Is It Weird to Do a 10-day Silent Meditation Retreat?

I recently spent 10 days in silence at a meditation retre and I have gotten a lot of questions about it so I thought I would dedicate this week’s letter to this intriguing subject.

*If you aren’t interested in meditation, this one’s not for you so you can skip until next week.

The first question I usually get is,?“Why would you do that?”

There are so many great benefits for leaders to take time out to connect with themselves and reflect… It helps us get perspective, think more strategically, connect with our values, and much more.

And, a meditation retreat is a special time where we can go a little deeper to sharpen our mind; our principal tool for our work.

Getting Off the Hedonic Treadmill

I like to say that we humans are comfort-seeking machines.

We pretty much spend all day, every day adjusting our experience to be more comfortable.

Scientists call this the ‘hedonic treadmill.’

Think about how often you get distracted. This is actually a comfort-seeking behavior.

We all get distracted 100’s of times a day.

But, continually seeking comfort comes at a cost. We can’t truly be present in the moment when we are always looking for a way to escape it.

Instead, when we can appreciate what is happening right now, we can be fully present in our life and?experience all that it has to offer.

The happy feeling we get in a flow state is in part, from being present in that moment. People who live their lives with more presence report higher satisfaction and joy.

I felt this years back after a retreat when I went on a motorcycle ride with my husband.

Typically while riding I would be constantly adjusting things to be more comfortable.

I would adjust how I was sitting.

I would adjust what I was wearing; taking clothes off and on, even while riding down the road!

I had a heated vest and I would turn it up and turn it down continually to adjust for the coolness of a mountain pass and then the heat of the valley.

But, after a retreat I found myself much more able to withstand the ups and downs of the temperature and the discomfort of sitting in one spot.

I was able to enjoy what I was doing so much more: seeing the amazing scenery, smelling the different crops, and feeling the wind on my face.

It was a sensory delight that I was completely missing before.

Spotting Your Habit Patterns

It’s only possible to see your mental habit patterns when you slow down enough to really observe your mind.

During a retreat, you have a special opportunity to watch how your mind works from an observer point of view.

You get to see how often you think things that don’t even make sense, even though they seem brilliant at the time.

When you get back into regular life, you can spot these habit patterns more easily and call them out for what they are.

For example, in this last retreat I noticed that when I was feeling like I needed a little recognition, my mind went to the things that I’ve done in the past that I’ve been highly recognized for.

So I spent the entire hour session looking around for products to develop and problems to fix.

Once I caught myself doing this I could then stop and give myself a bit of the recognition I was craving.

This let me allowed me to let go of the rumination and get back to the task at hand.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

So often, we are making it hard on ourselves simply by the stories that we tell ourselves.

A retreat is time that we have to challenge our assumptions and test out if we want to keep holding them or not. Since we are removed from our daily life, we can see things with more perspective.

Once we see?the stories our minds think up?for what they really are, we can start putting a little less importance on what we think.

This can help us drop our storylines and have more curiosity about how others think.

I have spent so much retreat time spinning off about all kinds of ideas.

However, once I got home, I realized that these ideas were sometimes ridiculous. Thankfully I never replaced the floors in my entire house, they are still fine all these years later.

Now that I know not to believe everything I think, I can let my ideas go and get back to meditation.

Learning How to Work With Pain

As a new runner, you don’t learn how to run a marathon by going out one day and running 26 miles.

Instead, we all know that you have to train your body and your mind to work up to that distance.

Yet, that is essentially how we deal with pain.

We wait until something catastrophic happens – we break a bone, get hit with chronic illness or diagnosed with cancer, etc.

Then, in the midst of the trauma, we struggle to deal with it because we haven’t trained for this.

A meditation retreat is a controlled environment where we can learn how to deal with pain.

When you sit all day meditating, it’s inevitable that something is going to hurt.

In one retreat, I had a lot of pain in my knee. It hurt, but I knew I wasn’t doing any lasting damage, it was just cranky – the perfect opportunity to train.

Through this training, I have learned?how to not get shot with a ‘second arrow,’?as they say.

The teaching goes that the pain is the ‘first arrow’.

And the ‘second arrow’ is our mind getting worked up over the pain.

If we can just take the pain for what it is and explore it with curiosity, we will see that pain is constantly changing and that it comes and goes.

Seeing the true nature of the pain can help us to drop the storyline about it.

You can use the same method for emotional pain and I can tell you that it really helped me when the pandemic broke out.

The next most popular question is,?“How do you find the time to get away?”

What Is Your Mind Worth?

Simply, I use vacation time to get away. Yes, my husband and I take separate and together vacations every year.

While my husband (and dogs) miss me while I am gone, I keep focusing him on the benefits of a wife that is happy and balanced.

He is totally on board these days because he GETS it now!

It’s always going to be hard to get away.

The bottom line is valuing yourself enough to take time to work on your mind, like a visit to the neuro-spa.

When you really get in and do the work, the benefits can last years.

And, your mind is pretty important, right?

Why not take the best care of it?

I love a 10-day retreat because most of my breakthroughs have been on Day 8 or 9 but there are also 3- and 7-day retreats that can be an alternative to fit in busy schedules more easily.

I have found that?you get what you put into it, so honestly, the longer, the better.

Another popular question is, "What about not talking, is that hard?"

Ahhh, Silence

I feel strongly about doing silent retreats because of the focus is on you.

Honestly, it’s a relief to not have to talk, even for me — an extrovert who talks a lot most days.

The benefit to not talking is that it takes all of the social pressure away and you can fully focus on yourself without guilt or pressure to fit in.

You get all the benefits of meditating with other people which helps you be more diligent but none of the downside.

I find this a relief.

I do love getting to meet the other participants at the end when you start talking.

It’s amazing how you have bonded with them over the week even though you haven’t spoken a word.

It’s a special shared experience that you all have together.

And funny enough, you also find out that all of the stories you had in your mind about what was going on with other people are usually the opposite of what really happened.

Those are the most common questions that I get. But there are so many more facets of a retreat that I would love to share.

In the interest of keeping a long email shorter, I will stop here.

What questions do you have? Comment below and let me know.

All my love,

Jill