10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

Chapter 7 Retreat

It was the longest, most exquisite high of my life, but the hangover came first.

Here’s what I’m mindful of right now: pervasive dread.

I’m sitting in a café in San Francisco, having what I assume will be my last decent meal before I check in for the Zen Death March. As I eat, I leaf listlessly through the mimeographed information sheets sent by the people at the retreat center. The place is called Spirit Rock, which sounds like a New Age version of “Fraggle Rock,” populated by crystal-wielding Muppets. The writing is abristle with the type of syrupy language that drives me up a wall:

“Retreats offer a sacred space, protected and removed from the world, intended to allow participants to quiet the mind and open the heart.”

The sheets request that we “take whatever room is offered,” whether it’s a single or a double. (This sends unpleasant images dancing through my head of potential roommates who are all gray-haired, ponytailed, beret-wearing, Wavy Gravy look-alikes.) The chefs will “lovingly prepare” lacto-ovo vegetarian food. We will be assigned daily “yogi jobs,” either in housekeeping or the kitchen, or “ringing bells,” whatever that means. There’s a lengthy list of “What Not to Bring,” seemingly written in 1983, which includes beeper watches and “Walkmans.” The retreat will be conducted in “noble silence,” which means no talking to one another and no communication with the outside world, except in case of emergencies.

The whole ten-days-of-no-talking thing is the detail that everyone I told about the retreat keyed in on. To a man (or woman), the people I had the courage to admit how I was spending my vacation asked something to the effect of, “How can you go without talking for that long?” Silence, however, is the part that worries me the least. I don’t imagine there will be many people at the retreat I’ll be dying to chat with. What truly scares me is the pain and boredom of sitting and meditating all day every day for ten straight days. For a guy with a bad back and a chronic inability to sit still, this is definitely a suboptimal holiday.

I call a cab for the hour-long ride to northern Marin County. As we cross the Golden Gate, I feel like a lamb leading itself to slaughter. I get an email from Sam saying he’s “envious” of the experience I’m about to have. His timing is impeccable. It’s an encouraging reminder that, apparently, these retreats can produce remarkable moments. In fact, I recently read a New York Times op-ed piece by Robert Wright, a journalist, polemicist, curmudgeon, and agnostic not known for either credulousness or mystical leanings. Wright wrote that he had “just about the most amazing experience” of his life on retreat, which involved finding “a new kind of happiness,” and included a “moment of bonding with a lizard.”

However, major breakthroughs—known in spiritual circles as “peak experiences”—cannot be guaranteed. What is almost certain, though—and even Sam acknowledged this—is that the first few days will be an ordeal. Classic prapañca: I’m casting forward to day two or three, envisioning myself marooned and miserable.

We roll up to Spirit Rock at around four in the afternoon. As we pull off the main road and onto the campus, I spot a sign that reads YIELD TO THE PRESENT.

Jesus.

The place is beautiful, though, like something out of a French Impressionist painting. We are surrounded by hills covered in pale gold, sun-bleached scrub grass, with clusters of vivid green trees nestled throughout. The center itself is a series of handsome wood structures with Japanese-style roofs, built into the side of a hill.

As I wheel my luggage up to the main office, I catch the first glimpses of my fellow meditators. They are solidly, solidly NPR—card-carrying members of the socks-and-sandals set.

We line up for our room assignments and yogi jobs. (I’m starting to figure out that yogi is just another word for “meditator.”) I’m told I will be a “pot washer.”

Hallelujah: I get a single room, on the second floor of one of the four dorm buildings. The accommodations are spare, but not gross. There’s a single bed next to a window. The walls are white. The carpet is tan. There’s a mirror and a sink. The communal bathroom is down the hall.

At six o’clock, dinner—and my first big shock: the food is excellent. It’s a buffet of smashed-pea dip, just-baked bread, salad with dill dressing, and soup made out of fresh squash.

I wait my turn in line, load up a plate, and suddenly find myself in one of those awkward, high school cafeteria–type situations, in which I don’t know where to sit. There are around one hundred of us. The crowd consists overwhelmingly of white baby boomers. A lot of these people seem to know one another—they must be regulars on the West Coast meditation scene. Since we haven’t yet been told that we have to stop talking, everyone’s kibitzing happily.

I find a spot next to a kindly, older married couple, who strike up a conversation. I express my fears about the first few days being brutal. The wife reassures me, saying it’s not that bad. “It’s like having jet lag,” she says.

As we finish eating, Mary, the head chef—a chipper, cherub-faced woman with short brown hair—gets up and makes a little presentation. There will be three meals a day: breakfast, lunch, and a light supper. There are rules: no food in the rooms; no entering the dining hall until invited in by one of the chefs, who will ring a bell; after eating, we must line up, scrape off our plates, and put them in plastic tubs for the kitchen cleaners. For hard-core vegans, there’s a special side area of “simple foods.” And for people who really have special dietary needs, there’s a “yogi shelf,” where they can keep their personal stash of wheat germ or whatever. Mary has none of the severity I was expecting. I had pictured a Buddhist Nurse Ratched. “I want you to think of this as your dining room,” she tells us, and she seems to actually mean it.

The official opening session is held in the meditational hall, located in a stately building on an outcropping of rock set apart from the dorms by a hundred yards or so. Before entering, everyone takes off their shoes in a little foyer. The hall is large and airy, with shiny wood floors and lots of windows. There’s an altar at the front with a statue of the Buddha. Arrayed before it are roughly a dozen mats in neat rows. Many people have shown up early to claim their spots and have built elaborate meditation nests out of small wooden benches, round cushions called “zafus,” and thin, wool blankets. They’re sitting, with legs crossed and eyes closed, waiting for the proceedings to begin. This sends my “comparing mind” aflutter. I’m clearly out of my league.

For those of us who can’t hack the traditional postures, there are several rows of chairs lined up behind the mats. So, much as I’d done as a sullen punk kid in high school, I find myself sitting in the back of the room.

