This past Sunday, I returned to the real world after a ten-day silent meditation retreat–a Vipassana course at Dhamma Pasava (“Spring of Dhamma” in Pali, the ancient language of the Buddha), also known as the Intermountain Vipassana Meditation Center in the mountains of Idaho.
For ten days, I had no direct human contact–no speaking, no gesturing, no eye contact–and no connection to outside influences: no phone, no laptop, no reading, no writing. Each day offered sparse vegetarian meals (breakfast and lunch only, no dinner), long stretches of stillness or rest (we did not exercise), and nearly twelve hours of meditation from 4AM until 9PM.
Yep, you read that correctly. TWELVE hours of meditation per day.
I didn’t go because I was looking for something specific. In truth, I don’t even really know why I went. It simply felt like a quiet nudge, a pull toward stillness and silence, that I couldn’t ignore. The idea of spending ten days completely alone with myself sounded both terrifying and irresistible. When do we ever get that kind of time? No roles, no responsibilities, no noise–just me.
And by just me, I mean all of me. What might I find on the inside? I think, ultimately, I wanted to discover that–whatever that may be.
Vipassana, as I understand it, is the practice of observing reality exactly as it is–training the mind to remain balanced so that wisdom has room to take root. There are no mantras, no visualizations, no altered breathing techniques, no escape. You simply sit with the natural rhythm of your breath and observe the sensations that arise in your body–from external contact at first, and eventually from within.
The instruction is simple, but relentless: breathe in and out, observing everything as it rises and passes away. Rise, pass away. Rise, pass away.
In doing so, you begin to develop equanimity–a balanced mind–teaching yourself to accept impermanence (anicca). The work continues as you learn to detach from both pleasant and unpleasant sensations, releasing the habitual reactions of craving (desire) or aversion (avoiding). From that steady state of awareness, peace can begin to manifest.
Learning this basic theory in the first few days, I thought ten days of silence would be peaceful. That ten days without conversation would feel like rest–a quiet reprieve from the constant hum of doing and a warm embrace of being. I imagined stillness as soft, maybe even serene.
It wasn’t.
Silence, for me, was loud. It scraped against every edge of me. It revealed how quickly I reach for something–a distraction, a story, a thought–anything to keep me from truly sitting with what’s here in the present.
Fortunately, the conditions of the retreat allowed for no escapes, admittedly much like a prison. I learned, very practically and very quickly, what craving and aversion felt like in my body. I watched the long echo of my own mind fade into the distance and the unbelievably profound pain within me rise to the surface.
Yes, you interpreted that correctly. I sat in excruciating pain for twelve hours a day.
But, true to anicca, I also experienced what true peace feels like, and I will be forever grateful that I walked this path. This experience was yet another doorway teaching me that I do not control this world, and that the more I learn to flow with it, the brighter this world becomes.
Building Castles To Avoid The Ground
On the first day, I started with a meditation cushion. But within a couple hours, I built a small fortress–layers upon layers stacked high in the name of “comfort.” Under my butt, below my knees, behind my back, beneath my ankles… it was ridiculous. And my movement was incessant. I switched positions dozens of times: cross legged, straight legged, upright, slouched, arms wrapped around my knees, hands turned upward on my thighs.
But I wasn’t alone. The entire room of nearly eighty students was filled with these makeshift castles and restless adjustments–each of us trying to find the least painful way to sit with ourselves.
By the third day, I realized the castle was a metaphor–a physical manifestation of how I build around discomfort in my life and normalize it as the best way. I pile on tasks, plans, goals, even self-improvement, hoping that structure will soften what hurts. But the only thing it softens is awareness. I could not feel anything from within until I sat in the primary position and felt through the pain.
So, by the end of the retreat, I had returned to a single cushion, sitting criss-cross, hands resting on my knees, my spine naturally lifted, but relaxed. In retrospect, it feels almost comical. I’d been told from the start to use the same posture practitioners have used for 2,500 years, but my mind thought it knew better.
Turns out, the position with no fortifications, no escape routes–just the rawness of being human–was exactly what they had already discovered. And that’s where the release was waiting: in the simplicity my ego kept avoiding.
The Mind’s Circus
Before I dive into the ego release, let’s first talk about the insanity that my ego created for me to avoid all of this. That sneaky devil.
Once my body was comfortable enough to begin feeling surface-level sensations, my mind entered the picture and so did the shit show of imagination.
