Video summary:
I’ve changed my definition of success:
“Success is the ability to arrive at and depart from moments of deliberate calmness for yourself and others.”
Despite my optimism about the future, I have, throughout my life and career, also developed a fair bit of rationalism. Unfortunately, I do not believe the future we are developing toward will be one where there is less anxiety, depression, stress and acquisition of our attention.
Therefore I’ve made it my mission to help my future self and the people in my life to Outcalm each other. In my search and education for this pursuit of success, I underwent a 10 days Vipassana silent retreat.
These are my reflections and my highs and lows.
TL:DR Vipassana meditation is perhaps the most non-dogmatic practice I have learned. Despite what critics might say, the practice asks you to train your ability to see the world as it is and not as you want it to be. In my eyes, such skills are becoming difficult in our world of accelerating information and responsibilities. To me, Vipassana presents an opportunity to not only regain more clarity on what constitutes a meaningful life but also how you can become more present in every moment of life.
The Scientist and the Cure for Suffering
2600 years ago, a scientist in India set off on the task to understand and solve the cause of human misery. After six years of research, he found the solution. A method so profound and with no dogmatic foundation that anyone could practice it and free themselves from suffering.
Many people were not very happy with the scientist because they thought he was interfering with the way of life that the Gods and religions had set in place.
Although the scientist educated millions, the practice was lost and changed from its original structure to be split up and adopted by various religions and gurus.
2500 years later, the practice was rediscovered, and over the last 50 years, it has started to spread again in the same form as it was originally taught. The scientist's name was Buddha, and the practice is Vipassana meditation.
My Own Experience With Meditation
I have been meditating for more than 15 years and have moved through a fair bit of techniques and methods.
My first encounter with meditation was at 14 when I interrupted my father as he meditated in his office early in the morning.“Please come back later, son.” I was confused as I couldn't figure out what he was doing. By the looks of it, he was just sitting in silence.
It was not until years later that I understood what he was practising, and today, I refer to meditation as sitting since people get all kinds of ideas about what meditation is or should be.
To many, meditation is a tool to be calm, and while this is certainly part of the practice, it is but the early benefits of meditation. Over time meditators will experience their practice graduate from a tool to a way of life and, finally, to enlightenment (or so they say).
For a long time, the idea of a tool was what I wanted my meditation to be. A tool to be more productive, effective and focused on my life goals.
However, I have come to experience that my 30s brought with it sensations I could not outwork, outsmart or outearn, such as anxiety, stress and a further detachment from my life goal.
At 30, I was making more money than ever before in my life; I was in great shape and had lots of friends around me. But left to my own thoughts, I would feel empty and sad.
I was humbled by the sheer weight that the world and myself put on my shoulders, and suddenly my meditation tool was not as effective anymore.
Today, years later, and with life throwing its curve balls as it does, I’ve completed a 10-day silent retreat and learned a method that challenges my past idea of meditation and life.
Two Words: Hard Work
In my 20s, I was ordained as a Buddhist monk and was, throughout the process, well introduced to Buddha and his story.
Still, Buddhism as a religion has a different narrative of Buddha. He is represented as a holy man rather than what he actually was: a man in his early 30s who was so fed up with the condition of suffering that he left it all behind to find a way out of misery.
This was the introduction that S.N. Goenka, the late teacher of the Dhamma.org Vipassana organisation, gave about Buddha. Suddenly Buddha went from a man that seemed unreachable to one of similar age who I could perhaps even share a few beers with and talk about life.
It was here my hard work began because Buddha would not want to talk about life; he wanted me to work on my reaction to it. This is what Vipassana meditation is about. Vipassana means "insight", and it is said to be the same method Buddha practised.
The 10 days you spend in silence doing the work are designed for you to get as close to the same practice as Buddha did without distraction from the outside world.
I won’t get into details about the structure of the course as I believe it will serve you better if you have fewer expectations about it, but here are the general points:
You are not allowed to write, speak, read or interact in any way with other participants.
You are to meditate about 10 hours daily between 4AM to 930PM. You get a few hours of rest and eat only vegetarian food.
You are to work for the full 10 days to learn the technique.
At first, I thought the silence (called “Nobel Silence”) was to make your mind more relaxed, but it is actually the opposite.
The silence is set for you not to be influenced by others and their experience of the method and rather develop your own truth about the practice. Something that is terribly difficult as you are naturally conditioned to create meaning through interaction with others.
The practice itself is where the work begins. Being an avid meditator myself, I had an ego going into the practice (always a good thing, right?) with the intention that I would do all sittings and keep a strong posture.
The result was that I, on Day 3, had made peace with the reality that I might leave with insights, but I might need to amputate my right knee for it.