As soon as I’m settled, I look over to see a row of teachers walking into the hall, single file. They’re all silent and stone-faced, with Goldstein bringing up the rear. I recognize him from the pictures on his book jackets. He’s taller than I expected. He walks in long, slow strides. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and khakis that ride high on the waist. There’s a roughly three-inch strip of baldness down the center of his head, flanked by short brown hair on either side. The centerpiece of his angular face is a large, elegant protuberance of a nose. He’s wearing a goatee. He looks very, very serious. The overall effect is a little intimidating.

The teachers take their seats in the front row and one of them, a fiftyish Asian woman named Kamala, welcomes us in that artificially soft, affected manner of speech that I’m now thinking they must teach at whatever meditation school these people attended. She formally opens the retreat and declares that we have now officially “entered into silence.” More rules: no talking, no reading, no sex. (I’ve read that there’s such a thing as a “yogi crush,” a silent longing for one of your fellow meditators, at whom you steal furtive glances and around whom you construct feverish fantasies. As I look around the room, I realize this will not be a problem for me.)

In her contemplative purr, the teacher tells us that the goal on retreat is to try to be mindful at all times, not just when we’re meditating. This means that all of our activities—walking, eating, sitting, even going to the bathroom—should be done with exaggerated slowness, so we can pay meticulous, microscopic attention.

At this point, I get my first look at the schedule we will be following for the rest of the retreat. It’s even more brutal than I’d imagined. The days will start with a five o’clock wake-up call, followed by an hour of meditation, then breakfast, then a series of alternating periods of sitting and walking meditation of various lengths, lasting all the way up until ten at night, broken up by meals, rest and work periods, and an evening “dharma talk.” I do some quick math: roughly ten hours a day of meditation. I honestly do not know if I can hack this.

My alarm goes off at five and I realize, suddenly and unhappily, where I am.

I pick out one of the three pairs of sweatpants I packed in anticipation of long, sedentary days. I pad down the hall to the bathroom, perform the ablutions, and then walk outside into the chilly morning air and join the stream of yogis heading out of the dorms into the meditation hall. Everyone’s walking slowly, with heads down. I realize that these people are really taking seriously the injunction to be mindful at all times.

As I walk amid the silent herd through the predawn darkness, I resolve to go balls-out on this retreat. If I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to do it right, damn it.

So, when I enter the hall, instead of going to the chair I’d picked out the night before, I wade into the archipelago of mats. I put two cushions on top of each other and straddle them, imitating the sitting style of some of the more experienced meditators.

I notice that as people file in, many of them stop and bow in the direction of the Buddha statue at the front of the hall. This makes me uncomfortable. I wonder how Sam deals with this.

Then another unpleasant surprise: There are pieces of legal-size paper at each of our meditation stations. They are lyric sheets. We will be expected to chant.

One of the teachers, a middle-aged white guy, takes the podium and explains that these are the “Refuges and Precepts,” the chants with which yogis have, for centuries, started their day. The lyrics are in Pali, the language of the Buddha, but they’re spelled out for us phonetically. He begins chanting, slow and low, and the rest of us join in, reading from our sheets. (Chanting is one of the only exceptions to the “Noble Silence” rule, along with the occasional opportunity we’ll get to speak with the teachers.)

On the right side of the page is the English translation. In the first part of the chant, we’re “taking refuge” in the Buddha, “the Blessed One, the Perfected One, the Fully Enlightened One.” Then we take the “precepts,” which are basically a series of promises: no harming (people or animals), no stealing, no lying, no substance abuse—and also, as if this might be a problem, “no dancing, singing, music, and unseemly shows.” If my friends could see me perched on this tuffet, chanting, they would be laughing their asses off.

When the chant ends, we’re off—we’re meditating. This is it. Game on.

Almost immediately, I realize that sitting on cushions is a terrible idea. I am assailed by back and neck pain. The circulation to my feet feels like it’s dangerously choked off. I try to focus on my breathing, but I can’t keep up a volley of more than one or two breaths.

In.

Out.

In.

Holy crap, I think my feet are going to snap off at the ankle.

Come on, dude.

In.

It feels like a dinosaur has my rib cage in its mouth.

Out.

I’m hungry. It’s really quiet in here. I wonder if anyone else in here is freaking out right now.

After a truly horrible hour, I hear a gentle ringing sound, kind of like a gong. The teacher has just tapped on what looks like a metal bowl, but apparently is a bell.

Everyone gets up and shuffles—mindfully—down the hill toward the dining hall. I follow along in a daze, like I’ve just had the bejeezus kicked out of me. A line forms outside the building. Oh, right. We’re not allowed to go in until one of the chefs comes out and rings a bell. There’s something a little pathetic about this.

I look around. While the word yogi sounds goofy—like Yogi Berra or Yogi Bear—these people all seem so grim. Turns out, mindfulness isn’t such a cute look. Everyone is in his or her own world, trying very hard to stay in the moment. The effort of concentration produces facial expressions that range from blank to defecatory. The instruction sheets gently advise us not to make eye contact with our fellow retreatants, so as to not interrupt one another’s meditative concentration. Which makes this the only place on earth where the truly compassionate response to a sneeze is to ignore it completely.

The outfits aren’t helping this little zombie jamboree. Aesthetically, many of these people seem to be cultivating an aggressive plainness—and in some cases, a deliberate oddness. Their clothes are often mismatched or several decades out of style. One guy is wearing pleated acid-washed jeans.

Breakfast is followed by a break, and then the second sitting of the day.

Even though I’ve retreated to my chair, I am nonetheless besieged by screaming back pain. I still can’t maintain concentration for more than one or two breaths. Perhaps because I’m having some sort of performance anxiety, the meditation is much harder for me here than it is at home. I feel like a rookie who’s been called up to the big leagues and just can’t cut it. I cannot believe I’m going to be sitting in this chair, here in this room, with these people, for the next nine days of my life.

During the first period of walking meditation, I’m at a loss. I have no idea what walking meditation even means, so I decide to just take a stroll. There are lots of animals here: salamanders, baby deer, wild turkeys. They come right up to you, totally unafraid. Apparently the “commitment to non-harming” memo has reached the woodland creatures. And the humans take it very seriously. Last night, I saw a guy in the meditation hall make a big show out of ushering a bug out of the room on a sheet of paper rather than squashing it.

