10 Days in Silent Meditation

I approached this experience like most things in my life, with openness to the unknown and curiosity about what it might reveal about me. Like so many folks, this year brought innumerable mental, emotional, financial, and spiritual battles that I felt completely inept to face. In spite of feeling deeply lost and disconnected from myself, I set out in search. In search of clarity, reconnection, and community. 

Early on, Spirit kept nudging and calling me to silence. It was honestly hard to reconcile because I felt so strongly that I had lost my voice and needed spaces where I could scream and externalize the rage I had been quietly nurturing for the better part of a year. I put that call to silence on a mental sticky note and dutifully filed it away like the background noise of my favorite comfort shows. I was making slow and steady progress in my own therapy and coming to some harsh realizations about myself and my role in my suffering. 

Sometime in early summer, the background noise of that call to silence began getting louder and louder, until I couldn’t keep it neatly filed away anymore. So I started searching for silent meditation retreats. I narrowed my search to those centering Black women and, surprisingly, found a few I was genuinely excited about. While I was not excited about the price tag, I had begun to understand that there was something of grave importance that intentional silence had to teach me. So I figured it was time. 

On a family call about our upcoming trip to Africa, I shared my interest in a particular silent retreat for Black women in California, which prompted my cousin to mention that she had recently seen a Black woman on social media sharing her experience at a free 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. Now my ears perked up at the mention of free because well…do I even need to explain? LOL. So she sent me the link, and I immediately looked up the website because I have been off social media during this chapter of my life. Everything seemed so easy and straightforward. The timing of my application for the LGBTQ+ course. Accommodations and vegetarian meals covered. Private room and bathroom. Beautiful scenic surroundings conducive to meditation. A 4-hour drive just outside of my home in Atlanta. And meditators are unable to donate until the very last day of their first completed 10-day experience. So I’m left wondering, what’s the catch? Is this the entry point to some sort of cult? Because I have been told more than once in my life that it would not be surprising if I accidentally ended up in one or leading one. Make of that what you will.  

Anyway, I’m prone to welcoming new adventures without thinking too deeply about it because at the end of the day, I know I’m protected. Not long after applying and having my therapist sign off on my participation, I received my approval letter and began making arrangements to be off the grid and device-free for 12 days (factor in travel days on the front & back end). My family, friends, partner, and community were all excited, encouraging, and rooting for me, so going into this experience, I felt ready to embrace it. Ready to embrace myself in silence, free from the incessant distractions of this world. 

The gravity of this experience did not truly sink in until I was sitting in the first evening's orientation, being reminded of the Code of Discipline, informed about the meaning and expectations around Noble Silence, and officially turning over my laptop bag and phone. This was it. Spirit guided me here to teach me something, and as an eternal student, I felt open and ready to learn. 

Over the next 10 days of this course, I would learn and be reminded, on a deeply intimate level, of so many things about myself. How wildly scatterbrained I can be. How hard I can be on myself. How focused I can be, to the tune of replaying entire television shows in my mind's eye. How my automatic thoughts and stream of consciousness are indelibly tethered to my favorite songs. How loving and devoted I can be toward others, even as I often put myself last. How that built resentment and eventually fueled rage. How pieces of past traumas I did years of meaningful work to navigate and move beyond were still stored in this body. I’d spent so much of the past year being averse to my reality as it is while craving and clinging to how I wanted things to be. I let so many things build up and had a samurai death grip on hurts, perceived slits, pain, pleasure, yearning, bliss; all of which kept me in a constant cycle of emotional highs and lows that I desperately wanted out of. 

Intellectually, every piece of wisdom imparted by the course teacher, S.N. Goenka, made logical, practical sense to me. Yet, here I was on day three, wondering if I had made a grave mistake coming here, because sitting with the wisdom my own body had to teach me felt too hard. I requested an interview with the assistant teacher to make sure I was practicing the technique properly, and sure enough, I was. This was meant to be hard work. I fooled myself by continuing to call this a retreat and internalized all the conditioning our culture holds around what that entails. Comfort. Luxury. Escape from hard things. And the self-centered ego underlying my belief that I deserve nice things. Disclaimer: I spend plenty of time being completely at peace with that belief. But here, there was no room for ego. No room for fantasies about this experience affording an escape from the problems in my life or even an escape from myself. In fact, the steady and pristine mirror this experience held up to me often felt jarring. 

But then something beautiful happened. When I stopped singing along to random songs in my head and stopped allowing Living Single to play on repeat in my mind's eye. When I actually practiced the technique of Vipassana meditation as it was so lovingly being taught to me, something clicked in my body. I watched sensations in my body rise and fall, and when I met them with awareness, curiosity, and equanimity, I understood. Everything is impermanent. The pain of my past. The euphoria I crave. It’s all so fleeting. Mastery over my thoughts, feelings, and reactions to life's stressors would require me to develop a deeper connection with my body because it truly does keep the score. Understanding the art of living will require me to meet change within the framework of my own body smilingly and with lovingkindness. It became clear that Spirit guided me here, to this experience, to teach me this technique.  A technique for which I have immense gratitude and for me, has been the key to meeting life’s never-ending changes with the equanimity, care, and kindness I aspire to practice in my daily walk.

If any of this speaks to you or piques your curiosity, check it out for yourself here. For those of you in the Atlanta area, the Southeast Vipassana Center is the closest. I plan to attend the 10-Day Black Heritage Course in December 2026 in Jessup, GA, as a volunteer server, supporting other Black folks on their journey. If you decide to apply, the application is here, and you can check out their year-round course offerings here. Maybe I’ll see you there…

Warmly & in loving kindness,

Dr. Monica