My 7-Day Mindfulness Meditation Experience

 

Image: Sanjog Shankar

I’d signed up for a Vipassana meditation retreat that would involve 7 days of doing absolutely nothing. No mobile phone, no Netflix, and worst of all, no social interaction whatsoever. Ok, I am exaggerating a little. I was going to do something while I meditated — namely, watch my breath. If my attention strayed, I would bring it back to my breath. From 7am to 9 pm every day, I would alternate between sitting meditation and walking meditation, an hour at a time each, with breaks only for meals and a brief Q&A session with Santikaro, the Buddhist monk leading the retreat. This intimidating routine was going to make me mindful, which I was told would quiet the constant chatter inside my head, switch out my negative thoughts and emotions for mostly positive ones, and allow me to sleep like a child at night instead of counting sheep in the wee hours.

Vipassana, translated as insight, is a type of mindfulness meditation that was taught by the Buddha himself 2500 years ago, and popularized worldwide in the late 20th century by the Burmese Indian teacher Satya Narayan Goenka. We’ve all heard of taking a deep breath to calm down. Vipassana takes this to a much deeper level. In practicing sitting and observing your breath and bodily sensations, you develop a new level of calm that is deep-rooted and unshakeable. Loosely, here’s how it is supposed to work:

• By learning to observe your breath and your body, you develop the “muscle” to observe your thoughts and emotions as things apart from yourself.
• By creating a distance and letting your thoughts and emotions arise and fade without getting caught up in them, you weaken their power over you.
• Your breathing becomes smoother, triggering the body’s parasympathetic or relaxation response. Your muscles loosen and unclench.
• You have more room in your head for creativity and new insights, or to resolve hidden baggage (we all have some!) that rises to the surface .
• With regular practice, these benefits become permanent.

While I was familiar with other meditation techniques that used music, visualization and concentration, this retreat would be my introduction to the art of doing almost nothing. Further, the most sitting I’d ever done at a stretch was my 45 min morning routine, epitomized more by its non-performance. At the last minute, due to a COVID case at the meditation center, the retreat would now follow a less-rigorous virtual format where we would practice from home. Nevertheless, could I sit for many hours in a day without being overwhelmed by aches, pains and restlessness? I was about to find out.

Day minus 1: In preparation for the upcoming week, I read The Equanimous Mind, an account of his first Vipassana retreat by Manish Chopra, a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. I even sit watching my breath for two hour-long sessions, desperately fighting sleep every inch of the way. As the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy before going into battle”.

Day 0: I surprise myself by bounding out of bed at 5 am and meditating for 90 minutes before the 7 am group meditation, the first session of the retreat. With the enthusiasm of a new convert, I have clocked another three hours of meditation by the 1:30 pm Q&A session with Santikaro. When I report feeling a new found calm and clarity, he says I’ve experienced samadhi, a mind established in equanimity. I sleep like a child that night.

Day 2: I wake up at 5 am once again. I clock more hours of meditation. As my mind becomes calmer and quieter, I become aware of a tightness in the muscles of my scalp, neck and shoulders. Santikaro thinks it could be due to underlying stress or negative emotions. I’ll discover its cause in a few days, on Day 7. Once again, I sleep blissfully at night.

Day 3: At the 7 am session, Santikaro leads a guided meditation contemplating Support. With the other participants, I contemplate how the entire Universe has supported me on my journey to where I am at this moment, doing what I am doing. On this journey, I have been supported by my parents, extended family, friends, teachers, society as a whole, my workplace Microsoft, the Earth, and my own body. Even my detractors and opponents, unconsciously, have led me to being where I am now. We rarely think about this, focusing instead on the negative things in our lives. This occurred as a deep insight, not as an intellectual thought, and made me realize how much I should be grateful for.

Day 4: Things take a downturn. I wake up late and missed part of the group meditation. My efforts to sit and be mindful are lackluster. I fight the urge to sleep all day. My mind wanders in a dream-like delirium, dredging up various negative thoughts and emotions.

