The primary purpose of this article is to recount my experience with the hopes that if anyone has questioned the merit of a 10 day silent retreat, or considered partaking, that they make the space in their life to take that plunge. An ancillary purpose for this article is to lay down a base post that I may refer to in future posts, as the topic of mindfulness is a hobby horse of mine, and I hope to revisit it often; for that reason, I apologize for the length of the article.

A few disclaimers about this post: The following paragraphs recount my experience on a 10 day silent meditation retreat, and should not be misconstrued for what one should expect to happen on retreat; expectation or desire for a “goal” or “result” can be the very thing that impedes real progress (if such a term like progress can be used without contradicting the foregoing point). It is important to remember that retreat in itself is not magical, except for the fact, as a matter of course, most of us tend to live in a way where we overlook the fundamental elements of our being; retreat is one of those incredibly rare and unique circumstances where you most deliberately attempt not to do that. It is in these extended periods of “psychic intervention” where real cognitive, emotional, and spiritual growth (or reset) is possible. Lastly, I would like to state that, notwithstanding my 10 years of lay practice, I am a relative neophyte in the meditation space when compared to those individuals who have had cumulative months or years on silent retreat. If anything in the proceeding paragraphs tickles your curiosity, I suggest seeking out these professionals and teachers who have dedicated their lives to the “path”. The community is kind and the door is always open. Thank you for reading.

Intro

After reading the book Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, which explains the science of meditation and highlights some of the benefits of sustained practice, I decided that I was ready to take the plunge into a longer and more intense meditative experience. The book had a number of points on why a multi day meditation retreat may be beneficial. As a daily practitioner for some time, I had heard on a few different fronts (most notably from Sam Harris, creator of the app Waking Up) the recommendation of minimum 7 days of retreat in order to really derive some of the benefits of sustained practice and silence.

Meditation, or “mindfulness” has grown in popularity over the last decade. Like many things thrown into the consumer mix, much of its depth and significance has been cheapened. “Mindfulness” (or “McMindfulness”), as it has been served up to the consumer, is marketed as a mere antidote to stress – a means to an end, with the end being some sort of psychological relief. This simplification of the “process”, coupled with apps that curate and promote the benefits of one type of meditation over another, has stripped mindfulness of what it really is: a way to relate to your experience. 

A ten day silent meditation retreat is not accessible for everyone. Nor is it necessarily psychologically compatible for everyone. In this busy world, it is difficult to carve out a few hours to yourself, let alone 10 days of no email, access to phones, or talking. There are also locale issues, as you need to live near a retreat centre to even have an affordable opportunity. Beyond socioeconomic and time issues, any kind of underlying psychological condition can also be exacerbated during intense retreat styled meditation.

With that said, however, I believe many people could greatly benefit from the type of practice and depth only achievable on retreat. Speaking for myself, after immersing deeply into some of the concentrated states only extended lengths of practice and silence can offer, I had many insights that I believe would have been otherwise lost or dismissed. My hopes in writing this post is that if you are interested in the idea of an extended retreat, and have thought about taking your practice to the next level, this might help tip the scale. It will certainly be an experience that you will never regret or forget.

The Retreat

My Vispassana retreat took place in September of 2021. Vispassana retreats stem from the Theravadin tradition, and consist of a fairly rigorous schedule. To yogis, this is known as the “Dry Path”. The gong would toll at 5 a.m., and we would begin iterations of sitting and walking meditations that would last until 10 p.m.; you were often encouraged to go later as the retreat progressed, if you could.

Silence is key

The most salient feature of such a retreat is the silence: there are no phones; there is no (or very little) permissible talking; and you were not even permitted to meet the eyes of your fellow Yogis. This is standard in the Theravadin tradition. Not all meditation retreats are like this. Some of the more secular non-dual styles of retreat (modelled off of the Dzogchen, Mahayana, or Advaita Vedanta traditions) are structured differently. This is sometimes referred to as the direct, or “Wet Path”, as the emphasis is not on the time and rigour spent on the practice. I recently did a non-dual retreat with Loch Kelly, which I discuss in another article, that was not silent at all.

At this retreat, however, silence was taken very seriously and that’s a good thing! Truthfully, the last time I had experienced this type of social vacuum was in the womb.

The effects of the retreat on me

It was not until this experience that I realized something pretty crucial. Meditating without some background in the theory, perhaps some formal instruction, is like trying to learn how to play golf by picking up a club having no instruction on how to swing. Sure, I was hitting balls decent enough (after almost 10 years), but I had developed a pretty heavy slice. That’s not to say there isn’t great instruction out there online or on applications (my favourite being the aforementioned Sam Harris Waking Up app). The simple fact that we can access content that you used to have to travel to Myanmar or norther India to attain is simply amazing.

