I Sat in Silence for 240 Hours. My Anxiety Has Never Been the Same Since
IT WAS THE seventh day of silence that nearly broke me. I was sitting in the “cell” I had been assigned to earlier that morning. Think a human-sized cupboard, windowless and about the length of an average guy’s wingspan. Not great if you’re scared of dark, small spaces or—as I was at that moment—your own thoughts. I had been alone with mine for about 148 hours.
When I checked into Vipassana Meditation Center–Dhamma Dharā in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, 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, unable to get out from under a constant drip of noise. During the first few days of the retreat, I discovered serenity in small doses. But instead of it continuing to get sunnier in my brain, I noticed storm clouds moving in. Now my thoughts were as dark as the cell I found myself in.
This was one thing I’d feared when I signed up for this retreat: that instead of healing and calming me, ten days of deep breathing 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 about seven years ago, when I walked into a bookstore and picked up The Miracle of Mindfulness, by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The book explains what mindfulness is: nonjudgmental awareness of one’s thoughts, sensations, and feelings. It is the simple (but not easy) 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, the book promises, you can take your mindfulness off the mat (or pillow, chair . . . wherever it is you breathe) and into the world, meet daily frustrations with generosity, and find everlasting peace and joy. Sweet, I thought, perhaps a bit credulously. I began meditating that day.
At first I did ten minutes in the morning, using popular apps like Calm and Headspace. I started reading more about Buddhism, acquiring my own 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. I was calmer and more alive to the world, less likely to hit “send” on an angry email and more likely to find myself on a street corner oddly appreciative of the way a plume of steam ribboned into the New York sky (incredible, I know).
Toward the beginning of this year, as winter thawed into spring, life got busy and my practice waned. When there are so many things 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 way too much time drinking from the Internet’s content fire hose. 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 perpetually felt like a tuning fork that had just been struck. I needed a reset, a silence boot camp/dopamine rehab of sorts. Since I’d begun practicing meditation, I’d wanted to try an extended retreat and remembered that, not long before, my friend had returned from one in Massachusetts he’d found quite powerful. It boasted a 4.9 Google rating—admirably high, even for nirvana. I signed up.
That’s how I found myself on a late-April day riding about 200 miles north out of Manhattan with a woman named Janet whom I’d met through the retreat’s ride-sharing message board. She was returning for her eighth time and described her first experience as “suffocating” but told me not to worry, that the people running the centre would “let us outside.” Comforting! Eventually we arrived at a property nestled among the woods in western Massachusetts. It began as a two-story 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 beyond 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 160-cell pagoda, and a handful of nature trails.
After checking in, I was shown to my single bedroom with bare beige walls, a set of shelves, a bathroom, and a twin-size bed. Then I marched to the pale-yellow 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 almost four months before: Was I of sound mind and body? Could I commit to being here for all ten 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 . . . not even eye contact. (It also meant no phones, of course.) After completing the forms, I handed over my iPhone and watched it go into a canvas bag, then into a drawer. 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 first 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 4:00 a.m. So would begin a day that included more than ten hours of meditation, with breaks for silent meals and nightly discourse talks that explained the philosophy behind the vipassana meditation technique we’d be practicing. Each day, every person was required to attend three one-hour group sittings in a wide, low-ceilinged meditation hall whose windows had been blocked so that it remained perpetually dim, lit by orange-yellowish bulbs. For the other seven hours of meditation, we could remain in the hall or return to our rooms (or, later on in the retreat, our cells). By 9:00 p.m. we’d be back in our bedrooms, preparing to go to sleep and start it all over again.
It’s the same schedule that’s followed at more than 240 retreat centres in the world where vipassana meditation—the technique of Buddha—is taught and practiced. (All of the retreats are free, entirely financed by the donations of former students. The Shelburne Falls location sees its 130-ish spots fill up about two hours after registration opens.) The centres were established and popularised by S. N. Goenka (“go-aink-uh”), a successful Burmese businessman who originally found vipassana meditation to relieve debilitating headaches. He died in 2013, but his presence is felt in the meditation hall: Recorded audio of his deep, croaking voice delivers instructions during the group sittings, and videos of him play on a mounted screen during the nightly discourse talks. The only other people who speak are the two assistant teachers who meditate at the front of the hall during group sits and are available twice daily to students who have questions about the technique.
