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When I first met Pierre, I couldn't have foreseen what the next three years of our friendship would be like. I had just come back to Montreal. Twice I'd failed to get a place in Toronto. My dream of traveling in a van had also fallen apart. So I rented a U-Haul and went to pick up my furniture from a storage unit. Pierre helped me unload it at the coliving house he had just started up. For Pierre's birthday in February, I made a short film from our first trip together. We found what we mistakenly thought was Crown land and went there to camp. I brought my camera along. I had no intention of filming anything. I was looking to get away, and so was Pierre. The most memorable thing wasn't getting kicked out of someone's private lake, even though I can hardly forget that. It was the chat at the campfire the night before. We talked about our worries and our hopes. About what would become of us. The meaning of it all. Girls, too, obviously. That campfire was where our friendship truly began. I hope the film speaks better than my words can. I love you, Pierre. I wish you the best.
Yesterday, I traded sun, beach, and a beautiful warm sea for a cold, gray sky and a pair of wet shoes. I still can't believe I did it. The constant winter overcast was reason enough to leave Canada and never look back. When I finally left, I had bought a ticket to a never-ending summer. It felt magical. Yet I am here in the cold again, and I couldn't be happier with my choice. I arrived in Marseille this morning. Dressed in light pants and a summer shirt, flip-flops on my bare feet, I stepped out of the airport. Cold rain got under my collar and ran down my spine. I held my small backpack over my head and ran to the bus station. There I bought a ticket to Aix-en-Provence. After four years of waiting, my France chapter has finally begun. I could, perhaps, write about this weird obsession that I’ve had with France for the last four years. About the language, que j’adore. The petit café I had this afternoon followed by a risotto served with the freshest baguette, as if it were the only way to serve risotto. But I’ll keep my message simple: don’t stop dreaming. It's not about some bucket list with three hundred items in it. Nor New Year's resolutions that you regret telling everyone about. But a childish, almost feverish “What if one day I…” sort of dream. Something that you are ashamed to dream of, perhaps because it's so silly or so trivial that you don't know why you should even bother. But you dream nonetheless simply because you can. I remember my first such dream. Back in school, I watched Sean Penn's Into the Wild. I'd never wanted to go to Alaska. And it didn’t seem realistic, living on the opposite side of the world. But it had planted a seed in the back of my mind until more than ten years later I landed in Fairbanks. And today, arriving in Aix, another itch got its long-deserved scratch. I walked into a grocery store and listened to the radio that reminded me of my favorite Café Montréalais on Spotify. I strolled the narrow cobblestone streets and pretended I was the main character of a new episode of Dix pour cent, filmed in Provence for a reason known only to me. It was a dream. But then again, I was living it. Be a fool. Dare to have foolish dreams. They might, after all, come true.
On December 31, I went to Wat Suan Mokkh in Thailand and registered for a ten-day silent retreat. I scribbled these notes on eight scraps of paper given to us for questions on days six and ten. Neither electronics nor diaries were allowed for “creative writing”. And because my writing isn't that creative anyway, here we go: Day -1 Day 0 Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 -- P.S. A ten-day retreat somehow turned into a two-week-long adventure and will likely take a year to process. But what an experience it was!
As I fought with my mother for the hundredth time over a reason that was silly yet too hard for her to understand, I concluded that this post was long overdue. While I had ninety-nine other chances to complain about my difficult relationship with parents, I kept postponing it, fearing that I would alienate all my readers, who seemingly belong to one of two groups: those with toxic parents and those who fail to admit it. Above all is an unspoken rule to not talk ill about family, for only a wicked person with a mind and a tongue of a devil himself has wits to appear ungrateful to his kin. And being ungrateful to one's parents is of the same level of madness as being ungrateful to one's entire existence. But arguing with my mother for the hundredth time felt like a drop in the ocean—if the ocean could fit in a teacup and the drop were the size of a meteorite. What makes it unbearable is both the fact that I am fighting with the closest and the dearest person, and that the fight itself consists of no solid argumentation whatsoever and is for the same reason as all previous fights—my mother's own insecurity. Neither this nor previous conflicts had any resolution, apart from staying silent for a week and then pretending we had never argued in the first place. But this time the teacup overflowed, and risking alienating one or the other or even both groups I've decided to cut all communication with my parents and, since nothing can be worse, write about it, too. Speaking about my parents, I'll mostly be talking about my mother as the relationship with my dad has been close to nonexistent after I'd moved to my university's dorm at nineteen. Like me, my father is a lone wolf. Most of the time he keeps to himself, and when forcefully pulled out of his bubble of comfort, he gets irritated and practically impossible to deal with. Growing up with a father who rarely showed any emotion beyond irritation left me with a sense of detachment and struggling to connect with others. The weight of his silence—his emotional absence—became too much. There seemed no way to make him happy and so I stopped trying. Nothing can describe better his relationship with my mother than the fact that they have no common interests, and the