Breaking Silence: Here’s what happens when an anxious comedian spends three days at a silent meditation retreat and shuts the f*%$ up
My adventure at a three day silent meditation retreat led by two mindfulness bigwigs
Some people say you’re a real New Yorker once you’ve lived in NYC for 10 years. I’d argue you’re a real New Yorker as soon as you begin therapy.
My therapist is the one who got me into meditation. I use the app Headspace and recommend it because it’s nice to have a pleasant British man repeatedly whisper in your ear that everything is going to be okay.
But honestly, I don’t do it enough. I’m a 3x a week for 20 minutes kinda guy. Nonetheless, I’ve been curious about silent meditation retreats for a while. 3–10 days of not talking sounds crazy, but I have friends who have raved about attending them. And I’m a neurotic New York City Jew seeker/comedian/complainer trying to survive a technology addiction and our neoliberal capitalist society’s values that are chewing away at my soul (and yours too probably!) and I want to be “fixed” so why not? And that’s how I came to sign up for a three day silent meditation retreat led by two mindfulness luminaries (Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein).
Jerry Seinfeld has been practicing transcendental meditation for over 40 years. After watching every episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, one thing seems pretty clear to me: Transcendental meditation doesn’t work.
Enter the void
I take the train up from NYC to the Garrison Institute (it’s near West Point on the Hudson River) and check into my room at the institute which is a former monastery. Time to get my monk on!
I make my way to the dining hall where folks gather. Talking’s still allowed for now. I chat with a few retreat vets who have done a bunch of 7+ day retreats and studied at the Insight Meditation Society, which is apparently a big deal in this world (the teachers of the retreat are founders there). Two retreat veterans tell me three day retreats are, on some level, harder than seven day ones because “the first two days are the hardest part.” That doesn’t make sense to me. But I’ll start to see why later.
I’m afraid about all this not talking. But as I look around at the others pouring into the room, it feels like a real who’s who of people I don’t want to talk to. Mr. Man Bun, whispering white haired hippies, a ponytailed guy in a shirt that says “World Peace Through Vegetarianism” (um, how is that supposed to work exactly?), etc. Maybe this won’t be so hard after all.
Then it occurs how to me how hooked I am on being judgmental. It’s my default mode. Within minutes of arriving, I see a blind guy with a cane open a door for himself and think, “Well, he doesn’t seem all that blind.” Early on, I notice the dynamic between a chatty husband and his wife and wonder if she’s attending simply because it’s the easiest way to get him to shut up for a while. I watch some Burner-looking dude spend 20 minutes cleaning up his spilled tea over and over again and wonder if this is a major form of mindfulness or a minor form of OCD. I sit next to a woman who stares at her bowl for five minutes before eating. Jeez, get on with it alre– aha, I guess this is why I’m here.
Going Silent
After eating dinner, we gather in the meditation hall for our first lecture. We learn how this will all work: We’ll do a lecture with teachings from the instructors, then a sitting meditation, then more lecturing, and then we go out and do a walking meditation. After that: Rinse, lather, repeat.
No talking and no eye contact. That’s okay. Not talking and avoiding eye contact is no big deal for me; I did it for four years straight in high school.
They also suggest you surrender your phone. The word “surrender” seems apt. As I give mine up, I imagine a soundtrack of a baby crying loudly as its pacifier is taken away. Once it’s gone, it takes me a while to stop reflexively reaching for it in my pocket. I can reach, but there’s nothing there. (Sounds like a zen koan already.) Okay, bring on the silence.
Lessons
Some mindfulness concepts the teachers discuss along the way:
Good and bad is the wrong prism for judging feelings and emotions. There is only skillful and unskillful. That which leads to less suffering is skillful, that which leads to more is unskillful. Remorse is skillful, guilt is unskillful. Why? You can let go of remorse but you are stuck with guilt.
Life is a battle between mental factors. On one side: love, compassion, and generosity. On the other: anger, fear, hatred, and envy. Luke vs. Darth. Which side will win?
