10 Days In Silence
My comeback to mental health came through Vipassana meditation. The picture shows The Dhamma Medini Vipassana Meditation Centre in Kaukapakapa, New Zealand.
“Don’t search for anything except peace. Try to calm the mind. Everything else will come on its own.”
A couple of years ago, I packed my backpack with no fancy clothes or makeup and booked a flight planning to discover Australia and New Zealand, more precisely the spectacular world of never-ending white beaches, surfing, and the culture of the aboriginal people. Instead, my journey ended up being something completely different, something deeper, and something that would change my life forever. I participated in a ten days Vipassana silent meditation course and discovered the spectacular inner world of my mind; a beautiful journey that led me to stillness and purification. Spending one and half week in complete silence and engaged in twelve hours of meditation per day was a challenging, yet wonderful and transformative experience for both body and mind. In ten days I went from stressed to blessed: from being a stressed-out lawyer working at Google’s European Headquarters in Dublin to feeling extremely blessed for being able to find inner peace, genuine happiness, and a balanced approach to work — on my terms. But my relationship with meditation didn’t start here.
I clearly remember my first encounter with meditation. As a child I was a curious thinker, constantly searching for new adventures. One day, sometime around my 15th birthday, I found my mother’s box with different cassette tapes, and one of the biggest adventures of my life was about to begin. It was like opening Pandora’s box, and when I put the tapes of Psychologist Lars-Eric Uneståhl into my freestyle (Walkman cassette tape player), something magical happened. The calming voice of Lars-Eric guided me through different techniques on how to relax, how to visualize success, and how to get into a meditative state of mind. It truly was like entering a new world, a world that I used to call “the other side”. I realized quickly how these trips to the “other side” helped me to effortlessly focus better in school, to endure more in sports, and to stay calm whatever challenge was thrown at me.
Just like we need to exercise our body in order to keep our muscles in good shape, the mind is also in need of exercise to stay sharp. Meditation is a good way to strengthen the “mental muscles”. As the years went by and my career as a semi-professional athlete accelerated, much time was spent on physical exercise, and while my handball club prioritized hiring the best personal trainer for us to get even more explosive muscles, no attention or money was set aside for a mental trainer. As I turned down a professional handball contract abroad in order to focus on challenging law school studies, lots of pressure — this time mental pressure — on myself followed, which initially resulted in excellent performance and a successful legal career. Before I had even turned 30 years old, I had big names such as Harvard Law School, adidas, Google, and Duane Morris LLP (big international law firm) on my CV along with legal publications, whereof one in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, several legal awards and scholarships, as well as a manager position. The behavior of pushing myself was rewarded with even more success, but instead of spending time feeling my body as practiced in meditation, I ended up spending most of my time “up in my head”, thinking. My lawyer mind got wired to organize, analyze, and perform, and as my freestyle was put on pause for a very long time, my “mental muscles” diminished in size.
My head kept telling me to continue pushing for more success and more sensational achievements, even if my body was desperately screaming to stop. All bodily warnings of a massive stress-related burnout were there, such as heart pain, anxiety, depression, extreme sensitivity to light and sound, memory loss, and incurable fatigue with 15 to 17 hours of sleep per day. But since my mind and body at that time were no longer aligned to communicate with each other, I wasn’t able to interpret the bodily signals until my entire body, mind, and existence one day just shut down. I was unable to get out of bed for several days, which turned into weeks, and ended up becoming months, and eventually years of mental illness and sick leave from work. This was a painful result of what long-term stress and press without any rest can do to the brain, and many medical researchers have described the symptoms experienced in burnout as similar to the ones in a stroke. My burnout was a clear reminder that I needed to reconnect with “the other side” from my childhood.
A few months before my “crash”, I had an important encounter with a former monk. He came to my Google office to teach us meditation and the art of breathing properly. During the meditation session with the monk, my brain, body, and mind — well, my everything — were so stressed out by the current workload and pressure that I could only focus on my breath for just a few seconds before my mind would start wandering off to prepare for the next meeting or presentation, decide on what to wear to the big event the following week, or how to find time to fly home to visit my parents in Sweden. Even if I could not successfully complete the meditation session with the monk, it gave me a glimpse back into the world I once knew so well, and a reminder of the importance of being able to feel, as opposed to just thinking.