I literally visualized a small monkey with big ears and a curled tail leaping from sensation to sensation–chasing, labeling, analyzing. When I realized I had manifested an actual monkey to represent the monkey mind, I saw how often my curiosity can be craving in disguise.
My mind didn’t just want to observe the sensations, it wanted to control. It wanted to name every feeling, assign meaning, and decide what should happen next. That impulse, to understand, categorize, and fix, was false awareness. It was attachment dressed up as curiosity. Observation became another way of reaching for certainty, another way of trying to be in charge.
The moment I saw that, I smiled at it. The monkey was only doing what it had been trained to do–trying to keep me safe through thinking and avoiding the pain. My work now was to let that damn monkey run around like a psycho, but stop following it.
Enter My Parts: Raquel & Rocky, Punk Rock & The Rock
Once the monkey faded into the background, my cast of inner characters stepped up to take control of the chaos. And honestly, they were impressive. Each one came with a plan, a strategy, a sense of purpose–so convincing that it took me awhile to realize what was actually happening.
If you’re familiar with Internal Family Systems (IFS), there’s the idea that we all have a kind of inner boardroom–a collection of parts that each serve a role that have been developed over our lifetime. There’s protectors, critics, achievers, rebels, children, fixers, etc. None of them are “bad.” They all exist to help us survive, but the real work is learning to let them sit at the table without letting them run the meeting. That CEO position is reserved for our core self.
During the middle portion of the retreat, those parts started showing up one by one.
First to arrive were my twins, Raquel & Rocky, two elementary school girls who were likely my earliest separation points. A time when I felt compelled to hide my shy, creative, and sensitive “Raquel” away from the world, allowing my loud, smart, and fearless protector “Rocky” to take the lead.
The twins showed up as pleasant sensations moving up and down my body–twin currents of vibration running in opposite directions, almost like waves crossing paths. It felt like comfort, like release, like warmth. After days of pain, I wanted to chase it.
But in Vipassana, even pleasant sensations are traps if you cling to them. And I realized that, once again, my mind was trying to recreate something it liked. My craving had simply changed shape–from escaping pain to pursuing pleasure.
As the twins’ energy faded, Punk Rock emerged–my Daria-like teenage dirtbag, sharp-tongued and self-possessed, armor made of sarcasm and superiority. Beneath the eye roll lived a deep sense of aloneness and an extreme desire for connection, particularly romantic love being as epic as the stories. Her defense was detachment; if she couldn’t belong, she’d make belonging uncool.
She appeared as temperature. One moment, fire everywhere in my body, coursing through me like rage disguised as independence. The next, ice blocks–heavy, solid, frozen walls of protection. I could feel her oscillating between those two extremes, burning everything down or shutting everything out. At first, I admired these sensations. She was tough, independent, unfazed. But when I sat with her long enough, I realized she was exhausted. The heat and the cold weren’t power, they were boundaries and survival mechanisms. She was terrified of being seen and desperate to be known, hence why she showed up late to the party and with such extremity.
Once I realized that my mind had created yet another insane scenario to avoid the pain, I laughed. My giggling allowed her to flare and freeze, melt and reform. I watched, without reaction, as the fire cooled into warmth and the ice began to thaw. Eventually, she settled–not gone, just quieter, more at ease now that she didn’t have to guard the door alone.
Thinking I was now so smart that I was out of the woods, The Rock showed up. My dashing, handsome, extremely jacked protector–the one I designed while working in male-dominated industries, always trying to be the cool chick who could hang with the boys. Cursing, unfeeling, hyper-suave, indifferent.
He was everything Punk Rock wasn’t: truly stoic, composed, untouchable. The ultimate armor. And like the others, he didn’t appear as a thought, he showed up as pressure. Insane pressure. A dense, throbbing weight that wrapped around my ribs and shoulders, holding me in a vice. It pulsed with authority, daring me to move, warning me not to. It was tension so thick it almost buzzed, like my body had become a hydraulic press, locked tight and unyielding.
At first, I felt proud of him. This part had kept me safe in rooms where softness was mistaken for weakness. He was my shield, my swagger, my ability to shrug off anything. But as I sat with him, the pressure started to hurt. Not the surface pain of muscle fatigue–a deeper, suffocating pain, the kind that comes from holding everything together for too long.
He was exhausted, too.
And again, I realized that this was a fabrication. So I stayed. I breathed. I let the pressure build until it finally broke. The Rock didn’t leave; he simply loosened his grip.
