The Most Psychedelic Experience I’ve Had While Stone Cold Sober

Scoot Your Butt to a Meditation Retreat

A few weeks ago, I spent four days meditating with the monks at my local Buddhist temple, Sitagu Buddhist Vihara in Austin. This was one of the most difficult and worthwhile experiences I’ve had in the past few years. I went from being a chronically distracted, frustrated, impatient little night owl to a disciplined gigachad able to get up at 5:30 AM, chant Buddhist texts in Pali and English, and then meditate up to six hours a day during my stay. Going on this retreat I also experienced some profound experiences of self-love, akin to a psychedelic journey, except completely sober. In my experience, meditation retreats are an extremely underrated hack both towards more discipline and self-love. A summary of my experiences and nuances below.

Set and Setting

The past few months (and really my whole life, but that’s another story), I’ve been struggling with my relationship to discipline. Sometimes I set unrealistic expectations for myself, fail to meet them, and then spend weeks in a state of self-blame or paralysis. Other times, I treat myself like a big baby and don’t make any expectations for myself, but this means that I don’t make progress towards the goals that make me feel alive. I’ve had a nagging intuition (and a very insistent boyfriend, Alex) suggest that I go to a meditation retreat.

I’d gone to meditation retreats in the past and found them extremely helpful, although the ones I attended were geared towards teens, and the longest sits were at most thirty minutes long. A “classic” entry point is the vipassana Goenka meditation retreats, which are donation-based silent ten day retreats where you get up at 4 AM and meditate for ten hours a day. Ew!

Sitagu Buddhist Vihara seemed like a perfect balance for me: 5:30 AM wakeups, daily 1-1 meditation instruction, no silence, sits longer than 30 minutes but not ten hours a day. Anything seemed easier than Goenka, and I just had to drive 20 minutes, so if all hell broke loose and my mind was too unmanageable, I could easily slink off in the middle of the night and retreat back to my apartment.

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The Experience

Do you think your life is too easy? Are you just too happy and too-easy going? Well, here’s an easy way to experience complete agony at any time of the day, and best of all, it’s completely FREE: go from meditating zero minutes a day to meditating for six hours on a single day.

For context, here’s roughly what my schedule looked like on the most strenuous day. There were also six hours of heavily suggested 1 hour walking meditations, but I made the executive decision to not do them.

• 5:30 AM chanting Buddhist and Pali texts

• 6:30 AM breakfast

• 7:00 AM 1 hour sitting meditation

• 9:00 AM 1 hour sitting meditation

• 11:00 AM Lunch

• 1:00 PM 1 hour sitting meditation

• 3:00 PM 1 hour sitting meditation

• 5:00 PM 1 hour sitting meditation

• 7:00 PM chanting Buddhist and Pali texts

How hard is six hours of meditation actually? I think it depends on how experienced you are, how suited the meditation style is to your psychology, and how much background anxiety and restlessness you have. Back in January, I once meditated four hours in a single day, but all the meditations were guided, and although I started out doing intense focusing meditations, by the end, I was so wiped out and unmotivated that I started laying down and doing chakra meditations, where you imagined points throughout your body and tried to relax them.

Under the insight style of meditation suggested by the temple, you sit straight, focus on the breath, and try not to move, especially when there’s bodily pain or restlessness. If there’s an itch, you don’t scratch it. If there’s a burning sensation in your legs, don’t shy away. Instead, try to truly feel the pain. What does this mean in practice? If there’s a freak earthquake, you better be sitting like the Buddha and feeling all the pain, unless it’s a Richter 9.

TLDR: I was a part-time jogger with some underlying knee problems about to embark on a Ironman run. Not only was I relatively inexperienced and about to do an intense meditation style, but, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m a pretty high-strung mofo. Whenever I’ve meditated for an hour or more. I’ve found that the first thirty minutes of every sit are pretty manageable. Then, forty minutes or more in, I get extremely restless. I feel a strong compulsion to kick and scream and throw a big tantrum.

This “tantruming” energy affects me outside of my meditation practice as well. Multiple people have told me that I tend to make mountains out of mental molehills. Even the mildest of inconveniences is an opportunity to throw a big fit, much to the detriment of my mental health. I’d been getting really frustrated with how needlessly difficult I make things for myself, and this retreat seemed like a good way to work directly with the tantruming energy, even if it would be extremely difficult.

5:30 AM chanting went okay. The first hour felt terrible, but it was a manageable sort of terrible. At some point I started seeing if I could count from 1 to 1000. After all that would mean over fifteen minutes were done with. During the second hour, I managed to focus on the rise and fall of my stomach pretty well, but I knew the day would only get harder.

Roughly three or four hours in was when I really started to struggle. Thirty or forty minutes in, I wanted to start kicking and thrashing and crying, but I couldn’t, because then the monks in the hall would think I was a crazy person. So, outwardly I was silent, but inwardly I was committing some genuine thought crimes.

How the hell am I going to get through this? I’m two minutes in and already dying! Why the fuck am I still thinking? I’m not supposed to be thinking! And now I’m thinking about how I’m not supposed to be thinking, and yes I’m supposed to observe this and de-identify with it, but I just can’t! This is fucking awful and unbearable, and someone get me out of this!

