10 Days of Silence, No Eye Contact, No Distractions – What Really Happens When You’re on a Silent Retreat
Think a human-sized cupboard, windowless. Not great if you’re scared of dark, small spaces – or your own thoughts. I had been alone with mine for about 148 hours.
When I checked into Vipassana Meditation Center – Dhamma Dharā in Shelburne, Massachusetts, USA, a week earlier, handing over my phone and severing all connection to the world outside my skull, I’d hoped to find a measure of inner peace. A respite from a life in which I was increasingly anxious and overstimulated. During the first few days, I discovered serenity in small doses. But instead of it continuing to get sunnier in my brain, I noticed storm clouds moving in.
This was one thing I’d feared when I signed up for this retreat: that instead of healing me, these 10 days might completely unmoor me, dredging the lake of daily distractions and leaving behind the barnacled, unresolved fears I’d sunk to the bottom of my psyche. Seven days in, I was learning just how damn loud silence can be.
Escaping the Noise
My journey to the Dhamma Dharā retreat centre began seven years ago, when I walked into a bookshop and picked up The Miracle Of Mindfulness, by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The book explains what mindfulness is: non-judgmental awareness of one’s thoughts, sensations and feelings.
It’s the act of observing your mind and not wishing what you observe to be anything other than what it is. The book also gives instruction for meditation, which is the formal training for mindfulness in the way that hitting balls is the formal training for tennis. With enough practice, says the book, you can take your mindfulness off the mat and into the world, meet daily frustrations with generosity and find everlasting peace and joy.
At first, I did 10 minutes’ meditation in the morning, using apps such as Calm and Headspace. I started reading more about Buddhism, acquiring a growing library of well-annotated books with titles like Thoughts Without A Thinker and How We Live Is How We Die. Then I attended a two-day retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York and took an eight-week mindfulness-based stress-reduction course. When my practice was at its most consistent, I was sitting for 45 minutes a day, six days a week.
Towards the beginning of this year, as winter thawed into spring, life became busy and my practice waned. When there’s a lot to do, ‘doing’ something that looks a lot like doing nothing can feel downright indulgent. Then there was the constant stimulation, the IV drip of dopamine and cacophonous wall of sound that came from living in New York and being a 34-year-old podcaster/ writer who spent too much time on the internet.
I wasn’t giving my central nervous system any chance to chill out, and the result was a persistent, low-level hum of anxiety that lived in my body. I needed a reset. Since I’d begun practising meditation, I’d wanted to try an extended retreat and remembered that, not long before, my friend had returned from one he’d found quite powerful. It boasted a 4.9 Google rating – admirably high, even for nirvana. I signed up.
On a late-April day, I arrived at a property nestled in the woods in western Massachusetts. It began as a two-storey house and barn on an eight- acre plot of land, and that’s what it looks like when you drive up. It’s only once you enter, passing through a reception hall and the two adjacent dining rooms, that you realise its sprawl. Now encompassing 108 acres, the centre is equipped with long wings of dorms (men and women are separated), a 200-person meditation hall (shared by the genders, with each entering and exiting on their respective sides), a dining hall, a 140-cell pagoda and a handful of nature trails.
After checking in, I was shown to my single bedroom with bare walls, a set of shelves, a bed and a bathroom. Then I marched to the dining hall to fill out some ominous paperwork that asked me to restate much of the information I’d put down when I applied to the course four months before: Was I of sound mind and body? Could I commit to being here for all 10 days? What did I hope to get out of my time? Who should the retreat centre contact in case of an emergency (read: a psychotic break)? It also asked us to confirm that we would be willing to complete the retreat in the required ‘noble silence’, which meant silence of speech, mind and body – no reading, no writing and no communication with any other meditators. It was a few hours later, when we were put through orientation and told we couldn’t have any interaction with ‘the outside world’, that I wondered if I’d accidentally joined a cult.
Pain and Pleasure
On the morning of the retreat’s first official day, we were woken by the ringing of a gong at 4am. So would begin a day that included more than 10 hours of meditation, with breaks for silent meals and nightly talks that explained the philosophy behind the vipassana meditation technique we’d be practising. Each day, every person was required our suffering. We suffer because we chase after what feels good and run away from what feels bad. The problem, though, is that nothing lasts. What feels good ultimately feels bad again – and vice versa. So we find ourselves forever caught in this spin cycle. Vipassana, Goenka told us, provides a way out by teaching us to be with all sensations, good and bad. Instead of trying to shape the world such that we have more of what we want (milkshakes) and less of what we don’t (anxiety), we should change how we relate to sensation.