Day 5: I fall off the pedestal. Discouraged by the previous day, I don’t meditate at all. I have no knack for this, the first few days were a false dawn, I tell myself.

Day 6: I am late again for the morning group meditation and miss Santikaro’s instructions. I remind myself that it’s the last day. The agony will end soon. I sit and attempt to put into practice the instructions from the previous day. I breathe gently, with my whole body. I bring kindness into my meditation, instead of judging myself for my lack of “progress”. Suddenly, my mind expands into boundless Awareness, with my breath at the center. My thoughts and emotions are still present, but are a tiny part of this infinite space, clustered around the breath. I can observe them with detachment, as if they belong to someone else, not me. The tightness in my scalp, neck and shoulders that has been nagging me since Day 2 eases up. Santikaro validates my experience in the afternoon’s Q&A session. I float unperturbed in an ocean of inner silence for the rest of the day. It's as if I am meeting an old friend after years, whose company I've forgotten how much I enjoyed.  I am Mindful with a capital M.

Day 7: I am up early once again, after a restful night’s sleep. The retreat ends with the morning meditation. The space and quiet in my head from the previous day continue unabated. Until 11 am. I am on a phone call with one of my doctors. The conversation turns contentious and I get worked up. I feel the muscles of my scalp, neck and shoulders seize. (Aha, this is one of the places my body stores stress!) The next four hours are a fall from grace. My mind is taken over by rumination and the phone call replays repeatedly in my head. Six days of mindfulness have evaporated in an instant and my self-esteem is at rock bottom. At 3 pm, I decide I am going to fight back. I am going to put the lessons of the past week into practice. I sit down, close my eyes and start observing my breath: in-out, in-out. It takes about a half-hour, but I manage to regain some of the sense of calm and equanimity that I felt on Day 2. The tension in my muscles eases up. Not quite the Infinite Awareness of Day 6, but I’ll take what I can get.

Post-Script: In my previous post, I’d shared the story of Jeff, who brought his hypertension under control with the daily practice of mindfulness. Herbert Benson, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has extolled the benefits of mindfulness on the human body — reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and depression — as early as 1975.In his best-selling 2011 book When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté has convincingly shown the connection between stress and diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and diabetes. Nipping stress in the bud with a daily practice of mindfulness seems to be a no-brainer in our quest for healthy mind and body.

When Life Blurs Your Vision

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever.” 

- Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (2011)

Image: Cat’s Eye Nebula, NASA Chandra, Hubble

It was on a business trip to Tokyo that Jeff learned he was at risk of losing one of his eyes. For about a week now, he’d been ignoring the strange dark curtain that had come down over the field of vision in his left eye. It’s a hair or something that has got stuck in my eye, it will eventually come out, he told himself. His teammate Kentaro wasn’t so sanguine when he casually mentioned it to him over lunch “I think you need to go to the ER right now, you may have a retinal tear.”

Two hours later, Jeff would discover that Kentaro was right on the money. As if from far away, he heard the Japanese doctor explain in a polite accent that his retina had partially detached from the back of the eyeball. He needed to be operated on right away to not lose the use of that eye permanently. And as part of the recovery process, he would have to lie face down for two months post-surgery to allow the retina to adhere back to the eyeball. No flying for another four months.

Let’s rewind a few months. A chip designer for a major semiconductor manufacturer, Jeff had just won approval for a new product that his team had proposed. He should have been breaking out the champagne. However, his management had not approved the extra heads he’d requested to fill out his team, and Jeff, a self-described Type A personality, was completely bent out of shape.

As he sat stewing over his computer that evening, he developed a throbbing headache. By midnight, the pain was unbearable and he could feel his heart palpitating under his rib cage. In addition to chronically high BP, Jeff was prone to temporary but extreme spikes in blood pressure. Worried, his wife Nicole dashed him to the ER, where his blood pressure registered at an eye popping 200/140. Jeff was administered metoprolol to bring it down and sent home. He was back in the ER at 3 am, his BP off the charts again.

