Having Spent 10 Days in Silence...It's Overrated, IMO
This took longer to do than I thought.
It didn't really, but the procrastination is strong in this one. I definitely didn't have a legitimate reason for putting it off, that's for sure. But I have been lamenting the lack of creative outlets in my life, and my creative brain was working at 110% coming up with excuses not to do it! So I guess that's a win?...
Anyway, here I am, post-Vipassana, feeling way less zen than I was hoping to. But such is life, eh? It was definitely a beneficial experience, but not necessarily for the reasons I'd hoped. This is going to be a pretty slapdash post in terms of continuity and structure, but here goes nothing!
Things Learned From 10 Days of Sitting in Silence
#1) Do your meditation retreat in a western country: as expected, I went through a great deal of suffering during my meditation retreat. But not because of the meditation itself.
My suffering began on day 0 (the day we arrived when they did orientation, before the silence started) when I got a nasty headache.
On day 1 this continued, along with some horrible neck, back, and joint pain. I chalked the headache up to caffeine withdrawal(which I've experienced before and tends to only last a day or two), and attributed the bodily pain to sitting this way for an extended period, assuring myself that I would get used to it.
On day 2 both forms of pain were even more severe, but again I chalked it up to the same reasons.
On day 3 the pain was still there, and I began to suspect something else was at play. My mind began pointing fingers at everything from the vegetarian food(I thought my low carb diet adapted body was having an inflammatory response to it, or something similarly absurd), to the wooden pillow and concrete bed(picture below), to a whole slew of far more ridiculous causal factors. When we had our afternoon break I approached one of the volunteers, explained the pain I was in, and asked for something to deal with it.
I expected some sort of herbal remedy which they had offered before for other ailments(of the gastrointestinal distress type), but was pleasantly surprised when he gave me a big pack of aspirin. Throwing two of those back worked wonders.
Day 4 I decided to test my hypothesis regarding the vegetarian food, eating only breakfast and planning to fast until lunch the next day. The headache and pain tended to set in around 11AM, and since breakfast happened at 8:30AM it seemed logically sound that, if the food was the culprit then skipping breakfast would prevent it. This turned out not to be the case.
On day 5 I was completely exhausted from dealing with this for days on end. The aspirin helped, but I didn't want to be taking the stuff constantly for a week or more straight. I knew that couldn't be good. Plus it seemed like this place (the meditation center) was the cause of all my suffering, and that I might recover if I could actually get a decent night sleep in and a meal with an adequate amount of fat and protein.
So I approached a different volunteer and told him how I've been suffering, and said that I wanted to leave. He then proceeds to talk at me for what seemed like an eternity (and in reality was 20-30 minutes) about all of the conditions that other people have dealt with while staying here that were even worse than mine, saying that what I'm going through doesn't sound all that bad, and a whole bunch of other arguments that I can't remember because at the time I was too busy stewing in my own misery.
Here's the funny thing about people who are extremely sleep deprived and have been struggling with pain; they don't exactly have willpower oozing out of every pore. I was in such a miserable state that the entire time this "conversation" was going on, all I could think about was the fastest way to end it so I could go back to my room and lay down for whatever sliver of a break I had left before the next session started.
But one productive thing did come out of this chat: we agreed that I'd go to a medical clinic the next day to see what was going on with me. This was very useful, as the next day when I went to the clinic and the doctor checked me out, he informed me that I had something called Chikungunya, a mosquito-transmitted virus with symptoms similar to Dengue fever, including the aforementioned headache and pain.
Quick side bar: afterwards while eating lunch at a nearby restaurant I mentioned this to the lady who worked there, and she referred to what I had as "Thai malaria". So that's cool.
One of the positives of this is that the doctor said it generally lasts about 8-10 days, clearing up within 2 days after that time frame. So at worst, I'd only be suffering for 2 days past the retreat, and this damned virus torpedoed the whole thing!
Awesome. This is why you do your retreat it in a western country where the likelihood of a mosquito putting you in horrible pain is significantly reduced.
Days 6, 7, and 8 were similarly miserable, me self medicating with unhealthy amounts of aspirin just to get through the day, and trying during those brief respites to focus on this whole "meditation" thing that's still going on in the background apart from my own personal hell.
Finally on day 9 they changed things up. Up until this point the retreat had been very structured, with guided meditations, talks by the head monk, readings from different books, etc. But on day 9 it was essentially an open day for us to take what we'd learned and simply try to meditate on our own to the best of our ability. I was really looking forward to this as it meant I could do it wherever I wanted, meaning I could just lay down in my room and try to feel less shitty.
BUT, fate having the sick sense of humor that it does, on day 9 I finally started to feel better. It was like magic, the pain cleared up overnight, my head barely bothered me, and I was good to go. This was great as all I really wanted was time to practice on my own, which leads me to my second biggest lesson learned from this experience.
#2) Do your research on the place you're going: When you google "meditation retreat Thailand" the center that I attended appears on pretty much every top X list for places to go. I viewed this as a good indicator that it was a pretty good place to go if I wanted to dive in the deep end and really take this thing seriously.
But I overlooked a crucial detail that would've tipped me off to the fact that this place wasn't for me: the types of people who write the posts containing such top X lists. I imagine that they're very much like many of the people who attended the retreat with me, which is to say they're probably off the fucking deep end of the woo-woo spectrum.
It's interesting because, as I forsook my own religion fairly early on in life I was always looking at different belief systems. I really wanted to know: did any of them make sense, logically? Or was it all super-powerful creators with ideas about right and wrong that in some cases just seemed like common sense, and in most other cases seemed horribly outdated and ridiculous?
