Field notes from a ten-day silent sit.
Day one: uncomfortable. The instructions sound reasonable. The body does not.
Day two: worse. What I thought was my mind turns out to be a small conference of factions I had never introduced. Each has strong opinions about lunch.
Day four: something changes. Not calm, exactly. A sense that the noise, examined, is thinner than it sounded. It is still noise. It is not, on close inspection, a wall.
Day seven: long stretches of an unfamiliar quiet. Not the absence of thought. Something more like thought that no longer requires me to be its subject. Difficult to describe. Not, I suspect, difficult in the ways I would have guessed.
Day ten: the silence breaks. Speech feels loud and imprecise. The person I was on day one is legible to me from a small distance, and I feel a kindness toward them that surprises me. This is the first thing I want to write down.
What Long-Term Meditators' Brains Show
Structural and functional differences worth taking seriously.
Vipassana in the Goenka Tradition
Ten days of noble silence and body sweeping.
The Trouble with 'Just Watch Your Thoughts'
Why the classical instructions are harder than they sound.
Sign in to join the conversation. Guests can read every reply.
Loading conversation…