Science understands the relationship between stress and blood pressure pretty well. The surge of hormones produced by your body when under stress causes your blood vessels to constrict, and your heart to beat faster. Jeff was literally driving himself up the wall.

Two visits to the ER in one night weren’t sufficient to shake Jeff up and he continued to charge hard at work. We can only speculate if his detached retina was caused by these episodes. Hypertension is considered a causative factor of retinal detachment in cats, but not humans. Temporary spikes in pressure are not known to be a factor either. While Jeff’s ayurvedic doctor believes there’s a connection, it’s not acknowledged by mainstream medicine.

Forward to New Year’s Eve, 2013, just a few days before his Tokyo trip. At a party in the exclusive Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, Jeff happened to watch a short talk by Ajahn Brahm, née Peter Betts, a graduate in theoretical physics from Cambridge University turned Theravada Buddhist monk. The Theravada school places emphasis on the practice of mindfulness — of developing mental calm (samatha), insight (vipassana) into the impermanence of all objects of desire, and compassion (metta) for all living beings.

In the world of hi-tech, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, and Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, are committed proponents of vipassana meditation, actively promoting it within their organizations. It was all new to Jeff, but something in the monk’s talk resonated within him.

It was exactly a week later that Jeff found himself in a Tokyo ER with a retinal tear. After a few frantic calls to his primary care physician and an ophthalmologist friend back in the US, he was greenlit for travel. He would fly back home for the surgery and long drawn out post-operative recovery.

Lying flat on his stomach for the next few weeks, Jeff whiled away the hours devouring talks on mindfulness by Ajahn Brahm. Within weeks of resuming a normal schedule, he had enrolled in his first vipassana meditation retreat, at the Dhamma Kunja center in Onalaska, Washington, two hours south of Seattle.

Over the past seven years, Jeff has logged over 5,000 hours of mindfulness meditation, well on his way to the proverbial 10,000 hours required for mastery. His intense, hyper-competitive personality has given way to a unshakably calm and measured demeanor. As Jeff describes it, his health crises were a wake up call. With Ajahn Brahm as his muse, Jeff chose to redesign himself. “I decided not to let any situation at work get under my skin, not to sweat the small stuff”, he says, and then adds, knowing that he sounds clichéd, “it’s all small stuff.”

In that last comment of Jeff’s is perhaps the secret of how mindfulness helps reduce stress. As you sit and watch your breath and your thoughts, you are able to see your thoughts as transient phenomena playing out on the screen of your mind. Instead of being caught up in them, you see them from a little more distance. The endless internal chatter in your mind gets a little quieter. In the space that is created, you are able to more mindfully solve those problems that need solving, and let go of thoughts that don’t serve a useful purpose. Your muscles relax, your breathing becomes calmer, and your body’s “relaxation response” kicks in, activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Jeff’s blood pressure is now back at a normal 130/80. He’s not had a spike in years. At his recent annual health check up, his PCP, perhaps not fully aware of research on the benefits of mindfulness and stress reduction, remarked “I don’t know what you are doing to keep your BP under control, but whatever it is, don’t stop doing it”.

For the record, the pioneer of scientific research on meditation, Herbert Benson, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, extolled the benefits of mindfulness on the human body — reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and depression — as early as 1975. Dr. Gabor Maté, in his best-selling 2011 book When the Body Says No has convincingly shown the connection between stress and diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and diabetes.

The uncanny timing of his stumbling upon a talk to mindfulness just a week before the events in Tokyo is not lost upon Jeff. At his moment of crisis, a set of ancient teachings from 2,500 years ago came to his rescue, helping him recover his health and recraft his relationship to both life and work. The Buddha, it would seem, had reached out across the centuries to deliver on his promise of both wisdom and compassion just when Jeff needed them most.

Post-Script: To protect confidentiality, names and some other specifics have been changed. The core details of Jeff’s experience, however, are accurate and are retold here as narrated to me by him.