This was the point of the body-scanning. The more time I spent scanning, the more sensations I began to notice. In contrast to the pain in my knees, I started to get a pleasant tingling through my arms and hands. Some people report getting this feeling over their entire bodies, similar to the body high of psychedelic mushrooms, as if they were composed entirely of light. Naturally, you might conclude that the ‘point’ of the retreat is
to cultivate these feelings, to move from painful, gross sensations to the pleasant, subtle sensations. The true point, though, is to notice this inclination to want to move from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ and to choose, instead, to practise equanimity (or, put simply, being chill). It wasn’t about finding peace but about learning how to deal with all the feelings.
In one particularly memorable session on day three, my leg was in so much discomfort that it started to tremble. I was conscious of the trembling, but felt completely detached from it. It didn’t feel as if it was ‘mine’ or belonged to me any more than the sounds of my fellow students shifting on their cushions or the cool air of the meditation hall. I didn’t have any desire for the experience to be anything other than what it was.
The Anxiety Cometh
Though I had moments of spiritual profundity while sitting with physical discomfort, it didn’t feel as if my mind was calming down. I tried to distract myself. I started doing calisthenics – press-ups, squats, sit-ups – in my room. (This was technically against the rules, seeing as we were asked not to do anything beyond walking and light stretching, but to be fair, beach season was around the corner.) I began inventing stories about my fellow meditators. These were all ways of trying to escape the reality closing in on me, like a storm rolling over the horizon: I was becoming increasingly anxious.
I have always been a bit obsessive-compulsive – and not in the ‘keeping a tidy desk’ way so much as the ‘can’t turn off the spigot of intrusive thoughts’ type of way. Once, as a 10-year-old, I spent an entire New Year’s Eve party at a family friend’s house in the bathroom, having such a bad episode of germophobia that I couldn’t touch anything without immediately washing my hands again.
A few years ago, around the holidays, I posted notes of gratitude to my closest friends, then spent days afterwards convinced I’d accidentally written horrible things. If I was driving and I hit a pothole, I’d convince myself it was actually a person. My solution was to spin incessantly in my own head, trying to think my way out of the bad feelings. In the same way I once washed my hands to get rid of the ‘germs’, I used rumination as a way to ‘wash’ out the waves of anxiety.
On the retreat, with nothing to distract me, my thoughts started going into overdrive. Goenka warned us this might happen. He compared the retreat to the draining of an infected wound. We were bound to see some psychic gunk come out. So my brain started pulling out all the tapes from Clay’s Library of Anxious Memories and playing them on a loop. I’d think and think and think, my worries acting like skiers slaloming down a slope, carving a deeper and deeper groove into my cognitive wiring.
I knew what Goenka wanted me to do. For him, it always came back to awareness and equanimity. We were to simply observe what was happening, to see ‘reality as it is, not as you wish it to be’. We were to do this by paying attention to ‘respiration and sensation’. Had my fears caused my breath to become more shallow? If so, could I deepen it? How did the anxiety manifest? What sensations did it cause? Where did I feel them? In fact, this was Goenka’s prescription, via Buddha, for all of life’s difficulties. We’re so distracted and disconnected from our breath and our body that we fail to recognise sensations before they become reactions. A loud noise enters our consciousness and we startle; someone cuts us off in traffic and we swear; work stresses us out, so we emotionally regulate by ploughing through a bag of crisps.
By paying closer attention, we were supposed to observe our habitual tendencies to automatically react. But, Goenka emphasised, it’s that external orientation – looking for something outside ourselves to blame or that can provide relief – that dooms us. Nothing outside can offer lasting satisfaction because nothing lasts. As long as we refused to accept this, we’d continue to suffer. Instead, we should remember impermanence and say, ‘Let’s see how long this feeling lasts.’
Into the Darkness
I found it hard to stick with the body-scanning technique. Focusing on my breath as it moved in and out of my nostrils was easy enough, especially as it was how I had always practised meditation. But trying to notice what I could feel on the back of my head, or on my eyelids, or in the crook of my elbow, felt tedious. So my brain would spin off and hit shuffle on the playlist of Bad Thoughts.
