to make us happy. There’s nothing wrong with all forms of striving, of course — many great things have come from pioneers who strived to make the world better in various ways.

But going on a meditation retreat, as I learned, is about seeing ourselves a little more clearly — our thoughts, impulses, and habits. Peeling back the layers of our minds to remember what’s there.

Going on retreat is about really understanding how our minds operate, and choosing what to let go of.

One thing that came up for me is a fear of being judged by others. I discovered that some of my habits and mannerisms come from this irrational fear. So I’ve made the conscious choice to not care about what others think of me as much.

Of course, this is easier said than done. But my strategy is to become more aware of when I’m feeling or acting this way. Over time, I should be able to choose how I respond to impulses of feeling judged, which will eventually go away. That’s the hope.

We have a lot to lose. And so much freedom to gain.

Just Noticing Doesn’t Mean You Have to Believe It

A huge portion of the thoughts we have are complete bullshit.

We have so many wild and deluded thoughts — often times,we know it. But sometimes we believe them.

Some real examples just from this past week:

• “You can’t do this retreat — you’re not going to make it through seven days”
• “If you don’t fall asleep tonight you will not be able to stay awake through a single meditation sit tomorrow”
• “Everyone else brought their black down Patagonia jackets, you should have brought yours too instead of the blue nano-puff one”
• “If you go on that hiking trail she’s going to think you’re following her…so find another trail”
• “Do I look good in these sweatpants?”
• “Your yoga moves aren’t as good as his”
• “If he makes noise one more time during one of these meditations I’m going to reach over and smack him”
• “Even though you’re full, you should really go up for a second piece of cake”

All of these are asinine. And there were many, many more .

One of the teachers spoke about one of his early retreats, when no-eye contract was strictly enforced. Back then, people knew one another from their socks, because they’d keep their gaze down towards the floor a couple of feet ahead. His judging mind, he said, was on in full force. He’d catch thoughts in his head about the conditions of other people’s socks (are they going to wear that same pair for 30 whole days? There are holes in them!). And of course then, that would lead him to judge the individual wearing them.

I had similar experiences. It’s really fascinating to catch our judgements before we believe them and question if they’re really worth accepting.

The same thing applies to any thought. Becoming more mindful of the thoughts we have allows us to choose if we want to believe them. We can choose to respond, or not.

If I could sum up this whole takway in one sentence, it would be this: We could all benefit from not taking ourselves so seriously all the time.

Would I go on another retreat? Yes. Just like a week of band camp, a week of meditation is a huge foundation for learning, but the practice can always go deeper.

For now, it’s nice to be back in the world — talking to friends, answering texts and spending time in my own apartment— all as mindfully as possible, of course.