“I am already exuding a monastic stillness”, I text my sisters from JFK. I’m about to board a flight to Wisconsin for a ten day silent meditation retreat, where I will be relinquishing my phone, writing implements, books and any other forms of communication. I will be meditating from 4:30 am to 9:30 pm with small breaks to rest and eat, even though I have never before meditated a day in my life (or an hour, or a minute). Ten days. That’s one day longer than the average length of the Apollo missions. But it’s also an amount of time I have wasted, over and over again, plodding through monochromatic days without anything to differentiate one from the next. And so I set off.
I signed up for a Vipassana retreat at the very last minute, shortly after quitting a thankless job, and mostly as a way to stress test my brain and participate in what seemed like a fascinating experiment. I didn’t have much in terms of expectations, probably because I didn’t allow myself to think about it very much. If I had, I would most likely have realized that my mind was poorly equipped for what I was asking it to do.
The only center with an opening left on such short notice happened to be in Menomonie, Wisconsin — the courses are free, including room and board, and as a result are almost impossible to get into unless you sign up months in advance.
On the flight over I read hungrily, trying to latch on to some phrase or word I might use as a post in the ground in the coming days, something to come back to and spool my wandering thoughts around. I make sense of the world through words - read, spoken, written, scribbled - and could not conceive of ten whole days without them.
Outside the terminal I wait for my ride, hoping for a brief moment that I’ve somehow flown to the wrong city and won’t be able to attend the retreat after all. But the ride comes, and I drive east with three other women who will also be taking the course with me.
The Wisconsin center sits on 15 acres of forest, a large colonial house with smaller outbuildings that serve as the women’s dorm, men’s dorm and meditation hall. We arrive around 5 pm, and are shown to our rooms after a brief orientation. Men and women will be kept entirely separate for the duration of the course, and we are to dress modestly at all times to avoid distracting one another. Silence will commence that evening at 7 pm, and with the exception of the teacher, we are not to communicate with one another by speech, touch or gesture. Lights in the girls’ dorm go out at 9:30 pm, and that first night I sleep soundly, and have lurid dreams about the boys across the lawn.
We are awoken at 4 am to the shrill sound of a bell chiming in the hallway, and I count ten peals to calm my startled mind. Day 1 has begun. From 4 to 6 am we are free to meditate in our rooms or in the dimly lit common hall. I clamber up to the top bunk as my roommate gets dressed and exits, and after assuming what I think is a meditative pose, promptly fall asleep.
That first morning we are taught the technique of Anapana, or mindful breathing. We sit cross legged in the large hall with our eyes closed, and focus on the sensations at the tips our noses and above our upper lips as we breathe in and out.
Try this: close your eyes and focus your entire attention on the right side of your body. Did you tilt your head to the right, however slightly? Probably. We are visual creatures, and trying to decouple abstract thoughts from “the ineluctable modality of the visible” is not an easy task.
As we sit in silence, the slightest sound captures the entirety of my focus, and I find my attention being flung across the room and back. I’m pretty sure I’ve stumbled across a universal truth: bodies trying hard to remain at rest make a lot of noise.
Ancient neurohackers
Vipassana is one of many meditation traditions out there, and like most, it revolves around mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to focus on the present without being overly reactive to it. It’s certainly experiencing a spike in popularity (2016 alone saw the publication of 667 research studies on mindfulness, up 114% from 2013) but it’s been around as a concept for at least a few thousand years. Its ancient roots hint at the deeply intuitive understanding our ancestors must have had for something science is only just starting to decipher: neuroplasticity.
Simply put, neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to alter its neural pathways in response to different kinds of influencing factors. For instance, a brain that has sustained severe damage will often rewire itself in an attempt to compensate for the pathways that have been lost. Healthy brain cells will signal to one another across the damaged areas, forming entirely new networks, or pathways. But pathways can also be created or destroyed based on behavioral and environmental factors, a finding which may explain why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been shown to be as effective as medication in treating major depressive disorder.
It’s not surprising, then, that a 2012 study of first time Vipassana meditators in India found a significant reduction in the incidence of depression among them (anxiety, the study shows, might be a tougher beast to tame).
Vipassana teaches you to observe the present, rather than react to it. Every time we react impulsively to something, whether positive or negative, we are reinforcing the mental pathways around knee-jerk reactions. Every time we sit still and observe dispassionately, even for a few seconds, we reinforce the pathways that promote equanimity and calm.