There’s no substitute for meditation. Sometimes people say “My version of meditation is ______.” And the blank is swimming, dancing, tennis, yoga, painting, etc. But you need a tool you can bring with you. When your boss starts yelling at you, you can’t just break into downward dog pose or start painting. Mind and breath are elemental. They are available constantly. That 24/7 access is why they are foundational tools.
Getting lost is the point. That moment when you notice that your mind has wandered is when it’s working. Every time you “wake up” from being lost, highlight it. Become familiar with the feeling of wakefulness and it becomes your default state of mind.
The fight
No phone turns out to be harder than the silence. But the hardest part is that it is sooooo much meditating. Like, I knew there would be meditating. But I didn’t know there would be this much meditating. Over 6 hours a day. Gah.
My process: Notice my weight. My back against the chair, butt on the seat, feet on the ground. Then notice all the senses. What I smell, hear, etc. Then a body scan starting at the top of my head and thinking about each part of the body all the way down to my toes. Then counting breaths. 1 for inhale, 2 for exhale, etc. Get to 10 and repeat again. Try to clear the brain. Think of nothing. Fail at that. Notice I failed. Go back to clear head. Visualize a beam of light emanating from my chest that slowly spreads and bathes everyone around me in kindness.
Honestly, that last part is rather stressful. I don’t think meditation is supposed to stress you out but my brain is determined. Reminds me of a quote from a new meditator that gets mentioned: “I was never an angry person until I started meditating.”
For a while, my mind puts up a fight to all this meditation. It leaps all over the place. I try to yank it back. After a day, I start to let go a little bit. That’s when I accept. This is what’s happening now. Then it starts feeling refreshing. I realize how much stimuli I throw at my brain all the time. I constantly force it to endure a firehose of information. It never gets to just chill.
I start to notice how many ideas I have. I write down notes. I feel like making things. I get a screenplay idea. And slowly I realize what’s happening: I’m bored! It’s been so long since I’ve been bored. It reminds me of childhood and how I’d just wander through the woods for hours. I remember eating cereal and reading the back of the box or taking a dump and reading the shampoo bottle. Now my phone is instant Jello for my brain. I think of a Courtney Love quote: “I love the internet. It’s like a video game about me.”
During meals, I gaze out the window and daydream. Remember daydreaming? My imagination rambles. I start to feel like boredom is the wellspring of creativity. When there’s nothing interesting going on, your imagination steps in to rescue you.
I keep a notebook on me. On the right side, I am good Matt: I jot down lessons from the mindfulness lectures, Buddha quotes, instructions on “loving kindness,” etc. On the left side, I am bad Matt: I write jokes that mock everyone around me and the entire process. I realize these split pages basically sum up my personality. Gentle and bitchy. The problem: Bad Matt is so much more entertaining than good Matt. (Or is that the solution?)
I think about why I decided to come here. And I think about how being a comedian has impacted my life offstage. How it leads me to do stuff I wouldn’t otherwise do. This is the life hack of being a comedian: Even when something breaks bad, it’s still fodder for material. It’s all material. Everything is copy. Heck, you’re reading this right now. And I realize that’s a weird reason to attend a silent meditation retreat. I’ve turned to silence because I want something to talk about.
Loving kindness
We learn about Metta (aka loving-kindness meditation). It’s a method of meditating intended to develop compassion. Basically you think of different people in your life and say to yourself, “May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.”
The point? We usually love in a dependent way. Salzberg explains, “When we say ‘love,’ we often mean, ‘I will love you (as long as…)’” That’s not what this is about. It’s not that kind of love. It’s not even about liking or approving of someone. It is about offering. Gift giving. Generosity of spirit.
Note: I can barely even type the phrase “generosity of spirit” without gagging a little bit. It’s the same way I feel when I drink Kombucha. I’m still a cynic at heart so this wellness stuff can get, well, tough to swallow. While I’m on the subject, the lectures invoke the word “equanimity” a lot. Buddhists like this word a lot. But I’ve never heard anyone use it in another context. I guess in current America, there’s not much use for a term that describes “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.”
Anyway, back to loving kindness. How it works: You start by saying the following over and over…“May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.” Then you do the same but wishing it for a “benefactor” (someone who’s been nice to you). May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease. (I’ve come to view this messaging as basically the opposite of Twitter.) Then you keep doing it but move on to thinking of a neutral person. Then someone you dislike. Then everyone in the room. Then everyone and everything in the world. (All living creatures, eh? Buddhists are like the Air Force: They aim high!)