only thing the two of them don't mind sharing, it seems, is the seat of the toilet. For some unimaginable reason they found it the most practical thing to keep living in the same one-bedroom apartment that my grandma bought with her own money some fifty years ago; the very same place that my older brother and I grew up in, sharing the only bedroom while our parents slept in the living room; the place that has seen every repair possible, from floor to ceiling, and therefore every repair but one—the repair of our parents' marriage. "Children of emotionally immature parents have to learn the hard way that they are not responsible for their parents' happiness, security, or well-being." — Lindsay C. Gibson, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” This sense of solitude—perhaps a cover-up for my father's loneliness—is the only thing that unites him and me. Despite my mother bringing up my and his similarities every chance she has, I can't imagine a person more different. Unlike me, he had decided to have children, and so he reaped what he sowed. Unlike me, he kept torturing my mother with his presence out of convenience of staying under the same roof. And unlike me, he kept cheating on his partner, her being my mother, and repeatedly coming up with lies that even a seven-year-old could see through. But even the ugliest of characters have as much good in them as they have the ugly, and so my father somehow kept the appearance of a kind and thoughtful and caring person. And that is as much as I can say about him, for I am lucky to hear his voice once every March when I call to wish him a happy birthday. Before I talk about my mother—and the complexity of her character deserves more than a couple of paragraphs—I will question the relationships with parents in general. Why do we give our family their own category as if they were a cast above all others? Like the socialite in a country with a corrupt government, we are willing to forgive our parents all crimes and harassment and humiliation simply because they appear to have authority over our lives. And who am I to live through the consequences of their choices? In his “Book of Secrets” Osho argued that there are two types of people, the logical and the emotional. But when did we decide to treat parents above all reasoning? Why do our relationships with family, unlike those with friends or partners, fall through the cracks of our mind and straight to the emotions? Instead of treating our parents based on logic and according to their actions, we treat them how we feel parents should be treated. But I am a logical person and thus reason must prevail. Barely distinguishing any status and hierarchy whatsoever, I put family into the same box as friends and colleagues and business partners. I do so because a parent must be a friend first and foremost, or what is that relationship without trust and acting in each other’s best interests? A well-working relationship benefits both parties. If one pulls the blanket, leaving the other in the cold, what is there for the other to catch besides a sore throat and sniffles? It's natural for humans to strive to be better, and so we must surround ourselves with people who help us grow. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning a worse person than they were yesterday. To the best of our abilities and the capacity of our knowledge, we look forward to starting a new day better off than the one before, as little as the difference could be, and aspire to do good. Out of five closest people, besides a husband or a wife and maybe two best friends, why do we make space for the only two, the dearest, who constantly talk us down? Forty percent of energy spent in blame and guilt-tripping is a heavy price to pay for being born. So why do we keep paying it? On the contrary, the right friend is not the one who supports every endeavor, though I wish everyone had supportive friends. No, this is enablement. In this case, you might as well surround yourself with five AI chatbots as LLMs excel at that. The right friend is one who knows when to encourage, when to be silent, and when to be a voice of reason, should you ever do something outrageously stupid. But take my mother, for example, for she is a fair parent but a terrible friend. First, I don't remember the last time she sided with me. When I was leaving Russia, she acted as though I betrayed the whole country. When I had quit my job, she reminded me with every occasion that I'd better find a new one soon. Now, that I am contemplating a ten-day meditation retreat, I suddenly appear to be joining a cult and will soon be out of home—not that I've had a permanent place in the last eight months—and enslaved and sent to a labor camp. As I discovered recently, my mother has an intricate ability to find the weakest spot in my thinking and exploit it viciously. She may as well have Spider-Sense because she always knows what doubts I have about myself even if I don't disclose it to her for exactly the reason of that exploitation. Take the meditation retreat, for example. As it is my first time going away to some distant temple in the middle of Thai woods, I, who is just a monkey with a worried mind, hesitated every part of that decision: being far from the city, being in the woods, being in a Buddhist temple, surrendering all possessions and technology to god knows whom, and spending the majority of the ten days sitting in silence. And as a normal human being excited about his adventure, I shared everything and in great detail with my mother, though withheld the questionability of the activity. To my surprise, it took long enough to trigger her anxiety, as she only came back to me after four weeks. Ah, did she come prepared! Suddenly I was watching interviews about a disappearance of a young Russian man—how convenient it is to be just like him!—in a Buddhist meditation retreat. The interviewer was a handsome journalist from a Russian government-owned TV channel which spread all day long no valuable content but propaganda. The interviewees, on the other side, were the disappeared person's village mates with thin white faces and under-eye bags so big and blue that a poor makeup artist couldn't hide with a centimeter-thick layer of a concealer. Because nothing can conceal twenty years of drinking vodka. "Trauma robs people of their sense of agency. Healing comes from reclaiming a sense of control over their own life." — Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score” The main flaw in my reasoning as I can so far see is that of being disturbed by my mother's poorly handled projections of anxiety. Truly, isn't that what makes one a greater person if he can be above all verbal abuse and manipulation? It is my choice to be offended, or is it not? But logic aside, the abuse is most hurting not because of the words themselves but because they come from the mouth of the closest person. Another might argue that we must ignore our parents' mistreatment and take care of them as one takes care of an older person because of age. But tell me then, if I am given a choice to save one person from a devastating fire, first being my mother, her life as mediocre as it is, and the other a noble biologist or, say, a pediatric surgeon whose work saves ten children each year, who should I urge saving? As I've recently come to making an extra dollar and realizing that not all is needed for my humble living, I considered donating a chunk of it, for that is the easiest I can do, not knowing what other use is there for the money. With these thoughts I came to my friend and asked him whether I should send it to a charity like The Red Cross or back home to my parents. Family always comes first, said the friend with the parents by no means nobler than mine. But to make him think a second longer perhaps I should have asked a different question: should I donate to a charity that provides humanitarian aid to those affected by war or to the two people that enable the very same war by bringing food and clothes to the young boys in the Russian military? Wnen I last wondered if my mother finally gave away my guitar that hasn't been played for a decade, she said that they've got many instruments in the army and that she sees no other way to dispose of it. Not all donations are alike. The reason my mother has such a complex personality is that I never know what next she'll throw at me. At the age of eighteen, I was thus presumed by her to be dating a hooker, since only a hooker could take interest in me. Little did I know that prostitutes have better things to do than flirting around with broke teenagers. Today, I seem to be dealing with drug addicts and alcoholics, in other words a questionable company, considering my mother's loud concern with me steadily slipping into crime. As someone who doesn't smoke, drinks sparingly, and is highly cautious about drug use, the only crime I am guilty of is not leaving my parents' house sooner. "If your parents have unresolved trauma and emotional immaturity, it’s not your fault. You’re not responsible for their healing." — Shannon Thomas, “Healing from Hidden Abuse” But to paint a picture this dark is not to give my mother justice. Having raised two children in a household so tiny that even a mouse would feel restless, and with a cheating husband as a cherry on top, she made sure we were warm and fed and somewhat happy. My brother and I had clothes and not rags, our toys were simple yet they were toys still, and both of us were educated by the best institutions that a family of our class could afford. I thank my mother for gifting me a guitar on my thirteen's birthday. I was let alone to play it, and I played it for hours straight, until the music has become the essence of my living. It was also my mother who transferred me to a better school after the 7th grade—though it meant steep monthly payments—after noticing that I was bored where I was, among the ordinary unmotivated students. The new school boosted my confidence and gave me amazing friends with whom I'd shared many precious moments, be it on the school's premises or besides a campfire some five thousand kilometers away from Moscow. It was, however, my very same mother who'd later tried to pull me out of that school—as I was spending too much time there—and send me to the outskirts of the city to a beaten-up college that produced no other alumni than cooks and plumbers. Another sharp memory of mine is waking up in the middle of the night at the age of eight to sharp gasps for breath. Someone was being chocked, I thought. The bed was shaking, rhythmically, methodically, and I was shaken with it. Shocked and scared, I slowly discerned my mother’s face in the dark, and then, above her, the face of a stranger. My parents never traveled together—although I don't remember them ever trying—and that night left me pitying my mother. An eight-year-old must not be asked to bear a secret of an affair of his parent, but I bore it anyway as I bore my mother's other, bigger pain of not being given the life she wanted. Nonetheless, I now had two cheating parents which didn't make my childhood easier. I don't know if there's a protocol of talking to abusive people other than ignoring them. I doubt it. It does, however, become more intricate when parents are the abusers. My journey into understanding parents' psychology began with reading Lindsay C. Gibson's book, named exactly as it should be, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. I had first gotten curious by the title, thinking that perhaps I would better understand my distant and self-indulgent father. I was wrong. I learned little new about him. Yet in this book I discovered a whole Pandora’s box that was my mother. I have since recommended this book to many friends and all of them came back saying that they in turn recommended it to theirs. This time my patience is over. I make no space for toxic people and I my mother will not be an exception. I banned her on Telegram, and she is the first person I've ever banned. I have no intent on keeping it permanent—but neither do I plan to communicate with her soon. If, like me, you’re fighting the internal battle of dealing with difficult parents, don’t you deserve a break too?
