Insights from a Week-long Silent Retreat
Dissolution, hallucination, and a whole lot of herbal tea
I’ve been meditating for nearly a decade now, and consider it one of my most important habits. So it’s a bit surprising that, until last week, I’d never done a full-blown silent retreat.
I’d always wanted to do a retreat, but (a) it’s a scary to thrust yourself into such an intense practice, and (b) I’m distrustful of spiritual authority. So I always found reasons to put it off.
Enter Wystan Bryant-Scott and Roger Thisdell. I met these two at a QRI study and was quickly impressed by their ability to describe exotic phenomenology and their wide knowledge of meditative techniques, but above all, by their warmth and humility.
When they announced a joint retreat, I jumped at the opportunity.
And so last week I spent seven days at a castle-themed home in Westchester, with around a dozen fellow meditators, doing nothing.
Outline
Detox
First insight: information fasting is extraordinarily effective.
At the retreat, we not only turned off our phones—we left behind books, writing implements, even casual conversation. There was nothing to do but sit, walk, and drink tea. For fifteen hours a day.
The retreat started on a Saturday afternoon. By Sunday evening, the amount of discursive thought passing through my brain dropped by around 50%, especially while formally practicing meditation. More importantly, about 80-90% of those thoughts were about meditation. I mostly stopped thinking about work, family, friendships, politics, life goals, etc.
I’ve never been so maniacally focused on one thing.
As painful as the detox was (more on that below), I feel like I’ve discovered a new superpower. I’m now trying to figure out small ways to bring this back into daily life—can I do no-internet Sundays? Spend one weekend a month totally detached? Maybe I’ll try and organize a smaller, looser detox retreat.
And I’d love to try applying this to other domains. What would happen if I focused solely on writing? On a single math textbook? If I just brought a guitar and a tape recorder?
Dissolution
I spent 8-9 hours each day practicing meditation. My focus was primarily on spreading and dissolving the tactile sensations that comprise my sense of a unitary, bounded self.
To illustrate—these days, when I close my eyes and sink into meditation, I feel a bit like this:
When I first close my eyes, each body part feels like a lump of tingling sensations surrounded by an empty void—as it probably would for you if you closed your eyes now. But within a few seconds, the lumps become fuzzier, and start to clump together. I notice tiny wisps of static in the void. I can feel currents of sensation pulsing through it all.
I call this set of sensations the tactile field: everything I can feel that isn’t sight, sound, or smell. The deeper I get into meditation, the more the tactile field smooths out—and the less it resembles a torso, limbs, and head.
But I’ve never felt that field completely smooth out. Typically, there’s a dense spherical shape in the center of my awareness, which roughly corresponds to my face and head. Below the sphere, there’s a blurry mound of sensation created by my torso and limbs; the limbs can be more or less well-defined1. Above and around the sphere are airy, staticky sensations that don’t map to any particular body part, or even to my sense of self—they’re more like my mental representation of space.
At the retreat, I spent most of my time trying to iron out those remaining clumps of tactile sensation.
The most stubborn clumps are the ones that comprise the dense pink circle in the center of the image, the sensations in my head and face. I’ve dissolved them before with chemical help: dissociatives like 5-MeO-DMT, nitrous, and ketamine (see those links for my previous trip reports) are all very effective.
My hope was that with Roger’s guidance, I’d be able to unlock this skill while sober. In my practice at home, I’d successfully dissolved the left, right, and bottom parts of the circle. But it still felt like there was a ceiling above me.
Roger’s first instruction was to look for specific areas in my scalp and forehead that might be generating those sensations. This seems wildly obvious in retrospect, but I’d been so fixated on working from within the dissolved mindstate that I’d completely neglected to look at my physical body!
Within a few hours I managed to relax a bunch of tiny muscles in my scalp, making the boundary considerably more permeable. But a throbbing sensation, coupled with a flashing white light at the top left of my visual field, persisted. Worse, any amount of focus seemed to exacerbate the throbbing.
It took a full day of struggle for me to finally palpate my skin with my fingers, only to discover a vein in my left temple, pulsating perfectly in sync with the throbbing and flashing. Within another hour I was able to relax some muscles in my neck and shoulders, which dropped the blood pressure in my head. The throbbing finally dissolved.
For a few minutes, only the wispy static was left—no more clumps. I was a transparent eyeball, floating in a boundless, empty space.
It still takes me a great deal of effort (and non-effort, Roger’s second most helpful instruction) to find my way back to this mindstate. But I’ve bushwacked a path, and now I just need to keep treading it.
Dreams and Visions
On Monday, the second full day of practice, I started to hallucinate.