That being said, there is something to be said about extended periods of sustained and persistent practice accompanied by some formal instruction. As someone who was keenly interested in the subject matter, I had dove pretty deep into the dharma and its various teachings long before the retreat. The actual formal instruction piece at the retreat, which I had more or less cherry picked in my self teachings, started to make sense under the retreat conditions. Simply put, without the precursor knowledge of how one should meditate, meditating can be an extremely frustrating experience. In fact, this confusion and frustration made up the better part of my journey. It wasn’t until I started to read the literature and dive into some of the great theory available online and in applications like Waking Up, that I began to iron out some of the issues in my plateaued practice.

The Importance of the Arena

In the context of this retreat, however, the most important aspect was the arena. Being in a space completely devoid of the noise from my constructed life, coupled with the extended time that would otherwise be impossible, was the antidote to some nagging issues in my practice. “Constructed” is the term I’ve chosen here because if you think about it, most of your life falls in this category: the car you drive, the job you have, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the apps you spend your time on, the books you read, even many of the relationships you have. They’re all constructed. Your whole sense of self is (shocker) constructed.

Being put in a position where you can just let all of those constructions go cannot be overstated. The retreat allowed me to drop all those earthly concerns about my job, those somewhat awkward relationships in my life, the state of the world generally, and just sit in the only thing that truly exists or matters — the now.

You would be shocked at how little time you spend in the now in your day-to-day. While doing walking meditations, where I was focusing on the micro movements of lifting, moving, and then planting my foot, I began to notice how much time I spent fractionally forward in the future, anticipating (and narrating) the next movement instead of simply witnessing or experiencing it, or slightly reclined in the past–thinking about some nagging issue in my life outside of the retreat centre, a problem I needed to solve, or reliving some awkward moment from long ago.

When you begin to notice how much you live outside of experience itself, you begin to see the paradox of practice: striving to achieve some far away goal of enlightenment is the antithesis to actually achieving that goal. Working hard, practicing hard, or “meditating” hard is not the answer. The answer lies in easing up, dropping the concepts or the narration that is running in the mind, and truly living in the space of awareness and experience without attachment, resistance, or judgement. The ultimate paradox of practice is that there’s nothing to do or “strive” for. Whatever you’re looking for is already there and always has been.

The conditions of retreat allowed me to struggle over an extended period of time in a vacuum. Once I found some ease and stopped pushing against the experience the compound interest accumulated. It was the retreat and the arena itself that allowed me to correct my golf swing (to continue the analogy). While I don’t shoot in the low 70s, I am on my way to being a decent golfer. In other words, I’m on my way to relating to my experience with less reactivity, attachment, judgement or resistance; the only way one should relate with experience is directly with it rather than through the broker of the mind which has a reputation of distortion.

The book Altered Traits states that the effects of one 10 day retreat can be equivalent to months, if not years, of daily shorter practice. The amount of time spent with no interruption is crucial because it allows you to transform the altered states found in meditative states into altered traits conditioned in the mind. This is one of the many reasons why a retreat setting, or the ‘arena’ is so important as a spiritual, mental, and focal injection.

The Clicking Ankle

A short story about the retreat shall help illustrate the foregoing point. I discuss this in more depth in another article. When I was 14 I very badly injured both of my ankles in a snowboarding accident. To this day, every time I take a step my left ankle clicks. This click is inaudible, usually, thanks to the fact I have shoes on most of the day. However, when you’re in the midst of a walking meditation barefooted in a room full of strangers where you can hear a pin drop, it sounded (to me) like a fog horn. The clicking wasn’t even consistent, or predictable; it clicks roughly 4 out of 5 times. This added an extra layer to the desire / aversion as I had some hope that maybe it would just stop.

I cannot tell you how much frustration this little clicking ankle stirred up in me. I wished it to go away so badly — for me, and for everyone around me. I believed everyone around me was equally frustrated with the “clicking ankle”. How dare he poison the temple’s silence. It took me days, and upwards of 15-20 hours of walking meditation before I finally opened to the feeling and let go of the desire of the clicking to go away. Remarkably, once I unclenched the fist of the mind and opened completely and met the desire without clinging, I was able to be free of this “micro suffering”. Further, when everyone on the retreat broke silence at the end and we connected as a group, I mentioned the clicking ankle and discovered not a single person noticed. All of that anguish and micro suffering had been in my mind alone.

