Day 0: Check-in, Orientation, Start of the Retreat

They shepherd the men and women to separate sides of the center. I walk up to the male check-in desk, turn in my wallet and phone, and pick up a form to fill out. An alarmingly handsome and calm guy in suspenders looks at me from behind his clipboard and says:

Suspenders guy: New student?

Me: That easy to tell?

Suspenders guy: First timers always forget to breathe.

Me: (Fake laugh)

I go to the cafeteria to fill out my form. A bunch of people chatting in groups, filling out forms, and generally not talking to me. I use my keen people-reading skills to size them up. A group of Indians (they must be meditation pros), a couple Europeans (must be total pros), senior citizens (gotta be pros).

I turn in my form and receive my room assignment. Of the 52 men, 47 are assigned to the new, classy rooms with private bathrooms. I’m one of the 5 selected to lodge in a windowless plywood cubicle separated from the dining hall by a curtain. My mattress is a 2 inch thick piece of foam, and the pillow is literally the depth of a slice of bologna. I unpack, make my bed, and set up my medicine chest.

I have a couple hours to kill before orientation, so I go outside to check out the grounds and talk to people. The half-dozen random people I meet will become the main characters in my FOOPS (fantasies of other people’s situations) for the next 10 days.

First up is Mukunda, a muscular Indian dad type in a 102nd Airborne t-shirt. He says 10 days of meditation and caloric deprivation is much harder than his 10 hardest days of military training. He’s keen on telling me and this other guy that he’s not the type of guy you’d expect to meditate. On the contrary, he says, he’s the guy who’s “always down to say racist and sexist jokes.” He tells us he’s already volunteered to wake himself up, sans alarm clock, at 3:45 AM every day so he can be the guy to bang the gong to wake everyone else up at 4. This is his third retreat.

The other guy in our little group of three conversants is Javier Lorenzo, a Spanish painter (“I usually paint realistic faces with abstract or psychological bodies”) who looks exactly like Woodstock from Peanuts. When I tell him I’m a hypnotist, he says he’s very interested in recovering memories from his childhood. He claims to remember nothing at all before the age of 17. His earliest memory is failing his high school exit test and all his friends graduating and moving on without him. He doesn’t remember how he became friends with them, or anything at all before 17.

A car pulls up and forces us to move off where we’re standing. The driver parks and gets out. It’s a super serious, janitor-looking white guy in a monochrome khaki murderer’s outfit. He strolls past us without looking up. Mukunda whispers “That’s our teacher, Bob Cannon.”

Sick of Mukunda, I slink away and sidle up to these two friendly-looking old guys, Rick and Jack. Rick looks like Donald Rumsfeld plus a bunch of skin tags on his face, but his eyes are shimmery in a “shit I’ll have whatever he’s having” sort of way. Rick has been on 6 10-day retreats, a 20-day retreat, and has just finished a 30-day retreat.

Jack, longtime friend of Rick, is a confused and markedly less enlightened-looking guy about to start his first retreat. Jack’s a little scared, but mostly he’s excited about his new Nike Dri-Fit shirt his wife bought him for the trip, which he kept pinching and rubbing between his fingers, baffled at the fabric/technology.

They feed us dinner (my last dinner for 10 days), and I meet a few other humans. Adam, a prematurely jowelly guy from Syracuse, a self-described conservative, says “I’m the last guy you’d expect to do something like this, but you know what, I need to find meaningful change in my life, so I’m excited.” He would struggle and eventually quit on day 4.

The best looking man there by far is Gilbert, a wise-faced 6’5 240 pound black guy with dreadlocks who turns out to be a professor of theater studies at Amherst. This was, shockingly, his first retreat – I thought for sure he was an expert! His wife attended one earlier in the year and started cleaning for the first time in her life when she came home, so Gilbert figured it must be worth something. He has 4 kids (2, 5, 12, and 14).

Me: What do they think about you and your wife doing this?

Gilbert: The young ones are too young and the old ones are just...

Me: (mimes texting motion)

Gilbert: Yup

Me: (I’m bonding with the cool guy! EEeee!!)

Next to Gilbert at the table is Kiran, a legally deaf hippie from Maine returning for his second retreat. His first was over 9/11. “I can’t imagine a better way to spend 9/11,” he says.

Will, an angry guy in his late 20s, like me has been selected for a cubicle room off the dining hall. Will is temporarily living with his aunt in New Haven and wants to know if I am “extremely spoiled like the rest of the Yalies.”

Finally, there’s this crew of young, experienced meditator bros, “sit-servers” who live at the center, alternating 10-day retreats with periods of cooking, cleaning and administering the place.

One of them is a nice Jewish boy named Ariel. One morning four months earlier, his orthodox parents woke him up and told him they were moving to Israel that day. Confused and upset, he drove up to the center, where he’s been living ever since. He says he bears almost no resemblance to his self of four months ago, and the biggest difference is equanimity.

The other sit-server bro is Goat Boy, a skinny bearded guy who walks, eats, and moves so deliberately that the only possible explanation is arrogance. I overhear him impressing a group of people with his decision to sleep in an outdoor cabin rather than the decently appointed rooms or at least heated cubicles.

After dinner, it’s time for orientation. A mid-30s probable virgin in a collarless dress shirt introduces himself as a “local meditator” and reads the rules from a piece of paper and tells us the daily schedule. He also alludes to an exclusive pagoda that we should not enter unless specifically instructed, before playing a cassette tape on a boombox that reiterates the same exact rules and daily schedule.

After this, it’s off to the meditation hall for the ceremonial doling of the mats, cushion selection, and vow of silence. When you enter the meditation hall’s outer door, there’s a large foyer for taking off your shoes and psyching yourself up. There are a bunch of cushions and little kneeling benches to choose from, and everyone got busy setting himself up with something comfortable. Some people built elaborate support structures with many cushions; others, such as myself (like a boss), used just one.

Everyone waits in the foyer clutching his chosen cushions. It’s totally silent for a couple minutes, even though we’re still allowed to talk. Someone quips “Noble silence hasn’t begun yet, guys” – nobody laughs and it's silent for another few minutes.

Eventually Frank comes out with a clipboard and calls names to assign mats. The more retreats you’ve attended, the closer you sit to the front of the hall. Since about half of the guys there are on their first retreat, I feel a grave sense of injustice and silently accuse many people of elitism as a dozen first-timers’ names are called before mine. I eventually get my spot in the second to last row, set down my cushion, put my arms through the slanket, and sit down.

The first meditation starts with an audio voiceover from Goenka saying “Repeat after me: I take refuge in Buddha, Sangha, and Dhamma. I agree to take the precepts of not lying, stealing, beating off, etc.” The recording tells us to ask the teacher in unison to please teach us the technique of Annapana (you are gonna teach us anyway lol), essentially just paying attention to the breath. We meditate for an hour, and the silence rule is now in effect.

I go back to my cubicle, and for the first time in months, go to sleep without listening to a podcast or audiobook. I wake up in the middle of the night with a very dry mouth and notice that my Volvic is gone. I feel as if I’m being punished for stealing, and I feel anxious about trying to hydrate without a bottle for 10 days (it’s not like I could just go to the store, ya know?)

In my dream I slip ‘n slide down a hallway to reach a new water bottle at the end. Before I get there, my ex-boss from Google steps in to ask me “Was that a powerslide?” I say “yes” and a bunch of people scream “noble silence!” I’m then pushed by an unseen pusher into a slimy, freezing cold “purification pool.”