Meditating 10 days in silence (or trying to)

My experience with Vipassana meditation and learning more about Buddhism

A Buddha at Borobudur temple, Indonesia — © Daniele Alfarone

Spoiler alert: If you are thinking of attending a meditation retreat any time soon, I suggest you not to read this article. Reading about my experience may give you certain expectations, whereas it is best to go there with an open mind. Everyone’s journey is different.

While in Bali, I attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. You arrive the afternoon before, meditate for 10 days straight, then leave the morning after. It’s roughly 10 hours of meditation per day, totalling over 100 hours. No phones, no talking, no eye contact, no reading, no writing. Just eating, sleeping, and meditating.

As you sit down on the first day and start meditating, something within you starts rebelling. Your body produces acute pain in unusual places — you were not designed to sit for 10 hours without moving. Your mind acts like a wild monkey that has just been caged. ‘What!? You want me to spend over 100 hours just observing respiration and body sensations? Have you gone mad?’

On the 11th day, I left the center relieved and exhausted — sleep deprived beyond what I thought I could endure. The alarm at 4 AM every morning was brutal. On top of that, my usual deep sleep just wasn’t there. Most mornings I was already awake before those 4 am bells. During the day, as much as I tried, I could not nap, despite how tired I was. When I told the teacher about this, he answered: ‘Very good! It means that your meditation is working well. Your brain is processing a lot. It’s normal, I also am not sleeping deeply these days’. Even Goenka, the latest prominent Vipassana teacher, explained that you sleep less when you meditate, and even when you lay in bed awake, meditation will make your mind rest. But I do know a bit about the science of sleep, and this did not sound healthy to me.

What an incredible, extreme experience this was. A once in a lifetime experience — at least if you ask me today. I am sure reflections will keep coming over time, but I already reflected quite a lot during the experience (probably too much) and hence have a few things to say.

My mind across present, past, and future

I think that in my awake hours my mind has roughly distributed its time this way: a third experiencing the present moment, a third dwelling in the past, and a third looking into the future.

Experiencing the present meant staring into the jungle during breaks, observing squirrels jumping from tree to tree or spiders building their webs, eating mindfully — but mostly, obviously, meditating. Here by “meditating” I do not mean sitting cross-legged with closed eyes. I mean effective meditation time, when the mind is entirely focused on the breath or on body sensations and thoughts that may arise are promptly recognized and dropped. In these deep meditative states, I felt a variety of things. At times acute pain in my knees or my upper back, in a constant struggle to find a comfortable position. At times a strong headache, stemming from the lack of sleep. At times no loud sensations, but subtle ones, which only start emerging after days of practice. I felt my heartbeat in my outer rings of my nostrils or pulsing in my elbow. A single hair touching my lip, my breath caressing my mustache, a tingling feeling moving in a dance on my skin. At times I felt I could control my sensations: by visualizing piercing through an area of my chest I could bring a feeling of chill from my chest to my back or increasing or decreasing my knee pain on demand. That felt revelatory — a glimpse of the power of a (trained) mind over things we did not know we could alter and control. Twice over the 10 days, I experienced for some minutes something I can only describe as bliss: a very light state, when you feel like you are floating, every part of the body permeated in a fresh pleasant flow, the mind in deep peace. It’s so hard to describe bliss!

My mind spent the rest of the supposed meditation time either in the past or in the future — ignoring my body.

Revisiting the past was something I did not realize I needed so much of. My subconscious kept presenting me with memories of conversations, images, events, from the last 10-15 years of my life. In some cases they were significant events that came up unsurprisingly, but in other cases they were memories that I did not even know I still stored. I was expecting some kind of eureka moment in revisiting so much, like the realization of a clear pattern. But there was none of that. It was more like a projection of a movie about my life, in a seemingly random order. Some memories, old and new, brought me to tears. Some made me smile. It was also interesting to notice how nothing came about my childhood or teenage years, as if there is really not much for me left to process there.

Projecting into the future meant planning what to do next week or next year — but mostly about writing. Not only did I have dozens of ideas of topics I want to write about: I actually started to write things down, word by word, in my head! Some of these ideas or some of the “written” passages I came up with I liked so much that I really wanted to write them down — then and there. That is why the writing ban was by far the hardest rule for me. I wanted to get them out of my head, so I could actually focus at the task at hand — meditating! — and I feared I’d forget everything. Out of all the writings, the most significant one was a short story inspired by an old conversation with an ex from 12-13 years ago — which was completely out of my radar. The story came to me almost word by word, like a revelation, on Day 1, after 6-7 hours of meditation. I guess that’s what artists mean when they say that some songs just write themselves. The story and the underlying memories were so deep and sad that made me teary. I realized then and there that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever written — so far only in my brain — and so I was determined not to forget it. I revisited it every day, making only minor tweaks. When I left the meditation center today, I headed straight into a café and wrote the story down, effortlessly. Overall, thinking so much about writing strongly reaffirmed what I already suspected: there is no project that excites me as much as writing, so I will make it my main occupation after this trip.

Vipassana and Buddhism

Every evening, we watched a 75 minute video talk by Goenka. I came to love those talks, as they provided the only intellectual diversion of the day. A time in which you could sit normally, with some back support, and just relax and listen to ideas and stories.

I learned that Vipassana is one of India's most ancient techniques of meditation. Buddha re-discovered it 2500 years ago, perfected it, and spent the rest of his life teaching it, as a path to alleviate human suffering. The key idea behind it, as far as I can understand it with my non-enlightened mind, is the following:

1. All the time, you receive inputs, from your 5 senses and from your own mind (thoughts)

2. Each input triggers certain sensations in your body: heat, perspiration, tension, deep relaxation, altered breathing, accelerated heartbeat, etc.

