What a 10-day Mindfulness Retreat Taught Me about My Anxiety Problem
The silence is palpable as I chew mindfully on my Thanksgiving meal. But not because everyone is hoeing into their turkey, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes, too busy to talk. Emboldened by my 7-Day “at-home” meditation retreat in September, I now find myself all alone in a sparsely furnished room at the Northwest Vipassana Center in rural southern Washington, on Day One of a 10-Day retreat. Back home, Bhavna and the kids are explaining to our friends why I am missing from the annual Thanksgiving ritual that we have been part of for almost 20 years.
I have been warned. If my first retreat was a 5K run, this is a marathon. Along with the 40 or so other participants, I have signed a vow of Noble Silence. Which means no talking or eye contact with each other for the next 10 days. Our smart phones were confiscated on arrival. Music, books and writing pads are verboten. The only respite? We may ask questions about meditation technique of the teacher leading the retreat for about 5 mins each day. Each of us has also committed to completing the entire 10-day course without bailing out. In other words, no backsies.
Each day will begin at 4 am, when the rising gong is struck. We are to meditate in our cells till 6:30 am, when another gong signals that breakfast is served. We are required to participate in group meditation in the main hall three times a day, at 8 am, 2:30 pm and 6 pm, and expected to continue the practice in our rooms for much of the time in-between. Lights out at 10 pm.
All meals are to be carried back and eaten in the solitude of our rooms. Did I say all? Dinner is notable by its absence. New students are permitted a small bowl of fruit at 5 pm. Old hands must refrain from eating after 12 pm. In the days to come, I will catch myself hoarding a cookie or muffin from earlier in the day for a clandestine evening snack.
On Day 4, an additional bomb is dropped. We are to sit completely still in the group meditation sessions, avoiding any movement unless the pain is unbearable. We are talking pain with a capital P. As I discovered at the end of the course, every one of my fellow students experienced unrelenting pain, mental fog, and sleep deprivation for much of the course.
Why did I sign up for such long drawn-out misery? I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s the same motivation that prompts someone to climb a Himalayan peak, or do an Iron Man triathlon, or as in the case of endurance artist David Blaine, stand on top of a 100-foot high, 22-inch-wide pillar for 35 hours straight. So partly, it’s to discover my personal limits. And despite the admonition that one should go in without expectations, I’m optimistic that sustained meditation will help various chronic health problems I have been wrestling with. Somewhere along the way, I hope to discover my authentic Self.
Now, all I have to do is survive the next 10 days. I’m following in the footsteps of others from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Jack Dorsey did a similar retreat in Burma some years ago and is a fan. Manish Chopra, Senior Partner at McKinsey, was moved to write a book about his experience.
Through the sustained practice of deep concentration and introspection, Vipassana meditation promises to help one achieve the following:
- Develop resilience to the ups and downs of work and personal life. You can’t control external circumstances, but you can change your response to them.
- Get deeper insights into complex problems to better solve them. Multidimensional problems resist simplistic solutions and need to be evaluated from multiple perspectives.
- Work with dispassion and energy, pivoting on a dime when the situation calls for it. Are you clinging to your ideas and conceptions, resistant to change?
- Develop deep-seated empathy or “metta” for oneself and others. Are even your difficult interactions with others coming from a place of genuine caring?
- Become aware of and get rid of one’s unconscious biases and fears. Are you sleepwalking through life reacting to people and situations in ways you later regret?
For the first three days of the retreat, students are trained to develop mental focus and concentration. You do this by focusing unremittingly on the breath and sensations at the entrance to the nose, a process called Anapanasati, or “mindful breathing”. From Day 4 onwards, you start the actual process of Vipassana, or “deep insight”. With a concentrated mind, you now scan your body for physical sensations slowly from head to toe, becoming deeply aware of them. Both focus and deep insight are to be practiced for 12 plus hours a day sitting on a meditation mat, an effort guaranteed to reduce you to physical and mental jelly.
Through the daily evening video discourses, I learn that the object of this self-inflicted punishment is as follows. First, you learn to sit still without constantly fidgeting and fighting the pain and discomfort. In other words, you are developing resilience and dispassion. As you explore the sensations in your body, you discover that instead of two or three large blobs of sensation, there are dozens of them. Some sensations are purely physical in origin; others have their origins in hidden emotional stresses that we all carry in our bodies. You are developing your powers of observation and the ability to break down a problem into its finer components. You also notice that the sensations come and go in waves. Nothing lasts forever, not even pain. You observe, viscerally, that the only constant is change. As for “metta” or empathy, if your heart isn’t bleeding for your fellow meditators, it is made of stone. What about becoming aware of unconscious biases and fears? I was about to find out.