Buddhism is one that jumped out at me as a belief system (and I know Buddhists would take offense to me calling it that, but just work with me here) because it seemed like a very logical approach to the world. Work on yourself, don't blame the world for your suffering. Physical possessions won't grant you happiness(and the desire for them can even cause suffering), it has to come from within. No belief in a higher power, none of the fluff, just sound wisdom to live your life by.
But during this retreat there were many talks and teachings about Buddhism, and from what I heard it is WAY less practical than I thought. The number of times I heard people talking about channeling energy, or focusing on X, Y, or Z chakra, or all manner of other fanciful phrases…sure, Buddhism has it's good points, but it also feels like it was loaded up with a good amount of nonsense like all the others.
Another side bar: In one interview I heard Naval Ravikant refer to himself as a "practical Buddhist". After this experience I better understand why one needs to make that distinction.
My bashing of Buddhism aside, there's an even more important reason you need to do your research ahead of time for this type of experience, and that's so you make sure you go to a place that's going to deliver what you're looking for. I had a fairly good grasp on why I think meditation is useful and beneficial, I just wanted to go to a place where I'd be disconnected from the outside world and could focus on meditating.
But this retreat had numerous talks every day by volunteers, monks, and recordings from the founder of the monastery, explaining the 118 different types of breath you need to be aware of and what each of them says about your current state, or the intricacies of Buddhism and how it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and many other things I'd remember if I wasn't in horrible pain while I was being told them (or if I didn't procrastinate so much and had written this damn thing right after I finished the retreat).
The point is, I went there to meditate, and only on day 9 was I given free reign to do that. So if you want to go to a meditation retreat and have similar expectations as I did, do your research and make sure that's what you'll get at the place you choose.
Speaking of which…
#3) For a "silent meditation retreat", there was a hell of a lot of talking!: This was mostly from the aforementioned talks. I came in expecting quiet time to contend with my thoughts, but I only had a few hours of that a day, instead spending much of the week going through Buddhism 101 through 401. Again, do your research kids.
#4) It turns out I already knew how to meditate: I realized this on day 3 or 4, while I was hopped up on aspirin (during one of my brief respites from pain) I totally blanked my brain out from all thought and visual images. I remembered discovering this when I was younger, and thinking "oh, that's cool, didn't know I could do that", then immediately letting my mind run off to more interesting things.
To a kid, the idea of thinking about nothing sounds pretty damn boring. Who'd have thought?
But for me this was an incredible insight. I'd already discovered how to do this thing, I just didn't realize that that's what it was at the time. So now it's just a matter of prolonging how long I can stay in that state, which is going to be a very long-term project. Still, it feels pretty good to have figured out that key piece already.
I don't really have a good segue for this next bit, but it was one of the biggest insights I took from the experience...
#5) One of my biggest personal faults is that I'm a pretty angry person: This was a very unpleasant thing to discover, and I'm hesitant to even write about it. But I knew that I was sick of the unrealistic highlight reels of perfect life that people portray on social media, and I promised myself when I started writing here that I'd cover the gritty gruesome bits of life, even if it meant getting a little personal from time to time.
So here it is; turns out I'm an angry bastard. Almost never externally, unless in an exaggerated fashion for comedic purposes. But my internal dialogue can be a very angry place. Whenever I see something that doesn't make sense, or someone acting or doing something in a way that causes difficulty for myself or others (from mild inconvenience to serious suffering), I can get very angry very quickly.
It turns out that when you think a LOT it’s very easy to fall in love with your own ideas about the best way to do things and become deeply entrenched in them, making anything that doesn't fit with your preconceived notions completely unacceptable.
Additionally, when I was younger I saw people who would bear a heavy load for the sake others, suffering in silence to improve their lives. To me this seemed like a very noble way to go about living. Only as I've grown have I realized how wrong I was.
Suffering in silence doesn't mean you prevent the other people in your life from suffering. It just means that instead of them suffering directly from the thing that's the problem, they suffer from it indirectly through the toll it takes on you.
Whether dealing with this thing makes you angry, drives you to substance abuse, makes you so busy dealing with it that you can't spend time with them, or any number of other reactions, one way or another damage will be done. So while it might seem nice on the surface, if you judge based on the results there's really nothing noble about being a martyr in your personal life.
In some ways it could even be called selfish or lazy, because the objectively harder, more painful, but correct thing to do is to talk openly about it with the people you care about who are involved.
If you're a problem solving type this can feel like a personal failure as you want to protect them from these difficulties, but open lines of communication are even more crucial when going through difficult times than in every day life. Refusing to do so to avoid bruising your fragile ego is childish.
That long rant/tangent aside, those things together can cause my internal dialogue to be a pretty angry place at times(actually, the rant above is a pretty good example of it). But even if it sucks to realize that, I think I'm far better off doing so and properly addressing it. After all, if you look at the dialogue around any subject of moderate importance it seems like many people are operating off of pure rage these days, with very little awareness of it and no attempts to resolve it.
-And lastly-
#6) I most definitely will never be vegan, vegetarian, or any other such thing: Even though the food wasn't the cause of my illness, that does not mean it caused me no ill. Nothing but fruits, vegetables, and starchy grains for 10 days. That's a LOT of fiber bound up in there. I'm talking enough to make you feel so bloated that you're basically carrying around a third trimester food-baby, day in, day out. No bueno.
(Jokes aside: I have many legitimate reasons for making that choice backed by a great deal of research, but this 10 day experiment was enough to confirm my thoughts on the matter. Perhaps I'll write in more depth on this at a later date.)
-In closing-
So that was my experience with 10 days at a meditation retreat. Despite the suffering it was a worthwhile experience and I'm glad I did it, I just feel I would have gotten MUCH more out of it had I been at one that was more focused on self-directed meditation, and had I not been in crippling agony for much of the time. Lesson learned!