Now, I’m no stranger to hallucination. I’ve done my share of psychedelic drugs. I’m an intrepid explorer of the dream world, and of the weird, hypnogogic spaces between wakefulness and sleep.
But now I was fully sober and awake, and somehow seeing long streams of dreamlike imagery behind closed eyelids. It was roughly equivalent to what I’d see on .75-1g of psychedelic mushrooms—not a heavy dose, but much more than a microdose.
I immediately sought Wystan’s council. He and I have bonded in the past over our love of cataphatic practice. He’s grounded in the Vajrayana tradition, and describes powerfully vivid interactions with Tibetan deities.
He assured me that my hallucinations were a common experience, and that cataphatic practitioners actually use the mindstates I’d been practicing in as a launchpad into imaginal spaces. Specifically, they aim to get as close as possible to that dissolved, boundless space, without actually crossing over. From there, they can grow new limbs (even a second head!), interact with deities, or slip out of body and explore the imaginal universe.
So I continued playing with the hallucinations, excited at the prospect of expanding my dreamwork into waking life. But by Wednesday evening things started getting a little too intense.
Freakout
I think the transition happened around a peak experience: one of the first times I stably entered that boundless space, I suddenly…disappeared. There was nothing but warmth, or maybe sparkling light. The warmth didn’t have a shape, a size, a location, or even a vantage point from which to observe it. There was just warmth.
I remember a vague effort to pull myself together, and the warmth became a string of red jewels, which coalesced into a circle. The circle became my face, and suddenly I had a body again. Whoa.2
That night, lying awake in bed, I experienced an extraordinarily vivid stream of hallucinations, for the better part of an hour. I saw a giant beetle eat the earth. I saw two cartoonish sharks make out. I saw geometric shapes, angels and demons, pulsating dragons. I saw what looked like an AI-generated orgy, with limbs and torsos and heads and breasts merging and morphing into one another, in an ecstatic Cronenbergian heap. I even met this guy:
The next morning, I dreamt of incompetent pilots attempting to build a space program, and nearly killing a crowd of bystanders with their first drone. The bystanders looked directly into the camera and held up signs saying “CODE RED”.
As the day progressed, things got shakier. The closed-eye hallucinations continued. And even with eyes open, the walls wouldn’t sit still. My visual field would spontaneously flatten into a 2D mess of shape and color. Everything felt sort of thin, like the world was made of papier-mâché.
I told Roger I was concerned. He gave the OK to break the container a bit, and turn down the volume.
Retox
Specifically, Roger suggested I skip our group sit and journal in my room. Instead, I opened up my text messages.
I’d been growing increasingly anxious that some horribly time sensitive thing was waiting in my inbox (narrator: There wasn’t). That worry compounded as things destabilized, and I was unsure if I’d be fit for work on Monday.
On the one hand, this worked very well. Almost immediately, the hallucinations abated, and the anxiety vanished. I was back to comfortably sitting the next morning. Above all, I built a lot of trust in my ability to reorient after an intense experience.
On the other hand, it was a complete reset. I thought I’d just crack the container open for 20 minutes, then maybe spend a few hours rebuilding it. But no—that tiny crack reset the clock back to Day 1. My narrative thoughts returned, and now they were mostly about work, not meditation.
I didn’t get back into full meditation mode until Friday afternoon, about 18 hours after breaking the seal. That gave me another 24 hours to continue practicing, but I never got nearly as deep as I was at the peak.
Integration
The retreat ended Saturday afternoon. Despite the setback, I was feeling incredibly positive about the experience. I’d made huge progress in my practice, added several new skills to my ever-growing mental toolkit, and got to peek a little further down the rabbit hole of no-self.
Midweek, I thought I’d be ecstatic to finally dive back into samsara. I fantasized about jumping into my car and heading straight to my favorite local bar for a beer and a cheeseburger—and I almost never eat beef. I even had an image in my head from the final episode of Breaking Bad, where Jesse escapes from literal slavery.
But my actual departure was quiet and somber. There were lots of hugs and smiles as we lifted our silence and ate a last meal together (with a cookie this time!) and I felt a mild, healthy sadness as I pulled out of the driveway.
About an hour into the drive I decided I was ready to listen to music, and put on The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron & Wine. At the start of the second song, to my great surprise, I began to cry.
When I stopped for gas, all I bought was a bottle of water. Normally I’d give myself a rare junk food treat to offset the boredom of a long car ride, but I was completely disinterested in the chips and soda. As I got close to home, I realized my desire for a cheeseburger had completely evaporated.
That night, after slowly digging out of texts and emails, I got some takeout, had one alcoholic drink, and watched one episode of TV. It was too much, too fast. I felt overwhelmed and dissatisfied by the lot of it.