Vipassana is widely translated as “insight” meditation or “seeing things as they really are.” It’s a three-step technique intended to bring meditators deeper clarity. In his talks, Goenka broke down the steps. The first step consisted of sīla, aka moral conduct. We achieved this by committing not to steal, kill, speak falsely, or engage in sexual activity for the ten days of the retreat. A moral mind, the thinking goes, is a calm mind, and you need a calm mind to reach samādhi (concentration), the next level on the path of insight. The first three days of the retreat would be spent reaching this concentrated state through anapana breathing, which involved intensely observing the breath come in and out of our nose. After three straight days of anapana breathing, we began the body-scanning technique that we’d do for the rest of the retreat during those ten hours, passing our awareness like a spotlight up and down our body, starting at the top of the head and moving all the way down to the toes, trying to notice what could be felt in each individual body part.
Goenka told us that some body parts would experience “gross” or obvious sensations, like tightness or pain in our knees and back; other parts would experience “subtle” sensations, like perspiration on the neck, a feeling of air on the pinkie finger, or the touch of fabric on the shin. By scanning, over and over, for seven straight days, we’d notice how many different sensations there are in our body, including ones that we are usually much too disconnected to notice. This would deliver us to the third and final step of the path, paññā, or wisdom, which would allow us to see the ultimate insight: that there is only impermanence (aniccā). It’s this trajectory, moving from sīla to samādhi to paññā, that makes up Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, which is what Buddha provided for people to find their way out of suffering and into enlightenment.
On the very first day, I became acquainted with sensations of the “gross” and “bad” varieties. It became clear that the retreat was going to be much more physically difficult than I had anticipated. I had expected my mind to wander (as it always does) and to find the stillness mentally challenging, but I had not fully clocked how uncomfortable it is to just sit cross-legged on a meditation cushion all day. Generally, we were sitting for an hour at a time before being given a small five-to-ten-minute break, primarily to stretch, use the bathroom, or desperately search the hall closet for different, more comfortable cushions. In the first 15 minutes of sitting, I’d feel pressure in my knees and glutes—all those years spent playing basketball and running and not stretching coming back to haunt me. By 30 or 40 minutes in, it would be unbearable. I would break my posture, extending my legs straight to relieve the tightness in my joints. As the day went on and my body became fatigued, tightness and irony bloomed in equal proportion: The longer I sat to quiet my mind, the louder my pain became.
As Goenka—or “Daddy Gankee,” as I came to call him in my head—explained it through the speakers in the main meditation hall, it is the pull between pleasant and unpleasant that creates our suffering. (This is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism: Life is suffering.) We suffer because we chase after what feels good and run away from what feels bad. This makes sense in theory. Who doesn’t want more happiness and less sadness? 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 technique, which we finally began on the fourth day. The more time I spent scanning, the more sensations I started 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, as Goenka stressed over and over, is to notice this inclination to want to move from “bad” to “good” and to choose, instead, to practice equanimity (or, put simply, being chill). To become aware and accepting of all the sensations. It wasn’t simply about finding peace but about learning how to deal with all the feelings, including misery.
It was sitting with this discomfort that delivered some of the more profound early experiences of my retreat. I recalled once reading that I could use my exhales as a form of ventilation, sending good energy to specific parts of my body. When the pressure started mounting to uncomfortable levels, instead of wondering how I could possibly stay that way for however many interminable minutes were left in the meditation session, I focused on remaining for just one more breath. The sensation could straddle a line between pain and pleasure, at one moment feeling like a hot iron and in the next, closer to a heating pad. A few times, the pain reached a crescendo and then dissipated entirely.
In one particularly memorable session on the third day, my leg was in so much discomfort that it started to physically tremble. Though I was conscious of the trembling, I 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, drafty air of the meditation hall. I didn’t have any desire for the experience to be anything other than exactly what it was. It was powerful enough that I’d break the no-writing rule and jot down some notes in the journal I wasn’t supposed to have. “What was this?” I wrote. “Grace? Mercy? Where you go when you die?”
