An Ant's World

Lessons from 10 Days in Silence

At the beginning of this year, I meditated for 100 hours. 10 hours a day, for 10 days in a row.

I was in complete silence for each of those days and also could not read, write, or move my body any faster than a slow stroll along an arrow marked path in a garden the size of a front yard.

There was also to be no eye contact or physical gestures towards or with anyone.

No sunbathing during “free time.”

Absolutely no phones, music, electronic devices or vices of any kind.

No food to eat, after 11am.

And full abstention from intoxicants, sex, lying, stealing and killing, including all living creatures, which I would later discover definitely included the ants who took up occupancy in my bathroom’s toilet bowl throughout the journey.

Alongside about one hundred other hopeful meditators, I entered a facility high in the Thai mountains to undertake what is known as a Vipassana.

The contract each of us was made to sign promised only one exit strategy; if you wished to leave, you could, but it had to be quietly, alone, and in the middle of the night.

As they pulled the front gates closed, I acknowledged the property’s remoteness. Considering it had taken me four public buses and one extremely lucky hitchhike in the middle of the day to get there, leaving in the middle of the night felt logistically ambitious, some might even say impossible.

Best to settle in.

And I did so with ease, actually. I was quite thrilled to finally have some quiet time. And as the clipboard, with the contract, reached my lap, my sweaty hand, eagerly, held the pen and signed away.

The goal: samadhi, a state of deep meditative consciousness, where the mind becomes fully absorbed, undistracted, and unified with the object of meditation.

Aka. control my wandering mind to a hopeful place of stillness.

Before arriving at the center, however, things were feeling, one might say, ominous.

I was completely lost having followed printed directions that read more like the Post-it notes my Dad enjoys giving, as if Google Maps were not invented.

My fourth bus driver of the morning eventually dropped me off, reluctantly, on the side of a rural highway after admitting he had absolutely no idea where I was trying to go.

I jumped out of his local truck‑bus, maneuvered over several large garbage bags filled with dill, and watched him speed away.

This was to be my first bout of real silence.

No cars. No people.

Just me.

And to the dismay of my sensitive heart, a freshly struck, dead, white cat beside me. For over an hour that cat became both my point of interest and my only companion while I waited for someone, really anyone, to drive by.

I looked at it with complete, stomach‑churning certainty that this was a sign. A very clear sign. The kind of sign that said: You absolutely should not be entering 10 days of silence in the mountains of Thailand, are you insane?

But almost immediately another thought appeared. The last time I had seen a small, white, dead creature before an uncertain adventure, things had gone in a very different, certainly positive direction.

In 2020, just before COVID shut the world down, I was living on a raw vegan eco‑fruit farm in Pahoa on the Big Island of Hawaii with about twenty other wildly enthusiastic humans. We were attempting to rebuild a biodiverse farm that had been overtaken by the 2018 lava flow. Each day flowed on the farm as we happily replanted and harvested massively overgrown orchards and fruit trees together. We were less farmers and more so young little hippies running around and eating 50-pound jackfruits with the intensity of starved children. We were ravenous for fresh fruit and for each other. We spent months climbing coconut trees, hiding in the monkeypod trees, chasing piglets, strumming our joint collection of ukuleles, showering every afternoon under swaying banana branches and dancing naked under every moonlit night.

It was chaotic, beautiful, slightly unhinged, and one of the most spiritually expansive periods of my life.

In Hawaiian mythology, Pele, the Goddess of volcanoes and fire, and the creator of the islands themselves, is said to visit people in the form of a little white dog, as a welcome blessing to the islands.

Unfortunately for my symbolism, the version I encountered on day one, in Pahoa, was also dead.

But the strange thing was this: I biked past this deceased dog just off the farm road where it had clearly been struck by a car and was no longer dwelling in this realm.

Twenty minutes later I circled back toward the farm.

And it was gone.

Not moved.

Not cleaned.

Gone.

The road, and its steaming black pavement, was completely spotless. No blood. No fur. No sign that anything had ever happened there at all.

You may think someone came to move it.

But I’m telling you: the scene, on this patch of Hawaiian jungle land, was not just “cleaned up” it was more like the universe had pressed delete.