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hr:after { content: "𓃰" !important; line-height: 1.5; } In March 2025, I went on a Jhourney meditation retreat that was one of the most profound experiences of my life, and deeply reshaped how I related to myself. If you had told my pre-retreat self that this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d done some meditation before—including a 10-day vipassana retreat—and while it didn’t do nothing, I was underwhelmed. I felt pretty resistant to spending that much time staring at the inside of my head: it seemed really hard to actually trust anything I learned that way, because it was such a complicated system. And besides, my brain seemed to work fine the way it was. I’d read some writing by serious meditators who seemed to be having a different experience, filled with insights and bliss, but it wasn’t one that I felt particularly drawn to. That much navel-gazing and wireheading felt self-indulgent, and anyway they seemed weird enough that whatever they were doing probably wouldn’t work for me. Then, in a moment of life imitating Bay Area House Party, we got Jhourney, a meditation retreat startup promising to speedrun you to the bliss part (tagline at the time: “Life-changing meditative bliss used to take thousands of hours to learn. We teach it in a week.”) When I heard them strongly recommended not only by the serious meditators I’d been reading, but also by a couple more hard-nosed coworkers, I decided to see what the hype was about. Jhourney teaches a style of meditation nominally focused on altered states called jhanas. Jhanas are blissful-feeling states that you can “relax into” if you release enough of what you might call tension or clenching or tanha, and then focus on an enjoyable open-hearted sensation like smiling, a joyful memory, or feeling care for a loved one. If done right, you can start a feedback loop of enjoying the enjoyment, and end up in a state of deeply absorbed euphoria. I say Jhourney is nominally focused on that because the jhanas are actually kind of a Trojan horse for improving your life and relationships, which somehow doesn’t sell as well as wireheading. Jhourney’s unofficial motto is “come for the bliss, stay for the personal growth.” The growth happens because a lot of the tension you’re trying to release in jhana meditation is downstream of repressed or “stuck” feelings, either small ones (“I don’t want to be hearing that sound over there” leading to micro-clenching the head and neck) or big ones (“I can’t let myself feel this sadness or I’ll cry and that would be shameful” leading to tensing the various face and chest muscles that would otherwise be helping you cry). In order to get into jhana states, a lot of people (like me!) end up having to work on untangling knots of emotional clenching, and this usually leads to a lot of growth. My first experience of my Jhourney retreat was showing up and being handed an 80-page handbook of meditation instructions. This already blew my mind a little, because I had never read anything about spirituality or emotions that I considered good. The “best” stuff I’d read about the mind was vapid pop-psychology, padding out truisms with engaging fluff until the result somehow became a marketable book. The rest was indistinguishable from astrology—it was never clear enough that I could tell whether it applied to me, which meant it didn’t seem to make falsifiable predictions. As for spiritual writing, it mostly felt like word-association mumbo-jumbo, with authors throwing around words that had the right vibes but that I wasn’t sure they themselves even really understood. Heck, the previous meditation retreat I’d been on had included watching an hour-long recording of the now-dead founder talking about how he could sense quantum vibrations. The Jhourney handbook didn’t have these problems, because it was written by software engineers. It was epistemically conservative and shockingly lucid, completely mumbo- and jumbo-free. To help with the inherently fuzzy language, they explained everything from multiple angles. They gave clear gears-level explanations of why they thought things worked the way they did. They even took a detour to explain their teaching philosophy so that students were oriented about why they were doing what they were doing. It was masterful pedagogy. Between the written instructions and the teachings from live meditation sessions, pretty soon I could get to a point that felt like the “on-ramp” to a jhana. But every time I got there, I would get stressed and “grabby” about what to do next, and “fall off” the ramp. By the time I got to day 4 of the retreat, I was feeling really frustrated about this, in a way that was starting to loop on itself. I was frustrated that I couldn’t reach jhana, and frustrated that the frustration was making things harder. I tried Jhourney’s recommended way of working with negative emotions, which was a self-compassion meditation. But no matter how much I tried, it didn’t really resonate; I couldn’t cultivate any emotional experience of self-compassion. In fact, I realized I couldn’t remember ever having had a real emotional experience of receiving compassion, and that that was probably kind of fucked up. A bunch of my friends were on the same retreat. Since I had no access to self-compassion, of course I used this realization to start worrying that they would judge me for having a hard time meditating because I was fucked up, adding even more layers to the feedback loop of doom. Days 4–6 were pretty bad. Every day Jhourney gave us a survey of “how was your day on a scale of 1-10 with 5 as a normal day?” I rated day 6 a 1.5. (To their credit, Jhourney knew this meant I needed extra help and offered lots of 1:1 time with different facilitators, although none of it made that much difference.) At this point, in one of my desperate attempts to think myself out of my feelings pickle, I started thinking a lot about the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The idea is that people usually identify with everything that happens in