The teacher mentions that something interesting happens when you wish loving kindness on a neutral person. Eventually, you start to fall in love with them. Because attention is a kind of love. (Maybe the only kind?) If you wind up bumping into your neutral person again, you feel a wellspring of affection. You created that. You turned neutrality into affection.
It seems silly at first. But part of all this is latency. It doesn’t work right away. It shows up later. You don’t see changes when you sit, you see changes when you live. Salzberg tells us this story about the first time she realized the method was working for her:
I was running around upstairs in the flurry of having to leave. I was standing in one of the bathrooms and I dropped a jar of something, which shattered into a thousand pieces. The very first thought that came up in my mind was: “You are really a klutz, but I love you.” And I thought, “Oh wow! Look at that.” All those hours, all those phrases where I was just dry and mechanical and I felt like nothing was happening. It was happening. It just took a while for me to sense the flowering of that and it was so spontaneous that it was quite wonderful. So: Not to struggle, to try to make something happen. Let it happen. It will happen.
All this loving kindness stuff is like a gratitude sleeper cell.
Walk it off
I’ve never done walking meditation before. It’s quite a sight. Dozens of people just wandering aimlessly in slo-motion on the front lawn of a monastery. Taking one step every 30 seconds. Barely moving. We all slightly resemble Wallace trying to move in his robotic pants in “The Wrong Trousers.”
The point is to focus on each step. Each step. Each. Step. Our teacher repeats that over and over.
Emphasize feeling over thinking. Take a step and feel it. Notice that feeling but don’t try to trap it. Just feel it. Think about EACH STEP. Are you in yourself or being pulled?
I think of my legs as planes and each step as a takeoff and landing.
We do it at night too. Then it’s even weirder to see all these people wandering in circles in slo-mo outside on the grass. It looks like a zombie flick where we’re all slowly descending on our prey.
It’s a weird feeling to walk in darkness. “Too dark,” says my mind. I think of turning back and heading inside. But I venture further out instead. Soon, my eyes adjust. What was black before slowly becomes visible. I just have to give my eyes a chance to adjust. I think of how the body adapts. And then I look up and notice the stars. I always forget to notice the stars. One shoots overhead. And the Hudson line train goes by and toots its horn. I think of lyrics from the U2 song “Zoo Station”:
Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass
The sounds of silence
The whole thing is hard. It’s like gentleness boot camp. We are mind warriors.
I feel like there should be a smoking area but for conversation. I can hear the organizers saying, “Pollute the air with cigarettes over there. Pollute the air with words over here.”
Once a day, there are Q&A sessions with the instructors. I have a long held belief that Q&A sessions draw out the worst in people. People get too excited to have a microphone. And if it’s people who haven’t talked in two days, well, multiply that.
One questioner gets the mic: “So much gratitude towards you right now. So, uh, if the goal is enlightenment…and the path is all these practices…um…more technically, note that I’m sitting…” Jesus, get on with it! Then I catch myself. And I wish that she is safe, happy, healthy, and lives a life of ease. But, y’know, a sped up life of ease.
The sounds of meals with no talking is overwhelming. You hear it all. Silverware clinking on plates. Breathing. Loud chewing. Every bite of corn on the cob sounds amplified. Every tap of a knife on a hard-boiled egg punctures. It boggles my mind that all these noises are omnipresent during meals yet typically go unnoticed. They’re there all the time but covered up by all our yapping.
Each meditation session ends with the ring of a bell. However, there is also a loud toilet in the main lobby that sounds a lot like a gong. So sometimes there’s a moment in the middle of a meditation session where you hear a ringing sound and wonder, “Is the meditation over or did someone just take a dump?”
More lessons
More from the lectures and Q&A sessions:
Everything changes. If you’re attached to your body staying the same, it’s a setup for suffering. Accept your nature. It’s not easy. Because deep down, we all feel like we’re exempt. Remember: “I am not exempt.” Anything can happen at anytime to anybody.