In fact, when I later spoke to Judson Brewer, a professor and director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center who wrote a bestselling book called Unwinding Anxiety, he told me that obsessive worrying is in fact a habit, in the sense that it gets wired into our brain on the same trigger-behaviour-reward loop that any addiction does. We have an anxious thought (trigger), we ruminate or worry about it (behaviour), and this distracts us from the bad feeling (reward). It’s counter-intuitive to think of rumination as a reward, but Dr Brewer explains it like this: ‘Worrying feels like we’re doing something, and doing something feels better than doing nothing, even if you don’t know that what you’re doing is reinforcing the habit. That’s the irony. If you don’t know how your brain works, it’s going to get stuck.’
This would have been helpful to know on day seven of the retreat, when each student was shown to their meditation ‘cell’. These were located in the pagoda: an ornate yellow domed structure at the back of the retreat centre. Each cell was just big enough for a square meditation cushion and dark enough that you couldn’t see your own hand. Outside of the mandatory group sittings, we were invited to use the cells as often as we liked,
to go ‘deeper’, because here there were even fewer distractions: no light and no fellow meditators.
During my first session in the cell, I was able to return to the serenely concentrated place I was in during the early days of the retreat. But then, dependable as the tides, my anxiety rolled back in. In her poem The Quiet Machine, Ada Limón describes a silence ‘that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore’. That was the type of silence I found waiting for me in the dark corners of my cell.
I had no choice but to stay quiet, unless I wanted to leave the retreat. Instead of staying in the cell, though, after 30 minutes I decided to take a walk along the wooded trails outside. Technically, we were only supposed to do this during designated break hours, but it became my go-to when my anxiety got really bad. Every day, I visited the same trees, watching buds on the branches struggle towards bloom after months of hibernation. Observing the seasonal cycles taught me the same lesson I would have learned by observing ‘respiration and sensation’. It was a lesson about impermanence, and patience as an antidote to anxiety. I noticed how nature wasn’t so much a fixed thing as a changing constellation of conditions. I realised I was, too: different parts of my personality showed up at different times of the day. There was nothing to ‘fix’ about my anxiety. It has its own rhythms, like a tree or a set of waves. It comes; it goes. Comes again. Goes again. Like breath.
Breaking the Silence
On the very last day, we were allowed to break our silence. Though my vocal cords still worked, I found my ability to regulate my volume slightly impaired, like the guy who’s had a few too many at the bar. As everyone chattered away with extreme ‘last day of camp’ energy and I relearned how to not shout-talk, I huddled with a Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach. He had attended multiple retreats and compared the practice of meditation to martial-arts training.
In jiu-jitsu, there are times when an opponent gets you in a hold and your body’s automatic reaction to that hold – to try to squirm out of it – is counterproductive. It further entrenches your opponent’s grip on you. This is why you train, the coach said, so that you can make the move that will actually help you. This is true of anxiety, too. When I’m grappling with my thoughts, there’s the move my emotions want me to make (entertaining the neurotic thoughts) and the move I should make (staying, breathing, tolerating). The retreat had helped me understand the difference.
Dr Brewer had made the same comparison using the metaphor of poison ivy. If you scratch it, it’ll spread. If you sit with the discomfort, it will go away on its own. To extend the metaphor, the retreat also taught me the importance of anti-itch creams. It’s good to have things that make our discomfort and emotional regulation more bearable: exercising, reading a book, talking with friends, taking medication if you need it. There’s no nobility in unnecessary suffering.
In his parting talk, Goenka emphasised that we would need to work diligently after we returned home, committing to sit for at least an hour in the morning and in the evening. We should expect our progress to be very small at first and large perhaps only over the course of a lifetime.
I will admit that since being at home, I’ve not once hit an hour-long session, let alone Goenka’s daily prescription of two. When I do sit, however, my days have a different quality. It’s like turning on the lights in a dark flat; it allows me to see everything more clearly. When I skip multiple days at a time, everything feels a little more clumsy, like I’m fumbling around in the dark. But I’m also trying to break down the divide between the act of formal sitting and the practice of simply bringing more awareness and equanimity into my everyday life. Being able to access peace and calm in the first 20 minutes of my day, sitting on a cushion – or at a 10-day retreat, removed from the world – is not as useful as finding it in the throes of a workday that’s completely falling apart. Plus, I’ve found that waiting to find pockets of complete stillness can reinforce the idea that awakening is some far-off destination, a place I’ll find time to arrive at once I’ve made it through all the things on my to-do list. It causes me to miss out on the opportunities to practise resilience that are close at hand.
There’s no finish line in meditation or in navigating anxiety. It’s often said that our practice is the seed and the fruit. You practise so that you can continue to practise. Or, as the American Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bodhi once said, ‘The only requirements for reaching the final goal are two: to start and continue.’
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