If you recognize that as the voice of SN Goenka, you've probably been to a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. If not, you're in luck because I just got back from one of those retreats, and today I'm going to be sharing everything that I learned. I'll share what actually happens inside your mind at a meditation retreat and why I think meditation is such a great tool, not only to make you happier, but also, yes, I'm going to say it more productive.
And what's cool about meditation is that while it's something that you can go really deep on, it's also something that you can do right now. Like, yeah, right now, seriously, let's try it. Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it and breathe out slowly through your mouth.
That's nice. But back to my point, if you wanna really feel the benefits of meditation, you need to go big like 10 days fully offline, meditating, non-stop the entire time big. Because when you do that for the first time, you realize that voice in your head. You know the one that's always saying.
Yeah, that one in neuroscience, this constant internal chatter is called the default mode network, or DMN. And outside of the moments when you've been in deep sleep or extremely concentrated on a particular task, it has never shut up, not once, not in your entire life.
And there's nothing that will make you realize this more than your first few days at a meditation retreat because during that time you do a technique called on upon a breathing. Which is basically just paying attention to the sensation of your breath as it comes in and out of your nose. But what it really is, is an epic battle between you and your default mode network.
The metaphor that I would use to describe this is imagine if you were a piece of driftwood that was trying to settle down on the shore. You find a good spot. You're in the sand. You think everything's gonna be fine. You're breathing in, you're breathing out. You're breathing in, you're breathing out. But then you start to feel a little water coming up under you as a wave rolls in.
At first, it's not much, just a little water tickling you, but then suddenly you realize you're not touching the sand at all anymore. You're completely free floating at the whims of the tides. And somehow you've been thinking about an angry email that you got from a customer last year for the last five minutes.
And once you realize this, you remind yourself, that's not what I'm supposed to be doing. And again. And really it goes on like this nonstop for three days where this is all you're doing. But the cool part is you really start to improve over the course of just a few days. On the first day, you might find that you can't focus for even a couple of minutes straight on your breath.
On the second day, you start to have longer periods where you're really zoned in on the breath, and on the third day, you might even find yourself sitting for a whole hour without ever getting derailed by a distracting train of thought.
In Buddhist terms, this is called developing your samati or concentration. It's a mastery over the mind that makes you the boss and allows you to turn off the DMN whenever you want. So now that you have this control over your mind, what are you gonna do for the seven remaining days of the meditation retreat?
What? What was that?
Okay, this sounds kind of weird, but I really mean it. You take all of that focus that you cultivated during on upon it and use it to gain an acute awareness of all of the sensations happening inside of your body. And what you immediately realize is that because of all of the noise that the DMN has been making all of your life, there's way more going on at a sensational level than you've ever been aware of.
And this in and of itself is really cool. It's really cool to just notice what your left pinky toe feels like or that little tingling sensation that's always been there somewhere deep in the middle of your right thigh. And as you become more aware of your sensations. Even in the austere environment of a meditation center, life just becomes more vibrant.
But these meditation retreats aren't just about having a nice time. They are about upgrading your mind at a very deep level, and you do this by observing the sensations in your body and just not reacting to them. It's pretty much as simple as that. A body scan, but with total awareness of all the feelings in your body and where whatever you feel, you just observe objectively rather than reacting to it.
Now, this might sound easy, but if you're sitting for an hour straight, it starts to get pretty painful. And what you'll notice is that your default reaction to this pain would of course be to simply move, change your position. But when you're doing these long meditation sits, you're trying not to do that.
But as you continue to observe it, there comes a moment where you can just look at that pain and.
Instead of being controlled by it in this reactive way, you're able to just view it objectively as just another sensation in your body. You try to take on this attitude of just, oh hmm, that's what I'm experiencing right now. And not really reacting to it in any way. The reason why this whole practice becomes so powerful is because if you think about it, among the five senses that we have, physical sensations are really the ones that hit us the hardest, and at the same time, they're the ones that were the least conditioned to pay attention to.
I mean, it's shocking when you begin this process and you realize that you actually couldn't even feel a lot of what was happening inside of your own body, whereas you never really have that problem with the things that you see, hear, or smell. And yet, physical sensations are actually the thing that we care about the most in a lot of ways.
I mean, think about this. If I told you that I was gonna show you the most beautiful image that you had ever seen for five minutes, how would you rate that experience against? Feeling the most blissful, pleasurable sensation that you could possibly feel for the same amount of time. I think most people would probably opt for the sensation.
It just feels way more real. And so in this Buddhist philosophy of mind, the idea is that. Most of our psychology is actually built up around our relationship with our sensations. Every time we've felt something that hurt us, we build up a new complex that wants to avoid that type of thing. When we've felt pleasure, we've suddenly become attached to that, and even the things that we've experienced through other senses that we liked, whether it was taste, smell, or visuals.
The thing that made them good or bad was actually the accompanying physical sensations that goes along with those experiences. Physical sensations at the end of the day are where our mind's, entire concept of what is desirable or not desirable kind of comes down to. So the idea is that if you can get down to this root level of how you're reacting to the sensations and solve that, there's not really any.
Deeper that you can go and the rest of your psychology will just kind of sort itself out. It might seem like a big claim, but having experienced it myself, I would definitely say that it works, and when I say that it works. What I mean is that as you continue to do this process, you kind of reach a state in which you're sort of mentally invincible.
The things that would normally bother you no longer do the things that would normally feel good, feel even better, and it unlocks a kind of creative brilliance that I have never experienced in my entire life any other way. Basically, you can enter flow state at any time. Nothing can distract you, and it gives you a kind of creative clarity where the best ideas seem to just fall directly into your lap, fully formed at the perfect moment for you to execute on them.
If you haven't already, you should read Stephen Pressfield's short and insightful book, the War of Art. In it, he talks about a concept of resistance, which is that insidious force that constantly comes up to prevent you from doing your best creative work. What I've come to believe is that the mental action of pushing through this resistance to be your most creative self.
It shares so much in common with the mental action of continuing to return to the feeling of your breath and defiance of your default mode networks, constant ENT treaties for you to think about random other things or of the mental action of watching an unpleasant sensation objectively without reacting to it.
And this is why I believe that meditation is by far the best mental training that you can do. If your desire is to be the most creative, productive version of yourself, now look, I don't want you to just take this from me. I want you to try it for yourself, and there's good news. These 10 day vipasana meditation retreats that I mentioned are completely free.
Yes, they are donation driven, and there is an opportunity to donate at the end of the course, but there's really not a lot of pressure to do it. These courses are kept alive by people who believe so much in this practice that they're willing to support other people going through the process. The one thing to note is that because they are free, they do fill up fast.
So make sure to register at least a month in advance. You can go to dma.org, that's DHA mm.org to sign up for one of these courses. They are intense. They are serious, but they're very well run and I'd highly recommend them. If you're interested in really dropping into a meditation journey, that will change your life.
One thing I'll add, and I'm not gonna go too much into it because I wanna make it the topic of an entire episode of its own, is that the main reason why most people don't do these is because they say they just don't have time for meditation. What I wanna say is that, for me at least, meditation completely transformed my relationship with time and has allowed me to use my time much more efficiently to do the really important things in life.
Like, you know, record this song.
With that. Thank you for tuning into another episode of Dream Labs. I'll see you next time.