Ten Days of Silence and Meditation
On my first ten day meditation retreat I had experiences that were sublime, blissful, and bordering on psychedelic, giving me a glimpse of what might be possible with dedicated practise.
“That would be my worst nightmare” was a response I often heard when I told friends, family and colleagues that I’d signed up for a ten day silent meditation retreat. For many people the idea of sitting alone with your thoughts seems either incredibly boring or fraught with danger. It’s certainly a world away from our hyper-engaged daily life where we fill even small pockets of time with podcasts, social media and a million other micro-distractions. But I was up for it. I wanted to know what would happen if I starved my mind of all the stimulation and distraction that it craved. I wanted to go inward and confront whatever needed to be confronted. I wanted to see what eighty hours of meditation felt like. I had meditated on and off for the last few years — usually 30 minute sessions four times a week — and it had changed my life for the better. But what would the effects of such a high dose be? Would it weaken the tendencies towards doom-scrolling and self-meditation that I had developed during lockdown? Would reality feel different?
I took the retreat seriously as an experiment, and while I had previously attended a four day retreat in the mountains of Northern Thailand, it…
