Sabbatical Dispatch 4: Santa Cruz Silent Meditation Retreat
We’re back with a special edition of our sabbatical dispatch! Our recent meditation retreat took place in Santa Cruz, right in the backyard of our bay area friends. While the physical location isn’t exotic, we found the experience both compelling and other worldly. In this post, we’ll be describing the "what's" and "how's" of this experience as well as our personal reflections. At any time, if you’d like to unsubscribe to reduce noise, please do so. You won’t hurt our feelings, promise!
Our History With Meditation
Before talking about our meditation retreat, let’s talk meditation at a high level first.
Meditation has gained popularity in the US in the past decade, especially in coastal cities where the pace of life is fast and likely stress-inducing. Meditation’s current popularity makes complete sense given its panacea of promises- tranquility, joy, productivity and much more.
The myriad of potential benefits contrasts with the prosaic appearance of meditation in practice. For most forms of meditation, you sit there in silence, with your eyes closed, trying not to think of much … for a very long time.
Jim had struggled with meditating consistently over the past 7 years. Sometimes, he felt an ephemeral sense of peace, especially when meditating in a group setting at the San Francisco Zen Center. But when life got stressful, the practice often fell by the wayside. There was always a doubtful voice murmuring something like, “How is just sitting there going to help you plan this weekend trip and get caught up on the spec due at work?” Life exigencies not only won out, but often undermined conviction in the benefits of meditation since it often didn’t feel “productive.”
Dawn had a more distant relationship with meditation. As a child, she meditated for fun when her dad occasionally brought the family to Buddhist temples in Northern California. As an adult, she struggled with sleepiness during meditation and didn’t experientially sense the appeal.
For both of us, there was always a curiosity to go deeper given the influence of Buddhism in Dawn’s family and meditation’s prevalence amongst our friends. Our sabbatical finally created the space to pursue this latent curiosity.
Meditation Retreat 101
Dawn had led the initial research into meditation retreats, after observing Jim’s inner struggles in 2022 and the loops of problematic habits we had both fallen into. For example, right up to lights out time, Jim would often be on his phone. This would contribute to later bedtimes and poor quality of sleep, which of course, led to even more late night device time. Dawn was getting used to reaching for a glass of wine when she felt tired or anxious, and this was conditioning her mind into dependency.
We’d love to describe a mindful and contemplative process by which we committed to a retreat, but for us it was actually quite simple. In a moment of clarity, Dawn had felt that the drastic habits reset a meditation retreat offers might not only be helpful, but necessary. Any other benefits on top would be a nice bonus.
We had considered locations as exotic as Thailand and Indonesia. However we ultimately settled on one in the US to give ourselves a more gentle onramp. Participating in a retreat stateside meant minimal cultural & language barriers and creature comforts like a bed with a mattress.
We are SO grateful to have eventually decided on the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. Both Varun and Erik were incredibly helpful in our decision process by discussing their own experiences. In case you ever consider doing a retreat yourself, here are some basic learnings from our research on retreats across the world:
Residential period of 7-10 days- For most retreats, you stay on premises at provided accommodations. The most common length we found was about 7 to 10 days, although shorter retreats are available especially in the US. The logic is that longer periods offer retreatants spacious opportunities to ease into stillness and mindfulness, which we personally found very helpful. For reference, we had both hit our strides around day 3 or 4.
An aggressive meditation schedule- Between sitting and walking, you can expect to be meditating somewhere between 8-10 hours a day. Makes sense given you’re there full time! We were initially daunted by this schedule but had quickly settled in even with minimal meditation practice pre-retreat. The individual sessions felt long, but the days felt short.
Silence, no devices & other renunciations- Retreats are almost always silent and strictly device free, #digitaldetox. This is to minimize distractions and facilitate deeper practice. Retreats that are affiliated with buddhism will also require taking the Five Precepts, which means no killing (even insects!), no stealing, no sexual activity, no lying, and no taking intoxicants during the length of the retreat. This largely means a more simple and intentional lifestyle, and we personally didn’t run into any issues during the retreat. We found the enforcement of all of these rules gentle and supportive at our center.
Applications-based in the US- US retreats are often over subscribed, with waitlists. If you decide to go, we recommend that you look at least 2-3 months in advance. International retreats are generally more accommodating. Some will even take walk-ins on the day of, but policies vary.
Costs varied widely- Some retreats are donation-based to make their teachings and benefits accessible to everyone. Some others charge fees, with scholarships for students and underrepresented groups. The upper range for a week-long retreat we found was ~$3000 for a single room at Spirit Rock Center in Marin.
If you’re seriously considering attending one (we recommend it!) and want more detailed guidance, we’re open to chatting at any time.
Our Experience at Insight Retreat Center (IRC)
To put the headline front and center, both of us had an INCREDIBLY FRUITFUL experience at our meditation retreat. We are deeply grateful to have arrived with minimal expectations. The retreat both challenged and rewarded us in ways we could not have imagined.