The third sitting is even more of a nightmare. My body has now found a new way to revolt: my mouth keeps filling up with saliva. I’m trying not to move, but this situation is untenable. I can’t sit here with a mouth full of spit. So I swallow. Every time I gulp it down, though, my mouth refills almost immediately. This, of course, completely derails my attempts to establish any rhythm whatsoever with my breath. My interior monologue now centers almost entirely on when the session will end.

Did I just hear the stupid bell?

Is that the bell?

No, it’s not the bell.

Shit.

Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit . . . Shit.

When the bell finally does ring, Goldstein clears his voice to speak. This is the first time we’ll be hearing from the Great Man himself. His voice is deep and booming, yet also has the slight nasal twang of a New York Jew, an accent apparently impervious to years of studying meditation in Asia.

Goldstein begins by setting us straight on walking meditation. “It is not recess,” he intones. In other words, no strolling around and taking in the scenery. The drill is this, he explains: stake out a patch of ground about ten yards long, and then slowly pace back and forth, mindfully deconstructing every stride. With each step, you’re supposed to note yourself lifting, moving, and placing. And repeat. Ad infinitum.

Excellent. So there will be no break from the tedium all day long.

And while Goldstein’s laying down the law, he makes another request. When each seated meditation session is finished, he wants us to wait to leave the hall until after all of the teachers have filed out. This, he says, would be more “decorous.”

Over lunch in a room filled with zombies, most of them chewing with their eyes closed, a giant wave of sadness rolls over me. I feel all alone and utterly trapped. The sheer volume of time left in this ordeal looms over my head like a mile of ocean water. It feels like the desperate homesickness I experienced every summer as a kid when my parents dropped me off at sleepaway camp.

Also, I feel stupid. Why am I here, when I could be spending this time on a beach with Bianca? She and I had had a few tense chats about this retreat. She wanted to be supportive of my “spiritual” quest, but it was hard not to be resentful of my using up ten days of vacation to go meditate, especially given how little time off I get. Furthermore, at least when I travel to someplace like Papua New Guinea or the Congo, I can call her every day, assuming I can get a signal. Here, I’m completely sequestered.

And now I’m sitting in this room full of strangers, thinking: I shouldn’t have come here. I’m such an idiot.

As the wash of sadness and regret crests, I am able to muster some mindfulness, to see my feelings with some nonjudgmental remove. I tell myself that it’s just a passing squall. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does keep the demons at bay.

In the next walking meditation period, I stake out my strip of land on the stone patio in front of the meditation hall, then pace slowly back and forth, trying to note each component of my stride. Lift, move, place. Lift, move, place. If a civilian were to stumble upon all of us yogis out here walking in slow motion, they’d probably conclude that a loony bin was having a fire drill.

Back on the cushion, I’m waging a Sisyphean battle, trying to roll the boulder of concentration up a never-ending hill. I’m straining to focus on my breath, gripping at it like it’s a rope hanging off the side of a cliff. I’m no match, though, for the pageant of pain, fatigue, and saliva. I find it humiliating—infuriating, really—that after a year of daily meditation, I cannot get a toehold here. Every instance of mental wandering is met with a tornadic blast of self-flagellation.

In.

Out.

I wonder if they’ll have more of that fresh bread at dinner?

Damn, dude.

In.

Did someone actually invent and patent the sneeze guard or, like math and language, was it devised in several disconnected civilizations, more or less simultaneously?

Idiot.

Incompetent.

Irretrievably, irrevocably, irredeemably stupid.

By the time the evening dharma talk begins, I’m feeling utterly defeated.

Goldstein and his crew process into the chamber, with Goldstein leading the way with giant, magisterial strides. He sits at the center of the altar; all the other teachers array themselves around him in their meditative positions, eyes closed.

Goldstein is trying to figure out how to put on the wireless headset. It’s the kind of microphone singers wear in concert so their hands can be free as they caper around the stage. Once he has it on, he says, “I feel like a rock star.”

A woman sitting behind me says reverently under her breath, “You are.”

As he starts his talk, I realize he’s infinitely less austere than he seemed in the hothouse of the meditation session. He’s actually funny, with a delivery that reminds me of those borscht belt comedians with names like Shecky.

He’s talking about the power of desire in our minds, and how our culture conditions us to believe that the more pleasant experiences we have—sex, movies, food, shopping trips, etc.—the happier we’ll be. He reads out some advertising slogans he’s collected over the years:

“Instant gratification just got faster. Shop Vogue-dot-com.”

Everyone laughs.

“Another slogan says, ‘I don’t let anything stand in the way of my pleasure.’ ”

“The best one of all,” he says, pausing for effect, in a wait-for-it kind of way, chuckling to himself as he lets our curiosity build.

“ ‘To be one with everything . . . you need one of everything.’ ”

The zombies erupt, as Goldstein lets out a series of gentle, high-pitched honks.

He goes on to answer one of my biggest questions, the one about Buddhism’s vilification of desire. It’s not that we can’t enjoy the good stuff in life or strive for success, he says. The key is not to get carried away by desire; we need to manage it with wisdom and mindfulness. Quite helpfully, he adds that he is by no means perfect on this score. He tells a story about his early years of intensive meditation in India in the 1960s. “My practice was going quite well, and the mind was quite concentrated. And it’s the kind of sitting where you think you’re going to get enlightened any minute,” he says with, I think, tongue in cheek. He explains that, at teatime at this retreat center, the yogis would be given a small cup of tea and a little banana. “So I’m sitting there, about to get enlightened and the tea bell rings.” Comic pause. “Enlightenment or banana?” Another pause. He’s cracking himself up again. “More often than not, go for the banana.”

The humor is a relief. As is his love for the material. After a day of wondering whether sitting and watching my breath is perhaps the stupidest conceivable pursuit, Goldstein’s talk is a welcome reminder of Buddhism’s intellectual superstructure. His enthusiasm is palpable and infectious. He discusses verses from the Buddha like a sommelier rhapsodizing over a 1982 Bordeaux.

“In one discourse, he captured the whole game in just a few words. These lines, if you heard these lines in the right way, you could get enlightened,” he says, chuckling again. “So here’s your chance . . .”

He’s talking about a verse where the Buddha calls everything we experience—sights, sounds, smells, etc.—the “terrible bait of the world.”

