In the summer of 2024, I went on a five-day solo retreat in the mountains of New Mexico. It was the first time I’d ever really committed to meditation, and to my surprise it turned out to be a deeply meaningful and lasting experience. In this episode, I talk about what led me to try it, what those days of fasting, solitude, and meditation were actually like, and the unexpected effects I noticed afterward in my everyday life. I also share some of the doubts and anxieties I carried into the experience, why meditation had always felt out of reach for me, and why this retreat nevertheless managed to shift something fundamental in how I relate to myself and to stress.
Episode links:
Related resources and recommendations:
- My episode with Brian Koppelman, where he talks about his experiences with transcendental meditation
- Alan Watts’ book The Way of Zen
- A playlist of Alan Watts’ lecture clips
- Sam Harris talks about how meditation helps
TRANSCRIPT
About a year ago, I went on a 5-day solo retreat in the mountains of New Mexico, where I meditated several hours a day. It turned out to be a life changing experience, which was definitely something I did not expect; so I wanted to share about it here. I’ve had a few friends ask me about it and what I did on that trip, and I kept telling people I’d eventually talk about it on a podcast episode, so I’m finally getting around to that.
That trip was basically the first time I’d really meditated. I’d tried half-heartedly over the years a few times, for a few minutes at a time, but I had never really focused on meditating, and never done it for more than a day in a row. I’d always liked the idea of meditation, and I’ve always been interested in Buddhist philosophies and practices, since I was young. Part of the reason for me having a bit of a mental block for that is due to some experiences I had when I was younger: back when I was struggling with some mental issues and dropped out of college due to those struggles. Part of the manifestation of my mental unwellness back then was me being a bit obsessed with Eastern and Buddhist philosophies; I thought I was possibly reaching some state of transcendence. I was also smoking too much marijuana, which definitely does not help you when you’re depressed and anxious. There are studies showing links between marijuana use and psychotic/delusional types of experiences. I talk more about those experiences in a previous episode. But those experiences were why I had a bit of anxiety when it came to trying to meditate; I would have associations with that unhappy and stressful and strange period of my life, and obviously anxiety like that isn’t really condusive to the relaxing state you want to achieve in meditation. And I’d also add that in general I’ve always been a highly anxious person, so meditation doesn’t come easy to people like that, even subtracting my early experiences.
There were a few recent factors that led to me wanting to try meditating more seriously.
The main one was a talk I had for this podcast in February of last year with Brian Koppelman, the creator of the poker movie Rounders, and the show Billions, and other shows and movies. He talked about his life changing experiences with transcendental meditation. His personal story of how meditation had hugely reduced his anxiety got me thinking, “I need to try this.” I’ll play the clip from that episode where Brian talks about this. I debated including the long clip from that episode but in the end I decided to include it because it was what got me down this path, so I figured it might be persuasive to you, too. But if you want to skip ahead to my experiences, just keep skipping until you hear only me and not Brian.
Zach: Do you mind if I ask you about transcendental meditation?
Brian: I’m totally happy. I love talking about it. Yep.
Zach: I know that you’re a big proponent of that and I was wondering, if you explained it to a lay audience, how would you pitch it? What are the benefits that you get from it?
Brian: Like Tim Ferriss says, I think he said something along these lines– I’m paraphrasing, I’m not quoting him– that it might be the thing that is most in common among the guests that he’s had on his show is that they do some form of meditation. I think I started meditating in 2011. And I want to say this succinctly. For me, the benefit is it reduced the physical manifestations of anxiety by something like 80% or 85%.
Zach: Wow.
Brian: One of the things is that when people want to sell stuff, they’ll say it makes your anxiety disappear. And we as human beings go, “Well, that’s bullshit.” Because nothing can. Because we’re humans and we know we’re mortal, so we have anxiety. But it just made the physical manifestations– the stomach or the heart– suddenly quickly. A month in, that stuff just went… The [line] just went way down on it. And that alone is enough. Then clarity of thought, peacefulness, sense of wellbeing. Look, I’m talking about lifting, but I’ve always been someone who exercises a lot. And part of why I started lifting and stuff is because as you get older, if you let yourself stay out of shape and you still play sports really hard, you can just hurt yourself all the time. And if you’re fat like I was, it’s just bad. So I had to start. Then you throw the cardio piece and you’re like, “Well, I got to do the other thing too.” So exercise has always been meditative, too, for me. I can get to that sort of alpha state that they call it, you know? Meditation is 20 minutes. The way I do it, Translated Meditation TM, there’s a book by David Lynch, the great filmmaker, the book is called “Catching the Big Fish” and he talks about it in a way that I find incredibly compelling. But essentially, you’re repeating a nonsense word to yourself quietly in your brain for 20 minutes twice a day. It’s very easy and it’s very calming. I just feel better doing it. I had a lot of questions going in. I had read all the sort of negative things about TM and I was very aware of it, I had very clear rules for myself about the ways in which I would engage. I would go take these lessons and then that’s the extent of my involvement. And it’s been, by the way, the extent. I’ve never gone on some retreat or thing. It’s just that I find this technique useful. And I’m just always after. It’s hard being a person, and so whatever makes being a person a little bit easier, I’ll take it. It goes back to the thing I said about mortality. We understand people are fragile, that means the people you love are fragile. And that stuff scary sometimes. So, anything that’ll help I’m interested in. Exercise is a huge one. Walking, not just as exercise, but walking is really helpful. Journaling is helpful, I think. And I think translated meditation, for me, is just very useful.
Zach: The form of the meditation, is it always the same? So, it’s 20 minutes of repeating the mantra and it doesn’t vary from that?
Brian: But the thing is, when you learn TM, it’s not rigid. You’re not forcing yourself to say this mantra over and over again. You’re allowing this mantra to surface and you’re kind of engaging with it. And then sometimes your thoughts come in. It’s like other meditation you’ve heard of. Your thoughts come in and then your thoughts move out and the mantra resurfaces. It’s just being in that space. And I’ll say I will not play. I do the morning meditation every single day in my life. I haven’t missed one since 2011. And I’d say I do the one in the afternoon 70% or 80% of the time, depends on the period. Right now I’m in a period of time where I’m doing it every day, but sometimes life makes it hard to the second one. But I will never play poker at night without doing this. Never. It’s a zero for me. Maybe I did it twice. And I just know. Like, I will meditate this afternoon before I go play poker tonight, for sure. And that will be useful. It will reset me in a way. It doesn’t mean I’m going to win, by the way. I could still lose.
Zach: And you said it’s something you say internally, you don’t say it out loud? Is that right?
Brian: Correct. You never say it out loud.
Zach: Is your mantra a secret? Or can you say what it is?
Brian: No, you don’t say what it is. And the reason is, you don’t want to attach anything to it. Really it’s a word sound noise. You don’t want to attach someone’s reaction. You don’t want to attach that moment. It really is just something to break the cycle of the pattern of thoughts.
Zach: You don’t want association.
Brian: No, you don’t want any. And no one knows it. In fact, because it’s like some state secret. It’s not special, it’s just because it keeps it pristine.
Zach: Do you have your own thoughts on what the mechanism is by how it helps you? Is it basically like… Because you said these other thoughts come in and you basically are able to kind of brush them aside, do you think it kind of sets you up to be more easily able to brush aside things?
Brian: Yeah, I don’t know. I was reading a book– this is not translated, this is a way to get to the answer– I was reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, he’s this amazing Buddhist. He had this phrase that he said he repeated to himself and he found it very useful. And I’ve done this not as TM, because it’s not TM, but I’ve done this sometimes to go to bed at night if I somehow am not able to fall asleep and my thoughts racing. He says, “I am not my body. I’m not even my mind.” By repeating that to himself, not out loud, it’s a reminder in a way that the thoughts you think aren’t necessarily valid. We all have thought things that we didn’t put into action or that turned out to be wrong, right? So just reminding yourself, yeah, you might feel a twinge in your knee, but you are not the twinge in your knee. It’s useful. Anything to create a tiny bit of separation from the thoughts that kind of own us most of the time and our essential nature, anyway that we can sort of separate those slightly, I think has tremendous benefit. And I think TM, though I don’t know, I really don’t know the answer to this, but what it feels like to me is that there’s probably a cycle of counterproductive thoughts that we all have. Who knows where they’re from? Who knows when we took them on? Whether they’re worries, fears, self-criticism, whatever the thing is, the mantra has a way of like if that thing is a circle that’s just going and going, maybe the mantra just kind of takes us somewhere else away from that and breaks it so that you have a minute to just have some peace.
Zach: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s like breaking the rumination or the ruts that we get into our normal—
Brian: Yeah, exactly right. Ruts. People should look at— I mean, there’s a lot of EEG studies and stuff, brainwave studies, and they’re doing more and more. There’s a lot of science now on this question. I was even reading recently… Recently, I put into two different AI engines a bunch of questions about meditation and the various forms, and about what the science said. And I was really prepared to be told that it’s all been debunked, but it just hasn’t been. The science really stands up for its benefits and you can just find that out. That’s just out there, people looking at the brainwaves and stuff.
Zach: Yeah. And like you said, there’s some understandable mechanisms by which you can see it helping you. And it’s now like some things you hear about you’re like, “That makes no sense.” You can see the logic there.
As soon as Brian said it had reduced his anxiety by like 80%, I decided I needed to get into it and give it a try.
**
Another factor there was that I was going through some hard things in my personal life. When i talked to Brian last year, my wife was in the process of leaving me; she had left once, suddenly, a year earlier, and then had come back a few months later and we were trying to work things out, but it wasn’t looking good, and I did not think it was going to work out. So I was more anxious and emotionally fragile than I’d been for a long time. (And I actually have an episode I’ve written about some of my struggles during that time, with the hopes that it might help other people dealing with similar struggles, but I am still sitting on it to make sure I feel good about sharing it, as it is so personal.)
So a few weeks after the Koppelman talk, on a road trip with my wife, we listened to some of David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish. I didn’t really like it and didn’t listen to much of it. I couldn’t relate to Lynch saying he had an immediate feeling of immense joy when trying transcendental meditation. I still can’t relate to that now. Everyone is different, of course, but his description of his experiences made it clear that he and I were very different people, and I didn’t get much out of his descriptions. I mention that just in case it’s interesting for anyone who has listened to that and had a similar reaction, and maybe because of that thought that meditation wasn’t for them.
In August of last year, I went to a place called the Lama Foundation in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. I used to live in Albuerquerque, and I’d been there a couple times before. My wife had once had a three day solitary retreat there, what they call a hermitage, and she had enjoyed it. The Lama Foundation’s main claim to fame is that it was where Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, wrote the well known book Be Here Now. I’m not a fan of that book; I found it quite silly, to be honest. I’m skeptical of almost all metaphysical and spiritual writings, and that specific book I found to be especially silly. Basically it involves Alpert doing a bunch of psychedelics, and traveling to India, and believing he’s witnessed amazing, magical acts, but he’s also doing so many drugs he’s an extremely unreliable narrator about what’s real and what’s not. But leaving aside any metaphysical or spiritual beliefs, the Lama Foundation is just a great property, and they have these two hermitage cabins there, where you can spend your days uninterrupted, without seeing anyone else if you don’t want to, and they bring you foods you request and leave them in a box where you can get them. The area is just very beautiful and surreal and intense-seeming, also; especially at night when the sun is setting and the light is a bit strange and the old fire-charred snags look other worldly; it does put you in a spiritual frame of mind, I think.
I’ll just give you a description of some of my decisions I made on that trip, regarding how I approached trying to have a meaningful meditation experience.
First, I decided to fast for four days. I’d fasted for five days before, years before. I’d also read about the idea that fasting puts you in a state more conducive to spiritual practice and inward focus. I had observed that myself when I fasted before; there was an interesting mental state, where things felt more intense, but calm. It might just be light headedness, I don’t know, but I do think there is something to that.
I also decided to practice a mix of transcendental meditation, with the mantra repetition, and just breath-mindfulness meditation: breathing and focusing on your breath. I printed out some instructions and tips for both of these kinds of meditations to bring with me.
Another decision I made was to not have any devices or books with me. The only things I took with me to the cabin were a few articles of clothing, and a pen and some paper. I locked up my computer and phone at the Lama Foundation lodge.
My general schedule while there was something like this:
Wake up when the sun rose, which was around 6am.
Try some meditation for an hour or so
Go for a long walk on the mountain trails or on the long winding roads near the foundation
Try meditation for another hour around noon or afternoon
Walk around some more
Try meditation again for an hour
I also made the decision to not read much or write much. The first three days I didn’t read or write anything. I was trying to embrace pure experience as much as I could. I broke from that the fourth adn fifth day, writing down some observations I’d had, and reading some books they had in the cabin (including some of Be Here Now).
One thing I struggled with was my back. I’ve never been very good at sitting in the traditional meditation position. I often just sat in a straight backed chair they had in the cabin, and this was my usual position. As many people will tell you, you can meditate in any position. I mention this in case anyone thinks that you need to be in a certain position. The important thing is that you’re comfortable. Although you shouldn’t be too comfortable as then you might just end up falling asleep.
For most of the time there, I felt like I wasn’t meditating correctly, that I wasn’t quote “doing it right.” I was having the often described experience of trying to clear my mind and just observe and be, but constantly having the usual trains of thoughts and random observations and random thoughts about tasks I needed to do, all those things flood my mind. But as I learned from my own experiences and from reading more later, it’s important to embrace the idea that there is no “doing it right.” That one should try to recognize that you are entering the process; that you are trying to observe experience, trying to calm your mind. One should try to not add insult to injury by thinking that one is not doing it right; one should try to embrace the idea that you are just learning about yourself and about your existence.
And I think once you start having an experience that you are part of the universe, that kind of cliche, it becomes easier to forgive yourself for not “doing it right,” or missteps you seemingly have.
[Alan Watts clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mimR10eAlPk]
That was a clip of Alan Watts talking about how he views the nature of meditation and its importance. After my meditation experiences, I became a big Alan Watts fan. His book The Way of Zen is great. If you’re curious about more resource recommendations, I’ve put some on the entry for this episode at my podcast site behavior-podcast.com.
So in the first few days of the retreat, I had a few minor positive feelings, moments that felt meaningful. Some of that enjoyment was in the form of just having more time to think, to be free from the usual things, like tasks and phone messages and internet stuff. Some of that was just the ability to let my mind wonder and think of more meaningful, existential things. Some of it was intellectual; logical aspects of Buddhist-related thought, about the fact that I am a part of the universe, and the universe is a part of me, and that I am a part of the universe unfolding. Some of the positive experiences were feelings of peace and connection, even as they were interspersed with feelings of frustration, doubts about what I was doing; skepticism that I was just too desperate to have a meaningful experience, which maybe is self-defeating.
On the fourth day, I had a highly meaningful feeling after I’d been meditating in the afternoon about an hour. For a few minutes, I felt filled with a glowing, peaceful feeling, a feeling that everything was right with the world and me, that I was tapped into something meaningful. I finally understood what people were talking about when they talked about the peacefulness and joy of meditation.
A little later that day, and the fifth day, I had less intense but still peaceful and nice iterations of that. It was all enough to make me feel like I’d at least tasted and touched what people mean when they praise meditation. I had had the experiences that would be enough to lead me to want to do it more, and to go down that path.
But these experiences weren’t life-changing. What I consider life changing was noticing how I felt when I left and got back to my regular life. It felt like a huge weight had lifted from me. It felt like there had been a heavy, anxiety-producing weight on my heart, around my heart, and that now I felt light. Something i wrote a few weeks after the experience was that I felt that my heart had been encased in some protective armor; that the things that usually bothered me and caused me pain were not reaching me now. I’m talking everything from very small things, like loud sounds that might usually make me jumpy and lead to anxious thoughts, to more major things, like the stuff going on with my wife and in my work.
And this was entirely unexpected. It was surprising enough to me that I’d even had the joyful, intense experiences I’d had a few times during the retreat. I was entirely prepared for the retreat to be just me mainly feeling frustrated, like I wasn’t able to meditate like others were. I definitely didn’t expect such a relatively small set of experiences to translate to such a big change in mood and feeling. And again, it’s possible that the two things weren’t directly connected; it’s possible I could have had the long-lasting effect of the meditation without ever experiencing the joyful, blissful state; I don’t really know.
And it’s been a quite lasting change. It has faded a bit, especially because I haven’t kept up the meditation, due to a lot of changes in my life, including my wife finally leaving me, me starting a new relationship, my moving to New York City, my starting a new job, and more. So it’s a little hard to track my state of mind across all these recent changes, and what’s due to what, but I do think that that experience changed me in a fundamental, lasting way.
I should mention that it’s not like all my anxiety is removed. I don’t want to paint a too rosy portrait of my life or what the meditation did for me. I’m still often a quite anxious person, just as I always have been, and that’s something I want to work on more. I want to meditate more, for one thing. But in major ways the anxiety is decreased. So I had a similar experience to Koppelman; I’m not sure if it was 80% like he said, but it was significant. I think the meditation experience built some stronger mental foundations; gave me a better base of calmness from which to operate and to which I can partly return.
For anyone who wants to try something like this, I’ll now list a few tips and observations I had, which might serve to help you.
- Again, don’t worry too much about the position you’re in. If a cross-legged or lotus position makes you uncomfortable, get a comfortable straight-backed chair.
- Try not to beat yourself up with thoughts that you’re not doing it right, or that you’re somehow ill suited to practicing meditation. This is normal. Keep trying to return to what you’re trying to do, depending on your meditation style you’ve chosen. Keep trying to return to observing your breath, or observing your thoughts. It’s entirely natural to have all sorts of intrusive thoughts; I would think that even the best practitioner of meditation would still occasionally have random thoughts. You are there to learn about how your mind works, and to observe it, so as to understand yourself and existence better.
- If you’re really having trouble just being, and have a lot of intrusive thoughts that are bugging you, i think it’s okay to just let them go like that for a while. If you can’t beat them, let them go on for a while. No one’s grading you; and sometimes letting them go on for a while is what is necessary for you to work them out of your system. I think this is especially true for people new to this way of being.
I feel that my positive experience was partly just about being free to think my own thoughts and connect with myself again. For me, how I live my life, my daily life is often just a parade of various tasks I’ve set myself to do; things to get through. That often includes even recreational activities, like reading a book or watching a show; even those more recreational things can start to feel like more assignments, a laundry list of things to do. So even apart from my meditation experience, there was something very calming and grounding on that trip in just being able to let my mind wander, to not be activity -focused, to just feel free to sit and do nothing and day dream. And that was also an important learning for me; that I need to make more time for just being, and try not to feel pressured to always fill my time up.
I also had a sense of my experience fusing different parts of myself, of bringing them more in alignment with each other. Most of us are living such hectic lives, that I think there can be little time to let all your experiences and thoughts meld; there’s not enough time for processing. So I think just sitting and being, meditating or not, ** is time your mind spends compiling and fusing all the various thoughts and motivations and goals you have, and coupling them more tightly. During my trip, I had the sensation of my scattered inner multitude of voices coalescing in a stronger, more stable, more calm configuration.
Another interesting part of this is just how easy it’s been for me to go from having such an amazing experience and being very excited about meditating, to basically not meditating at all. This is partly because of so many things going on in my life, as I’ve said, but it’s still kind of astounding to me. I haven’t had many experiences that amazed me, and this was one, and yet now I’m back to living as if that amazing experience didn’t happen; you’d think having such an amazing experience, you’d want to continue down that path, keep pursuing it; keep chasing the dragon. I tell myself almost every day: I need to make more time for the meditation, I tell myself, okay, tomorrow, I’ll get up early and do it for a few minutes, and really start doing it every day. But then the next day rolls around and I’m exhausted and just want to sleep or rest a few more minutes before work. Plus there’s the knowledge that it’s not that an immediately exciting endeavor; I will have moments of joy occasionally doing it, but that’s mostly not my experience doing it. It’s a practice I think is valuable, especially with the reduction in anxiety, but the payoffs are more long term. Put another way; I experienced a magical thing, but the magic of it isn’t directly obvious or available to me; I’m still not even sure what factors led to it being a magical experience. So that’s another factor for me failing to keep it up even though I want to keep it up.
But maybe for now, it’s enough for me to know it happened, that it did help me in some long term way, and that it’s there when I want or need to return to it.
Have you had an interesting experience with meditation? Feel free to reach out to me at behavior-podcast.com and let me know about it.
Again, I’ve got some book and other resource recommendations for you on the topic of meditation; you can find those on the entry page for this episode, on my site behavior-podcast.com.