However, the beauty of the practice is that it helps you overcome sensations like strong pains, and today my knee feels better than ever.
These humbling insights happen on different days for different people, often multiple times, and Day 3 was a small insight in comparison to the 3 that were to come in the following days. These were:
I am way more distracted than I think.
The equanimous mind is a beginner's mind.
Vipassana teaches you how to live life.
Your Surface-Level Sensations Are the Top of the Iceberg
Everything you react to or are distracted by starts as a sensation, from what makes you ich your arm, the words of the email you send to the tone you use speaking with your mother. Everything has a cause, and most of these causes we don’t pay any conscious attention to.
But what if I told you that underneath your surface level of distraction or “pebbles” lies subconscious distractions, or “boulders” that occupy much deeper and dominant behavioural patterns?
These patterns remain unseen to the conscious mind, and for me, they started surfacing in two very clear manners.
On Day 4, I started getting new visitors as I was meditating. It was no longer sounds, inches or thoughts about business and the world outside; it was instead women.
Similar to how Odysseus, tied to the mast of his ship, craved the sirens singing their songs, I found myself deep in the sensations of former romantic partners and fantasies. After two days, the sensations faded, but I began a more terrifying distraction as a result.
On Day 7, I started catastrophising. I am not unfamiliar with my anxiety, and catastrophising is one of the ways it gets my attention.
Usually, it has a trigger that comes in the form of alcohol or high stress, but neither was present during my silent retreat.
One evening I realised a ringing in my ear and thought it was an electrical sound from the fan above my head. I put in earplugs and realised that the sound was coming from inside my head.
I was shocked as I couldn’t figure out whether this was something that had always been there or something I had gotten as a result of intensive meditation.
“Oh my God, I’ve broken my mind!” The ringing caused me to panic and imagine a future of never being able to hear my future children speak and going mad. I had to leave the meditation hall to relieve myself from my panic attack (which I did thanks to Dr. Hubermanns "Physiological Sigh").
I then continued my meditation, and while the ringing has not stopped even today, I now treat it with equanimity.
Equanimity Is Pretty Cool
My way out of suffering at the moment sensations arose was through equanimity, a state of mind that refers to effortlessly maintaining an inner calm and awareness regardless of external circumstances.
Coming into the retreat, I admit that the equanimous mind was a state of mind I had understood intellectually. Again, I was humbled.
Intellectual understanding did not help me when distractions arose.
At one point, I was thinking about the pain in my knee, and whether it would be permanent damage, then I was thinking about that my nose was really itchy, and then I was questioning whether I was escaping my real-world responsibilities by going away to 10 days and that I should really just get a job at that startup.
Trying to reason with your thoughts is like reasoning with a madman. No effort of intellect will make them understand. You can only observe, expect things to change and try not to hold judgement.
Think of equanimity like real spontaneous laughter in the sense that it has no effort. If you are attentive, it just appears, and at a moment's notice, it is gone again.
I had such a moment on Day 4. Because of Nobel Silence, I did not know any of my fellow meditators by name, so I would give them nicknames based on their apparel or demeanour.
In the meditation hall, I had two students sitting next to me, one at my right, nicknamed “The Builder”, and another directly in front of him, nicknamed “Warrior Monk”.
In the meditation hall, you could borrow pillows as support for your sitting. There were all kinds of pillows that you could stuff underneath your knees and legs to help you deal with the joint pains.
Warrior Monk is an older gentleman who always wore a brown uniform that looks like the ones Shaolin Monks wear (hence the nickname). He would come into the hall and sit on his cushion using only a small pillow (the size of a wallet) as support. Then he sat like a statue, not moving a muscle for the entire meditation period. He was very admirable.
The Builder is a tall man about my age who did not get his nickname until that Day 4. As I entered the hall early in the morning and sat down, I glanced quickly at my two fellow students.
Warrior Monk was sitting as he does with his one small pillow, but The Builder had made a throne of cushions, with a backrest and about 8 big square pillows for support of each knee. His throne raised him a head higher than the Warrior Monk, making it look like the Buddha appeared beside me in the flesh.
The stark contrast and surprise of the two meditators made me laugh hard, but due to Nobel Silence, I held it in, turning the laughter into a series of stomach cramps and tears flowing from my eyes.
It left me in a momentary state of pure, effortless bliss with no craving for the moment that had passed and no expectation of when the next moment will arise. I believe this was my first encounter with equanimity.
Since then, this effortless state has become my practice for the equanimous mind. When my “boulder” distractions appeared in the days to follow, I worked on having an attentive mind that held no judgment towards what arose and passed away.
Of course, at times, I would be lost in thought for minutes on end and agitated that I couldn’t focus.
