terminal boredom

a positive review of a meditation retreat

Hi! If you DM’d or emailed me this week, I was absent because I have been in Watsonville, California participating in a meditation retreat. This was my first experience with this kind of thing. My friend Nick, who loves to meditate and talks about it often on Twitter, suggested it as a transition ritual because I am moving from the east coast to the west coast (more on that to come). I don’t meditate very often (for a while I was doing 45m a day, but that dropped off when I got more busy), so I was nervous. But I ended up having a really good time and wanted to talk about it on here, in case any of you guys were interested in the same thing.

Some potentially notable things:

1. As I mentioned above, I don’t regularly meditate. So I was going from 0 to 3/4 hours of meditation a day.

2. It was a silent meditation retreat, so no talking. I was also not using my phone/laptop (but cheated a little bc I knew I had to check my email a couple times).

3. It was a weeklong retreat, but I had trouble getting up to Mt Madonna on Friday so I ended up going on Sunday night and only did ~5 days.

4. It was a jhana retreat. More on the jhanas here.

5. It was specifically hosted by a startup, Jhourney, that was trying to collect EEG data from people doing jhana. I skipped doing the EEG because I wasn’t confident about my ability to get into jhana on command so that didn’t affect my experience, but seems kind of interesting.

The actual experience: