Guest Post: Quieting the mind

As a neighbor and friend of Kalil's, I've had the honor of witnessing his brain rewiring project in person. As a guest blogger, I wanted to share a bit about a powerful "rewiring" experience of my own that I undertook over the winter holiday.

I attended a 10-day course in Vipassana meditation, a silent retreat involving intensive daily hours of sitting and learning specific meditation practices passed down by a lineage of teachers from Burma/Myanmar. I am fairly new to meditation, having started a somewhat consistent daily practice only about 6 months ago, and rather than going into depth about the techniques I learned this past week, I'd like to share a bit about my personal experience in a few blog posts.

During the first three days of the retreat, we practiced anapana meditation, learning to concentrate and focus our attention on the breath. The first day, I mostly sat in the meditation hall letting my thoughts wander this way and that, every once in a while returning my attention to my breath: in, out, not trying to control it or change it, simply observing. My anxiety was high these first three days, especially each evening as we received the instructions for the following day and I wondered if I'd be able to follow them, to surrender to the strict routine I had to agree to follow in order to participate in the course. By the second night, I was unable to wear earplugs to bed. My senses had already become acute enough that when I put in the earplugs, I heard what seemed to be a deafening high-pitched ringing: the sound of my own nervous system, one I usually pay no attention to, distracted as I am by the thoughts, dialogues, stories, images, and melodies running constantly through my "monkey mind."

I am told that the second day is usually the hardest for students in this course, and that afterwards, in the words of a fellow student, "the mind gives up." For me the third day was the hardest: with the encouragement of the teachers and the patient practice of "smilingly" returning to the breath whenever my thoughts wandered, without judgement or disappointment, my mind indeed was quieting. I cannot recall a time when I have gone more than a few seconds without thinking, except perhaps when engaged in creative expression and experiencing flow. With only my breath to pay attention to and no creative project to engage in, I felt as though I was descending into the depths of my mind, and what I found there was disconcerting indeed. When I told the teacher the next morning that I had experienced vivid nightmares the night before, I was gently told that this was normal, to give them no significance, and that if I was awakened again in the night, to simply return to the breath. I had no further nightmares.

In the months preceding the course, I had made two related decisions in my daily life that resonated with my experience of these first few days of meditation: I stopped trying and I embraced failure. Faced with the realization that I would never live up to the ridiculous expectations I had set for myself, realizing I would never be the person I believed others expected me to be, I stopped trying and accepted myself as I am. Applying a very difficult new technique in my work as a teacher, I found myself failing over and over. But I believed in the technique, and rather than giving up, I embraced my failures and tried again the next day, and the next, and the next, but this time not knowing whether I would ever succeed, and embracing the process instead, accepting whatever might result. These decisions served me well in my process of learning how to meditate.