I Didn't Talk or Use My Phone for 10 Days

The easiest part of my recent 10-day silent meditation retreat in the mountains of Kyoto, Japan, was locking up my phone, my book, my journal, and my pen on Day 0 for the entire retreat. The hardest part was how painful and exhausting silence and meditation were on the body. And the most surprising part was learning that I love going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4am.

I went into this retreat for a little reset. To kind of clear the cache, wipe the internal drive, and come home feeling a little more inspired and a little more creative. I basically wanted to pause everything and live in a way I normally don't for ten days.

My daily schedule was:

• 4amwake-up with the morning bell
• 6:30ambreakfast
• 11amlunch
• 5pmtea and fruit
• 9:30pmlights out

Every single hour in between was used in meditation. The retreat was twelve days total (one before, ten in the thick of it, one after) and a little over 100 hours of just sitting in a meditation hall on a blue cushion with myself, my thoughts, and 50 other people.

And the meditation schedule inside that was:

• 4:30am to 6:30am
• 8am to 9am
• 10am to 11am
• 1pm to 2pm
• 2pm to 3:30pm
• 3:30pm to 5pm
• 6pm to 7pm
• 8:15pm to 9pm

Two assistant teachers led the entire course mostly by playing chants and discourses by S.N. Goenka, who brought this technique back into the world in 1969 after the Buddha first taught it more than 2,500 years ago. The discourses were entertaining and inspiring. Goenka threw in a lot of his own opinions on the difference between organized religion and meditation-based understanding, which was hilarious and made concentrating even harder.

Vipassana is a 10-day silent meditation retreat with centers all over the world. Take the word "retreat" with a grain of salt, though: this is not, by any means, a soft little getaway where you unplug, sip tea, and come back glowing. Vipassana is WORK. Every single day is spent working hard on your mind-body connection, your compassion, your awareness, and honestly the future of your whole emotional well-being.

So what does one do for ten days without social media, the news, talking, reading, writing, and living life as we know it?

In My Brain

Starting around Days 1 and 2, with nothing coming from the outside into my brain, my mind started playing back the soundtrack of my childhood. Things I hadn't heard in yearssss. And it did. not. stop.

The weirdest thing was that by Days 4 and 5, I noticed the soundtrack was moving chronologically, from sounds I used to hear as a little kid all the way into high school. Felt like my brain was playing itself back in order. A few memories came along with them too, but it was really about the sounds.

Some of the sounds I heard: the opening score of Animaniacs and of the novela Luz Clarita. The Despierta América morning show sound, as well as the radio jingle for Radio WADO, "Es Radio Waaaadooo." Can't forget the COMPARE commercial from that popular supermarket chain in New York City — the Dominican version of Gristedes, where they used to sell 11 plátanos for $1.

The early sounds came up and passed easy, because I was mostly just surprised to be hearing commercials and jingles I hadn't heard in so long. What was hard was when parts of songs I grew up listening to popped up and looped for hours.

• "It's Gonna Be Me" by NSYNC
• "I Wanna Be With You" by Mandy Moore
• "Entre Tu Cuerpo y el Mío" by Milly Quezada
• "Canta Corazón" by Alejandro Fernández

These and a few more songs that, of course, I can't remember now as I write this, looped in my head while I meditated and did chores.

When we stop feeding our brains with scrolling, other people's problems, what we'll eat for lunch, what we'll wear, our jobs… it doesn't mean they empty out or go quiet. They actually start to show you everything that's already in there.

For me it was 30 years of sounds. The sounds playing in my headphones while riding the 1 train from Harlem to Dyckman on the dark mornings of winter for school. Songs that played on repeat on my red iPod Nano around the time I first met my mother. Sounds from the shows and music videos on MTV Hits that were playing during my first time with my first boyfriend.

I looked it up when I got home. Turns out there's a name for having a song stuck in your head: earworms, or what scientists formally call "involuntary musical imagery." Something like 70 to 90% of us get them. Researchers think the reason it's almost never the whole song, just a verse or a chorus on loop, is that the brain latches onto unfinished things. An unfinished loop is an itch it keeps trying to scratch. And they show up most when the mind has nothing else to hold onto.

This experience inspired me to make a playlist of songs from my childhood (and probably yours too, if you're a Latino kid who grew up in NYC). You can listen to my Sounds of My Youth playlist here.

With the radio in my head playing itself out on loop, the only two questions I had any real control over were what was for lunch and whether there would be hot water for my shower later. So let's talk about lunch.