“It’s . . . an amazing statement,” he says. “Moment after moment, experiences are arising, and it’s as if each one has a hook . . . and we’re the fish. Do we bite? Or do we not bite, and just swim freely in the ocean?”

I’m thinking: Yes, right—there is a point to sitting around all day with your eyes closed: to gain some control over the mind, to see through the forces that drive us—and drive us nuts.

As he deconstructs various parts of the Buddhist scriptures, it strikes me that Goldstein is what you get when a brainy, intense Jew like my father decides to build an entire career out of Buddhism. I assume Goldstein’s parents would have preferred him to be a lawyer or a doctor, but instead he’s basically become a Talmudic scholar of Buddhism. And somehow, that accent, so much like my dad’s, makes me like him even more.

As the speech goes on, however, he starts to lose me. Earlier, he was joking about enlightenment, but now he’s speaking without irony about rebirth, karma, “purifying the mind” and achieving “liberation.” He closes by saying that the dharma “leads to calm, ease, and Nibbana.” (An alternate pronunciation of Nirvana.)

Oy. Way to ruin a great talk.

At the end of the last sitting of the day, another unpleasant surprise: more chanting. This time, it’s the metta chant, where we send “loving-kindness” to a whole series of “beings,” including our parents, teachers, and “guardian deities.” We wish for everyone to experience the End of Suffering.

It occurs to me that perhaps the quickest way for me to achieve the End of Suffering would be to go home.

I have a line running through my head from Chappelle’s Show, indisputably the funniest show in the history of television. In one of the sketches, Dave Chappelle appears in a “Hip-Hop News Break” as “Tron,” a “Staten Island man” who has been brutally attacked by members of the rap group the Wu-Tang Clan. Lying in a hospital bed surrounded by reporters, he says the rappers had sewn his anus shut and “kept feeding me and feeding me and feeding me.”

“It was torture—straight torture, son.”

That phrase—“straight torture, son”—keeps bouncing through my skull as I rotate, with the rest of the zombies, between sitting meditation, the Ministry of Silly Walks routine, and waiting in line at the dining hall to fill our bowls with grains and greens. I’m flat-out loathing this experience.

Late morning, I’m lingering, bored, in front of the message board in the foyer outside the meditation hall. With a frisson of excitement, I notice there’s a note for me. It’s from Goldstein. In neat, handwritten script on a small, white sheet of paper, he suggests we meet in about an hour. As the note explains, yogis are supposed to have regular interviews with the teachers, to discuss our practice. Since I didn’t get on his schedule today, he’s carving out some extra time. Around here, this is the closest you’ll get to a thrill.

At the appointed hour, I’m at the main office, taking off my shoes and pushing open the screen door. I pad into the carpeted room, where Goldstein is using his unreasonably long arms to pull an office chair directly in front of the big, fluffy love seat he’s planning to occupy. He pats the office chair, indicating I sit down.

One-on-one, he’s even looser than he was during the dharma talk. As is my wont, I pepper him with biographical questions. Turns out he was raised in the Catskills, where his parents owned a hotel for Jews from New York City. This explains his comic timing; he literally grew up in the borscht belt.

I feel privileged to have this audience, but also mildly stressed. I have a million questions, and yet I don’t want to overstay my welcome. He has a clock prominently displayed on the little table next to his chair, just like Dr. Brotman has on his desk.

I start with the most acute problem. “My mouth is filling with saliva all the time and it’s messing up my ability to concentrate.”

He laughs and assures me that, for some reason, this seems to happen to a lot of meditators. I find this enormously comforting. He suggests I give myself permission to swallow. Don’t fixate on it, he advises, or it’ll get worse. He says his mother—“a very intense woman”—used to have the same problem, except she refused to swallow, not wanting to cave to her urges, and would let it all run down the front of her dress. I am dying to hear how he convinced his Jewish mother to meditate, but I don’t have that kind of time.

He asks how my practice is going, generally. Not wanting to reveal the full extent of my despair, I allow that I’ve had some low moments, but then add that even as I was experiencing those moments, I knew they would pass. He smiles wide, slaps his knees, and says, “That’s the whole game!” It’s another useful reminder of why we’re here: to learn how to not get carried away by the clatter of the mind.

After fifteen minutes, I figure I’ve used up all of my time. The meeting was brief, but hugely satisfying. This guy really is a gem, a mensch. He’s like an emissary sent down every back alley and culde-sac of the mind, so that the rest of us can tell him our problems and he can say, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there, and here’s how you deal with it.”

This era of good feelings is brief. In one of the midafternoon seated meditation sessions, a teacher named Spring takes the podium and announces that today “We’re going to try something different.”

Spring, who appears to be in her thirties, is the embodiment of everything that most bothers me about the meditation world. She’s really working that speaking-softly thing. Every s is sibilant. Every word is overenunciated. She wears shawls. She’s probably really militant about recycling.

She says we’re going to do metta or loving-kindness meditation, which sounds like it will fall foursquare into the category of Things I Will Definitely Hate. Here’s how it works: we are supposed to picture a series of people in our minds and then, one by one, send them well wishes. You start with yourself, then move to a “mentor,” a “dear friend,” a “neutral person,” a “difficult person,” and then “all beings.” Interestingly, she says not to pick someone to whom you’re attracted. “Too complicated,” she says. So I guess Bianca will not be on the receiving end of the good vibes.

I am immediately convinced that this exercise will never, ever have any meaning for me. Even Saccharine Spring acknowledges it might feel a little forced, although she insists it has the potential to “change your life.”

The one good thing about metta meditation is that, since we’re supposed to be physically comfortable while generating these good vibes, we’re allowed to lie on the floor. I would treat this as a free period, except I really did promise myself to play full-on. I lie down and prepare to love hard.

We start with ourselves. Spring instructs us to generate a vivid mental picture of ourselves, and then repeat four phrases. As she says them aloud, her speaking style elevates to an entirely new level of cloying. She draws out the last syllable of every word in an almost Valley Girl–esque drawl.

May you be happy.

May you be safe and protected from harm.

May you be healthy and strong.

May you live with ease.