So standing on that quiet Thai highway, with this dead cat beside me, waiting for a hitch that I doubted would ever come, my brain made a very reasonable and warming leap.

Maybe this cat wasn’t a warning.

I thought it to be a very odd welcome sign, but perhaps the Universe has simply decided that seeing mysterious dead animals is now my official spiritual onboarding process.

And if that was the case, it seemed I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Eventually a ride did come, as they always do and the journey began.

The first few days were honestly fascinating; I love processes and my brain is intrigued by how well-oiled machines of humans do things and especially different things. Because the Vipassana method has been in place spiritually since the time of Buddha, 25 centuries ago, but in this iteration since the 1970s, when S.N. Goenka, a businessman from Burma brought the practice to the people and spread it through accessible centers around the world; there are many processes in place to ensure meditators adapt and thrive.

Designated seats in both the meditation hall and eating quarters ‘the canteen’, corkboards filled with regimented daily schedules down to 15 minute intervals, laundry sign-ups, dish-cleaning procedures, signs for common areas and restricted zones, as well as gongs going off at all times, which signal when to wake up, meditate, eat, walk and go to sleep.

Silence, you see, can really only be practiced for so many days, with so many people, if it is organized with rules, timelines, and expectations.

With every detail considered and taken care of by the facilitators, the goal of the meditator, then, is simply meditation. But meditation is like parenting a newly walking toddler; you must patiently and continuously follow the mind wherever it wanders.

Though I don’t have children of my own I have been a live-in nanny with many hyperactive children, so I knew the feeling of never-ending vigilance.

I was watching my mind, happily and vigilantly; practically skipping into the meditation hall and nearly running to the nightly “Dhamma Talks” given by S.N. Goenka, prerecorded from his original talks from the 70’s that played, like a relic, on a rolled in, block TV. It was as if someone had a VHS of Jesus giving Sermons.

Each hour-long meditation seemed to offer more and more insights followed by Mr. Goenka’s talks filled with parables and jokes that left me feeling both giddy and seen. On the second night I ran back to my room, body tingling, and sat on my bed in disbelief.

I had just sensed into such a small part of my left nostril that I had never felt before. How could I be 31 years old and never have felt a certain part of my body?

Either I was beginning to lose my mind, or I had just taken my first qualifying dive off a high board into the depths of acknowledging the beauty of being a human, with a body simply able to breathe.

My outright manic enthusiasm came to a crashing halt however, on the morning of Day 4.

On the third night Mr. Goenka ended his talk, knowingly, by saying, “Tomorrow we introduce the Vipassana method. Get rest, get rest.”

Here I was thinking I had already mastered the method; just be silent and meditate.

I went to bed both anxious and excited.

At the crack of dawn, 4am the following morning, I found myself sat on top of two stacked meditation pillows, with four blocks perched under my knees; and only after 5 minutes of fidgeting did I start to process the words I was hearing from the recorded meditation:

“Strong Determination. For the next hour, you will practice the Strong Determination Meditation. There will be no movement whatsoever. You will repeat this, an hour at a time, 3 hours a day, for the next 6 days. At the same time, you will move your focus from your breath to the sensations of the body. Top to bottom, bottom to top. Noticing all sensations with acceptance. Observation.”

I squinted out of the corner of my right eyeball to look around at the other hundred meditators (save one, who presumably did in fact escape during the middle of the night) and each looked to be absolutely at peace.

The gong gonged and away we went.

Where exactly, I still cannot place. But of all the places I have traveled, the furthest I’ve ever been was sat there in that meditation hall.

I left my body.

The pain in my legs became so unbearable from sitting in complete stillness that I actually became certain that someone was beside me slowly sawing them off. The hour of stillness was leading to a terrifying new sensation that was not allowing me to observe let alone accept.

So instead of staying I opted to check out. I was so viscerally aware that I was still in the hall meditating but as far as my consciousness was concerned, I was at my grandparent’s cottage watering plants with my recently passed away Nana on one of the most beautiful, peak Summer evenings I’ve ever seen. The lake was glimmering and I was 6 years old. She was 60, in her prime, fiddling and dancing around. We didn’t speak, just laughed and coexisted. We held hands and jumped off the dock and then sat on a moss-covered smaller dock as we watched the sunset. Except it didn’t set, it just stayed and so did she.