This repeated one million times, except each thought loop, I got more urgent and more and more tempted to sprint out of the temple and drive to the nearest In-n-Out.

Eventually, I just gave up on focusing and transitioned to a tried-and-true tactic, begging. “God! Or someone! Please help me!” I screamed to myself. “Someone teach me how to relax. I feel like I’m dying.”

Shortly after, I was reminded of previous psychedelic experiences of feeling really relaxed when someone stroked my left arm. So I meditated on the sensation of my left arm being stroked (even though it wasn’t, and I was sitting upright with my arms clasped), and I was able to calm down a lot.

Next, I had memories of being a young baby, in particular of the comfort from sucking my thumb. I decided to keep imagining sucking my thumb and felt much more relaxed, like a baby. I noticed that this sense of relaxation was much deeper than anything I had remembered before. It felt extremely foreign. Why did it feel so foreign? I wondered. 

All at once, it became clear to me. I hadn’t felt safe in my body since I was a young kid. I couldn’t be so hard on myself for having trouble relaxing, not when I hadn’t felt safe in decades. For so long, I’d been so frustrated with myself for having such extreme reactions during meditations and making things so needlessly difficult for myself. But now, I understood the deeper mechanisms at play underneath these “stupid and annoying overreactions” (my previous description) and how harsh I was being. 

All of this tantruming, all of this restlessness, stemmed from a perceived lack of safety and a lack of comfort. When I comforted myself as if I were a baby, I soothed some parts of myself that I never soothed previously. My tantrums were actually cries for help, I realized, not signs of deficiency to be stamped out. I decided to comfort myself whenever I had issues with the meditation moving forward. 

The rest of the meditation became much more bearable for me, even though it was still pretty annoying 😛

Takeaways

I learned a lot from this experience, both about myself and about meditation in general. Here are a few highlights:

I am capable of doing difficult things, even if the path taken is not normal

In college, a good friend and I went to the same meditation retreat. I often broke down crying and felt extremely anxious during the meditations — especially the ones directing self-love to myself — while she found the overall experience quite pleasant. I used to get extremely frustrated about this and concluded there was something wrong with me.

I can now see how unhelpful focusing on the “normal” way of being is. Rather than focusing on the standard way of doing things, the most helpful thing I can do is meet myself where I’m at with acceptance. Sometimes what I need is to not meditate for a year, and sometimes what I need is to give myself a firm but loving kick via a Buddhist temple.

There exists a healthy discipline free from self-coercion

The afternoon I left the temple, I had a call with Daniel Brottman unpacking my experiences. Daniel mentioned a frame I found really helpful: there is a difference between self-coercion and wholesome discipline. Self-coercion says, “You’re never going to amount to anything, unless you hammer yourself into being less despicable”. Wholesome discipline says, “There is a commitment I am capable of making here out of a wholesome motivation. It may feel difficult, but I still must engage wholeheartedly.”

My experiences at the temple showed me that wholesome discipline can make life easier. I may not like exerting effort, but I often do love the results. There are deeper layers of self-trust and self-respect I gain when I accomplish difficult things that are for my highest benefit or the benefit of others.

If You are Nearsighted, Meditate without Your Glasses On

The worst feeling in the world — in my humble opinion — is when you’re in the middle of a difficult meditation and accidentally get a glimpse of the clock. There’s no fury like that of time moving so freaking slowly.

I’m lucky to be extremely nearsighted, so when I take my glasses off, I can’t see the time and accidentally condemn myself to EVEN MORE SUFFERING.

Caveats

As Tasshin Fogleman writes in The Path of Love, “Like many things in life, meditation poses risks and can have a wide variety of negative side effects. While you might start meditating with the intention to be happier and less stressed, you may find that meditation practices can increase stress, or bring up feelings of depression or anxiety.” This has been true in my experience: I had and still have many unprocessed emotions that come up during meditation. In the beginning especially, this was quite debilitating.

Outside of my experience, I’ve heard of negative effects both within personal practice and at retreats. Meditating many hours a day on retreat, you become very vulnerable and emotional; it’s important to exercise discernment about teachers and staff. At the temple, I wasn’t the hugest fan of the 1-1 meditation guidance, and exercised discernment about what to let in and what to hold at arm’s length.

As Tasshin says, “Imagine you're doing an exercise program. How would you know whether to keep going or to stop? Use common sense. If you don't like it, if you can't bring yourself to do it, if you hate it, if you're injuring yourself: stop. If it consistently feels awful and bad, stop.”

Meditation can be extremely profound, but it’s not the only way to improve your life. I’m grateful for my experiences with the practice, and think it can massively improve the lives of others, but always exercise discernment before scooting your butt to a meditation retreat :)

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Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or DM me on Twitter, especially if this post convinces you to sign up for a meditation retreat or meditate more frequently!

If you enjoyed this essay, check out two related essays: Don’t Wait for The Perfect Moment and My Practical Reason for Meditating.