I get that, just like regular meditation is designed to build our mindfulness muscle, metta is supposed to boost our capacity for compassion, but all this exercise is doing for me is generating feelings of boredom, disdain, and insufficiency. It makes me question my generosity of spirit. If I was a good person, wouldn’t I be suffused with love right now? If I was a good husband, wouldn’t I be on the beach with Bianca? Thank you for that, Spring.

Today is my thirty-ninth birthday. I am confident it will be the worst birthday ever.

The morning meditation is an epic battle with sleepiness. I can feel fatigue oozing down my forehead. I am overcome by the desire to burrow into this fuzzy oblivion.

The next sitting is a festival of pain, saliva, coughing, and fidgeting. My heart pounds. I feel shame and anger as I swallow, snort, and shift in my chair. Heat rushes to my cheeks. I must be driving the people near me crazy. I try to be mindful of it all, but I’m starting to forget what mindfulness even means. Straight torture, son.

Off the cushion, my misery is also intensifying. Most of my thoughts center on how I can possibly survive six more days here. I recognize that part of the goal of a retreat is to systematically strip away all of the things we use—sex, work, email, food, TV—to avoid a confrontation with what’s been called “the wound of existence.” The only way to make it through this thing is to reach some sort of armistice with the present moment, to drop our habit of constantly leaning forward into the next thing on our agenda. I just can’t seem to do it, though.

I wonder if the others can tell that I’m struggling. Everyone else here seems so serene. I mean, there are some ostentatiously mindful people here. There’s one guy staying on my floor who I have literally never seen moving in anything but slow motion.

I really thought it would be easier by now. This is way worse than jet lag. I’m starting to worry that I’m going to have to come home and tell everyone—Bianca, Mark, Sam—that I failed.

I do the last walking meditation session of the night in the upstairs area, above the meditation hall. I’m struggling to stay focused on lifting, moving, placing, with my mind wandering variously to thoughts of watching TV, eating cookies, and sleeping. At the end of one back-and-forth, I look up and see a statue of the Buddha. Silently, I send him the following message: Fuck you.

I wake up desperate.

I’m drowning in doubt, genuinely considering quitting and going home. I seriously don’t know if I can make it another day. I need to talk to someone. I need help. But I don’t have an interview scheduled with Goldstein today. The only lifeline available to me is Dreaded Spring.

Since she is still technically an apprentice teacher, Spring is not assigned to directly oversee any of the yogis throughout the retreat. She has, however, posted a sign-up sheet on the message board for anyone who wants to come see her for an interview. With no small amount of hesitation, I sign up.

When my time comes, I enter the little office where she’s receiving people. She’s seated, smiling, with her shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looks impossibly smug to me. I’m not even sure we are equipped to communicate with each other. We’re two different species. This is going to be like a lizard trying to talk to a goat.

But whatever—I dive right in to my cri de coeur. “I’m giving this everything I have,” I tell her, “but I’m not getting anywhere. I don’t know if I can hack this. I’m really struggling here.”

When she answers, she’s no longer using her funny voice. She’s talking like a normal person. “You’re trying too hard,” she tells me. The diagnosis is delivered frankly and firmly. This is a classic problem on the first retreat, she explains. She advises me to just do my best, expect nothing, and “be with” whatever comes up in my mind. “It’s the total opposite of daily life,” she says, “where we do something and expect a result. Here, it’s just sitting with whatever is there.”

She goes on to say that she’s received a whole series of distraught retreatants, many of them in tears. This produces a very un-mettalike feeling in me: a satisfying rush of Schadenfreude. Well, well: some of these zombies aren’t as blissed-out as they seem, after all.

I look back at Spring, sitting there with her curly locks spread out over her shawl, and I realize this nice woman was a victim of another one of my rushes to judgment. Spring is actually very cool; I’m the dumbass. She’s right: it’s not complicated; I’m just trying too hard. I feel so grateful I could cry.

For the next sitting, I decide to take a chair from my bedroom and put it out on the balcony at the end of the hallway in my dorm. I tell myself I’m going to lower the volume, to stop straining so much. I’ll just sit here and “be with” whatever happens.

I can hear the others in the distance, walking back into the meditation hall for the start of the session. Then it gets really quiet. I sit, casually feeling my breath. No big deal. Whatever, man.

A few minutes in, something clicks. There’s no string music, no white light. It’s more like, after days of trying to tune into a specific radio frequency, I finally find the right setting. I just start letting my focus fall on whatever is the most prominent thing in my field of consciousness.

Neck pain.

Knee pain.

Airplane overhead.

Birdsong.

Sizzle of rustling leaves.

Breeze on my forearm.

I’m really enjoying putting cashews and raisins in my oatmeal at breakfast.

Neck. Knee. Neck. Neck. Knee, knee, knee.

Hunger pang. Neck. Knee. Hands numb. Bird. Knee. Bird, bird, bird.

I think I know what’s going on here. This is something called “choiceless awareness.” I’d heard the teachers talk about it. It’s some serious behind-the-waterfall action. Once you’ve built up enough concentration, they say, you can drop your obsessive focus on the breath and just “open up” to whatever is there. And that’s what’s happening right now. Each “object” that “arises” in my mind, I focus on with what feels like total ease and clarity until it’s replaced by something else. I’m not trying; it’s just happening. It’s so easy it feels like I’m cheating. Everything’s coming at me and I’m playing it all like jazz. And I don’t even like jazz.

Back pain.

Funny lights you see behind your eyes when they’re closed real tight.

Murderous itch on my calf.

Knee. Knee, knee, knee.

Itch, knee, back, itch, itch, itch, knee, airplane, tree rustling, breeze on skin, knee, knee, itch, knee, lights, back.

Then I hear a loud rumble approaching. It’s getting closer.

Now it’s super loud, like the fleet of choppers coming over the horizon in that scene from Apocalypse Now.

Now it’s right in front of me.

I open my eyes. There’s a hummingbird hovering just a few feet away.

No shit.

The next sitting is even more exhilarating. I’m back in the meditation hall now, and I’m really doing it. Whatever comes up in my mind, it feels like I’m right there with it. At times, I still find myself looking forward to the session ending. But when those thoughts come up, I just note them and move on.

It’s like a curtain has been lifted. It’s not that anything in the passing show is so amazing in itself; it’s the sheer rapidity of it all, the objects arising and passing, ricocheting off one another with such speed. And there’s something about the act of being present and awake in this way that produces a gigantic blast of serotonin.

Hands feel stiff.

Bird.

Feet numb.

Images of all those creepy baby faces in Renaissance art.

Heart pounding.

Back. Bird. Hands. Feet. Heart. Back, back, bird, feet, bird, bird, bird. Feet, hands, feet, feet, feet.

Hands. Hands. Back, back, back. Heart, bird, feet. Feet. Bird.

Feetbirdfeetbirdbackfeetfeetfeetheart.

Bird.

Bird.

Bird.

Old lady in the front row produces an epic burp.

It’s like I’d spent the past five days being dragged by my head behind a motorboat and now, all of a sudden, I’m up on water skis. This is an experience of my own mind I’ve never had before—a front-row seat to watch the machinery of consciousness. It’s thrilling, but it also produces some very practical insights. I get a real sense of how a few slippery little thoughts I might have in, say, the morning before I go to work—maybe after a quarrel with Bianca, a story I read in the paper, or an imagined dialogue with my boss—can weasel their way into the stream of my mind and pool in unseen eddies, from which they hector and haunt me throughout the day. Thoughts calcify into opinions, little seeds of discontent blossom into bad moods, unnoticed back pain makes me inexplicably irritable with anyone who happens to cross my path.

I’m remembering that time when my friend Kaiama stumped me by asking how anyone can be in the present moment when it’s always slipping away. It’s so obvious to me now: the slipping away is the whole point. Once you’ve achieved choiceless awareness, you see so clearly how fleeting everything is. Impermanence is no longer theoretical. Tempus fugit isn’t just something you inscribe in books and clocks. And that, I realize, is what this retreat is designed to do.

Having been dragged kicking and screaming into the present, I’m finally awake enough to see what I could never see in my regular life. Apparently there’s no other way to get here than to engage in the tedious work of watching your breath for days. In a way, it makes sense. How do you learn a sport? You do drills. A language? Conjugate endless verbs. A musical instrument? Scales. All the misery of repetition, the horror of sitting here in this hall with these zombies suddenly seems totally worth it.

Walking meditation is starting to click for me as well. I’m out on the patio in front of the retreat hall, deconstructing every step. Lift, move, place. My feet feel nice on the warm stones. Midway through one of the endless round-trips to nowhere, even though it’s technically a violation of Goldstein’s rule against using walking meditation as “recess,” I stop and stare at three baby birds perched on the ledge overlooking the courtyard, screeching their heads off as their mom zips to and fro, popping food into their mouths. I’m transfixed. A few other people have joined me, gaping at this little show. I feel incredibly happy—and I keep telling myself not to cling to it.

When I walk back into the hall for the next sit, I see Spring up at the altar. Right, it’s metta time. I lie down, and we start in, directing the four phrases at ourselves.

May you be happy. May you be safe. Etc.

Then Spring tells us to pick our benefactor. I pick my mother. I summon a mental picture of her from a few weeks ago, when she and I were taking care of my two-year-old niece, Campbell. We had just given Campbell a bath, and all three of us were lying on the bed. My mom started singing Campbell’s favorite song, M. Ward’s “For Beginners,” which Campbell referred to as “the uh-huh song,” because the chorus includes a lot of “uh-huhs.” I’m able to generate a real felt-sense of my mom. I’m enjoying the sweet absurdity of a grandmother having memorized the words to an indie rock song. As I picture her, with her neatly coiffed, short gray hair, and her smart, casual clothing, something entirely unexpected overcomes me: a silent sob wells up in my chest—with all the inevitability of a sneeze.

There’s no stopping this. Tears rush down the sides of my recumbent face, streaming down my temples in hot streams that get thicker with each successive wave of emotion. The water is pooling behind my ears.

“Now pick a dear friend,” says Spring. She’s back to using her funny voice but it’s not bothering me at all.

I go with Campbell. It couldn’t be more convenient; she’s already right here in this scene I’m conjuring in such vivid detail. She’s propped up against the pillow on the bed. I have one of her little feet in my hand and am looking at her sweet face with her mischievous eyes, which are eagerly lapping up all the attention my mom and I are giving her.

I’m crying even harder now. It’s not an out-loud sobbing, but there’s no way the people around me aren’t noticing this, because I’m sniffling and breathing choppily.

The blubbering lasts right up until when the bell rings. As I walk out of the hall, I’m grateful for the rule against eye contact; otherwise, this would be very embarrassing. I emerge into the daylight, walk down the hill a ways, and stand in the scrub grass under the warm afternoon sun. Amid the crashing waves of bliss, I feel a gentle undertow of doubt. Is this bullshit, or the real deal? Maybe it’s just the result of five days of unbroken agony finally relieved? Like that joke where the guy is banging his head against the wall—when asked why he’s doing it, he says, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

But no, the waves of happiness just keep coming. Everything is so bright, so crisp. I feel great. Not just great—unprecedentedly great. I’m aware of the urge to cling to this feeling, to wring out every last bit of flavor, like with a tangy piece of gum, or a tab of ecstasy. But this is not the synthetic, always-just-about-to-end buzz of drugs. This is roughly a thousand times better. It’s the best high of my life.

My nose is running savagely. I don’t have anything to wipe it with. I blow it into my hand and walk, dripping snot, to the nearest bathroom, laughing goofily.

I take a run. I’ve been doing this most afternoons. I’ve found a little route that goes through an adjacent horse farm and out into the local neighborhood of upper-middle-class homes. I’m still high. As my feet pound, I’m crying, then laughing at myself crying, and then crying some more. I’m wondering whether this is the start of a different way of being in the world for me, one where—as Brilliant Genius Spring has described—you train yourself to have compassion rather than aversion as your “default setting.”

I’d be loath to call what I’m feeling spiritual or mystical. Those terms connote—to me, at least—otherworldliness or unreality. By contrast, what’s happening right now feels hyperreal, as if I’ve been pulled out of a dream rather than thrust into one.

