So, how was it? Reflections on my first Vipassana retreat

How a death in the family and a botched rave landed me in a 10-day silent meditation course in the Berkshires

I finished my first 10-day Vipassana meditation course this past Sunday morning. I’ve been describing it as “life-changing” to those who’ve asked about the experience in the intervening days, but this feels like an understatement. Does there even exist a pithy descriptor to convey the dissolution of everything I believed to be true about myself, my place in the world, and the nature of reality?

I started this course having never successfully meditated continuously for more than a few minutes in my entire life. I took a twice-a-week class for PE credit as a freshman in college, read a book on mindfulness that I heard about on Fresh Air, tried various apps, but nothing ever stuck because it never felt like anything. Throughout this time, the specter of of a 10-day Vipassana course loomed in my subconscious as a thing I might try at some point before writing off the whole thing as being “not for me.” But that moment was always “down the road”—despite knowing full well that the road my life was traveling on would never yield 11 continuous days of unstructured time free of obligation. Then I got laid off from Meta in spring of last year.

The first round of layoffs happened only three months after I became a full-time employee. (I’d spent my first two years there as a contractor employed through a temp agency.) I was relieved to not be among the 10,000 people to have lost their livelihoods in that moment, but this quickly gave way to jealousy. The severance packages were more than reasonable and the outpouring of true compassion for the “impacted” contrasted starkly with the sham sense of camaraderie among the remaining. It was a strange feeling to face because for the longest time, what I thought I wanted more than anything was a job that paid me handsomely for doing very little. And yet, having obtained just that, I was now more miserable than ever. While sitting at my desk doing nothing between appearing in occasional meetings, I would daydream about quitting during the periods where I wasn’t too busy dissociating.

When it was announced barely 2 months later that more layoffs would be happening in the spring, everyone on my team had a feeling we would be on the chopping block—as evidenced by the fact that we had received almost no work to do in the new year. Come Memorial Day weekend, our suspicions were confirmed and I was freed from my inability to accept responsibility for my own unhappiness.

I would love to report that at this was the beginning of a period of intense introspection where I took control of my life and became solely accountable for my destiny. In reality, it took a summer of doing almost nothing, followed by an entirely fruitless and agonizing four month long job search, and finally, sitting hospice with a loved one as they shed their mortal coil. Only then did I hit rock bottom. Even so, I was still unable to look up from the ground to see the signs in front of me.

The weekend after my wife’s grandmother passed away, I found myself waving goodbye to my house, my wife, and her best friend—who had come up from the city to keep us company in Vermont. I had bought an expensive ticket to what was sure to be a legendary warehouse party many months ago and I told myself that I could be a more supportive spouse in the weeks to come if I were able to blow off some steam first. Sure, whatever. I had never been to a party by this promoter of queer raves, but I had heard great things from other people and the lineup of DJs was noteworthy enough to headline a European festival. Everyone in the ravers’ chat agreed it was going to be one for the books. And in a way, it was.

The night felt off from the moment I stepped in line, which inexplicably took 20 minutes to process 30 people into a capacious venue at the very beginning of the party.¹ Handing my coat to the coat check, I got the sense that they would lose it (which they did²). The lights over the bar were so bright that the entirety of the warehouse was lit up as if it were an office. And the sound system was woefully underpowered for the cavernous room. But the $70 cover I’d never get back and the reputations of the headlining DJs kept hope alive against all evidence to the contrary.

At around 5AM, my friends and I were trying to dance in a tight circle to keep the sweaty, shirtless men with no spatial awareness from barging in between us as they had been all night. I closed my eyes briefly and saw a vision of a saw blade cutting through my left arm, back and forth, back and forth, fresh blood seeping from the pulsating wound. After a minute, the handle appeared and it was revealed that my own right hand was gripping the saw. A shocking reveal, yet strangely comforting. If it’s my hand, it is within my power to let go of the blade. I snapped out of it and made pleading eye contact with my friend J. It was time to pull the ripcord.

After 5 hours of being steeped in the steamy exhalations of other people, emerging from the venue into an unseasonably wet January rainstorm felt like a baptism, freeing me from the hell of other people misbehaving on the dance floor. I saw on J’s face that she was experiencing the same thing. We walked a few steps around the corner to call a car, shared a deep breath, and burst into laughter.

The joke was still on us though because car after car refused to pick up, forcing us into the 45-minute subway journey to her apartment. We spent the entire ride comparing our observations on how bad the vibes were and cracking up at the depths of our own deceptions while dodging the judgmental, exhausted, annoyed stares of strangers sharing the space. The entire time, our bodies continued buzzing off the cursed energy of the night, seeming to dissolve and reconstitute every few minutes as the M train rumbled along the elevated tracks above Ridgewood, Queens.

We arrived at J’s apartment around sunrise, removed our soaked coats, put the kettle on and cut up some fruits before settling onto either end of her couch. The tone shifted in a contemplative direction and I recounted the privilege and profound sadness of sitting hospice with someone you love, who loved you; of seeing their corpse devoid of spirit. I talked about how it led me to realize that important parts of me were no longer willing to suffer another minute of a job I didn’t believe in, regardless of the financial repercussions. I told her about my vision of the saw in my arm. She took this all in and paused for a moment before suggesting that it was time for me to sign up for Vipassana.