THE ANXIETY COMETH
THOUGH I CERTAINLY had moments of spiritual profundity while sitting with physical discomfort, it didn’t feel as if my mind was necessarily calming down. I tried to distract myself. I started doing calisthenics—pushups, squats, situps—in my room. (This was technically against the rules, since we were asked not to do anything beyond walking and light stretching, but to be fair, beach season was around the corner and I didn’t understand why someone who was enlightened couldn’t also be snatched.) I did a lot of mental math, calculating how many hours I’d spent in silence and how many more I had before I could kiss my girlfriend again. I began inventing stories about my fellow meditators, even going so far as to start resenting one guy who looked strangely like Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai and who stared deeply and longingly into his oatmeal every morning in a way that, frankly, I hated. 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 incessant, intrusive thoughts” type of way. Once, as a ten-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. My hands got pinker and pinker until they cracked and bled from the knuckles. As I got older, the obsessive rituals turned into obsessive ruminations. Instead of being worried about something in the outside world contaminating me (like germs), I became fixated on the idea that I might cause harm, that something in me might contaminate the outside world. I’d have a bad thought, and instead of recognising it as just that—a thought—I’d allow it to spill over into my reality.
A few years ago, around the holidays, I mailed notes of gratitude to my closest friends, then spent days afterward convinced I’d accidentally written horrible things instead of nice things, thinking of ways to intercept the USPS before the notes were delivered. If I was driving, especially at night, and I hit a pothole, I’d convince myself it was actually a person I’d accidentally run over, often circling back—sometimes multiple times—to make sure I hadn’t committed vehicular manslaughter. “You think there are things happening inside of you that can affect the outside world that are not real,” my therapist once told me. When this happened, my solution was to spin incessantly in my own head, trying to think my way out of the bad feelings associated with worry and fear. 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 that were rolling in.
On 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’d been neglecting. We were bound to see some psychic gunk come out—the unresolved feelings, anxieties, and fears that are forever hovering in the background of our awareness but that we don’t stay still long enough to notice. The ones that led French philosopher Blaise Pascal to once quip that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
So my brain started pulling out all the tapes from Clay’s Library of Anxious Memories and playing them on a loop. I’d sit to meditate, only to find myself forced to sit through another double feature of “Was That Pothole I Hit Once Actually a Person?” and “Could I Have Gotten Herpes from That Public Water Fountain?” 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,” a refrain he kept repeating. 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 flip them the bird; we find that work is stressful, so we emotionally regulate by plowing through a box of Cheez-Its; we have an anxious thought and spin off into a ruminative loop.
By paying closer attention, we were supposed to observe our habitual tendencies to automatically react. To see how we run toward what we like (Cheez-Its) and away from what we don’t (work). But, Goenka stressed, it’s that external orientation—looking for something outside ourselves to blame or that can provide relief when we feel bad—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. He compared it to planting bitter seeds and hoping they’d yield sweet fruits. The way toward contentment starts by turning inward, he said. We should remind ourselves of impermanence and simply say, “Let’s see how long this feeling lasts.”
INTO THE DARKNESS
I SPENT THE next few days in and out of cycles of anxiety. I found it hard to stick with the body-scanning technique. Paying attention to my breath as it moved in and out of my nostrils was easy enough, especially because it was how I had always practiced 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 left elbow, felt tedious and effortful. So my brain would spin off and hit shuffle on the playlist of Bad Thoughts. Anxiety had become like a habit in my life, and in long periods without distraction we default to what’s habitual.
In fact, when I later spoke to Judson Brewer, M.D., Ph.D., a professor and director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, who wrote a best-selling 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 or compulsion does: We have an anxious thought or feeling (trigger), we ruminate or worry about it (behaviour), and this distracts us from the bad feeling (reward). It’s counterintuitive 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.”
When I asked Dr. Brewer why our brain would do this, he explained that it was due to a mix-up of our evolutionary wiring. One of our survival mechanisms involves negative reinforcement, which you’ve probably heard described this way: You place your hand on a hot stove, your hand screams in agony, you learn about the danger of stoves. We feel that our anxious thoughts are dangerous, like a hot stove, so we try to think our way out of them with worry. But we mistake discomfort for danger, and because our ruminating is the equivalent of taking our hand off the hot stove, we never stick around long enough to see that our anxiety isn’t actually all that hot, that it won’t actually kill us, and that it’s the very act of trying to think our way out of it that reinforces our idea of how dangerous it is.
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 very 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, even after giving your eyes time to adjust. Outside of the three mandatory group sittings in the meditation hall, 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. Despite already being too deep inside my own psyche, I opted to give it a try.
During my first session in the cell, I found myself 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.” When I went back for another session later that day, 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 the buds on branches struggle their way toward 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 cycles, impermanence, and patience as an antidote to anxiety.