And when he softened, along with the others, the silence and stillness of this endeavor finally began to settle in.
A World Rewritten
As the days passed and I began to settle into stillness, my perception of the outside world started to shift. I had always been a nature lover, but how was I to know that even my engagement with nature had been surface-level?
It was subtle at first–just the trees outside the meditation hall seeming greener, the grasses containing endless shades of peach, or the sky holding a sharper shade of blue, and the clouds containing a myriad of Pantones. This is where the technique became undeniable: everything looked, tasted, and smelled more alive.
Colors were so vibrant they almost hummed. The white of my walls wasn’t just white–it had depth, tone, texture. The wooden floors shimmered with tiny particles of light. The brown of the bare trees looked like it had been repainted overnight.
Food, too, transformed. A single bite of rice and lentils felt layered with flavor and sensation–salty, earthy, warm, grounding. Peppermint tea became an entire experience: warmth spreading down my throat, coolness blooming on my tongue, the gentle tingle that lingered long after I swallowed.
Even sound changed. Footsteps outside my room carried their own rhythm; the wind brushing against the building felt symphonic. Time slowed enough that I could sense every transition–the moment something began and the moment it dissolved.
The world wasn’t different; my awareness was. The stiller I became, the more I could feel the infinite details that had always been there. Life hadn’t grown louder, I had finally grown quiet enough to hear it.
Learning To Stay
As I mentioned, the first few days, I felt physical pain, but because I was constantly moving and comforting myself, it stayed surface-level–familiar and manageable. Once I finally pushed out the imagination and committed to the advised posture and practiced strong determination–meditation without any movement–the real deep pain began to emerge during the last third of the retreat.
My back didn’t just hurt. It violently screamed. Every second felt like an eternity. My instinct was still to move, to shift, to fix, but the instruction was clear: stay. And when I could quiet my mind and find the courage long enough to do so, the pain began speaking to me in a language I had never heard before.
I should add some context here: I’ve been battling chronic sciatica for years. I’ve worked with incredible healers and practitioners, but I’d always experienced my pain in broad strokes–a burning, soccer-ball-sized ache in my lower back, or a sharp, electric line down my leg. I could only sense it at a gross level. It was either there or not, big or gone, all or nothing.
Because of that, I was always chasing it–trying to stretch it, fix it, or outsmart it. But in Vipassana, sitting perfectly still, I started to feel its subtleties for the first time. The exact texture, temperature, and tone of the pain. Where it began. How it moved. What it wanted.
That awareness–that new vocabulary of sensations–gave me a kind of power I had never experienced before. Not power of control, but power of intimacy with myself.
I began to notice that pain wasn’t one giant thing. It changed constantly–pulsing, drilling, exploding, spreading. Sometimes it felt like a jackhammer, sometimes a corkscrew, sometimes a bull dozer. It had layers, textures, colors. It was unbelievably torturous.
And the more I willed myself to stay, the louder it spoke and the more dramatically it moved. It traveled from my shoulder down my spine, across my ribs, into my hips. At one point, it felt as though my muscle was being skinned away with a scalpel, micro-layer by micro-layer. I felt nauseous. I wanted to pass out. You bet to hell I cried.
The longer I sat in stillness and silence, the more that I could feel each sensation unraveling, not just of muscle, but also of memory. The pain wasn’t new; my wisdom told me it had been stored there for a very very long time.
And in the moments when I stopped resisting the pain, the pain finally started to release me.
When I Became Nothing
There were three distinct periods during the middle of the retreat–somewhere between the imagination games and the pain–when I stopped feeling like a body at all. And I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean literally.
It was as if my physical form dissolved, and what remained was vibration. Every atom of me was humming, electric but weightless. There was no border between where I ended and the air began. I could feel myself suspended in space, not floating above the floor, but existing through it–the floor itself losing shape, becoming a field of energy that matched my own frequency.
For those moments, I wasn’t a person meditating in a hall. There were no people, no walls, no structure–just pulse and movement. I was sensation itself. I was breath and wind, heartbeat and tree. There was no separation between me and anything else. Everything was connected, dissolved into an atomic landscape of oneness.
But that glimpse of infinity became its own challenge. I craved it. When the pain returned, I wanted to get back there. And even though I thought the work would get easier, it became harder. I had to learn that this, too, was just another vibration–the same as pain–alive, temporary, constantly changing. I couldn’t want or avoid either. I had to let it all just be.