No itch lasts forever
The courses are taught from a recording made over 20 years ago, but there is an instructor present in the room with us. In the outside world she has a job, a family, presumably even raises her voice at times, but here she sits silently on a raised podium at the front of the hall. She is the only person we are allowed to speak to, or even make eye contact with. By speaking to another meditator, or engaging with them in any way whether or not they choose to respond, you have irretrievably punctured their tranquility (or torment, as the case may be).
On the first day, she asks to see me over lunch. I had filled out the original application in a hurry, failing to mention my history of anxiety, but they had teased it out of me with the many forms we are required to fill after we arrive. She asks me if I’m doing ok, which I am. I tell her I still have enormous stores of mind chatter to work through before I have to confront any kind of mental stillness, and she laughs. This will probably bring out the worst in your anxiety, she tells me. If you’re not willing to face it, you should probably leave.
On the second day, I feel myself skirting the border between I have an anxious mind and I am an anxious mind. Between the two exists a large chasm separating anxiety as a painful experience, and anxiety as an all consuming state beyond which there is no self. I am not prepared to face the latter, and am afraid of breaking something I will not be able to fix. I decide to give it one more day.
On the third day I feel my mind begin to settle, but my phone still feels like a phantom limb, the internet a part of my brain I have lost access to. I am untethered from the future, cannot do something as basic as check the weather, jot something down for my future self, or send an email out into the world.
But the past is my constant companion, and I replay the last few days and weeks in my mind over and over, like a movie I’m watching on repeat. Behind closed eyelids I make lemon meringue pie. Separate four eggs, slowly. Beat eggs whites until stiff, whisk egg yolks and sugar.
Twice a day we all get what little exercise we can, walking around the women’s dorm in a closed circuit. There are clearly marked ‘Course Boundary’ signs so we don’t stray too far off course. Exercise is a distraction, and is frowned upon here.
I take a toddler’s interest in my hands, the grass, the bugs in it. I must have looked mad, but surely we all did - (no wonder the neighbors think it’s a cult and tried to warn one of my course mates).
Every day the women around me seem to amass more layers, retreating deeper and deeper into a cocoon of shawls, scarves and wraps. I imagine us slowly evolving into amorphous blobs of fabric, and giggle to myself.
Giggling feels like cheating. Even looking in the mirror feels like cheating.
Trying to busy my mind, I count everything: 237 steps around the walking path, 26 steps down the hallway from the bathroom to my room.
On the fourth day, we advance from Anapana meditation to the technique of Vipassana meditation, and are asked to sit absolutely still for an hour at a time. No itch lasts forever, they promise. We scan our bodies from top to bottom, bottom to top, focusing on each sensation as it arises and passes. It is a “ choiceless , impersonal observation”, says the voice from the recording. “What a flickering, chattering mind you have, a monkey mind”, he continues. And I couldn’t agree more.
I long for sound. On the fifth day the rain comes, and doesn’t stop. I am grateful for the soothing splatter of raindrops on the windowpane, the deep rumble of thunder.
And slowly, somehow, the stillness finds me. It doesn’t creep up on me or reveal itself in a triumphant moment of bliss. It’s three seconds here or five seconds there of pure focus, and I do feel triumphant — but only until I remember that my feeling is reactionary, and do my best to swallow it. All sensations, good or bad, have the same characteristic, we are reminded: that of arising and eventually passing away.
The stillness feels like silence, and the silence feels like magic. I notice sensations on every square inch of my body. I don’t know if they’re created by my intense focus, or simply revealed to me because my brain isn’t distracted, but it doesn’t matter. Everything I eat tastes brighter, louder, more complex. Even the grass seems sharper.
Over the last few days, I manage to stay focused for longer and longer periods, taking as long as an hour to do a single body scan. But as the end approaches I grow restless, and the knowledge that I’ll be home soon draws me out of my tranquil bubble.
On the tenth day we sit for a final group session, and are allowed to speak to one another as a way to ease back into normal life. Looking everyone in the eye is overwhelming. I know the women around me as the one who closes her eyes when she eats, or the one who breathes too loudly, and now I have to contend with them being real people. I can finally ask my roommate why she had cried herself to sleep every night, and ask everyone if they were as focused and serene as they looked (luckily, no one said yes).
When they return our belongings and phones to us, I wait several hours before switching mine on. The outside world seems like an overwhelming place, far too loud and bright for any reasonable person. It takes a few days to readjust to the sights and sounds of normal life, but once I do, I still find myself walking slower, talking slower and eating slower than I ever had before.
Unfortunately, only long term meditators exhibit long term structural changes in their brains. Ten days is not a long enough time period to have rewired my grey matter, but it’s certainly a long enough to convince me that it’s doable. And that’s a good start.