These same desires experienced on retreat are not all that different than your desires in every day life. The major difference being that on retreat, it is your job to notice these things, whilst in life we are often living disillusioned swinging from the vine of one thought or emotion to the next vine of desire or aversion. Hearing or reading the Dharma, and recognizing that these are not new ailments was revolutionary. Ancient wisdom had found the antidote to many of my issues. Many of these insights were discovered by sitting in silence, in an “arena”, for long periods of time, without any distraction. One need not reinvent the “Dharma” wheel here; all of the answers are in the texts and are well documented. You just need to find some space in your life to feel and experience these wisdom directly, opposed to understanding them conceptually.

The arena is important.

Two insights – Impermanence and the (lack of) Self

There were two major realizations or insights that I had on retreat that I had never truly had before. Conceptually, I had read about these things and in a certain conceptual way I understood (or had glimpsed) their importance. Retreat conditions, however, allowed me to really investigate these insights; there is a difference between thinking about these things and feeling them.

Obviously a retreat does not necessarily mean you’ll have any kind of insight like this. In fact, the instructors warn against describing one’s experience on retreat as it might lead others to go in with the same goal orientated approach that can put one in a rut for years (like me). For the first 5-6 years of my practice, I had been practicing with a goal orientated, “achieve” something or “fix” something approach; during these years I had “achieved” relatively little beyond deeply concentrated states and some of the feelings of rapture and bliss that accompany a good sitting practice. While I was still very much a victim of my emotions and thoughts during the first years of my practice, these years and the general lessons that life and loss had taught me had tilled the soil and made me fertile ground for two important insights highlighted on the retreat: (1), that all things are impermanent; and (2), that there is no self.

Impermanence

One of the tenets of buddhism is the idea of impermanence. Now I understood this conceptually but had never fully felt or experienced impermanence (or watched it) at the micro level. What I realized is that while things were rising and passing, there was almost always an anticipatory period or residual period of attachment to the thing that might arise, has arisen, and then inevitably dissipates. It is in those refractory periods where you have desire, or aversion to the thing arising or passing where you suffer (even if it is just a micro suffering).

Everybody knows that, for example, one is born and one dies; things come and things go. However, to understand this truly, down to the micro moment, you need to observe the cascade of time unfolding onto each moment (which in itself is a concept). It is not just you that is born or dies at some undesignated time, it is every moment that has a birth and death. In fact, the process, when examined close enough, blurs and becomes the same. The cascade of time, in the non-dual sense absent of past and future becomes a string of pure consciousness often described vaguely as the “present”. This “insight” on my retreat completely dissolved the walls of past and future in my mind and everything began to collapse in on itself. The true realization that impermanence is everything (actually everything) was one of the biggest “ah ha” moments of my life. Suffering lays hidden in the grass of clinging; clinging to the things that cannot be clung too; clinging to the the things that will no longer be; clinging to the form that can not and will not last.

Thoughts and emotions, cravings and desires, aversion and discomfort, all come and go. Our forward lean into the future and recline into the past are elements of delusion, and while the past and future may serve as useful teachers, they so often become our greatest oppressors. This doesn’t mean you abandon all of these things (thoughts, emotions, or projections of past and future); no, in fact it means quite the opposite. It means you can relate to them in a pure and free way without any suffering. You can just relate to experience and life without feeling like you need to own or define it.

I had been taught these things as a neophyte very early in basic mindfulness training but it hadn’t clicked in the way it did on retreat. If you’re anxious, that is ok; it will come and go. If you’re sad, that is ok; it too will come and go. If you want tea, that is ok; that desire will come and go. A lesson learned that has since saved me much hardship is that satisfying a desire is not the only way for a desire to go away. The impermanence of all things makes this true.

I truly believe that this realization at the micro level was only possible for me under the conditions of retreat. I could see things I had never noticed before. On my walk to the temple each morning, for example, I noticed how much I was wanting (or desiring) to get to my destination or how I looked forward (at 5:00 a.m) to the next meal or a cup of hot tea. I call this “fractional forwardness”. In the example of walking, one will notice that clinging to the desire of arriving doesn’t change the walk. Even if late the clinging won’t change that result either. What can change is one’s clinging to the desire of some other set of conditions. The clinging is also impermanent. If you observe this feeling you’ll notice it come and go. At a more obvious level, when you understand the impermanence of all things you can become less attached to these unstable states. Much of life’s suffering lives in the attachment or clinging to impermanent things. You begin to see how much you are stacking these little micro irritations over the course of the day which eventually manifests into “general stress”. On retreat, I was able to observe on a subtle level and to see its truth. A true understanding and witnessing of impermanence at the micro level was the catalyst.