After dinner, it’s Goldstein giving the dharma talk. He’s making an intriguing point. The Buddha’s signature pronouncement—“Life is suffering”—is the source of a major misunderstanding, and by extension, a major PR problem. It makes Buddhism seem supremely dour. Turns out, though, it’s all the result of a translation error. The Pali word dukkha doesn’t actually mean “suffering.” There’s no perfect word in English, but it’s closer to “unsatisfying” or “stressful.” When the Buddha coined his famous phrase, he wasn’t saying that all of life is like being chained to a rock and having crows peck out your innards. What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.”

As Goldstein points out, we don’t live our lives as if we recognize the basic facts. “How often are we waiting for the next pleasant hit of . . . whatever? The next meal or the next relationship or the next latte or the next vacation, I don’t know. We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we’ll experience. I mean, we’ve been, most of us, incredibly blessed with the number of pleasant experiences we’ve had in our lives. Yet when we look back, where are they now?”

It’s so strange for me to be sitting and listening to what is essentially a sermon, complete with quotes from a sacred text, and to be genuinely moved. After all those years of being the only nonbeliever in a room filled with rapt devotees, here I am sitting and taking notes, totally engrossed, nodding my head.

I mean, he’s so right. In cartoons, when the characters slurp down some delicious food or drink, they smack their lips and seem totally sated. But in the real world, it doesn’t work that way. Even if we were handed everything we wanted, would it really make us sustainably happy? How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough? Rock stars with drug problems. Lottery winners who kill themselves. There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.

Goldstein makes clear, as he did the other night, that he’s not saying we can’t enjoy pleasant things in life. But if we can achieve a deeper understanding of “suffering,” of the unreliability of everything we experience, it will help us appreciate the inherent poignancy of everything in the world. “It’s like we’ve been enchanted,” he says. “We’ve been put under a spell—believing that this or that is going to be the source of our ultimate freedom or happiness. And to wake up from that, to wake up from that enchantment, to be more aligned with what is true, it brings us much greater happiness.”

On retreat, with nothing to look forward to, nowhere to be, nothing to do, we are forced to confront the “wound of existence” head-on, to stare into the abyss and realize that so much of what we do in life—every shift in our seat, every bite of food, every pleasant daydream—is designed to avoid pain or seek pleasure. But if we can drop all that, we can, as Sam once said in his speech to the angry, befuddled atheists, learn how to be happy “before anything happens.” This happiness is self-generated, not contingent on exogenous forces; it’s the opposite of “suffering.” What the Buddha recognized was a genuine game changer.

After the final meditation of the night, as I leave the hall, I turn around toward the Buddha, and—I can’t believe I’m doing this—I bow.

I wake up, and the world is still magical.

I’m becoming almost frighteningly alert. My senses are heightened, like in the movies when a mortal starts turning into a vampire. After breakfast, as I walk back up the hill, I can hear the mice scurrying underneath the brush alongside the path. I have a freakish attunement to the communications within the hidden society of birds in the trees.

Meditation is still easy. I start by doing a round of breath-focus, which is like filling a hot-air balloon; once the mind is fully inflated with concentration, I just let it fly into choiceless awareness.

Urge to scratch.

Image of a row of baboons sitting on bales of hay.

Thought of the illicit apple I’m hiding in my room.

Even “bad” stuff doesn’t seem to really get to me. I can feel myself playing with the cape of pain draped over my back. I’m investigating it, without letting it truly bother me.

At lunch, I realize that I’ve now become one of these people who chews with his eyes shut. Eating mindfully, I actually put the fork down between bites rather than hunting around the plate while I’m still swallowing. As a result, I stop eating when I’m full, as opposed to stuffing my face until I’m nearly sick, as I usually do.

I spot a guy on the other side of the room who seems to be enjoying his meal immensely. I experience a sudden upsurge of what the Buddhists call mudita, “sympathetic joy.” It’s so strong I almost start blubbering again. It happens once more when I look up and see three women helping one another get the remaining chai out of the big metal pot in which it’s served. This tableau of silent, awkward, eyes-averted cooperation fills my eyes to the rim.

But then, as quickly as it came, the rapture evaporates.

The afternoon meditation session is a humbling reversion. Sleep beckons with the unwanted seductiveness of a clingy ex-girlfriend. At times, I nod off for a nanosecond, and then come to with what feels like a jackhammer to the head. At the end of forty-five minutes, I have a massive headache. It’s official: the magic is gone.

The afternoon metta session leaves me cold.

During the last sitting of the day, I am hit with a sickening jolt of restless energy so strong that it feels as if it might leave my limbs palsied. It gets so bad that I do the heretofore unthinkable. I resort to the one measure that, despite all the preceding difficulties, I have not yet employed: I give up. I open my eyes and sit in the hall, looking around guiltily.

Now I’m back to counting the days until I can leave. The thought crosses my mind that maybe I’ve gotten all I’m going to get out of this experience.

I’m still bowing to the Buddha, but mostly for the hamstring stretch.

I’m on the schedule to see Goldstein this morning. I arrive full of piss and vinegar; he’ll be the first person I tell about my recent meditative attainments. I practically bound to my seat, and give him a full report on my breakthrough: the choiceless awareness, the hummingbird, the metta-induced weeping.

I don’t know what I’m expecting. Applause, maybe? As it turns out, he’s pretty much unimpressed. He smiles and gently tells me he’s heard this story a million times. This is, like, First Retreat 101.

I thought I’d achieved a front-row seat in the theater of my mind. He makes it clear that I really had loge seating. “As you continue your practice,” he says, “your NPMs—noticings per minute—will go way up.”

Then I tell him about the horrific jolt of restlessness from the night before last. Again, his response is: Nothing special. Happens all the time.

He is massively reassuring, though, on the inevitable vexations and vicissitudes of the practice. It is, he says, not unusual at all to go from bliss to misery within the space of an hour. He assures me that as I get more advanced, the ups and downs won’t be so jagged. I get up to leave, comforted by the knowledge that I am walking a well-trodden path. People have been doing this very practice for 2,500 years.

On my way to the door, he shouts after me and says I’m moving too fast. “You’re not being mindful enough,” he says. Like a sports coach, he exhorts me to up my game, to pay more attention as I do things like walk and open doors. “This is the stuff!”