For years, I have maintained a calm and imperturbable demeanor at work. As a senior leader, you are expected to deal with stress, letting it slide off your back like water off a duck’s. In my own estimation, I am doing an admirable job of this. However, muscle knots (myofascial trigger points in medical parlance) keep appearing mysteriously in my shoulders. I frequently wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble going back to sleep. I have a sensitive digestive system even though I stick to small portions and organic, vegetarian food. I am in denial, though. Ups and downs are to be expected at work, and my problems are no different from what anyone else in a rewarding but high-pressure career faces.
Eight days into the retreat, I wake up from an uneasy and vivid dream in the middle of the night. In the dream, a prior manager toward whom I had frequently reacted by feeling unappreciated and anxious asks “So, are you behind once again on your deliverables?” As I lie awake in the dark, my anxiety refuses to simmer down. I toss and turn, replaying events long past in my mind. Strange, I think to myself, this is a situation from a few years in the past, why am I feeling this anxiety now? No matter, I am at a mindfulness retreat, let me put into practice the technique we have been taught and observe any sensations in the body that might be associated with this anxiety.
As I scan my body, I don’t feel a thing. I am about to resign myself to lying awake with just my racing thoughts for company, when voilà! I feel a buzzing sensation arise in the region of my stomach, covering a triangular area about 8 inches long. I observe it with great interest and curiosity — and dispassion. In fighting the pain of sitting for long hours over the last few days, I’ve never felt anything like this sensation, so clear and so specific in shape. The buzzing persists for what seems like a half hour. The insight dawns that the stomach is where I store anxiety. I can feel gas bubble up in the area of the duodenum. It exits in a great big burble that would do a Yellowstone mud pot proud. The next day, in a gentler version of an Ayahuasca purge, I visit the bathroom four times. I feel lighter for having uncovered and released a hidden emotional pattern that I have been carrying around for years. Will my sensitive digestion heal and settle down as a result? Only time will tell.
In the aftermath, I reflect upon all the times I have been on the other side of the equation, where I have been perceived a source of anxiety and stress by my reports and peers at work. Science has shown that negative emotions are stored in the body and can cause dis-ease. Meditation makes it clear that we can truly understand the reality of this only when we experience it viscerally, versus just intellectually. And it is only this lived experience that can translate into genuine empathy, into changes in how we interact with and perceive others at work.
The retreat isn’t all hard work and no play. On Day 3, while sitting and concentrating deeply on a spot the size of a rice grain at the tip of my nose, I see beautiful blue and yellow lights dancing in my field of vision. When I mention it to the teacher, he confirms that this is a side-effect of deep concentration and asks me to get back to work. In the evening video discourse, the narrator mentions that deep concentration can give rise to a vision of Kalapas, “the smallest units of physical matter, said to be about 1/46,656th the size of a particle of dust from the wheel of a chariot”.
Early the next morning, as I meditate in my room, I see a mass of trillions of seething and swirling atoms in front of my closed eyes. They are conscious and alive and are inviting me to merge into them. I jump in headlong as if into quicksand find myself engulfed in trillions upon trillions more atoms. Every inch of me is alive and I am full of exhilaration as I dissolve in this endless sea. I am deeply disappointed when I snap out of the experience just as suddenly. The teacher at the retreat gently nudges me to continue my practice when I bring up my experience with him. No indulgence here. I learn later that this is a well-documented experience known as “bhanga” in the Pali language of early Buddhism. It is another side-effect of deep concentration, as described here on YouTube by Shinzen Young, an American meditation teacher who has led collaborations with neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School, Yale and Carnegie Mellon to integrate meditation and science.
We are allowed to break our vow of silence on Day 10. My fellow students and I gather for dinner in the kitchen. I rub shoulders with tech industry folks from Google, Facebook, Blue Origin, and a professor from the University of Washington Medical School. The guy from Facebook shares that he frequently turned into a ball of light during meditation, with “subtle” energy coursing through his limbs. He thinks it could all be a hallucination. Comparisons are made with The Matrix, and then inevitably, the talk turns to psychedelics. Almost everyone has a story to share, of trips to Peru, of working with shamans. The question on everyone’s lips — can you achieve the same insights and experiences with a tryptamine session as with meditation?
Later on, in the quiet of my room, I am reminded that we are missing the point. It is not about experiences, which come and go. It’s about developing equanimity and awareness, about facing the vicissitudes of life with unshakeable calm, and going about both with empathy for others and your inner demons laid to rest. That’s going to happen only if we integrate mindfulness into our daily routines, as natural as two, er, three meals a day and catching the bus to work.
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