The Lack of Self

I don’t expect everyone or anyone to buy this one right away as I passively engaged with this idea for years without giving it much attention. Retreat conditions made this much clearer to me. It wasn’t until the retreat coupled with some of the teachings that I got a true and sustained glimpse of what people call “no self” or “emptiness”. During walking meditation I tried to find the source of this “self” I had identified with for so long: I am Al; I like learning languages; I am a lawyer; I go to the gym; I try to eat healthy; I enjoy science fiction and ice hockey. But what about the Al before he learned his second language? What about Al before all of those things? What about the Al that was angry, depressed, irritated, anxious. Was that the same Al? Was that the lover of ice hockey? Who is Al?

While walking I tried to find this “Al”, and I realized that there was nothing solid to grasp. Al was a way “I” related to the world; even more confusingly, Al was different depending on the scenarios of the world I was relating to. Even using “I” here is confusing as it denotes a subject; a thing that everything else is happening to. I started to realize that I wasn’t the experiencer, but that I was experience itself. This ties in very neatly with the non-dual teachings I was discussing before. However, without understanding this idea of “no self”, one can forever run on the treadmill while getting no where. I discuss some of the limits of language and the self in my article on language and reality. 

There was a liberating moment when I realized that I was not on the river bank watching the river of experience as some third party, but that I was the river and that there was no bank (as so aptly described by philosopher Sam Harris). All of this came to me in a flash during a walking meditation on the 6th day. The act of keeping close attention to the movements of your feet, followed by a dropping of concepts and labels to just experiencing “experience” rather than labelling it as something by one of my infinite, illusory selves. I had dropped the narrator, broker, or lens in which I was filtering experience and I suddenly understood what was being said when people spoke about “no self”, or the “illusory self”. I also had a taste of the immense feeling of peace, joy and aliveness that accompanies the unshackling from one’s small sense of self.

This realization did not just blow up my identity. I didn’t cease to be “Al” in that moment, or even now. Rather, I no longer cling to the identity of what it means, or what I think it means, to be “Al”. All of these things that I “am” dissolved into what they actually are: content within the context. I had intellectually wrestled with this in the past and had consistently met the brick wall of ego defence over and over: if I’m not Al, then who am I? Having felt it opposed to thinking about it, I was able to glimpse what is meant by no-self. I was always trying to dissolve the subject through the lens of the subject, which is like an index finger trying to point at itself. My prejudiced (and nervous) readings on the literature of no self, was often accompanied by a deep fear that everything I had been doing or believed in was somehow under siege by this line of thinking.

But in this moment of clarity on that walking meditation, I was able to taste the things that I believed in better than I had ever done before; they were untangled from the conceptual ropes that had obstructed me from seeing clearly. To quote Sam Harris on this subject, having realized that there is no self, one does not cease to like Chinese food if they had enjoyed it before such a realization. And that was exactly my experience. One needs the self and the mind to relate to the world. But using a self and having a “sense” of self are two separate things: one need not attach to the ephemeral watery notion of one’s self to have a name, or an identity, or even a history. Once I was able to untether the mind and become experience, opposed to being the “experiencer”, or the one experiencing, I realized that my whole life I had been identifying as the operating system, when really I was the device.

I think that’s enough on this point for now. Volumes of text have been written on the subject and I’ve already deviated from the point of this piece. To tie it all back: I was only able to have this insight at a retreat under the conditions of intense practice, silence, and instruction.

Final Thoughts

So where do you begin: 3 day? 5 day? 7 day? 10 day or more…? Realistically, I think you should start wherever you can (even if that means just starting with a daily 10 minute practice). I recently did a 1 day non-dual retreat with Loch Kelly on a weekend via zoom and it was excellent. The world has changed; there’s never been a better time to access these great teachers (even from the comfort of your own home). Once you start the process of living an examined life, and exploring the nature of your mind, you’ll find the time (as I did and do). And the more you plunge into this, like compound interest, the more the benefits will accumulate in your life. The hope being, that one day, you need not sit and meditate to find these states of spaciousness, and that your life becomes the continuous stream of awareness and experience that it has always been (and will continue to be) if you let it. The retreat showed me that your mind can become the tool (some Buddhist schools refer to it as the sixth sense) to help you relate to the world and solve problems, not to be the world, and thus being the problem. You can toggle in and out without the emotional entanglement that often causes so much suffering.

As mentioned in the intro, there is nothing inherently special about retreat. Retreat just allows one to deliberately practice a state of being that most of us tend to live in direct contradiction to most of the time.

I originally started this discussion because I had a number of talks with people about my experience on a 10 day silent meditation retreat. I became compelled to document it in a more permanent and public way thanks to this. While few may read this, those that do may just decide to begin the greatest and most noble adventure: the navigation of the nature of one’s mind. This is the journey of living an examined life. And the best part about that journey is that it never ends.

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or any of the other contact information provided here on ThoughtNotion if you’d like to discuss any of the points raised above. The resources are there, and if I can be a touchpoint, please, don’t hesitate.