their mind, but this is actually a confusion; it’s more accurate to think of “you,” the conscious part, as a small human rider perched atop a large lumbering elephant that often does its own thing. The only things that are actually in the rider’s action space are things like “say words to the elephant,” “visualize mental images to the elephant,” “direct attention to a particular aspect of experience,” etc. Everything else—including all emotions and many thoughts—is the elephant’s job. In this frame, the fact that the self-compassion meditation wasn’t working for me wasn’t really “my” fault. Whether the emotional experience of self-compassion happened was up to the elephant, and the only thing “I” (the rider) could do was to keep gently saying the words or doing the technique or whatever, and wait for the elephant to steer, at its own pace. Around that point I decided to give up on the Jhourney curriculum and just do whatever seemed like it would feel nice.1 I broke the rule of silence to ask for some reassurance from a close friend who was also on the retreat. When I got back to meditating, I made up a technique for myself where I imagined sending love and compassion to the elephant instead of to “myself.” This turned out to be a cheat code: I immediately felt an outpouring of warmth, and the reassuring things I was telling myself started to emotionally resonate. I really wish I could describe better what happened after that, but unfortunately it was a while ago and involved a lot of subtle mental movements, plus it’s hard to track what’s happening while a chunk of your psyche is liquefying. I remember a sort of sense of “going inside” the feeling of compassion and love for the elephant, having it take up more and more of my attention, and feel more and more deep, rich and meaningful. Then some kind of rush of energy and a full-body frisson that I’ve learned often happens when my brain has rearranged itself.2 When I got up and walked outside, I gradually noticed that the world felt pretty different. I realized that I’d always carried a “refrigerator hum” of subtle body tension that was now gone. Walking around the retreat center looking at the views felt amazing, like I could have spent days just melting into the landscape. The Lipton peppermint tea at the hot drink station tasted unreasonably good. I would sometimes tear up with joy or gratitude for no reason. I felt much deeper care and connection with my friends. Maybe that makes it sound a little gooey and impersonal, like I took a drug that replaced my normal self with a puddle of love or something. The actual experience was the opposite; somehow it felt like this was all happening because it was easier to be myself. The care and connection wasn’t coming from some foreign love puddle; it came out because a bunch of psychic gunk had sloughed off and made it easier for the real essence of Ben-ness to shine through. And then I used my newfound mastery of emotions and self-compassion to live happily ever after flailed around trying to integrate everything back into normal life. One of the big changes I noticed after the retreat was that my emotions got 2–3× more intense. I think this was net positive in the end, but it made coming back to work hard—I had a stressful role managing a large team, and I also needed to catch up from a week of being incommunicado, which was extra stressful. And it wasn’t exactly helpful that suddenly, if someone was annoying on Slack, it would sometimes make me want to shoot flames out my ears. Over the next couple weeks, the intensity settled back down and the changes in my moment-to-moment experience went maybe 80% of the way back to normal (e.g., I stopped spontaneously tearing up in normal circumstances). Some of them stayed, though: A lot of my shame/cringe reflex turned into a self-compassion reflex. I used to get super embarrassed by minor mistakes (things like, I don’t know, forgetting to lock a public bathroom door and having someone walk in). Now those things come with a very clear sense of “gosh, what a normal-person type of mistake that millions of other people have also made, it probably didn’t even register for the other person.” I became much more easily moved by art. I went from being moved to tears by a poem or piece of music maybe once a year to once a week. I stayed much more aware of my more subtle emotional responses. I remember listening to some instrumental folk music I’d probably listened to 100 times before, suddenly noticing that the melody felt deeply nostalgic and then realizing that was two levels further out on the feelings wheel than I’d ever felt for music. I still felt much less of a need to be distracted or stimulated than before. I used to listen to podcasts at 2× speed whenever I wasn’t fully focused on a task (e.g. if I was doing chores or walking). Now I have no desire to do this, and when I do listen to podcasts, 2× speed feels unpleasant. Similarly, I started to dislike a lot of restaurant food, and to really enjoy very simple home-cooked meals that I would have considered too bland before. Friends continued to mention that my body language was different. One noted: “more upright posture, more open shoulders, more fluid and gentle.” Another described me as “‘leaving less,’ as in, spending less time ‘out of the room’ in interactions.” These were great changes, but even better, a bunch of mindset and relational shifts also stuck around. Mindset-wise, I guess I’d just say I got feelings-pilled. If you’d asked me what the deal with emotions was before the retreat, I probably would have said something like: Positive emotions are nice, although you shouldn’t let them distract you too much from your long-term goals. Painful emotions are responses to stimuli that are part of our evolutionary inheritance, but are largely maladaptive today because we’re in an environment so different from where they arose. Assuming you have good enough self-control not to act out on them, their main effect is to make you dumber, which you should mitigate by not engaging with whatever makes you emotional until you’ve