Be an animal
OR: don’t do a meditation retreat
Earlier this month, I did a 7-day silent meditation retreat in a Buddhist monastery, nestled high into a mountainous rainforest in Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand.
At 4:30am, I was startled awake by the piercing gong of a steel bell and began a slow rotation of meditation, walking meditation, chores, meals, and tea, with plenty of idle time in between, until collapsing into my mosquito-net-protected cot at 8:30pm.
People say, "Everyone should do a meditation retreat." This is such general advice that it's worthy of serious suspicion. I'd compare a retreat with running a marathon. If someone asked me if they should run a marathon I would reply: "It depends. Do you like to run? And, how much do you want to push yourself?" I hope you see how the same applies.
I found disconnecting and not speaking for an entire week was the main benefit. With everything but the essentials stripped away, I could evaluate my life clearly, let ideas ferment and thoughts simmer, notice what truly matters to me, and discover what my brain is like when I'm not always stuffing it with information1. Clarity comes with quiet.
Generally, I've fallen away from meditation and moved towards embodied rituals that I find more helpful. Journaling, exercise, and time in nature, among others2. I've written about this before.
Meditation is amazing for some people given their nature and specific flavor of suffering. My friends who are serious meditators are calm, content, insightful people and speak about their practice with a luminous glow. But I find it hard to make a case that "everyone should meditate".
There are many doors to the same room.
~~~
Disembodiment is the disease of modernity.
We’re crushed by comfort and convenience. We underestimate how much the genes of our ancestors live on in us, at our own peril3. We’ve forgotten that we have a body.
Meditation tends to put me more in my head. Especially when I’m struggling, sitting and closing my eyes is a crisp, gold-trimmed invitation to my neuroses. This magnifies a sense of disembodiment, often experienced as confusion, overwhelm, and spaciness4. Like my mind is a prison I can’t escape.
Simon Sarris tweeted: "Vaguely against meditation because it is more sitting. Everyone has lots of sitting. There is a joy to the opposite of meditation, to being so unselfconscious in doing a task that you become an animal again… Do more things that make you feel like an animal, like you are really inhabiting a body."
As my thoughts mature, I find myself falling more into this camp: Go outside, go hungry, go naked. Worship the sun. Hug trees, climb trees, climb rocks, stand under waterfalls, sleep under stars, get dirty, be cold. Sauna, steam, ache, sweat, trail run. Run in the dark, run in fields, lift things, yell, jump, laugh, walk around barefoot in the snow. Seek discomfort. Get out of your head and into your hands5.
Do things that remind you that you have a body6.
Workouts are good, workouts until exhaustion are better. But nowhere did I find more embodiment than my three months of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I've been exercising and playing competitive sports my whole life, but BJJ was the only activity that pulled me entirely into my body and the immediacy of the present moment. At the gym or on a long run, I still think about nagging problems or essay ideas or my to-do list. Not in BJJ. There was a need to be intensely present or find myself in a triangle choke, arm bar, or ankle lock. I forgot entirely about the external world of wanting and achieving. I forgot entirely about myself. There was a certain primal joy. The physicality, the force, the measured aggression, the sheer exhaustion. I felt like an animal.
Similarly, my happiest days last year were waking at dawn in the raw wilderness of a backcountry trail and hiking till dusk with 30lbs on my back.
~~~
Related thoughts:
Pursue active things to do with your time.
Start doing something. Something that seems interesting. Something hard. Something meaningful. Something ambitious, larger than yourself. Something spectacular if you could pull it off. Give your attention and time to it. Focus and execute.
Find a rock and push it up a hill.
Set aggressive goals. Tempt failure. Seek joy.
Start a family. Serve others. Sacrifice for them, in unsexy ways. Care for them more than yourself7.
Make things, make art, make a sanctuary. Make your surroundings better. Above all, make an effort.
Learn what you like to build, then build it8. Create a home. Create sacred spaces. Create rituals. Notice beauty. Practice wonder. Observe mystery. Encourage enchantment. Feel the rapture of being alive. Bathe in the vigor of life.
Envision a beautiful future. Aim high. Strive towards it9.
Whether it's your nature or your nurture, or some ineffable combination, the path forward is developing your own set of rituals. But most modern people, I think, will be better off with more embodied doing.