Buddhists talk a lot about right speech. But how do you measure right speech? A: Does it bring people together or drive them apart? (And yes, the answer is another question. After all, this is Buddhism.) Fun fact: Pali is the original language for Buddhism and its word for useless talk is Sampa Palapa. It’s great because it sounds like just what it is.
Many conflate love and attachment. Attachment is pulling, love is generosity. Love is not holding or grasping. That is attachment, which only contributes suffering. And we often choose suffering as a habit pattern.
We are 100% responsible for our suffering. We our responsible for our mind state. Whether we get caught up in it is up to us. We are not the victim of someone else’s behavior. (I can’t help but think about how frequently social media presents the exact opposite p.o.v.)
Suffering comes from 1) holding on to something that is changing or 2) an aversion to something that is arising. It’s not the experience itself. It’s in how we relate to it. The power is in the strength of our minds. Conditions will only be temporary. Real happiness is in the freedom of our minds. We must let the thoughts come and go.
How our minds work:
The event.
Your reaction to the event.
How you feel about the reaction.Often, we wind up in an A-B loop. Get to C and then A-B has nothing to do with it. Like, you may feel anger but actually underneath it is fear. You’ve got to address the roots of the tree instead of the leaves.
And a couple of anecdotes from the lectures:
There was an incredible cellist. A maestro. And at 93 years old, he still practiced over three hours every day. When asked why he continued to practice so much, he replied, “I’m starting to see results.”
A nine year old girl in Baltimore who was prone to violence underwent mindfulness training. The next week a teacher saw her in the gym with another student. The violence-prone girl was holding the other student by the throat and pinning her against the wall. “You’re just lucky I know how to meditate!” she said. And then she went and sat down on a nearby bench.
Birding
It’s the final day and we’re getting close to the end. During the last walking meditation, I see a bird up in a tree. It has a red mohawk and is pounding its beak against the tree. What bird is that? I answer myself a moment later: Duh, it’s pecking wood. You got this, Matt. And I remember watching Woody Woodpecker as a kid. He was my favorite. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve said the phrase “If Woody had gone right to the police, this would never have happened.”
Anyway, the bird spits out pieces of wood as other chunks fall away from the tree. So much debris. So much effort just to find the occasional insect. It occurs to me how much this approach is like a mindfulness practice. There are so many thoughts we must let go to get to the kernels that actually nourish us.
And then I remember, I’m not supposed to think so much. Just focus on the steps. Each. Step. I look back down.
False meaning
Goldstein talks about how our minds are playing tricks on us all the time. One of the biggest tricks: That we actually know how to evaluate a situation in the moment. In truth, we inject false meaning into situations all the time.
Example 1: A man hears birds chirping outside a building and thinks it is beautiful. Then he finds out it is merely a smoke alarm and thinks it is ugly. But it was the same sound! The lesson: If he just labels it sound, he stays with the primary source instead of layering judgement on top of it. Stay with the actual thing instead of your feeling about the thing.
Example 2: Two friends go to see the cherry blossom trees. They are beautiful. One friend mentions, “They’re no longer at their peak.” Now the other friend is disappointed. Something that used to be great is now a bummer. The same experience shifted from pleasant to unpleasant merely because of how it got labelled.
It makes me think of my own life. Once, I was en route to the gym and realized at my front door that I forgot my headphones in my 4th floor apartment. “Damnit, now I have to climb back up four floors to get my keys.” But I was on my way to the gym to climb the Stairmaster. Climbing these stairs wasn’t a hassle. It was literally doing the thing I was going to the gym to do. But, y’know, labels!
Also reminds me of a Three’s Company episode I saw back in the day. Jack is in the kitchen cooking breakfast and wearing only his underwear. Janet enters, sees him, and is aghast. She shrieks and covers her eyes. He asks why. She says, “You’re in your underwear!” He explains it’s actually a bathing suit and he’s wearing it because he ran out of laundry. Then she totally changes and is fine with it. But all that changed was the label he gave his article of clothing.
Quotes
Some quotes that get mentioned during the lectures and Q&A:
“As long as there is attachment to the pleasant and aversion to the unpleasant, liberation is impossible.”
-Buddha“In feeling unworthy, you are deluding yourself.”