The below sample schedule helps paint the picture of our daily cadence:
What this schedule doesn’t illustrate is how supportive and flexible the whole experience was. The teachers often reminded everyone to be gentle with themselves and take whatever time they need, whether it’s napping in your room, or just some stretches in common areas. Dawn and I attended about 80% of the sitting and walking meditations throughout the day, playing hooky to catch up on sleep or just take a walk outside when the weather was nice. Each individual session ranged from 50-75% attendance, so there was never pressure to strictly adhere to the schedule.
This sense of gentleness and care permeated throughout every aspect of our experience. We each had our own private room which was simple and clean, with thoughtful details like closet hanger organizers and temperature controls. The vegetarian meals were surprisingly filling and all homemade, regularly featuring hearty stews and soups that were comforting at the end of long days. To supplement the meals, tea and light snacks (e.g. boiled eggs, crackers, peanut butter etc.) were available at all hours of the day in the kitchen. All of us received individual one-on-ones with the teachers throughout the week, called “practice discussions”. The teachers’ main goals seemed to be providing compassion and warmth rather than delivering critical feedback on our approach. Dawn was encouraged to nap even more since she was struggling with staying awake during meditation. Jim was gently reminded to let go of some of his own self-awareness and guilt about losing focus in meditations due to shoulder pain.
It’s hard to describe in words the sense of peace and stillness that settled over the center and washed through each of us. Because of the vowed silence and the careful attention with which people moved, the loudest noise was often the sound of someone releasing a deep breath. The sound of the woodpeckers and mockingjays, and the gentle breeze gliding through the redwoods were the perfect background soundtrack.
We’ll be sharing more about our individual experiences, insights, and benefits below. Before continuing, we just wanted to call out a couple of things that make writing about the phenomenon of a meditation retreat challenging. First, many facets of buddhism and meditation are experiential, with teachers encouraging practitioners to momentarily suspend efforts to intellectually dissect concepts and instead invest in experiencing first hand. The retreat’s instruction reinforced this theme. Many talks centered around encouraging focus, belief, self-care, and stamina, rather than unpacking difficult spiritual concepts.
Second, describing outcome-based benefits and takeaways fly in the face of the process-oriented nature of meditation. While the retreat definitely endowed us and other retreatants with many benefits, we suspect that to solely focus on those benefits would be to miss the point. A teacher summed up the prevailing wisdom on this topic with her answer to a retreatants question, “I’m experiencing the deepest sense of stillness I have in a while in a recent meditation, what should I do next? What else should I be aiming for?” A summary of her response was along the lines of, “That’s awesome that you’re feeling those things while you’re sitting. We spend way too much time in our daily life considering the question of what’s next. Just lean into that sense of tranquility you’re experiencing right now. That alone is enough.”
Jim’s Personal Reflections
I’ve been used to solving problems my whole life, whether it’s small problems like the optimal strategy in a casual board game with friends, or big Problems like how anyone can know whether they’ve found their soulmate for life partnership. In certain moments, like that of the latter question, I had learned to lay down my universal “solving” hammer and summon other faculties like surrender, belief, and love. However, the early days of the retreat gave me such a humbling and stark reminder that I am fundamentally still a “solver”, aiming for resolution and certainty across my life.
On the first night, I had a lot of trouble sleeping, despite a long travel day, a comfortable bed, and very quiet surroundings. I’m no stranger to an occasional bad night. So I stayed patient, opened up a book, and eventually drifted off for around 5 hours.. On the second night, I was sure that I would nod off quickly given the fatigue from the night before. Yet as soon as I laid down, the yawns had disappeared. Fresh off about 8 hours of meditation, my mind wasn’t racing but rather a disconcerting blank. After struggling to stay patient, a slow walk in the dark, and a lot more pages of a novel, I eventually managed another 5 fitful hours of sleep. The same thing had happened on night three as well, with a creeping crescendo of annoyance and worry bleeding into my consciousness.
Meanwhile, I had developed a nagging shoulder pain during the first few days. Consulting with a teacher, we had ascertained that this wasn’t anything serious, just overuse of some shoulder muscles while in meditation position. I had tried just about everything to assuage this pain. Strategies included using extra cushions, sitting in a chair rather than on the floor, stretching before sitting, changing my position and more. None of it had worked. Without anything else to distract me from this pain during long hours of meditation, I could feel it metastasizing inside of me. Doubt crept in, driving thoughts of, “But what if the teachers are wrong and this pain is indeed serious?” Frustration set in, underlying internal questions of, “WHY isn’t this pain going away?? I’ve been here for 4 days already, and my muscles SHOULD be strengthening. What is going on??”.
On the fourth night at around midnight, the sleeplessness and pain had melded together into a single ball of frustration and fear. Lying wide awake nursing my shoulder against the cold wall, I was at my breaking point. I considered leaving right then and there. I had considered the logistics of leaving a note for Dawn, the route I’d take, and more. And then something unclenched inside of me. Now that I had considered the “worst case scenario” which would put me in a more comfortable setting that same night, things didn’t seem quite as bad.