I knew that something needed to be done to realign my mind and body in order to live a life in balance and harmony, and since my sudden sensitivity to noise made me desperate for extreme silence, I did a Google search on “Where can I find silence?” The search result led me to a Vipassana silent meditation course in New Zealand. Although I wasn’t sure what to expect when signing up for this, I was in an inexplainable way completely convinced that I was taking a step in the right direction to reset my inner compass. I decided to throw myself out into the beautiful unknown thinking to myself: if not now, when? Off I went Down Under, my backpack and I. I felt brave.
At the meditation center in the middle of the rain forest of Kaukapakapa outside Auckland, around 60 women and 40 men were gathered together for this mental challenge. The rules were strict: no speaking, eye contact, or physical contact with the other participants. Also stealing, smoking, or drinking alcohol was prohibited under any circumstances. We left all our distracting belongings, such as computers, phones, cameras, and even books, notebooks, and pens in a secure room to which we had no access for the duration of the course. After receiving introductions and instructions from the meditation teachers we entered the “Nobel Silence”, and the internal focus on ourselves, and ourselves only, began. All students were dressed in loose, modest, comfortable clothes, wearing no makeup or perfume, and were devoted to simplicity with no external or superficial disturbances during the course. Men and women lived and ate separately, but meditated together in a big and bright meditation hall.
Wake-up time was at 4 am by a big golden gong gong and bedtime was around 10 pm after the last meditation session had finished. We slept in modest individual wooden rooms next to the beautiful rainforest, a river, and a waterfall completely isolated from the big city life. The air was crisp and clear and the stars shone brightly in the night. So did the glow worms! It was so silent that I could hear my own thoughts!
The twelve hours of meditation per day were divided into eight meditation sessions and one evening lecture about the meditation technique. The philosophy behind Vipassana is non-religious, and this meditation technique has been taught for more than 2500 years with great success due to its universal approach to healthy living in pure harmony free from any aversion and cravings. Each session lasted between one and two hours, and we were instructed to practice strong determination by not moving our bodies at all when meditating. A five-minute water and toilet break was given before the beginning of the next session, and the schedule was this intense in order to get the most out of the ten days. Breakfast was served at 6:30 a.m. and a delicious vegetarian lunch at 11 a.m. This was the last meal of the day, except for a small tea break in the afternoon. The early wake-up time and restricted food intake were indeed a bit inconvenient at first, but surprisingly easy to adapt to after just a few days.
During the meditation sessions, we sat down on a few pillows on the floor in a big meditation hall in complete silence while verbal instructions were given to us by renowned and amazingly patient teachers. For the first three days, we focused on trying to feel the sensations in our nostrils and paying attention to our breathing in order to sharpen our minds for the days to come. This technique is called ‘Anapana’.
From the fourth day onwards we started practicing the meditation technique called ‘Vipassana’. It means ‘to observe things as they are’ — and not as you want them to be. We learned how to objectively observe, body part by body part, the arising and disappearing sensations within, without reacting to or judging them as good or bad, comfortable or uncomfortable. In this concentrated deep state of mind that is meditation, I experienced lots of different sensations, such as painful and numbing legs, and a tickling sensation on the nose. The beauty of meditation practice is that we get to access our subconscious mind, and the more we practice the faster we get to that state of mind. This is where we can reprogram old habit patterns.
Our mind is incorrectly previously programmed to react to these painful or uncomfortable sensations in our body by, for example, changing the position of the legs to get rid of the numbing pain, or by scratching the nose to get rid of the tickling sensation. So instead of reacting, we were instead instructed to merely observe the sensation, sit with the feeling, and accept it for what it is, whatever that is. By practicing this we experienced the impermanence of a sensation, ‘anicca’, and began to understand on a deep and subconscious level that sensations arise, but eventually, all go away. This birth and death of sensations is constantly happening inside of us, every millisecond of our existence. You have never had a tickling sensation on your nose lasting for a couple of years, right? Not even a couple of months, days, hours, or minutes. It usually automatically disappears after a couple of seconds.
In order to maintain a balanced mind, it is vital to remain objective to a sensation, which implies not disliking a sensation even if it’s a painful one, but also to not like it too much even if it’s a pleasurable one. We find aversion and hatred on one side of the “miserable spectrum”, and craving and clinging on the other side.