-Dalai Lama“When you turn 55, it feels like breakfast is happening every 15 minutes.”
-Miss Kentucky, 1936“I have what you need.”
-Jerusalem shopkeeper to random passersby“It’s better to live a single day seeing the momentary rising and passing away of impermanence than to live 100 years and not see it.”
-Buddha“Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability.”
-Line from the movie “Dan in Real Life”“If you truly loved yourself, you would never harm another.”
-Buddha“So you’re in the soup too.”
-How Carl Jung would begin therapy sessions with patients“Don’t pick up the phone on the first ring. Let it ring three times and breathe.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh“People will never see their reflection in running water. It is only when the water is still is when the reflection will emerge.”
-Dr. William D. Parham“A great deal of mindfulness seems to be citing clever quotes.”
-Matt Ruby
Silence broken
We did it! It is time to “break silence.” I like how that sounds violent and gentle at the same time. Feels appropriate.
Last event on the retreat agenda: “Book Sales.” Because everything always ends in sales. Exit through the gift shop. I wonder if right before you die, the angels try to sell you some merch: “I lived to be 89 years old and I all got was this lousy t-shirt.” Tons of people (over half the attendees?) line up to get books signed by the two instructors. I like ’em both plenty but still feel like there’s some cult of personality stuff going on here that makes me uneasy. Humans want a hero.
Still, I’m grateful to them. And I think of my other guides in mindfulness: Wayne Dyer, Steven Hagen, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Krista Tippett, my therapist, my ex, my mother, etc. They opened me up to a point where I could be here.
At the end, I roll up to Goldstein and decide to ask a question about our current political climate. I ask about all the rage and anger that is fueling the resistance. I ask, “How does one resist people like [redacted] without actually becoming like him on some level?”
Goldstein replies that there is skillful and unskillful resistance. In the end, it comes down to the work you are doing on yourself. Are you training yourself to behave skillfully? Otherwise, you will not be truly resisting. You must engage in a practice. You can be fueled by anger and rage but you’ll be unable to endure. Unskillful emotions are not sustainable; You will burn out.
Am I fixed? Nah. I don’t even know if I want to be fixed. But I feel like I visited a place I’d never been before. Like I was a tourist to parts of my own mind that are usually off limits.
Then I retrieve my smartphone. It feels so good to hold it again. I open the NY Times app, read a story about Rwandan children with strep throat, and start crying. You can’t resist this much introspection. It bends you toward gentleness. I feel sensitive, like an exposed nerve.
Then I head back to New York City. I get on the subway. And it all begins to evaporate. I think of the (false) story about painting the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time they finish painting it, it’s time to start all over again.
Same thing with mindfulness. It never ends. It’s a practice. There’s no quick fix. It’s what you do every day that matters. You paint the bridge and by the time you’re done, you’ve got to paint it again.
May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.
Quick mind bits
Breathing is your anchor.There is a body.
Each step. Each. Step.
Exercise the letting go muscle.
Recognize what you don’t know.
Practice generosity. Do no harm. Use wise speech. Concentrate and use your insight.
Conditions are inherently unstable.
Your cause of death: Birth.
It’s not difficult to understand, it’s difficult to remember.
You’re clingy. Stop clinging.
The end of birth is death. The end of accumulation is dispersion. The end of all coming together is separation.
The core skill we practice is being able to let go and come back.
Weaken the power of rushing in your life. It is a very tiring energy to carry.
Renunciation is non-addiction. Addiction is slavery. Not being addicted is freedom.
When you have the thought to give something, give it. You will not regret your generosity.
We are all connected. “Us and them” is just a construct.
Don’t believe your thoughts. Thoughts are very seductive. See them arise but don’t be imprisoned by them.
The only universal truth is constant change. The truth of impermanence.
The feeling of enlightenment is the mind getting lighter and lighter.
We spend a lot of our time putting up flypaper when we could just install screens in our windows and avoid the whole issue. We often focus on cleaning up the mess instead of trying to prevent it in the first place.
Why “do no harm” matters: If you do no harm, then you feel no remorse. And then your mind is open to do the real work.
Now we go back to what we used to call normal.