So with that spaciousness, I turned my attention to the teachings and practice from the last four days. I slowed down my breath, moved my attention across my body gently, and watched my thoughts start to slow down. At a certain point, I began to trace the sequence of emotions and thoughts around pain, for example:
SIGNAL: A nagging throbbing pain in the shoulder
INSTINCT: An immediate urge to want to move and avoid the pain.
EMOTION: Annoyance at how pain isn’t subsiding even as I’m lying down
EMOTION: Fear that this pain might grow even worse than tomorrow.
INSTINCT: Suppress the annoyance and fear. They’re enemies of sleep and unproductive.
As all of this slowed down in the quiet darkness and the underlying panic faded, I could start to feel the “gaps” between these thoughts. For example, I saw the slight gap between the signal of pain and the instinct to move. And when I gently told that instinct to just wait a bit, it faded after a while. When I let go of trying to quash the annoyance and fear inside of me to return to my breathing, they had faded a bit too. After about half an hour of gentle effort, I had finally drifted off.
The following day I woke up and went back into meditation practice. I further built upon the foundation of letting go and gently warded off my instincts to fix the self-perceived problems inside of me.
I want to tell you that this insight of “not fixing” had fixed my shoulder pain and insomnia but in reality neither was the case. Throughout the rest of the week, I continued to experience both afflictions. However, the quality of my experience had transformed. The fear, impatience, frustration, and annoyance underlying the physical pain had slowly subsided. At times, I even feel like I had made friends with both afflictions, talking to them gently and hearing indistinct murmurings back. Or perhaps it was just the sleepless delirium setting in.
I left the retreat with a torrent of ideas and concepts. Some of them have already faded before time of writing, hopefully still leaving echoes in my subconsciousness. However, one remains etched in my mind, that some things can’t and shouldn’t be fixed.
Dawn’s Personal Reflections
I had few expectations going into this retreat. Mainly, I wanted to support Jim. But there was also a lingering curiosity about Buddhism, a sense that I’d regret not trying this experience at least once in my life.
On the first day of retreat, I struggled a lot. It took all the energy I had just to stay awake during the sitting meditations. This extreme sleepiness was what had deterred me from meditating in the past. It made the whole experience feel futile — a tired mind is desperately searching for and clinging to distractions. When I sought help from one of the teachers during our practice discussion, she revealed that she sleeps most of the day during the first couple days of retreat. “We often don’t realize how exhausted we are from modern life,” she said.
Her words gave me the gift of permission, encouraging me to take care of myself first. So the next day, I started taking not one but two naps; and that was the turning point of my week.
On the afternoon of the third day, I was meditating after a nap and the experience was night and day compared to before. My mind was so Clear, Bright, and Focused. There was even a quiet, emerging sense of joy. Momentarily, I was able to observe my mind as if I were a separate entity — fully aware, and in awe of its vastness. Experiencing the contrast between meditating with a tired mind vs. a well-rested mind helped me understand mindfulness in a completely new light.
Before, I knew what mindfulness meant in theory, and that it was “good for me.” But now I felt mindfulness in my heart. With clarity, I felt what mindfulness meant to me and why it was beneficial. To me, mindfulness means: to be aware and present, with grace. First, awareness is needed to notice passing thoughts and emotions, and to give them the undivided attention they deserve. Next, presence means to co-exist with and observe these emotions — not wishing for them to go away or looking for distractions. And finally, the hope is to do all this with grace, with acceptance and kindness for ourselves and others.
Sure, this sounds nice and all, but why is it useful? I asked the same question before, so let me share some practical findings. During retreat, I experienced how practicing mindfulness can diminish the power that negative emotions & thoughts have over you, thus reducing the suffering that results. Once you notice the fear, jealousy, and self-doubt that appear in your mind, you can bring it into the light for observation. “Notice the shape and texture of it”, as our teachers instructed. “Don’t chase it away, let it stay for a moment”. Often, what seemed formidable and daunting will shrink into something rather unsubstantial, and before you know it, it’s floating away.
One day in the middle of retreat, I was sitting outside a teacher’s door, waiting to have my practice discussion. The doors were a little thin, so I could hear bursts of laughter and the sounds of lively conversation. After a few minutes of waiting, I noticed a tightness in my chest. This tightness slowly expanded.
Then, as if watching race cars drive by in slow motion, I observed a string of thoughts parade through my mind. “This other student is way more charismatic than you. He has more meaningful things to say. People like him are going to get ahead in life and you’re not.”
Woah. That was interesting. Perhaps a little intense. Hmm. Maybe I’m just feeling some anxiety and self-doubt since I don’t have much experience with meditating. But that’s okay. It’s okay I feel this way, and it doesn’t need to extrapolate to other areas of my life.
Slowly the knot in my chest grew smaller, and pretty soon it floated away.