For as long as we’ve been friends, J would go off grid for about 2 weeks at a time, often with little or no notice. The reason was always the same: Vipassana. I don’t think she was my first introduction to the concept, but she was the only person I knew who’d done it more than once. We’d talked about it occasionally in the intervening decade, but she’d never once evangelized it. Until now.

Those who know me well probably think of me as the giver of advice, but rarely the taker. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that this instinct to give freely whenever possible stems from the deeper hope that I will receive it in return, during a time of need. That time had come.

Fast forward 5 months and you find me sitting cross-legged atop a stack of cushions in a dimly lit meditation hall in Western Massachusetts. I am just one of the roughly 140 people in the room. My eyes are closed with enough force to produce a slight furrow in my brow, my back and neck are slightly more hunched than is healthy, and my fingers interlaced with my hands in my lap. It is around 8:35PM, a few minutes into the last group sitting of the evening. The 1991 audio recording of the renowned and deceased meditation teacher just instructed us to narrow the area of awareness to the patch of skin above the upper lip and below the nostrils as we breathe naturally. This is in contrast to the past 72 hours, where we were told to observe the breath itself through both nostrils in addition to the upper lip.

Up to this point, I had found it nearly impossible to actually focus on my natural breath. If, as teacher says, the mind is a raging bull elephant that this technique was meant to tame, then focusing on the sensation of my natural breath felt like trying to restrain the beast with nothing but dental floss and a cowboy hat. Each session would start with a few minutes of sustained presence, but once the bull realized what was happening, it would buck and thrash against the slightest touch. Rather than keep tossing floss into the wind, I left my mind to wander amongst the traumas and dramas of the past, crash into future plans and anxieties that will almost surely never come to bear, and stumble into low effort memes to describe my experiences so far. That was all about to change.

Within a few short breaths, a tingling sensation arises. Despite focusing intently on just the upper lips, I cannot ignore that my bottom lip is now tingling too after a few more breaths. And now my entire mouth. Within 20 seconds, it feels like a swarm of bees is trying to escape my skull. On the next exhale, the barrier between my cranium and corpus melts in an instant as the buzzing rushes down my neck and through my chest on its way to the outer limbs. The next inhale pulls it all right back up into the top of my skull, dissolving into lightness and leaving a trail of ecstatic vibrations in its wake. Bean fully freaked, I make the conscious decision to break my focus and begin to deepen and steady my breath. I feel my extremities start to re-solidify as quickly as they’d started dissolving mere moments before. A few more controlled breaths steadies my torso. And finally, my head settles into a much lower frequency vibration, which persists for the rest of the half-hour sitting.

At the end of the session, I thought about not saying anything and just going back to my room to try and sleep it off. But I was somewhat concerned about the continued buzzing throughout my body. The assistant teacher’s response to my description betrayed no surprise, but his words implied that this was not an expected result at this stage of the training.

I returned to my room and tried to sleep, but it was several hours before the tingling subsided enough to allow drowsiness to settle in. This gave me plenty of time to reflect on what had happened. I came to no satisfying spiritual, metaphysical, or epistemological conclusions, but I did know one thing for certain: It was time to drop whatever reservations remained and fully submit to the work.

The remaining seven days contained many more moments of shock and wonderment, but none of this magnitude. This is somewhat by design. We are trained to approach all sensation with equanimity—that is to accept and observe what comes without reacting positively or negatively. By day 9, I could have started levitating in the middle of a session and be more intently focused on the tension that was blocking me from fully experiencing the sensations in my left knee.

At the end of it all, I am just slightly less miserable than I was before I started. And I feel a persistent and tangible awareness of my emotions that didn’t previously exist. My therapist will be thrilled to hear it.

The nature of a wound is to heal over time if left alone. But realizing I’m holding my own saw is just the first step. Putting it down is another. Stopping myself from picking it up again, when I’ve been raised to do so at every opportunity, will take a lifetime of work. Perhaps multiple.

I’ve been shown the path to reducing my misery over time through persistent practice. I don’t know if I have the gumption in this life to keep it up indefinitely (if past experience is anything to go off of, I probably don’t), but the mere knowledge that a path exists fills me with a renewed sense of purpose and direction that I hadn’t known was missing.

It may sound like I’ve found religion or something similar, but you’ll have to trust me that it’s not. I won’t try to explain further because—as the previous paragraph demonstrates—I find it impossible to talk about this in a way that doesn’t immediately collapse into a pile of saccharine new age cliches.

I also want to avoid coloring the expectations of anyone who is considering signing up for their own Vipassana course. I came into this experience barely knowing anything about what to expect and I believe this played a big part in the benefits I ultimately received from my participation. If you are thinking about doing it, you should. You can find out all about how to enroll at dhamma.org. And if you’re not, then don’t. It makes no difference.³

1. I later learned that people arriving at peak time ~2AM waited over 2 hours in the pouring rain.

2. I gave them the ticket they gave me, only to be presented with someone else’s coat. The attendant then assured me that I was to blame for the mix up as I calmly described my coat to them.

3. Although you would get this low effort joke if you read it again after attending a course.