Honestly, I had no fucking clue how I was going to achieve that.
Fuck that pain. Give me this eternal bliss.
I don’t care about indifference.
I want enlightenment.
The First Quiet
On the seventh or eighth day (hard to keep track, but closer to the end than the beginning of the retreat), something deep shifted. The pain didn’t stop, but my reaction to it did. I didn’t move. I didn’t wish for it to end. I just sat there, breathing, aware.
It wasn’t blissful or profound. It was neutral–steady, honest. The noise dropped away, and what was left wasn’t an answer. It was awareness. This was equanimity at play. I did not crave the tingles nor was I averse to the tension. I merely sat in the sensations, watching them arise and pass away continuously.
For the first time, I understood that peace isn’t a state you reach; it’s what remains when you stop searching and surrender to what is.
And for the first time further, I felt quiet from the inside out. Not silence as in “no sound,” but silence as in “no resistance.” The kind of quiet that feels truly alive, like the world is breathing with you, from within you. The same pain that once felt unbearable now existed without mental weight. The same breath that once felt trapped in my chest moved freely. The same body that had screamed for escape now sat perfectly still.
After a couple days of practicing this new way of being–this embodied equanimity–I began to notice that my physical body was changing, too. My posture taller. My shoulders less rounded. Space between my ears and collarbones. My diaphragm connected. Tiny pockets of tension dissolving in places I hadn’t realized I’d been holding for years.
In those moments, I finally felt what enoughness truly feels like–physically, mentally, experientially. I was in full authority to simply be here: a breathing, whole human. And yet, I knew that wholeness wasn’t bound by my skin suit, but intertwined with everything expanding in and beyond this reality.
This wasn’t the perfection of equanimity, but it was the beginning. The beginning of living from this place. Of working from this place. Of walking the path not to escape, but to remain, come what may.
The Sound Of Return
On the tenth day, the silence broke.
I sat there frozen for a moment, unsure of what to do with the invitation. My tongue felt foreign, like a tool I hadn’t used in years. Around me, the room erupted into sound–laughter, tears, relief, awkward small talk. People who had spent ten days pretending not to exist beside each other suddenly couldn’t stop smiling and breaking the rule of no touching.
It was disorienting and beautiful.
We traded stories of pain and bliss, hallucinations and healing. Some had felt waves of joy. Others, endless anger. The details didn’t matter. The shared silence had bonded us more deeply than any conversation could. There was a softness in how we looked at each other, a slowness in how we moved, an unspoken understanding that every one of us had touched something unexplainable.
For that brief moment between the return of sound and our departure, I believe I felt the energy of the entire space on that property to be unconditional love.
But the silence breaking wasn’t an ending. It was an initiation–an invitation to carry what I’d learned into the noise of the real world, to practice stillness in motion and awareness in the everyday.
The Aftermath
Reentry was strange, but full of wonder. Airports, traffic, conversation–everything felt both louder and flatter at the same time. I was receiving pleasant and unpleasant sensations in mostly similar ways, finding myself filled with an immense amount of peace regardless of what was occurring.
I continued to meditate day and night to the best of my ability this past week, keeping my breathing natural throughout the ups and downs of the day so that I could retain a sense of equanimity despite the reintegration into noise. Each encounter–every honking car, rushed traveler, or awkward small talk–became a test of presence, a mirror for how easily the mind wants to return to craving and resistance. It was hard, but not nearly as hard as before. One small step on an endless journey of practice.
I am again a baby of this world, as I find whenever I learn a new skill that exists beyond the veil. I must remember to nurture myself gently, slowly, and with forgiveness as I navigate an unknown world with unlocked layers of awakeness.
Not so shockingly, Vipassana didn’t give me answers. It stripped them away. It reminded me that awareness isn’t something you find, it’s what’s left when you stop trying to fix, explain, or improve every moment. It’s the space beneath it all, waiting for you to arrive. It exists when you meet the moment as it is.
And maybe that’s what I went for all along: to learn how to stay. To learn how to be with myself. Because staying isn’t a single act–it’s a lifelong discipline. One I will fail at often, but now recognize as the real practice beneath all others.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter why I went, because peace isn’t the absence of pain or noise or striving. It’s the willingness to keep breathing through it–awake, curious, whole, and open-hearted. That’s what I will take away and that’s what I will lean into.
