The Six Elements of a DIY Silent Retreat

These are the ingredients — experiment and mix to taste

When my partner asked if I wanted to go on a silent retreat with him sometime, my answer wasn’t exactly ‘No’.

It was more like an ‘Oh, hell, no.’

I even wrote an article about it called ‘Dear Future Me, Please Don’t Go on a Silent Retreat.’ That’s how much the traditional Vipassana silent retreat scares me.

But I made him a counteroffer: a DIY silent retreat weekend. One where the two of us would come up with our own rules.

A vipassana silent retreat is built up of six elements. These elements are:

In normal day-to-day life, we tend to avoid most of these because they make us uncomfortable. In traditional Vipassana retreats, the idea is that you either actively seek out these uncomfortable experiences (like boredom and hunger) and/or ignore them when they arise (like pain).

Too many people — including myself — this is a tad much.

Though in theory, I’d love to be more resilient to hunger, pain, and boredom, the reality is probably that I would have a mental breakdown on day two and never return.

We agreed to try 48 hours of our own brand of silent retreat.

A silent retreat doesn’t necessarily need to be an all-or-nothing kind of thing. These rules that traditional retreats follow are arbitrary, and though they tend to be roughly the same for every retreat, who says you can’t create your own retreat and use these five elements as sliders?

So let’s make a slider panel of these, where 0 is ‘normal life’ (e.g. you look at your phone whenever the hell you feel like it) and 100 is ‘traditional retreat’ (e.g. no phones allowed). You could slide that up to 0.8 and set a rule that says ‘10 minutes of screen time per day just to make sure no one has died — after that they go back in the box’.

This is roughly the ‘slider panel’ we eventually came up with:

We agreed to not use our phones, laptops, or anything similar. We agreed not to read any books (though I broke that rule 24 hours in a fit of hysteria — more on that later) but we were allowed to write (by hand), take pictures (with a camera), and draw or paint. Workouts and yoga were fine, but no workout videos or apps: we had to come up with it on the spot.

So basically, creating was okay, consuming was not.

We took a fairly relaxed approach to meditation and basically did it when we felt like it. For me, that amounted to about an hour each day, cut up into shorter bits. Which, I might add, is way more than usual for me. In normal life, I average approximately 0 minutes per day.

For me, ‘not eating anything after noon’ was a dealbreaker — but not eating until noon is something I do quite often, so we decided to fast until 1 PM each day and then just eat whenever we felt hungry afterward. We ate fairly soberly: scrambled eggs for lunch, rice with vegetables for dinner. We didn’t consume any alcohol or sugar for those 48 hours (an incredible achievement, I know).

We agreed to no talking and no sex, and I reluctantly agreed to no kisses, though I broke that rule a lot. I drew the line at no cuddles and we did sleep in the same bed. We also played charades rather a lot when we couldn’t talk. All in all, there was a fair bit of communication going on.

My partner was asleep for the better part of those 48 hours — seriously. We’d go to bed at 11 PM, he’d wake up at around 11 AM and then nap for almost 2 hours in the afternoon. I didn’t sleep nearly as much but I definitely didn’t kick myself out of bed before I felt like it.

Nah man. The moments I meditated, I made myself as comfortable as I could, though I did notice that I meditate better when I sit upright than when I’m lying down.

I had a short mental breakdown 24 hours in when my partner was napping. I had already broken the rule of ‘no reading’ by whipping out my e-reader, but Edith Wharton had nothing on my understimulated brain.

Pretty soon I was bored out of my mind. Literally. I started roaming the one-room apartment, randomly looking at things, and finally settled on looking at his sleeping figure on the couch. Suddenly, the thought that he might wake up to find me staring at him was so hilarious that I started laughing — quietly, but rather maniacally, I’m afraid.

I couldn’t go to another room so I hid behind the stairs, silently shaking with laughter, and of course, he woke up and looked at me with a mixture of worry and amusement.

I broke my vow of silence with the words ‘I AM SO BOOOORED’ and he chuckled, sat me down on the couch, and stroked my hair for a bit. Things were easier after that.

Yes. Next time I’d go harder on the meditation — I feel like I actually got to meditate for maybe the first time in my life because there was no ‘I have to quickly go do something else right now’ in my brain. There simply wasn’t anything else to do, so I could focus on finding a technique that worked for me.

I might also slide the ‘boredom’ slider up a bit further — no watercolors, no cameras — and I think I’d like to get up and go to sleep at a set time. Getting through a dull day is a lot easier when you’ve already slept through half of it.

No. But it has been pleasant and I feel like I’ve learned some things about myself. This could be the first step towards something bigger, and because this first experience hasn’t been so harrowing, I am less afraid of what the rest has to offer.

I feel like it’s been a useful and easy introduction to ‘quiet time’ and I recommend it to anyone who’s curious to find out a little bit more about themselves, without subjecting themselves to 10 days of torture (sorry, the traditional retreat still sounds like torture to me).

All in all, 10/10 would recommend. What would your sliders look like?

About the author
Here so you can learn from my mistakes: a singer/writer with a busy brain and a longing for focus. Get your dose of excruciatingly personal stories and uppity advice.

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