chilled out. My new view is more like the following (this is still an oversimplified strawman and reality is a lot messier): All emotions are important and beautiful components of unconscious/intuitive cognition.3 However, they sometimes create impulses to do things that aren’t actually good ideas. In the process of socializing ourselves not to follow those impulses, we’ve been trained to try to make the emotions themselves go away in painful ways, by repressing them or clenching up around them. Unintuitively, repression and clenching actually cause the emotions to “stick around” in some sort of partially metabolized state, which has negative side-effects, like anxiety, thought-looping, numbness, blind spots, impaired reasoning, bringing up secondary emotions as defenses, etc. A different way of working with these emotions, that’s better for you in the long term, is to figure out how to welcome and accept them. This eventually leads to them feeling less bad, and giving you more impulses that are good ideas and fewer bad ones. But it’s not as simple as “just stop repressing.” Welcoming emotions requires fully feeling them; if they’re strong, that can be too overwhelming to work unless you have a deep felt sense of safety. That safety can be provided in many different ways, e.g. a therapist, friends, some kinds of meditation, etc. If you don’t have access to enough safety, repressing or clenching temporarily might be your best option. The main thing that changed my view here was spending days at the retreat paying close attention to my own emotional experience. For example, near the beginning of the retreat, one of the facilitators claimed that thought-looping was usually a sign of a stuck or repressed emotion. I was really skeptical, but then I had several very clear experiences of thought-looping around something, going off to a private place to cry about it, and immediately stopping the thought spiral and relating to it differently.4 Similarly, I’d ended a long-term relationship right before the retreat, which I’d felt a lot of internal conflict and self-doubt about. My therapist had often told me things like “if you felt enough of your feelings you’d feel clear about this decision,” which sounded crazy to me at the time (uh, it’s a really hard call and there are a lot of tradeoffs that I don’t know how to weigh!). But on the last day of the retreat I noticed that I felt much clearer that a lot of the things I didn’t like about that relationship were real and important, and felt much more confident in my choice to end it. Of course, I’d already heard plenty of people say things like “you can’t make this kind of decision logically, you have to listen to your heart,” but I never really understood what they were talking about. In retrospect, I just didn’t have the ability to do the “listen to your heart” internal move, because the pipes were clogged by too much repressed gunk. I wish those soundbites had included a second sentence like “of course listening to your heart can be much easier said than done, so if it feels hard or unclear for you, here are some first steps to get started with, and be prepared for it to take you many hours (or years) to figure out what your heart is trying to say.” This new mindset really shifted the way I related to my emotions. While I still often experience them as painful, it’s much less than I used to, and now I start from the assumption that they’re not “actually” painful or bad, and that the best thing to do with them is to figure out how to accept them, welcome them, and find the wisdom or beauty in them. Overall this feels a lot better—when I run into something stressful or hard, instead of just flailing around not knowing what to do about it, it feels more like I have some kind of sense of direction or overall orientation, which is really comforting and grounding. I also noticed that a lot of these ways of thinking about emotional difficulty within myself were also useful metaphors for thinking about emotional dynamics between people. Just like resisting your own emotions is a common coping strategy but ultimately doesn’t work very well, resisting other people’s emotions is also a really common but damaging pattern, which I would guess is very involved in a lot of (most?) relational damage. For example, I realized that a big part of the root problem of the relationship that I had just ended was that both of us were missing the capacity to accept a bunch of each other’s emotions, which was something I hadn’t been able to articulate clearly at the time. I now think practices explicitly focused on welcoming each other’s emotions are a really valuable tool for nurturing relationships over time. In fact, I started to notice that a lot of sticky problems—both in my personal life, but also the type that I ran into as a manager—were partly downstream of people resisting emotions of one type or another. Alice is hard to communicate with, because she frequently monologues about unimportant details, because she wants to prove she understands everything, because she has a bunch of stuck fear/resentment about not being taken seriously. Bob and Clara have a persistent disagreement about strategy, because Clara doesn’t care enough about Bob’s opinion to engage, because Bob was cruel to her once; Clara never complained because she’s avoiding the feeling of having been hurt by it. Dave’s team is underperforming but Erin, the exec sponsor, doesn’t want to manage him out, because she’s scared of the conflict and of making Dave’s reports, who like him, angry. Of course, just because a problem is caused by stuck emotions doesn’t mean that unsticking them is the best way to solve it; but it was still a really useful lens to view what was going on. The other shift that stuck around was in my relationships. I made a huge improvement in my friendships, which a few different things contributed to: I felt a lot clearer about what I wanted from close friendships—mainly, a strong felt sense of safety and care—and that this felt like a big missing piece in my life. I also started getting better at feeling those. With a lot of my shame reflex dissolved, I felt generally safer with people overall—my intuitive predictions about how they’d respond to things I did felt more positive. I also got a lot better at noticing and appreciating the different ways people expressed care for me. Because I felt generally safer, I also got more willing to take risks or be vulnerable, which helped build closeness faster. A friend reflected that I seemed more courageous. This also meant that my “friend type” changed—I cared more about emotional connection and less about intellectual connection. Luckily, even though I live in a really heady milieu, I was still able to find a lot of big-hearted people and gradually build up a set of close friends who are wonderful at both. So far, this is the change I’m the happiest about. My dating life changed a bunch as well: I started being able to feel much more strongly attracted to people. For example, later that year, I got a crush on someone that was stronger than any crush I’d had in high school. I had a run of anxious-attachment-ish experiences, which I’d never had before, although they got way milder over time.5 The extra safety and courage I mentioned above were helpful in dating too: I got much more comfortable with communicating tricky things or being in weird situations (e.g. ones outside the standard script of “meet someone on an app, go on some dates, become exclusive”). A friend commented that it seemed like I had more degrees of freedom. These changes have been really wonderful overall, but also kind of intense. Becoming much more emotionally aware solved a bunch of my problems, like wanting deeper friendships or not understanding why my relationship was unsatisfying. But it turns out winning that boss fight just made all the enemies level up. My old problems got replaced with horrible new problems, like that sometimes my newly deep friends and I would have conflicts, or that I would be more into the person I was dating than they were into me. The part of my life where I feel the most mixed about the impact is work. About six months after my retreat, I got a pretty bad case of burnout and left my role managing a big team for a significantly less ambitious IC role. I don’t think the retreat was the main cause of my burnout—the main cause was that I didn’t have enough background in the area I was managing to have the type of impact that I wanted to, with a side helping of some difficult working relationships. But it turns out my new psyche had also gotten worse at repressing or avoiding emotion, and that made everything harder. I think of repression as the emotional equivalent of technical debt or deferred maintenance: a way of avoiding an immediate cost, in this case feeling uncomfortable feelings, in exchange for paying a higher cost later to clean it up.6 My role exposed me to a constant stream of low-grade painful things, like people being disappointed or annoyed at me, me being disappointed or annoyed at other people, projects not going well, office snacks being replaced with worse snacks, and so on. With less ability to avoid or repress, I had to feel more of them fully as they came up, and that was really draining. It also required enough time and attention that I had to defer a bunch of maintenance on my personal life. Even now that I feel like my energy levels have mostly recovered, I’m still not sure whether I want to go back to the center of the vortex. It’s not just that I would have to start deferring maintenance again; I’m also much more aware of a lot of maintenance I’d already deferred and really want to clean up—things like investing in friendships, like I mentioned above. If I were only working toward my personal growth and happiness, I’d say this change was clearly good. My life feels much richer and more whole, and taking a less ambitious role forced me to release some layers of ego attachment to having a “shiny” job or career, which was deeply freeing. But… I also care a lot about my impact on the world, and I think the next few years will probably be a critical period where my work could be especially high-leverage. From that perspective, it’s sad to feel resistant to maxing out on work right now. I feel pretty unsure about what to take away from all this. Here are some disconnected reflections. I would never have said that I had a problem with self-compassion or self-esteem before doing this retreat, because I was able to say the right self-compassionate words when I directly asked myself things. But from my point of view afterwards, it’s clear that I did have a big self-compassion problem; even though I could say the words, I wasn’t really feeling them or acting like they were true. Having the actual embodied experience and habits of self-compassion is the closest I’ve come in real life to The Vitamin.7 Jhourney is doing something really cool and is way better than most/all other meditation retreats on several axes (amount of support available, pedagogical excellence). That said, you probably shouldn’t expect to have this life-changing of an experience; I would guess I had something like a 95th-percentile-plus outcome in terms of long-term effects. I still think it’s awesome as an introduction to both meditation and embodied emotional awareness. I feel like I got really lucky on timing: if the retreat had ended one day earlier, I don’t think I would have gotten to the life-changing part. That freaks me out a lot. At first I concluded from this that I should get super into meditation. Then I did two more retreats (another Jhourney retreat and a Dustin DiPerna introduction to mahamudra retreat) and neither one of them had nearly as large of an effect. The second Jhourney retreat was really helpful in reinforcing my daily practice, and I do think a daily meditation practice was helpful in stabilizing the changes that became permanent, but I’m not even totally sure about that. Jhanas are definitely real. Also, it was kind of wild hearing somebody tell me something that sounded totally fake (“achieve bliss on demand using nothing but your brain”) and then back it up with an 80-page engineering manual and meticulous data on success rates. Overall this made me much more likely to believe that various other types of “woo” phenomena are real, at least in the sense that people are accurately describing their experiences. (I still believe the universe runs on physics, but a lot of woo things have physics-compatible explanations, especially if you buy that people’s intuitions can sometimes do spooky things.) I described this as “chang[ing] my personality” in the title, but I don’t want to oversell the magnitude. I do have a lot of conversations where someone asks me “so how come you’re so <like X>” and I tell them “I did this weird meditation retreat a couple years ago.” But also, there are a lot of different aspects of personality, and even though a bunch of those completely changed for me, most of them are still the same, so I’m still very similar to my past self in an absolute sense. What flags should tip you off that you should maybe be staring into your emotions more? Here are some things that I think might be clues (a lot of which described me, in retrospect): You often get stressed and stuck in thought loops You’re easily annoyed or frustrated You have too much scarcity mindset—you often worry this is the best job or relationship or whatever that you’ll ever have, in a way that’s not justified by the fundamentals You seek out a lot of distraction or stimulation; it’s not very enjoyable to just exist in the present You feel a lot of internal conflict or uncertainty about what you want There are parts of yourself that you really don’t like or wish were different You feel some missing depth, richness, or meaning in your life but can’t put your finger exactly on what I’m also just left with a lot of questions: Was this set of experiences… good? I’m really confident that it will be good for my own long-term life happiness. But the timing meant that I feel less willing to sign up for intense work during what might be one of the most critical periods for humanity, which feels bad even if the change was positive. I feel kind of unsure how to balance these. My shoulder Jeremy Bentham says I should have just kept playing push-pin. My shoulder, uh… deva? says if I follow my heart my impact on the world will be higher, even if it’s less predictable or legible. I don’t really feel like I buy either of these. It seemed like before this I was in a personality attractor basin with a lot of numbing and repression. How exactly did this happen, and more importantly, how can I/we avoid having it happen to as many people in the future? I have some sort of fuzzy leads on this (e.g. when I was young it was really easy to make me cry so I got picked on a lot in school), but not a particularly complete picture (e.g.: does this happen to everyone who has that experience? If not, what makes the difference?) Mechanistically, what did the elephant meditation do? Why did it work so suddenly and create such a lasting shift? (Was that in fact what was responsible for most of the lasting shift? How much of it was instead about what I learned at a cognitive level?) Is the glowy, “easier to be the essence of Ben” state that I ended up in right afterwards something that can be stabilized (or have aspects stabilized)? If so, how? More generally—where do I go from here? I’m convinced that doing the right type of introspection or meditation type thing for a week can unlock amazing things, and it feels like there are more amazing things out there to unlock, but I wish I had a better way of navigating towards them than semi-randomly trying things. A draft reader asked what I would tell my past self, or someone like me, about this arc. Ultimately, I’d boil it down to: There are probably a bunch of feelings that you’re refusing to welcome into your experience, and this is probably involved in a bunch of the things that are unsatisfying about your life and relationships. You can improve this by gradually, in a safe context, paying loving attention to the uncomfortable parts, from a place of wanting to know and care for yourself rather than to fix yourself. When that’s hard, remember that it’s not your fault. You’re just the rider; elephants gonna elephant. Let it go where it needs to and keep loving it as best you can. Thanks to Alex Allain, Catherine Olsson, Elena Lake, Jess Ocean, Rahul Dalal, and Sasha Chapin for feedback on a draft of this post. Ironically, Jhourney more or less recommends doing this in various parts of the handbook, but I was too into following rules to follow the part of the rules where they told me to stop following the rules. I don’t think this strictly qualifies as a jhana by Jhourney’s rubric, because it wasn’t stable and self-sustaining, but it otherwise felt close to how they describe first jhana. I do mean all, even ones that our culture really doesn’t like—for example, anger is a sign that something you care about is threatened and needs protecting, and fully welcoming it can help bring clarity about what exactly needs protecting and how. If you’re curious to learn more about the beautiful and constructive aspects of negative emotions, I recommend the book The Language of Emotions, Joe Hudson’s podcast (search for the emotion you’re interested in), or here are some specific articles summarizing his views on anger, fear, and shame. It was a lot easier to see this clearly on the retreat than in normal life: doing lots of meditation both made it easier to notice my own thought processes, and also faster to “unstick” or welcome the underlying emotions. I’m not totally sure what was up with this; I think it partly had to do with calibrating to the new level of attraction I could feel. Like tech debt or deferred maintenance, sometimes repression or avoidance can be the right strategy, if you’ll have more resources to deal with the problem later! “My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency.”
Scarcity and survival keep you from being your best.
An old playbook is back for the deepfake era. Is it working?
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