Since the mind had been reprogrammed on the deepest, subconscious, level in meditation to understand impermanence, this could later on also translate into, and be used in our “real life”. So when we experience something painful or uncomfortable in life, for example a breakup, the death of a loved one, an argument at work, or a nasty comment from someone, we will no longer react with negativity, pain, sadness, anger, fear, or any kind of aversion because we have experienced in meditation that the sensation is merely temporary. By not giving it any attention it will eventually dissolve automatically. Why give attention and energy to something as impermanent as a temporary sensation?
The same theory can be applied to the other side of the spectrum, craving. Too much craving, just like too much aversion and hatred, creates a miserable mind. The pleasurable sensations in meditation, which I could easily crave more of, appeared when I experienced a free flow of subtle, evenly distributed wonderful vibrations throughout the whole body, and when this happened we were instructed to try very hard to not get stuck in, and attached to, these euphoric sensations. The reason for this is that too much craving and clinging to a specific sensation on a subconscious level in meditation, could, later on, translate to craving and clinging for the good things also in our “real”, conscious, life. This might eventually result in a limitless craving for a bigger house, fancier cars, more clothes, more food, more alcohol, and other things in life that give us a temporary dopamine kick of pleasurable sensations. It doesn’t mean that we can’t strive for great things in life, it simply means that we should learn to observe and understand, on an experiential level, that these feelings are impermanent, ever-changing, and short-lived.
During the last day of the meditation course, we practiced the final technique, called ‘Metta’. The focus in Metta practice is positive thinking, gratitude for what we have in life, as well as compassion, love, and goodwill for everything and everyone around us.
Someone who has never participated in a Vipassana ten days silent meditation course might think that the biggest challenge is to be silent. In my experience, I’d say this was not the case at all. Surprisingly, perhaps, since I love to talk a lot, but for me the most challenging part of these ten days was the involuntary engagement with all the thoughts bubbling up from the suppressed, or not previously accessed, subconscious mind, to the surface of consciousness. The difficulty was enhanced by the fact that I had nobody but myself to elaborate on this with. I felt stuck in my mind, but I also knew that I needed to sit with, and observe, these thoughts without reacting to them in order to reprogram my stressed-out and imbalanced mind in order to come out stronger on “the other side”. It was definitely worth the sweat since the success was bound to come.
During the course, I experienced three magical meditation moments, which clearly demonstrated the mind-blowing(!) power of the mind. They made it very clear to me that once we become the master of our minds, we can truly master anything.
My first magical meditation moment occurred on the evening of day six. I had arrived at the course with lots of anxiety and felt during the meditation sessions the first five days extreme pressure over my chest. It felt very heavy, like someone had covered my upper body in blocks of concrete, hindering me from breathing properly. Then, suddenly, as I was objectively and non-judgementally scanning through my body for what felt like the 500.000th time (!), it felt like a big stone was falling off my chest, and leaving a physical whole inside of me enabling easier breathing and a rapid decrease of my anxiety. I experienced a free flow of sensations throughout my body, which was a really unique feeling. I felt lighter, happier, and like the seeds of hope I planted before the meditation course for a life of less stress and better mental health, were finally giving some fruit. A suitable metaphor to use in order to explain this sensation is a pasta strainer, in which the boiled pasta gets soaked up and the water runs through. It was like my mind was going through a strainer or filter in which all negativity, aversion, or cravings ever experienced got soaked up, and out on the other side I experienced a clear and purified mind.
After a few more days of challenging focus training, I discovered that my focus had improved significantly. I was able to direct my mind into feeling the sensations in any particular area of choice throughout the body. This was possible since I learned from experience that sensations are everywhere in the body, and in a constantly changing and never-ending flow, and if I could just sustain a balanced, equanimous, mind, I would be able to feel them. Vipassana simply just gave me the key to unlocking the previously encountered barriers that have been blocking me from feeling these sensations.