The Good Food

The food was vegetarian, Japanese-influenced, and delicious. Every single day there was perfect Japanese white rice and miso soup, always a different one: mushroom one day, tofu the next, then seaweed, then sweet potato.

There was a glass noodle salad so good that the second we were allowed to talk again I walked right up to the chef and asked for the recipe. One day we had a vegetable Bolognese over spaghetti. Even as a meat-lover, I looked forward to every single meal.

The rule was no dinner because it's hard to meditate on a full stomach, so the last meal of the day was tea at 5pm with fruit. Sometimes a banana with half a kiwi or orange, other times a full apple and a slice of watermelon.

Every so often we'd get a little treat, too like a Ferrero coconut chocolate, a lemon tart, an apple crumble… but it wasn't always, which somehow made it sweeter when we did get one.

Everything was low sugar, low salt, no dairy, no gluten… I felt accidentally healthy af.

Turns out that when your whole day has the same five events in it and three of them are meals, everything else becomes a big event too, even laundry.

The Life-Saving Chores

With no phone, no writing, no reading, no nothing, the ordinary little chores became the joy of my day. I washed all my own clothes by hand for ten days, from my underwear and shirts to my pants and towels. Then, I pinned them all on the clotheslines to air-dry.

No fragrances were allowed at the center, so I washed with a coconut-based detergent they provided. That, plus air-drying outside, made everything smell SO GOOD and the clothes came off the line perfectly hard and soft from the sun.

I washed my dishes three times a day. I made my bed, swept under it, and tidied my room every day. I shared the room with four other women, but because there was silence in place and we had five fans running all day in our room, it was almost like they weren't there. Did I tell you there was no AC?

This all made that mid-day shower feel like a damn vacation. And if I decided to wash my hair that day, it was LUXURY.

When there's nothing to distract you, the little things we do to care for our bodies and our space stop being chores and instead become things to look forward to because these are things you're doing for you and no one else.

All in All

I'm still not totally sure what to make of the whole thing, and I'm okay telling you that. It was hard. It was strange. Because this kind of meditation allows you to go into the depths of your subconscious mind, there were many times when I didn't recognize anything going on in my own head, kind of like a dream where you don't know a single person or place in it.

There was something special about being in dead silence with 50 people around at all times, though. And not talking for ten days made my throat and chest completely still, with no vibration in that space for longer than at any point since before I was born. The whole thing was beautiful in ways I didn't expect, and I'm curious about what the long-term benefits will turn out to be.

What I can tell you is that since I've been back, I've been meditating twice a day, and the biggest difference is space. There's A LOT of internal space. Things that used to take up a whole morning and afternoon in my head now show up, pass through, and leave, and I get to just watch them do it.

I also feel extra calm. My mind isn't overthinking (which is hard to settle into as someone who overthinks everything LOL). It's almost suspicious. Like there's more I should be thinking about or considering, which is usually the overthinking talking.

There's also a certain confidence looming around me constantly. Not the kind of confidence that's loud and showy, where you're trying to convince somebody of something. It's a lowkey kind of confidence that doesn't need anybody to agree with it.

I think before I speak a little more. And I actually watch what I think now instead of just accepting whatever thought or desire comes up. That part is genuinely new for me. For most of my life a thought would show up and I'd treat it as true, simply because I had accepted that my mind had its own mind.

I feel physically stronger, too. Sitting cross-legged in the same posture without moving from 4:30am to 6:30am for almost two weeks will do that to you. My back holds itself up differently. No amount of gym or strength training could have prepared me for 100 hours of meditation, though.

Would I Recommend It?

If you're curious about meditation, or you've tried other kinds and you're looking for something that really works on your determination and mental strength, or if you feel miserable all the time even though you know there's a lot to be grateful for and you hate how happy everyone always appears to be, then yes. Go in knowing it's hard, it's not for everyone, and it will humble you.

I'm not someone who runs from hard work, and this still handed me my whole self on a plate.

After the meditation course was over, I packed my stuff and hitched a ride to the bus stop, where I found a vending machine. I popped in ¥130 and treated myself to an ice-cold Coca-Cola. That first sip brought me right back into civilization.

More About Vipassana

Vipassana is one of the oldest meditation techniques to come out of India. The word Vipassana basically means "seeing things as they really are." You start by watching your natural breath to sharpen your focus, and then you spend hour after hour observing the sensations moving through your body without reacting to a single one. You don't chase the good sensations, and you don't fight the bad ones. The idea is that if you can stop reacting while meditating, you slowly loosen the old habit of craving and aversion that creates the misery that runs the rest of your life.

If you want to look into it, everything's on the Dhamma website.