I wish you the effort to experiment, the patience to practice, and the courage to commit.
Off to plant trees,
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👋 what i’ve been up to:
Early Tuesday morning, I caught a flight to Loei in Northern Thailand where I’ll spend two weeks at The Mindfulness Project, a remote workaway with “a radical new approach to reforestation and sustainable living”. Sleeping in tents, swimming in rivers, watching eagles soar above.
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
American poet Charles Bukowski on aloneness:
“And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want.
What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
📸 photo i took:
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Most notably, I came away with a refined and exciting vision for my future.
Not an epiphany exactly. More a discovery of hidden limitations I had been placing on myself without noticing. Like a door hidden in plain sight, it all seems so obvious now. Like it was always right in front of my eyes. But that’s how the truth works.
Now, like recognizing the pattern in the carpet, I can't unrecognize it. All I can think is “I can’t believe I didn’t see this before”. It's jarring to realize how blind I was.
Nonetheless, for the first time since I realized my fate was not to climb ladders on Wall Street, I have clarity on my future. Real direction. I connected previously disparate dots in my past and have outlined the future I want to author. It's exciting but a lot to process.
I also experience peak states while being absorbed by a good book. My parents could have told you this when I was 3. While reading brings joy, it’s a sedentary and intellectual activity that doesn’t counteract disembodiment.
A related idea that was paradigm-shifting: Humans evolved in scarcity, but now live in abundance. Much of our struggle comes from this.
I also find 1-2 hours of meditation per day (the required amount to make serious progress) to be incompatible with a committed family life.
If I continue to practice, it will mainly be short Loving Kindness meditations. A posture of love and gratitude is an appropriate response to the hardships of this world. I will never be sufficiently grateful for the people I have in my life, nor be able to love them to the extent they deserve.
There’s strong evolutionary evidence for this camp, but we won’t delve into that here.
What did you love to do as a child? Children are embodied creatures by nature—creators, world-builders, obsessives. Playing, yelling, running, getting their hands dirty. Much of this is lost in “maturity”.
My bouts of depression are downstream of my self-indulgence. There is more to life than staring at my wounds. There are people that need me. There are things bigger than myself to serve. This realization heals.
Many things are substantially less difficult than you think. Most people just aren't trying that hard. You must make an effort.
Effort is the duty of today.
Learning more about Buddhism pushed me closer to Christianity. Living in a monastery and experiencing the Eastern tradition showed me how much my way of perceiving the world is rooted in Western (Christian) thought. And I realized I like these thoughts. Moreover, I think they're more true.
An idea that kept looping in my mind on the retreat: The difference between Christianity and Buddhism is the difference between pushing a rock up a hill and noticing its texture. This is an oversimplification. But, from what I can tell, the Christian message is: Aim at something ambitious. Strive. Work hard to actualize it. Let the soul make demands on the body. Be pulled forward by hope, by an idealized vision of the future. Whereas the Buddhist message is centered around accepting your current conditions, internally transcending them. Realizing all sensations and thoughts are appearances in consciousness and not real. Perhaps it’s: Acting on your surroundings vs. Accepting them as is.
This difference explains why the West has largely been responsible for driving massive progress in technology and innovation. Rene Girard believed science was unleashed by Christianity.
I love reading your Substacks, Tommy.
Regarding your last sentences in your second to last paragraph, perhaps it's a both/and. Perhaps, accepting what is starts first AND then acting. I have found when my actions come from resistance, I am fear based. When Acceptance of it all lies as the foundation, I act from love, and there is a sense of flow, of meaning, of purpose.
I grew up Christian and transitioned towards Buddhism in my late 20s. It's interesting you say spending time meditating pushed you more towards Christianity. In comparison, I feel a lot of messaging in Christianity does not give you a toolset or instructions on how to do what it says you should do. Whereas Buddhist lessons are actionable how-tos, giving you instructions on how to actually see reality and then start to transcend suffering.
But also, I spent years thinking all I should read / focus on were Buddhist teachings, only later to really appreciate we are animals, physical beings in this world, and the best practice is taking the skillset and engaging with all this world has to offer. A balance of both. All the active things you suggest.