After two 10-day silent retreats, what mind powers did I attain?
Years ago when I owned my own yoga studios, I conducted 7-10 day juice cleanses. Students and friends would often express strong skepticism about their ability to tolerate deep hunger. It truly terrified people. Silent retreats and long hours of meditation invoke a similar terror. Silence and hunger are great teachers.
It seems what we most fear is what is inside us when we face difficulty, what might arise within us if we are without the most basic distractions like books, podcasts, Netflix, incessant chatter and even food. And, in silence, you get to delve into your deepest recesses, crevices and fault lines.
In March and July of 2026, I attended 10-day silent retreats. Finally, I had retired and had enough time to do what I had wanted to do for over four decades. Sit. This simple meditation technique, called Vipasana, is said to be the technique used by the Buddha to reach enlightenment, and allows moments of space between a sensation and its contiguous thought, sequenced as sensation-thought-reaction. After two retreats, it is more like: sensation-pause-question quality of thought-pause-discretion in action-pause. This was what I gained or developed as a byproduct of the retreats.
The gruelling schedule of 10-11 hours a day of sitting in silent meditation were a body metamorphosis. The western body is not a body that is typically in anything other than chairs, from toddlerhood on. So I am not, as a yoga teacher, super supportive of this crash course in sitting. However, this is the method and I wanted to test drive. Well, yogini or not, my body had much to convey about this choice. I had intense, knife stabbing pain in my right shoulder blade that lasted the entire time: approximately 110 hours of sitting. God help me. I was rendered to tears.
Some of my challenges (aka suffering) were things like dark thoughts hidden and accumulated in my minds crevasses; excruciating pain stored in my body and profound questions about what motivates my actions in life. The first few days I had nightmares. I was assuaged by the teacher that this was just residual sludge coming out of my psyche. My nightmares were shockingly detailed and viciously violent.
What was astonishing though is that through all these intense discomforts, I discovered that I have developed deep aversions in my mind and they have caused me pain throughout my life. I am not so much a pleasure-seeker (too disciplined) but rather a pain-avoider. I construct elaborate plans to avoid suffering and in the end, simply create more.
I suppose my mind power is that I feel less enslaved by my mind's deep aversions and even less a fool to my attachments. My mind can no longer run my life rampantly, chasing this and running from that.
Sit still and be quiet.
After the retreat. Meeting your life.
If you can sit completely still for 5 minutes a day, you will begin to discover the nature of your own mind. Simply observe.
Sit comfortably. Sit with a timer. Sit and watch how your mind is racing around like a crazy, out-of-control toddler. This is just a lack of discipline and we all share this. No judgment.
Once you have spent a minute or two observing your mind, you can begin with a simple observation of the air that is coming in and out of your nostrils. Cool inhale; warm exhale.
If you have no desire to meditate at this time in your life, accept this. Maybe you will some other time.
One ordinary experiment.
For a week, while you are at work, set a timer or vibration on your phone or watch so that the last minute of every hour you receive an alert.
For one minute, observe your nostrils. You could also observe the quality of your thoughts. Another option is to observe your feelings.
After a full work week, what have you discovered? How does this inform your life, life choices or place in your life, right now?
Which ordinary inner reality could become a place of learning?