3. You subconsciously classify those sensations as pleasant or unpleasant and, accordingly, react with either craving (wanting more of it) or aversion (wanting less of it)

4. All things in life, pleasant or unpleasant, are impermanent — they arise, and eventually pass. Hence, your desire is bound to generate misery. Enter human suffering.

(Pardon me, I am sure Buddha did not use bullet points.)

Vipassana teaches you to observe sharply at your body sensations, as to develop awareness of your emotional state, and maintain equanimity — that is do not react to the sensations, understanding their impermanence. This promises to end, or drastically reduce, your suffering. Equanimity may sound like cold indifference to us Westerners, but Buddhists claim that mature equanimity produces a radiance and warmth of being.

Consciousness, subconscious, and identity

I learned that intentional interactions between your conscious mind and your subconscious are possible — and can go both ways. Your rational mind can stimulate your subconscious to make you relax by intentionally taking deep, long breaths. Vice versa, your subconscious can inform your rational mind of how you’re truly feeling by producing evident body sensations (e.g. a lump in the throat) — and you can train your rational mind to be more attuned to those sensations, so that you also become aware of subtler ones. Being aware of your emotional state at all times is a pillar of Vipassana and I can see how it can help in life. We live under the illusion that our rational mind is the decision maker, but there is so much that gets strongly influenced — when not dictated — by your subconscious. Kahneman explains this very well in Thinking, Fast and Slow, my favorite non-fiction book. Many of our decisions are taken by our subconscious mind and only retroactively justified rationally — with arguments that are often plausible, but not really why you took that decision. We attach our sense of identity solely to our rational mind, when in reality the mind has many depths (the duality conscious-subconscious is just a simplification) and the mind and body functions are deeply intertwined and cannot be decoupled.

This illusion of full rationality is mostly a Western thing. In the East they traditionally understood this much better, perhaps explaining why there is much greater spirituality there. Over these days, it became quite clear to me how in order to experience deeper truths, learn more about yourself, and find more inner peace, you have to quieten your rational mind and stop intellectualizing everything. This is a pillar of Buddha’s teaching: an experiential truth is deeper than an intellectual truth, a living wisdom is greater than that of someone who only read books and thought about things. That is why Vipassana meditation is designed to make you experience some of the fallacies of the rational brain and how your subconscious can become more conscious, rather than just trying to explain it with words.

So here I go: a very long-winded intellectual explanation for why I should think less, and time spent writing about meditation, instead of actually meditating — I am a living contradiction!

This sense of identity we develop, this “I” — the Buddhists believe — is merely an illusion. Our body keeps changing, our thoughts keep changing, our beliefs evolve. We change — exactly as the nature around us changes. We are made of billions of cells that keep dying and being born. So what’s this I we talk about?
There is a quote I love about this:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man.” (Heraclitus)

But our sense of identity does not even stop there! Around the “I”, there is a larger sphere of the “mine”, which include those around us: my son, my father, my brother, my best friend, etc. Next, what we strongly believe in: my philosophy, my thinking, my beliefs. And finally, even things we don’t possess at all: my desires. We develop a great attachment to all this, without realizing its ever-changing, impermanent nature — and this condemns us to unhappiness in our lives.

Realizing the flaws of these thought patterns can help dissolve our egos. This, in turn, can make us feel much more connected to others and to nature, part of something bigger than us. This feels to me to be another key difference between East and West. In the East there is (or at least there was — before the East started copying the West) less individualism, more community, more connection to the land, and hence more spirituality and inner peace.

Closing reflections

As I write these words, I sense some hints of wisdom in them. But then again — it’s only an intellectual wisdom. To turn it into something useful in my life, I need to practice it, experience it, live it. Otherwise, as Goenka kept repeating in the evening discourses, ‘you are just playing an intellectual game’.

My expectation was that after 3-4 days, 40+ hours of meditation, you'd mostly run out of thoughts. Your mind would quieten and meditation would become easier and more effective. But it looks like you cannot run out of thoughts — or at least I could not, at least not now. I am going through a huge life transition at the moment, as I closed a 9-year entrepreneurship chapter and I am shaping up a new one, with endless possibilities. I wonder whether coming here during a more ordinary phase of my life, for example just taking 2 weeks off work, would have made for more effective meditation. At the same, if my subconscious kept throwing at me past memories and future plans, it means that I needed to go through all that. Surely, for many people a Vipassana experience is much more than quiet meditation time.

In one of his evening discourses, Goenka talked about how he saw many students arriving to the meditation center looking miserable — and then leaving radiant, with a big smile on their face. It was kind of the opposite for me. I arrived there very happy, grateful to have the opportunity to experience something so unique, and ready to fully embrace it. I left feeling exhausted, with a restless mind and, yes, with a smile on my face — but mostly from relief that it was finally over. I think I really do not function well under sleep deprivation, and everything is less enjoyable. Of course, that does not shed a bad light on the whole experience. In a couple of days with a calmer mind and deeper, longer sleep, I’ll be myself again, and what I’ll be left with is a lot of learnings and things to reflect and work on.

I already know that I will not aim for enlightenment — not my nirvana. I will already be content if I can take steps towards less judgment, craving, aversion, and develop more presence, compassion, happiness and, ultimately, inner peace.

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The story that came to me on the first day, almost word by word, is published here: