My horrific experience of doing a silent Buddhist meditation retreat
Some stereotypes ring true. I am on my post-uni gap year, travelling through South East Asia, looking to find a better version of myself. And I am doing quite well so far. But the thirst for self-improvement is rarely quenched. So I decided to sign up for a week-long silent meditation retreat, in the hopes of accelerating this process of self-discovery. It didn’t go well.
Meditation retreats are common across Thailand. They offer both locals and tourists the opportunity to immerse themselves in Buddhist practices and teachings, in the hopes of finding a sense of inner peace and a break from the troubles of the external world. I have met many other travellers who had done one, all of whom described positive outcomes.
While I was in Vietnam, I had a phase of burnout. It was around the two-month mark of my travels. I had never been away from home for so long. I had never squeezed so many new experiences into such a short amount of time. My mind state was low; I felt lonely and exhausted. This wasn’t helped by the food poisoning I got from eating ice cream in Hoi An.
I have been meditating for around five years but broke my daily streak when I started travelling. I thought returning to the practice might offer some respite from the difficulty I was feeling, so I looked into meditation retreats for when I returned to Thailand. I found a free one which had good Google reviews and signed myself up for a month later.
During that month, I began to naturally feel better and had some truly amazing experiences. I was feeling great in myself but I wanted to go ahead with the retreat regardless. I arrived at the centre feeling nervous but optimistic. I knew very little about what I had signed up for, but I had an open mind and was excited. The other people seemed quite nervous too. It was an awkward atmosphere. Nobody seemed sure if we were allowed to speak to each other or not. It was a silent retreat after all. I found it interesting that I would be getting to know these people over the next week without saying a word to them.
We got into the cars and headed to the monastery—our home for the next seven days. The first red flag was that we had to hand in our phones. I, rather naively perhaps, gave mine to a stranger with only a hint of scepticism. My phone is usually the thing I cling to the most while travelling. How would I get home without it?
The next red flag was the sleeping conditions—a plank of wood with a yoga mat and a thin, stained sheet as a blanket. There was also a mosquito net, but it was too short and reached to about a foot above the bed, making it pointless. The bathrooms were attended by very large stripy spiders who had the carcasses of a thousand flies woven into their sprawling webs—not to mention the bats, who only appeared when the sun went down.
Around 5 pm the silence officially began with the first meditation. They introduced the method, which was a simple one of mindfully focusing on the breath, and told us not to think. I took this as another red flag. I like thinking. I have always believed it to be a vital part of meditation. But I maintained an open mind and did my best to adopt the method.
The next morning came with the abrupt sound of a ringing bell—our alarm. It was 4.30 am. I never wake up this early. “What on earth am I doing?” I contemplated as I lay on my plank of wood and gazed at the mosquito net hovering above me. Everybody else seemed to shoot out of bed and head for the showers. I got up about 20 minutes later, skipping any form of morning routine.
I headed to the meditation hall and sat on my mat. I’m a coffee person. No coffee was allowed in the retreat. They claimed it was a mind-altering substance. I think it was because they didn’t want us to feel any form of joy. It was 5 am now, time for the first meditation. I spent the whole hour trying not to fall asleep. This was followed by yoga, which woke me up a bit. Then breakfast—a feast of plain rice and vegetables. It was foul.
Now, an hour of “free time”—free time where we weren’t allowed to do anything. No reading, no writing and no thinking. I was still of the mindset of maintaining an open mind, so I sat for the hour attempting to be mindful and push all thoughts away. The bell rang again, beckoning us back to the meditation hall. We sat and listened to an hour of Buddhist teachings played out of an old rusty stereo. I don’t remember much of what was said, as I wasn’t paying attention. I hadn’t had any coffee after all.
Then, the concept of the walking meditation was introduced. This is a very specific method where you lift your toes, then your heel, then your knee and then put them back down in reverse order. It requires your full, undivided attention to do correctly in order to stop you from thinking. This made me realise that Buddhism is just a very old form of OCD. It is a specific routine to repeat over and over to cope with unpleasant feelings and thoughts. Thousands of years ago, the person who came up with this walking meditation may have been revered as enlightened. Today, they would be referred to a specialist. “Oh no, he’s doing the walk again—we had better take him back to the shrink”.
This is also when I had my first moment of clarity. I looked around at everybody blindly following instructions to walk in this way and recognised the absurdity of what was going on. We all had zombie-like expressions, slowly and aimlessly walking around in a ridiculous manner. Anyone observing from the outside would have thought we were all completely mad. It looked like a scene from a social-horror film directed by Ari Aster or Jordan Peele. This is when I first felt as if I was part of a cult. My open mind began to close.
Lunch was served at 11.30 am, a foul feast very much the same as breakfast. This would be our last meal of the day, followed by more “free time” and then a beckoning back to the meditation hall. Now, it was readings from Buddhist scripture and group chanting. The scripture described the Buddha, encouraged us to worship him and adopt his teachings without question. The chants had us all singing in uniform about how we would devote ourselves to the Buddha and renounce all pleasures which went against his teachings.
Before the retreat, I was under the impression that Buddhism wasn’t a religion, but rather a way of life. However, this experience made me realise that Buddhism is a religion—a religion like any other. In the West, we tend to glorify Eastern religions. We compare them to Christianity, with its connotations of war, wealth and control. We say that Buddhism is about peace and freedom. This is not true.
Karl Marx famously said, “Religion is the opium of the people”. He argued that religion is an old form of mind-control used by elites on the lower classes to create an illusion of happiness and force them to accept the suffering created by unjust economic systems. I’ve been aware of this theory for years now. This retreat made me understand it for the first time.
The leaders explained that the poor living conditions were to teach us how to live a good life with very little. They explained that the boredom and lack of distraction were to allow us to notice when we were suffering. I disagree. I think it was to create suffering. They then gaslighted us into thinking it was how we always felt, then offered us a solution to the suffering they created. The solution was to think in the way they wanted us to—or, even better, not think at all. Accept everything. Question nothing. Control.
To make it clear, I don’t think the leaders maleficently came up with this. I think they’re a symptom of it. They may have had good intentions passing on these teachings. But the original intention behind these teachings was bad—a method to keep the people of the East subdued, just like Christianity subdued those in the West. A person sitting cross-legged, thinking nothing and accepting everything is no threat to those in power.
I began to realise this by the end of the second day. But my immature stubbornness kept me there. Day three passed very much the same way—the prison-like schedule was unwavering.
I am aware that this may come off as quite a scathing critique, so I’ll detail some of the positives I experienced.
I did get very deep into the meditation practice. There was a moment where I felt all of the electrons in my body firing. I felt my inner life force like it was on fire. It reminded me of The Beatles song “Within You and Without You”, written by George Harrison, and gave me a deeper perspective on the message of the song.
I also sat with my eyes closed and was able to see my hands. Not vividly, but their outline, through my eyelids. I lifted them and could track their movement accurately without using my vision. I took this as the practice heightening my other senses. It was fascinating.
There were two beautiful teachings which stuck with me. The first was to accept our neuroses, because they make us who we are and they are what makes other people love us.
The second was to treat every hug with a person you love as the final one, because it very well may be.
I tried to cling to these positives as motivation to stay. But by the end of the third day, the negatives outweighed them. During a reading, something was said which finally locked the door of my slowly closing mind. It was something along the lines of this—
“Clever people may be too clever to be here. Their minds are full of the dirty water of everything they’ve learnt. They need to replace that dirty water with our clean water”.
In recent years, education has been my main priority. Knowledge is the true power of this world. Critical thinking is a deal-breaker. I was not going to sit and listen to somebody telling me everything I had worked so hard to learn was “dirty water” and needed to be replaced with a way of thought that they approved of. I took this as a literal admission of their intentions to brainwash.
I looked around at my fellow cult members in shock, hoping somebody would share my expression. Nobody did. Everybody was obediently sitting, listening to these teachings as if they were ultimate truth. I felt genuine fear. I have meant it humorously so far, but I recognised that I was in a cult. They could have convinced these vulnerable people of anything. I needed to leave.
That final evening, I sat down next to a young man who must have only been 18. He had his head in his hands looking completely numb—drained of all joy. Just a few days previously, he had an expression of optimism. Now, it was all gone. I wanted to help him, to reach out and explain that this was wrong, that he needed to leave. But I couldn’t. Or, at least, I didn’t. Maybe I should have. But I knew this was my cue to get out.
I left the following morning. The leaders weren’t shocked and allowed me to leave without resistance. However, over breakfast, one of them gave me a look—a look as if she was staring into my soul. It was a sinister moment. I gave her a confused smile in response, which she returned like the mimic creature from the Doctor Who episode “Midnight”. It took a few days before I realised that there was evil in her gaze. It sends chills down my spine when I remember it.
Adjusting back to the real world was strange. I booked straight into a cheap resort and put the air-con immediately on full blast. I had far too much of the coffee I was desperately craving. I put on my favourite all-American brainrot propaganda (WWE) and tried to return to normal. But it took a while. I had a few moments of dissociation where I felt like I had never left the cult, which was paired with attacks of paranoia, telling me that they were for some reason looking for me. For about a week I was having random attacks of anxiety and confusion, which have only recently stopped.
I have returned to normal now and can reflect on the experience with a smile. But it was not happy at the time—strange, considering peace and happiness is what they promised to deliver.
Not being able to speak to people made me realise just how much I love people’s company. As an introvert, I often tell myself I prefer being alone. But I kept thinking of jokes in my head and trying not to laugh at them. I wanted to share them with the people around me but wasn’t allowed. It made me realise just how much of my life force comes from making people laugh and having people make me laugh.
At the risk of sounding like an Instagram post, the most valuable lesson I got from this silent meditation retreat was that joy doesn’t come from sitting in silence. It comes from smiling and laughing.
