Last year I spent a month alone, meditating. Around week 2, I came up against a huge wall of dissatisfaction, impatience, and rage. This whole path seemed to lose all meaning and it seemed like there was no difference between continuing vs just living like a degenerate. Theoretically, I could explain to myself that this was a huge ego backlash but practically, I realized how much of our understanding hinges on feelings to support that conviction. All that was zapped so logic didn’t help. It was really tough. Then I decided to stop fighting with it and fully allow those emotions, anger, dissatisfaction, etc. to be experienced interally and expressed through screaming, etc. This is when my energy and vigor came back. Once I dropped resisting, and started to grok what it means to actually do nothing ‘just being an open space for internal experiences to arise’ something surprising happend: fully being in touch with sadness, rage, fear, loneliness felt amazing! I cherished them equally or almost even more than joy or love. It was like: ‘OMG I no longer have to push this away’. It’s just beautiful, alive energy! It cannot harm. What harms is the resistance to it. For the first time in years I felt fulfilled. I realized that emotional fulfillment is only possible when all is allowed and felt. WEEK 4 I started noticing micro tensions all over my body, old traumas surfacing and releasing. Towards the end of the retreat there was so much clarity and insight that I couldn’t keep up taking notes. It was like fireworks of energy erupting out of deeply helt pains in the body, releasing through my heart and spine. Every time I surrendered to simply doing nothing about my discomfort, I came out clearer, freer, and MORE ALIVE. This vitality and power peaked to a point where I was laughing about how easy the retreat had become. It felt like easy mode and I secretly knew that retreating wasn’t necessary if you know how to feel pain. It’s only our resistance to the triggers of daily life that clarity and energy close down. If we can process pain, we stay open. In fact, we will become even more open and energetic as we learn to not only hold space for ourselves but others. Some of the essential insights: We merely pretend to be limited. Nothing is enforced upon us, no disease, no suffering, etc. Everything is voluntary, on a deep level. Without exception. It's impossible for God to truly limit itself, so God can only pretend and voluntarily act as though he isn’t Himself. And that's actually the only way God could have fooled himself into a first-person POV dream. We are consciously or unconsciously upholding our limitations through resistance. And there’s only one thing we essentially resist: pain. The more we drop resistance to pain, the more we remember how we created our entire life as God. Below every thought & tension there is an emotion. Below every emotion there is a pain. Thoughts, tension, and emotions are resistance to pain. Pain liberates energy and opens up clarity. Pain is the motivating factor behind everything we do. Samskaras (deep stored traumas) feel like there’s “no space left.” No watcher consciousness. You just get thrown back into the fire. Life never gives you more than you can handle, but it will bring you right up to the edge and it will be your choice to be with that or refuse/resist/decline the challenge. Full liberation isn’t escaping into endless retreats. It’s being aware of your resistance to pain in every moment so that you can be free, at peace, and in love in the midst of your daily life. This is the challenge. This is the real work. Not just awakening, but integration. If you’d like to hear more, I recorded a video about my experience: AFTER THE RETREAT All that being said, I had a lot of resistance to leaving the retreat because I strongly felt that it was TOO SHORT & incomplete. I could see the insights slipping through my fingers and clarity slowly diminishing. I thought that it would have taken another 2-3 months of dissolving the micro tensions/traumas throughout my body IN SECLUSION to ‘get over the hill’ so it'd be much easier to stay in touch with ground truth and remain in that silent stillness. This, however, was a great challange to surrendering to where life was carrying me. And it turned out that only because I left the retreat, I met a guide who helped me recognize things that would have taken years to realize - or never. TECHNIQUE & SCHEDULE: There was no schedule. I mostly did nothing (with a bit of emphasiz on opening ever more deeply to feeling) as it’s very easy to not actually do nothing but subconsciously suppress emotions. For the first half, I also did a bit of work and then gradually transitioned into silence. This was extremely powerful as it helped me face a lot of the ‘inbetween phase’ between our normal state and deep meditation. Usually, meditation retreats dive straight in, minimizing the agony to just a few days. For me however, it was stretched out, I lingered in it and worked with it for 1-2 weeks until I got so comfortable with it, that it gave me unshakable confidence to be with difficult emotions. I only did mahasi vipassana noting, breathing, yoga, etc., sometimes/rarely to help settle into meditation if I was restless. Otherwise, I kept on returning to doing nothing and just feeling. I think the retreat became so effortless to be on retreat towards the end because the underlying root cause of distraction and discomfort was addressed: pain. Most other techniques utilize the mind to effort. This is unsustainable for many as it is fuled by willpower and ones own vital energy. Whereas when we ‘do nothing’ we can focus all of our energy on simply doing nothing while being aware of what emotions/pains we feel, without doing/focussing/efforting, etc. This awareness of emotions and pain liberates incredible amounts of energy so it becomes extremely easy to sustain.