But here again, the equanimous mind matters as I would return to the practice doing my best not to hold judgment towards my own shortcomings. I realised I can be terribly hard on myself.
Since the silent retreat, I’ve come to consider my practice for an equanimous mind similar to insulating yourself. Imagine having an air gap between the arising sensations and your reactions. Suddenly even if the outside temperature changes, you can still keep you cool.
Vipassana Teaches You How To Live a Good Life so You Can Die a Happy Person
I am not enlightened, I am not on the other side of anything, and I have not found the meaning of life. I’ve humbled my ego, gotten more familiar with the deeper behaviours of my mind and found a practice that seems to bring more of “me” out into the world.
In the days since the retreat, I started embracing a condition that I’ve been averting for a long time in my life, I am pretty lost. Lost in the sense that a lot of the roles and responsibilities I’ve taken on in my career and life have not brought me closer to the peace I had hoped would come with it.
Looking at my reactions, especially in my 30s, I believe my efforts have brought me closer to what others consider success, but further from my definition of it: “Success is the ability to arrive at and depart from moments of deliberate calmness for yourself and others.”
This has made me reflect on the primary regret of the dying: “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”. Two things have come from this reflection:
Intellectually I understand it is important to live a life true to myself, but
I have no practical idea how to do that.
Goenka speaks of this intellectual understanding as one of the reasons to practice Vipassana because it teaches you how to develop your own truth about yourself. This was what the Buddha did; he did it non-dogmatic, without influence from others and only with his mind.
In today's world, we rely a lot on understanding why we do things before we do things. We like to be read, have studied and rationalised every action so that we can be certain that we are doing the right thing.
The problem with this is that we don’t become familiar with our truth, that is, our psychology and the nature of our mind.
It is not that intellect and critical thinking are bad. It is that we rarely have the opportunity to allow our mind to settle so that we can really observe what arises. AND not treat what arises as good or bad.
If we cannot bring our mind to a silent place, how are we going to make sense of it? How can we truly know if we are doing what is right for us?
I had a conversation with my father on this topic, and he brought up a valid point. “If we cultivate an equanimous mind, a mind where no desires or aversion exist, is it not a sad reality as we want to love and care?”
I thought of the Buddha and whether he was a caring and loving person. I believe he was.
I believe the reality of a mind in its equanimous state is a mind that is free to care and love without hindrance. In other words, our desires and aversions complicate what we truly are capable of, which is effortless love and compassion for ourselves and those around us.
When I think about my own life, I believe my reactions have brought me further from my ability to care. It is something that I will work on building the courage to pursue for the rest of my life.
An Ancient Brain in a Highly Technological World
I understand that some readers might think that love is not a good enough reason to pursue meditation and equanimity, I know because I was one of them. I believe it is because love, as a word, is romanticised in our modern world.
We can’t just go off-grid and sit in silence for 10 days to be more loving. We have responsibilities, roles and companies to build. In the world today, you are either on the curve creating value, understanding AI and innovating the next big thing, or you fall behind.
No one wants to fall behind; I can work on loving when I am wealthy.
Our world today is fundamentally different from the world Buddha and even Gorenka lived in. Time is more valuable, and 10 days now have a price that can be hard to afford.
At the same time, sensation and distraction are no longer just the nature of the mind but a thriving business model. The information age does not want you to develop equanimity because it requires a reaction from you to keep growing. Peace of mind is bad for business.
“When information is free, it is our attention that becomes costly. So we must be increasingly aware of where we invest it.” - Alexander Avanth, TEDx: Navigating Digital Mindfulness
It is difficult to find time to invest in yourself. Most of our investments are made indirectly into assets related to the self (think business, family, relationships) but not very often directly in the self.
My practice of sitting is the most direct investment into my own personal development. Additionally, as I put more time into my practice, I experience a direct benefit to those around me. In other words, I Outcalm myself so that I can Outcalm the world around me. I believe this is what the world needs.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus and also a long-term Vipassana practitioner, wrote it scarily well:
“Today you have a higher chance to die from your own hand than in armed conflict or natural disasters combined.” - Yuval Harari, Homo Deus
I am not citing him to have you fear your mind but to invite you to understand that whatever seems to be going wrong in life begins and ends there.
“Begins” is the magic word. It is the essence of every practice, whether building a new business, a new relationship or observing your thoughts.
You are not in the middle of your life, career, or relationship, regardless of what you believe. You are beginning it, and you can begin again with whatever did not work for you earlier. Hold no judgment.
Personally, I will begin my journey of being lost, and I will do so with the practice of equanimity. I hope to share my learnings on the way and invite you to share yours with me.
So to begin our journey, will you sit with me?
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