By observing the landscape over the course of a week and a half, at different times of the day, 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, a weather system, or a set of waves. It comes and it goes. Comes again. Goes again. Like the breath. As I was thinking this, heading back to the retreat centre for afternoon tea, I looked up and noticed a rainbow that had appeared after a brief shower, arcing its way across the indigo sky.
BREAKING THE SILENCE
ON THE VERY last day, after the morning meditation session, we were allowed to break our silence. Though my vocal cords still worked (thankfully), 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 to not shout-talk, I found myself huddled with a Brazilian jujitsu coach, whose burly build was offset by a gentle demeanour. He had attended multiple retreats and compared the practice of meditation to martial-arts training.
In jujitsu, 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 really the counterproductive reaction. It further entrenches your opponent’s grip on you. It’s like being in one of those finger traps. This is why you train, the coach said, so that you can make the move that will actually help you—not the move your body and mind tell you to make. 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, trying to wash away the feeling of fear) 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. I appreciate the sentiment, and it’s one I came to understand more deeply by white-knuckling my way through my own anxiety storm. But 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 and persistently 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 life. Life is chaotic and difficult by nature, so we should measure our progress not by how calm our lives are but by how quickly we’re able to come back to calm after chaos. Goenka compared it to swimming. You only need to pop your head up every so often and catch a glimpse to make sure you’re heading in the right direction. Or, as I’ve heard another famous teacher describe it, you’re shooting for “short moments, many times.”
I will admit that since I’ve been home it’s more like “short moments, almost never.” I have not once hit an hour-long session, let alone Goenka’s daily prescription of two. My practice has waned again. When I do sit, however, I find that my days have a different quality. It’s a bit like turning on the lights in a dark apartment; it allows me to see everything more clearly. When I skip multiple days at a time, everything feels a little more clumsy, like the power has gone out and I am fumbling around in the dark, bumping into hard edges.
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 ten-day retreat, removed from the world—is not as useful as finding it in the throes of a workday that’s completely falling apart or during a chaotic Thanksgiving dinner. 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 when I’ve gotten through all the things on my to-do list. It causes me to miss out on the opportunities to practice resilience that are close at hand.
This thought has been a buoy for me. I have lost touch with the deeper part of myself that I accessed on retreat, but that doesn’t mean I have to forgo it entirely. I can find little moments of awakening within a larger day of mostly being asleep. That type of incremental progress is the practice of a lifetime. And that’s why it is a practice. There’s no finish line in meditation or in navigating anxiety or in any other of life’s difficulties. It’s often said that practice is the seed and the fruit. You practice so that you can continue to practice. Or as the monk Bhikkhu Bodhi once said, “The only requirements for reaching the final goal are two: to start and continue.”
SILENT RETREAT 101
IF YOU’RE LOOKING to find a good silent retreat (and not accidentally join a cult!), keep these factors in mind:
Length
Some retreats last a weekend. Some can last 60 days. Choosing the right one for you will depend on what you’re hoping to achieve (and your available PTO). If you’re just trying to get a taste for the practice—or want to give yourself a launching pad back into it after it’s dried up—go shorter. The longer you go, the more you’ll be able to reset and unhook yourself from your daily habits and routines.
Type
One obvious choice to make is whether you want to spend your time in silence (and even what kind of silence: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers famously spent his in a dark, isolated underground bunker). There are retreats that involve meditation but do not require hours of silence. Some also allow for other activities, such as yoga and work practice (where you spend some of each day doing specific on-site work like cooking, cleaning, or gardening).
Cost
As retreats have become more popular, the price tags have gone up, especially for some of the more famous retreat centres. So you’ll need to decide if you want to pay for a more comfortable, five-star experience or if you’d like to do something more low-cost, like vipassana, whose retreats are free, entirely funded by the donations of previous students.
Location
Another thing to consider: location and accessible transportation. You have to do your retreat at an actual retreat center, and that might mean traveling if there isn’t one close by.
Vibe
Before you decide to commit to a retreat, make sure to do your research and look at reviews from attendees so you don’t accidentally join a cult. If there are a bunch of odd stories and some stuff feels off to a bunch of people, it probably is. Some cultlike indicators may include one main leader with a special individualised mission, members who may appear fearful of the outside world, and a ban on continued relationships with former members.
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