I came back to my present body to the sound of the gong once more.

I would say this experience could have perhaps been heaven.

But if that was heaven, Day 5 to Day 7 were hell.

In fact, so hellish that the only words I ever spoke out loud throughout the duration of the 10 days came on the morning of Day 6 when I woke up to the gong and wrapped myself in my bed’s blanket. I was essentially sleepwalking to the meditation hall, when I accidentally said aloud, “This is hell.”

My brain has never bothered me as much as it did during those 30 hours. I could not get a grip, I could not order the child to come back, she was running. And I was stuck sitting.

I was moving in and out of dream states, seeing unimaginable visualizations and then for one entire afternoon sitting, spanning 4 hours, I could not stop thinking about the name of my ex-boyfriend’s childhood friend’s Mom... in other words I was losing it.

One thing that did keep me going was my ability to make up stories about my fellow meditators, which was something I knew I would enjoy. Although we had to avoid eye contact, I could still look at them from afar and one woman in particular kept me entertained as she seemed to pull out a new International Marathon finisher shirt each day. On Day 7 she whipped out her Boston Marathon kit but instead of intrigue and imagining her family at the finish line, happy and inspired by her success, it made me cry.

This was the day where the evil thoughts were winning and my mind was circling around the sentence: “You are not strong enough to do this; you have no such strong determination.”

These women were practically Monks, some probably in their 80s sat, so serenely, immovable, unshakeable. And then this woman, clearly having the mastery of stamina and determination from what appeared to be running a race on each continent.

So that afternoon I lost it. Mid meditation instead of stillness or inner calm, I felt rage and anger. Actually, I don’t think I have ever felt so angry, frustrated and disappointed. And that says a lot given the men I have previously dated. Having survived them, I really thought peace and quiet would be a cake walk.

But I surprisingly, “saw red.”

I stormed out of the seating and ran straight to my room. I slammed the door, quietly so as not to disturb the Monks and threw a pillow at my wall.

This may not seem like an irregular outburst for some, but I don’t think I’ve ever responded with physical aggression aside from once throwing my Koodo flip phone at my wall in high school.

I threw the pillow a few more times and then stepped outside to see if the trees could offer me refuge.

My jaw was still clenched, my eyes squinted when I noticed a family of ants crawling up the trunk of an undeniably magical Grandfather teak tree. Their little shadows were casting so perfectly in the early evening hazy sun that their bodies were projecting onto further away leaves and it looked like a movie. I leaned against the railing and watched with a focus as if their movement were this year’s Oscar winning feature film. I was calming down and coming back to my body when a warm breeze moved through the trees and made its way so gently to my cheek. Almost as gently as my Mom’s cheek feels when it’s pressed to mine; when one of our hugs lingers for too long that I think I’m going to, and sometimes do, explode into tears.

I felt this breeze so deeply that my own little tear began strolling down my face.

Did a breeze always feel this way?

I used to love ants, when was the last time I stopped to watch their journey?

I wiped my tears and felt nothing but presence. Nowhere to be, no one to be, just me alone.

Observing without attachment. Allowing the ants to go about their business, allowing the breeze to come and go. Moving sweetly through the trees, a warm tingly feeling, reaching the hairs on my arms, sometimes missing me completely and just dancing its way through the branches.

I realized that I have been here, but I haven’t really been here.

The last time I was so presently in my body was actually back in Hawaii. One night, in the girls cabin I stayed in, my roommate Fae and I, both about to fall asleep on our parallel twin beds, heard a breeze coming. We stopped talking and listened to the surrounding trees bending as we waited for the gust to come through the big screened walls and bring a cooling effect.

But it never came. We both sat up in full body chills, Pele.

The Goddess had visited us.

Making her presence known in the element of air, coming at us in full force and stopping gently like an octopus turning to swim the other way.

Just as that memory surfaced in my mind, I looked up and noticed the head Assistant Vipassana teacher. She appeared as distant as a mirage, walking slowly through the forest in the distance, her own quiet afternoon.

She moved with such stillness; she almost seemed to float.

I watched her with a feeling of peace.

Presence was possible.

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