I wonder: Is my growing reverence for Goldstein a form of Stockholm syndrome? Or is this person genuinely special? As I stand outside the office, soaking up the sunshine for a moment, the hummingbird reappears.

An hour or so later, in the morning question-and-answer period, a brassy redheaded woman in the front row asks the question that’s been nagging at me this whole time: “If enlightenment is real, where are all the enlightened people?”

It gets a good laugh, including from Goldstein, who promises that at tonight’s dharma talk he’s going to explain everything.

This I’m looking forward to. During the course of this retreat, he has repeatedly dropped words like “liberation,” “awakening,” and “realization.” But is this vaunted transformation actually achievable? If so, how? And what does it look like? In the Buddhist scriptures, people are getting enlightened left and right. They’re dropping like flies—even seven-year-olds. The Buddha had an entire lexicon to describe enlightenment: “the true,” “the beyond,” “the very hard to see,” “the wonderful,” “the marvelous,” “the island,” and more. All those words, and still I have no idea what he meant.

At seven o’clock, it’s time for the big show. We’re all assembled in the hall. Goldstein is finally going to explain enlightenment.

He starts by acknowledging that for “householders”—non-monks—the idea of an end to craving can seem unattainable. “Can we even imagine a mind free of craving? I think most of us resonate probably more closely with the famous prayer of Saint Augustine: ‘Dear Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.’ ”

There’s laughter, but then Goldstein launches into a dead-serious description of the various steps toward achieving the “unshakable deliverance of mind, the cessation of craving without remainder.” His description of the stages of enlightenment makes it sound like the most elaborate video game ever.

The process starts when the meditator becomes super-concentrated, when their NPMs reach epic velocity. It’s like my backbirdknee experience, only on steroids. You see things changing so quickly that nothing seems stable. The seemingly solid movie of the world breaks down to twenty-four frames per second. The universe is revealed to be a vast soup of causes and conditions.

From there, the path, as Goldstein describes it, involves moments of terror, periods of sublime bliss, pitfalls, trapdoors, and detours. At the end, the meditator arrives at the true goal of Buddhist meditation: to see that the “self” that we take to be the ridgepole of our lives is actually an illusion. The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any “self” you can put your finger on. So, for example, in my backbirdknee jag, if I were more enlightened, I would have been able to see that not only is reality not as monolithic as it appears, but also the “me,” who was noting all the arising objects, isn’t solid either. “The strong, deeply entrenched reference point of ‘I’ has been seen through,” says Goldstein from the front of the room. “That’s Nibbana.” The illusion of the self is, per the Buddhists, the wellspring of all our negative emotions—specifically, greed and hatred and confusion about “the nature of reality” (i.e., that we’re much more than our egos, that we are connected to the whole). Once the self is seen as unreal, these emotions are uprooted from the mind, and the meditator becomes “perfected.” The mind goes from a monkey to a gazelle.

Sounds awesome, I guess, but as he concludes, I realize that he hasn’t answered some of my most basic questions. If it’s so rare and hard to reach enlightenment, why bother trying? Is Goldstein himself enlightened? If not, on what basis does he believe in it? What do enlightened beings look like? Is Nirvana/Nibbana a magical state? A place? Once I’ve achieved selflessness, do I then just return to my everyday life, or do I no longer need to put my pants on in the morning?

The Buddhists clearly figured out a workable, practical system for defanging the voice in the head, but to add on top of that the promise of a magical transformation seems to me too cute by half. I buy the thesis that nothing in an unreliable, impermanent world can make you sustainably happy, but how will a quest for an enlightenment that almost no one can achieve do so either?

When the talk is over, in a minor act of rebellion, I walk down to the dining hall and binge mindlessly on rice cakes.

In the morning question-and-answer session, Goldstein redeems himself with a little humor. In exhorting us not to tune out during these closing hours of the retreat, he says, “They’re like the dessert. Just maybe not the dessert you ordered.”

As he presses his case, he says something that bugs me. He urges us not to spend too much time thinking about the stuff we have to do when the retreat is over. It’s a waste of time, he says; they’re just thoughts. This provokes me to raise my hand for the first time. From the back of the echoey hall, in full-on reporter mode, with my overloud voice apparently not atrophied one bit from disuse, I ask, “How can you advise us not to worry about the things we have to do when we reenter the world? If I miss my plane, that’s a genuine problem. These are not just irrelevant thoughts.”

Fair enough, he concedes. “But when you find yourself running through your trip to the airport for the seventeenth time, perhaps ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this useful’?”

His answer is so smart I involuntarily jolt back in my chair and smile.

“Is this useful?” It’s a simple, elegant corrective to my “price of security” motto. It’s okay to worry, plot, and plan, he’s saying—but only until it’s not useful anymore. I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to balance my penchant for maniacal overthinking with the desire for peace of mind. And here, with one little phrase, Goldstein has handed me what seems like a hugely constructive tool for taming this impulse without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Achieving choiceless awareness and metta-induced blubbering may have been the most dramatic moments of the retreat, but this is unquestionably the most valuable.

I awake to the smell of freedom.

Today is a half day. We do some meditation in the morning, and then we “break silence.” The zombies reanimate, transforming from the mindful walking dead back into normal human beings. You can almost see the color return to their cheeks.

It’s fascinating to engage with the people around whom I’d spun rather elaborate stories during the silence. Turns out, they’re totally normal. I have lunch with a handsome German woman, who admits that she called her kids a couple of times. Also at the table is a middle-aged technology executive, who says he came on a lark and largely enjoyed it.

A young Asian guy approaches me. He’s athletic and good-looking. In observing him over the past days, I had assumed he would be stern and serious. Turns out, he’s super friendly. He tells me he felt “privileged” to be near me during that metta session when I cried. This produces a starburst of conflicting emotions, including gratitude and embarrassment. I mumble something and extricate myself.

The teachers warned us that the real world would seem clangorous and jangly after ten days of silence, but as I pull away from Spirit Rock in a cab, I turn on my BlackBerry and devour my email with curiosity more than dread. I visit my sister-in-law and enjoy being climbed on by her two young children. On the plane, I binge on TV shows on my iPhone. The habits of a lifetime reassert themselves with astonishing speed. It may have been one of—if not the—most meaningful experiences of my life, but I was nonetheless ready for it to end.