How a Silent Meditation Retreat Prepared Me for the COVID-19 Pandemic
Last autumn, I drove one hour east to the small town of Menomenie, Wisconsin, where I spent 11 days and 10 nights at a Vipassana meditation center. Already an experienced meditator, my goals for the retreat were fairly specific: to sit with, and explore, concepts springing from Buddhist philosophy in order to deepen my practice and brighten my experience of everyday life. Of course at the time I had no idea how the lessons I learned there would apply to sheltering at home during a global pandemic just months later.
The timetable at the retreat was strict and unvarying. A bell woke us at four every morning. The first meditation session began at 4:30. While there were three one-hour “hard” meditation sessions every day, each lasting an hour and during which the goal was not to move from one’s preferred position (I logged those hours on the floor on a cushion), in all the day was made up of more than ten hours of meditation interspersed with instruction and two meal breaks. The day ended at 9:30, when students returned to their dormitories for lights out.
It was serious stuff, ten days of intense concentration and focus. While the students were segregated by gender, one aspect that lightened the difficulty was the community of other students — in my case, about a dozen other men. But there was a catch. For the duration of that ten days, we made a pledge to observe the concept of “noble silence.”
That meant no talking, except in short sessions with the teachers that occurred roughly every other day. It also meant no hand gestures, eye contact, or communication of any kind. We were to spend ten days in self-imposed isolation, in close physical contact with other people (including sharing sleeping quarters and using shared bathrooms) but without a moment of conversation or connection. It was a kind of spiritual quarantine.
And then, about six months later, the chain of events that unfurled with surreal rapidness. The first cases in Washington state. The rapid spread of COVID-19 and the warnings from experts. The waves of school closures. The restaurants and bars shuttering. The order to shelter in place. The Zoom calls and FaceTime sessions with family and friends staring back from our screens as though trapped inside in some kind of dream, and knowing that we looked the same to them.
The isolation came over us so quickly, we barely had time to absorb its impact. In my case, I have been lucky enough to have a comfortable home, and a spouse with whom I get along very well. But as the weeks go on, we feel the need to spend part of the day away from one another, as though careful not to squander the warmth and connection of one another’s company with over-familiarity. We isolate within our isolation, working on projects and, yes, meditating.
I find myself remembering the lessons of that retreat. Now as then, keeping to a routine makes the experience of time passing in a relative vacuum more meaningful. It seems to be built into us as beings, living for thousands of years in harmony with the rising and setting of the sun. As with the retreat, eating simple and home-cooked foods helps with balance. Before the pandemic, we ate at restaurants probably three or four times a week; now we build our days around what to make from the week-plus of groceries we store after each infrequent trip to the grocery store.
But there’s more. There is a quality to the silence that teaches us that it is more than the absence of noise, of talk, of activity. The silence exposes the true power of our minds, free from distraction in a way that can be both exhilarating and terrifying. Isolation teaches us how profoundly each individual mind creates and sustains the worlds in which we live — as well as how these moods, opinions, fears, memories, and emotions flit and churn upon the canvas of experience like clouds in the sky. They move, they thunder, they obscure, they vanish. Like the weather, our inner experience never stops, and never stays the same.
There were moments during every single day of my meditation retreat when I wished more than anything else that I wasn’t there. That’s certainly the case during these fraught and immensely challenging weeks.
There’s another lesson, though. During the retreat I was unable to communicate with my fellow students, but I knew they were there. I sensed their shared humanity, their kinship with me, in a way that transcended everyday social interactions. I didn’t know them, but I cared about them. I knew they were struggling, just like me. I was rooting for them, with a spontaneous compassion that is so difficult to feel during “regular” times.
These days are that experience writ large. Most of the human species across the planet are experiencing this mix of fear, grief, uncertainty and, at times, relief and gratitude that life will continue and love will endure.
It’s possible that there has never been an experience shared by as many of us at the same time as what we’re going through now. It makes it possible to open one’s heart to the billions of others, all those minds and spirits suspended in hope and doubt, our differences erased by the hand of history at least for a while.
The biggest lesson I learned from my retreat was that my inner goals were far less important than the feelings of connection and compassion that lie underneath everyday life. In a strange paradox, isolation taught me to feel that link in a way I never had before. One of my greatest hopes for these days, amid tragedy and challenge, is that we’ll share some form of this awakening as we rebuild what comes next.
