When I was 31, a group of my close friends planned to do 10 days of silent meditation at a monastery in Chang Mai and they invited me to come. I said yes without even thinking. A trip to Thailand to experience the Buddhist culture? No brainer.

I had been practicing yoga for 10 years and teaching for 4 but my experience with meditating was isolated to the 1 hour portion in our teacher training and an occasional drop-in to the Sangha held at my yoga studio of employment. I wouldn’t have even been able to call myself a casual meditator at the time; maybe mediation-curious would be the fairest description of where I was on the meditation spectrum.

For a month before our trip, I started getting up at 6am every weekday morning and trying to meditate for a grand total of 15 minutes. That was the extent of my preparation for this very big leap into the deep end of practice. If I could come up with a new word to say how grossly under-prepared I was for this experience I would call myself faux-pared. And I knew it. This was not a Vipassana retreat with teachers from the United States on a luxury resort. No, we were staying at a Buddhist monastery and our daily mediation practice was set by the monks who ran the monastery. We were studying with people who had dedicated their lives to the practice of meditation, taking vows of poverty and abstinence. A part of me started to dread this part of our trip.

We arrived at Wat Ram Poeng on February 3rd in the afternoon wearing all white. All of the clothes, including our undergarments, for the entirety of our time there, had to be white. We met with a strangely animated and flustered monk carrying a cell phone who seemed to be in charge of getting us settled in our rooms, but for the next 30 minutes we watched him run circles around himself and the growing number of attendees also waiting to be checked in. When he seemed to reach a fever pitch of anxiety he would mumble the phrase “knowing, knowing, knowing” under his breath like a mantra to calm his nerves. He eventually took our cell phones for safe keeping and ushered us to our rooms, which were little more than a mat on a wooden frame and a toilet. And so began the silent part of our experience. From then on the extent of our conversations would be with the monk who would prescribe to us any changes in our mediation routine based on our experience.

Our daily schedule was as follows:

4am- Bell chimes to alert the start of meditation.

6am- Breakfast bell chimes. Meal is silent. When you are finished you return to meditation.

10am- Lunch bell chimes. Meal is silent and this is the last full meal of the day.

11am-12pm- Sweep the grounds and clean your room.

12pm until 6pm- Meditate

6pm- Short break and the chance to have a sweet bean based drink to hold your hunger over or to buy a snack from the shop on the grounds. Meet with your designated monk to get your next days meditation assignment ie. What’s the duration of seated meditation and what’s the duration of walking mediation (both of which are alternated all day long)

8pm-10pm Meditate

Each individual received a timer to alert them to when it was time to switch from seated to walking and vice versa.

I would set my timer and follow the very simple instructions of the monk to feel the breath move from the base of the spine to the crown of the head and back down again. I would hold myself upright feeling the pain build around my hips and my shoulders. I would riot on the inside until the timer went off. I’d get to open my eyes and step one foot in front of the other before turning around and doing the same thing back from whence I came until the timer went off yet again, at which point I would return to the dreaded seated mediation.

I have to give myself credit for being 100% accurate about how very not prepared I had been for this experience. The anxiety I normally feel - a kind of low-key buzzing around the edges of my life - would become a full blown tsunami of panic. Some days, by lunch time it would get so bad, that the sounds happening in and around the grounds felt like a physical assault on my body. I would finish eating, go into my room and put a pillow over my head to dampen the over-stimulation.

I felt ashamed for not loving the experience. I felt ashamed for not having the fortitude to “meditate well.” I felt ashamed for wanting to leave. I pondered leaving; fantasized about it, if I’m honest. But by the time the idea had fully formed we were 5 days in. I had made it to the halfway point and perhaps the competitive part of my ego did me a solid this once and I decided to stick it out.

On the advice of my assigned monk, I mitigated my panic attacks with LOTS of extra sweeping and shortened the length of time of my sits. The physical onslaught of sensation lessened, my shoulders loosened, and my desire to “get it right” dissipated. On my second to last day the timer went off on my seated meditation and I had this overwhelming desire to stay in the quiet peace of the moment just a bit longer. That was the closest thing to an epiphany I experienced while I was staying at Wat Ram Phoeng.

I was giddy on the last day. Grateful that I had stayed and “achieved” the completion of 10 days, but I would be lying if I said that was glad I had done it at the time. More than anything else I was glad to be leaving. We said goodbye to our “knowing” monk who returned our cell-phones and took a picture with us. And that was that. We spent another week meandering Chang Mai before half of us went back to the States.

I thought that was it for me and meditating. My take away being that I wasn’t built to meditate and that I would have to find other ways to cultivate presence. But that very brief moment of yearning for another few moments of quiet peace that had taken place the day before I left Wat Ram Phoeng had planted a seed and that seed (though it took some time) began to germinate.

I started to find myself called to have quiet, still time where I was deeply present in my body. I gave myself permission to shift my away from strict posture in seated meditation. I’d let myself get curious about what happened when I moved and shifted my spine. I started researching styles of meditation and found myself drawn to the teachings of Tantrics and Vajrayana Buddhists, who use the body as a way in rather than teach you to disconnect from it. I learned techniques that opened up a gateway to a deep well of personal experience and that personal experience beckoned me to keep coming back to sit.

This is a very, very long story to say that I think there are many of us who feel that we aren’t capable of meditating. That our busy-ness, or the limitations of our bodies or the weight and speed of our thoughts won’t allow us to get to that quiet, spacious, oneness. I will not say that it’s going to come easily for all of us, but with regular practice, a healthy dose of curiosity, and a set of techniques that suit you, the experience of meditation is one we can all explore towards. And while I am by no means a master it would be my sincerest privilege to share with you the set of techniques that has helped me to illuminate the path.

Join me for Cultivate a Meditation Practice: a set of 3 pop-up classes April 25, May 23rd and June 13th at 6:15pm. During each class we will chat together common pitfalls and ways to troubleshoot, we will explore functional technique to prepare the body and minds through guided meditation, and we will free write about our experience with each technique. At the end of each session you will receive a recorded version of the technique we practiced to get you started at home and you will be invited to join a forum where we can discuss our experiences in between sessions.

Drop-ins are $35 or buy all 3 and pay $80. These pop-ups are included for members.

BY ELIZABETH SCOLLAN

The Reluctant Meditator