Vipassana took my focus from constantly being “in my head”, thinking, to being more “in my body”, feeling. I understood that the more I pushed myself to reach a certain feeling when meditating, the less I managed to feel it. The technique of doing more and pushing harder which had led to great and quick results in my legal career, was no longer working. Instead, Vipassana painfully taught me the opposite: doing less would get me to my end goal faster, and better. By letting go of how I wanted things to be and sensations to appear, they would appear just because, and only when, I did let go of trying. For example, I could decide to direct my focused mind to the tip of my middle toe, or a specific spot inside my throat, and immediately feel a physical sensation there. If I tried too hard to feel the desired sensations I wouldn’t succeed because I was then craving for it, which resulted in my mind no longer being relaxed and balanced. As soon as I let go of trying hard to feel these sensations and just observe the process that was automatically already and constantly happening inside of me, the result came automatically! Pretty cool realization! The Chinese philosopher and founder of philosophical Taoism, Lao Tzu, said the following around the year 600 BC: “By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.” The fact that I came to the same realization more than 2500 years later is a great indicator of how universal and fundamental this law of nature is, and how this meditation practice truly can work for anyone, independent of nationality, age, or gender.
The second magical meditation moment that occurred, and acted as a true reminder of the interconnectedness of the mind and body, relates to my back pain. I arrived at the meditation course with severe pain in my lower back from my former days as a semi-professional athlete. I was worried that it would be too painful for me to sit on the floor on top of just a few small pillows for so many hours. After completing the course I was amazed to realize that most of my back pain had disappeared, and I understood that having a strong and healthily reprogrammed mind which does not overreact to pain was the way forward. Since my pain is related to a degenerative disk clearly visible on several MRI scans, the physical pain could for natural reasons not be completely eliminated, but the mental part of the pain could indeed.
When we after ten days had finished the “Nobel Silence”, the “Nobel Chatter”(!) began, and everybody started talking and laughing, men and women together. It was a wonderful atmosphere, and I realized that I had been surrounded by wonderful people in silence for so long, all with their own purpose of being there, all now one step further on their own transformative personal journey.
After the course, I was overwhelmed with positive emotions. I felt genuine happiness, less perfectionism and anxiety, fewer cravings for superficial things, a clearer and sharper mind, more efficient decision-making and enhanced problem-solving capacity, greater inner confidence, more emotion control and motivation, increased patience and compassion towards people around me, as well as non-reactivity, a lightness, and detox in both body and mind, as well as a natural mental and physical calmness and balance.
Undoubtedly, nobody can change one’s entire behavior pattern in just ten days since it has taken a whole lifetime to create them. There is a need to be diligent in continued practice in order to see improved and sustained benefits. However, meditation is not about reaching a final goal with perfection, it’s merely a way of living in awareness of the now. My own journey towards inner peace, a balanced life, and mental well-being is, and will forever be, ongoing. I am immensely grateful for the technique I learned, and I would like to return for another round of silent meditation, at another one of the 180 magical locations worldwide in which Vipassana courses are offered. In the meantime, I make sure to meditate every day. I now know the importance of keeping meditation in my life, since I got painfully aware of what happens when I lose track of it. Starting each day with meditation is a way for me to align my mind with my body because I have now realized that they belong together, and are not separated from each other. This way I center myself internally with focus, gratitude, and clearness before I take on all the external challenges of the day. Meditation is my anti-stress medicine.
The visits to the “other side” I had as a child have now, with my rediscovered passion for meditation, altered in shape and form. I have exchanged Lars-Eric in my freestyle to Vipassana, and I can clearly feel that the boundaries between the “other side” and my “real life” have blurred out. My two worlds have finally melted together and become a fundamental part of who I am.
The third and last magical meditation moment happened during my last night in the rainforest in Kaukapakapa. I was standing outside in the pitch black night looking up in the sky that was lit up by all the bright shining stars. At this very moment, I felt the most genuine happiness, stillness, and gratitude I have ever felt in my whole life, exceeding the temporary happiness of career achievements or the purchase of a long-time desired item. This was me being, as opposed to me doing. I felt free from negativity and cravings, I felt balanced, and as if my inner compass was finally functioning properly. I felt excited about life again, and a bit like a blank white canvas, ready to start over and recreate life on my terms. And suddenly, in that very moment of euphoria, I witnessed a shooting star! For me this was a rather magic and symbolic moment of ‘anicca’, showing that everything in life, even the stars in the sky, is impermanent and ever-changing. With this awareness, I returned home and made some major changes in my life, which enabled me to live a healthy and balanced life constantly aware of the impermanence of everything. I left my job at Google in Dublin in order to be able to work and live closer to my parents in Sweden. I want to make sure to spend as much time as possible with them before they, too, will become stars in the sky.