But before sauntering off to bed I spent a couple minutes meditating, and tapped back into that spacious equanimity. It was a reassuring reminder that, no matter what life throws at me, I can always lean on this mindstate.
Karma Police
Throughout the retreat, I kept asking myself: why did it take me nearly a decade of practice to make this leap? I’d have made so much more progress, so much faster.
The answer is that I’m hugely skeptical of spiritual authority. I grew up a sincere Catholic, and then in my early teens learned that the men I trusted to have all the answers had been doing lots of child rape. This was earth-shattering, and a few years later I left the Church, with the clear sense that I should never delegate my spiritual autonomy to another human.
Throughout my years of meditation practice, I did try to make contact with existing communities. About two thirds of them turned out to be verifiably corrupt: one teacher punched a student in the face, and stole tens of thousands of dollars; another guru faced multiple accusations of rape; another convinced several students to take out loans they couldn’t afford to attend his trainings. The best I found was a well-established meditation center, but even there, I was turned off by the teacher’s self-certainty, and her flippant dispensation of life-changing advice to a woman she’d never met before. The room was filled with doe-eyed people looking for someone to fix them, someone to give them the answer, someone to worship.
But with Wystan and Roger, I was able to build up the container of a friendship first. They’ve been consistently open and vulnerable—I’ve helped Roger think about his romantic life, and watched Wystan process some mild anxiety about returning to school. For all their meditative accomplishments, they feel like my peers, and have always treated me like a peer. When I ask their advice, it feels more like getting tutored by a friend with a PhD than like requesting an audience with a guru.
I hope they’re able to maintain that humility as their influence inevitably grows alongside their natural talent for teaching. They’ve chosen one of the most psychologically dangerous professions out there—somewhere between slaughterhouse worker and prison guard.
We can see that clergy of all faiths have very dangerous jobs…Think if you were the pope. It would be a real spiritual problem to deal with your grandiosity…everyone constantly dumps their idealizing projections onto you…Think about going around the world and having 400,000 people gathered in front of you idealizing you while you do Mass.
…Just because you are ordained doesn’t mean that your shadow disappears. I deal with clergy all the time who have massive problems managing their own grandiosity. They tend to act out a lot. In fact, the phenomena of clergy acting out sexually, or in substance abuse, workaholism, or any other compulsive behavior, relate directly to the problem of managing their inner grandiosity.
—Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity
Wystan and Roger are the only meditation coaches I’ve met whom I trust wholeheartedly, the only ones I don’t squint at and wonder just how much ego is hiding behind their equanimous gaze. (I feel similarly towards Shinzen Young and Rob Burbea, though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting either.)
For all my reading, conversing, and community seeking, I can’t name another teacher who seems to sit below average on the narcissism spectrum—including those I believe to have a robust experience of no-self. Spiritual practice doesn’t protect us from our worst instincts; unless we’re very careful, it magnifies and disguises them.
Thanks to the relationship I’ve built with these two, I was able to finally give myself over to a deep, intense practice, without worrying that I’m falling into someone else’s ego trip.
I’m immensely grateful to Roger and Wystan (and to our wonderful organizer, Jess!) for creating this space. It’s redoubled my enthusiasm for meditation, and given me a whole new set of techniques for growth.
I’m very much looking forward to the next one.
When my body map is well-defined (i.e. I can still feel my arms), there’s still a surprising amount of fluidity. I can move my arms in my mind’s eye (or, more accurately, in my mind’s body) out to the sides, or up above my head. I can even hold them in superposition: two different sets of arms, one neatly folded in my lap (aligned with my physical body), and another stretched out in front of me. With practice, I’ve been able to grow and shrink the size of my hands, or stretch them miles apart. I’ve turned my arms into massive vines, sprouting giant redwoods. The imaginal body is remarkably malleable.
While there’s usually a small visual component to those hallucinations, they are mostly tactile impressions. And as I’ve argued before, tactile sensations are fundamental to proprioception, to our felt sense of self.
Even immediately after this experience, my memory of it felt untrustworthy. I’ve now played it back dozens of times, no doubt modifying it in the process. In particular the “sparkling light” might be a post hoc addition due to visualizing the experience in my mind’s eye. The string of red jewels comes from my first replay, but I’m still not sure I trust it.
All I can say for certain is: wow.
feels like you got a taste of 'die before you die' and I sincerely enjoyed reading the details. Also appreciate the re-entry lunch debate. From the wormhole of no-self to road trip junk food treats... just a metaphor for what we're all doing here.
I've never made it for longer than three days at a retreat, and never had any of the way-out special effects.