What a 10 day silent meditation retreat taught me about leadership
A couple months ago, after braving a winding and dilapidated mountain road into a jungle outside Pokhara, Nepal, I walked into a silent Vipassana meditation course.
Ten days later--after around 120 hours of sitting in self awareness, deeply concentrating on emotions and sensations arising in the body--I came out feeling like I had just had brain surgery.
Sitting through this type of course shows you what it's like to have awareness (and therefore control) over your physical and emotional reactions to the world around you. As if your brain were reconfigured with an air gap between stimulus (these can be sensations, emotions, or thoughts) and reaction. This gap provides space for observation, to notice the effect of the stimuli, and maneuver your mental state and mood toward the most healthy reaction.
In a way, it's a hyper-effective tool for managing mood. A secret weapon for neutralizing the stresses of our busy and complicated lives, jobs, and relationships. And as I walked out of that place, the only thought on my mind was:
ANYONE who wants to be a good leader
MUST experience this.
Let me show you why.
Context is Key
The Dhamma Pokhara center was a wild place that overflowed with natural beauty. Nestled into a thick canopy of acacia and rhododendron, the small mindfulness outpost was a scattering of clay and brick structures extending down a steep ridge, thin cement paths zigzagging across trees to connect bunk rooms to the rustic mess and meditation halls.
Hiking down the path that first night, you have the feeling of descending into a savage amphitheater. The zigzagging path disappearing hauntingly down into the darkening shrub below. As you look up from a clearing in the trees, the imposing Himalayan range—snowcapped, jagged, and bathed in the orange sunset afterglow—towers in the distance, with Annapurna and Daulagiri, two of the highest peaks on earth, glaring down menacingly.
The area also teems with life. As dusk turns to night, the jungle erupts with sound. High pitched whines, snaps, and whirs—some combination of cicadas, grasshoppers, and moths battle each other across the humid air. Caterpillars, some plump and fuzzy, others ribbed in white and neon orange, crawl across the walls around the toilet pits. Butterflies and moths perch around the glow of the bunk lights—black and white with rorschach blotches, brown and khaki tie dye, or some even electric blue. In the mid mornings, troops of rhesus macaques come out to forage. Tan-furred and red-faced, they hop furtively across trees, rustling branches that leave trails of gently falling leaves as the simians pass by. Making it to camp, they hop on top of the bunk houses—with heavy thuds—and hiss and howl at each other as they fight over berries caught on the corrugated metal roofs.
Despite the beautiful surroundings, the experience is intense and internal. And it's far from paradise. Each morning, you start meditating at 4:30am, cross legged on the floor, and go continuously until 9:30pm, with a few breaks for food and leg stretching. As minutes turn into hours with each sitting, your hips, legs, feet, back, and neck howl--when they aren't numbed entirely to sensation or torched by pins and needles.
With nothing else to distract you, and meditation to focus you further on the sensations, it's perfect agony. Your hips will feel like they're bursting into flames, backaches will feel like blows from a sledgehammer. And if the sitting isn’t bad enough, the monotony is even worse. The first three days, you focus exclusively on your breath, specifically the area of the nostrils and upper lip. For the next seven, you focus on sensations of the body--scanning back and forth, back and forth, endlessly...
This experience is only enhanced by the surroundings. Your “bed”, which consists of a wooden bench draped in a bedsheet, exacerbates the lack of sleep. And when the nighttime insect screeching winds down, the daytime cicada sounds blare like sirens, while monkeys’ pounding and hissing on the roof above you reverberate deeply into your skull.
Lesson #1: See discomfort as impermanent, and surrender as a superpower.
Ordinarily, ten days of the discomfort described above would be unbearable. Each minute, waiting for the pain and tedium to end. Only to go into the next hour... and the next... twelve times a day... for ten days.
But the pain, the noise, and the discomfort are all designed to teach you about impermanence. The pain will end next time you get to stretch legs. The noise will end when the cicadas go to sleep. The understanding of impermanence helps you build tolerance to discomfort because you start seeing it as merely a passing sensation.
What's more, you begin to see each moment as an opportunity to practice your attention--to practice NOT being bothered by discomfort. And the better you get, the more power you feel over your surroundings and your mood. You learn that you have the ability to control your reactions, if only you surrender to the discomfort by seeing what it has to teach you. This superpower trains a resilient patience to get through uncomfortable things.
In the professional world, frustration and discomfort is everywhere. Projects go wrong, people disappoint or frustrate you, and shit sometimes hits the fan. Part of the discomfort is avoidable--you can take more precautions, build systems to manage risk, etc. But most of it isn't. And resisting all discomfort is exhausting. Instead, good leaders can train their minds to surrender to the discomfort and focus on what can be learned from a situation. Beyond just getting you through hardship, it'll help you learn more from it, and find ways to enjoy the experience (what some call "Embracing the suck").
Lesson #2: Use silence and speech more intentionally.
In the first few days of the retreat, you quickly realize that your mind is an uncontrollable mess. A turbid lake, agitated by stimuli, emotions, and sensations. In days of silence, you'll find yourself--out of the absence of new stimuli--ruminating on experiences, interactions, and conversations of the past. Some from immediately before the silence, some from months or even years before. This teaches you a few things.
First is that your mind can be profoundly affected by experiences you don't even process as significant. Everything you do, every person you talk to, stirs the soup of the mind and prompts new reactions (emotions, thoughts...). In the retreat, you'll have new thoughts or nonverbal exchanges that may resonate in your mind for DAYS. When you quiet your mind, you can notice how far single experiences can propagate in your subconscious--whether positive or negative.
Applied to the workplace, this experience will make you understand that even the passing comments, remarks, and criticisms you make can have strong effects on people, whether they realize it or not. It shows you how compliments can go further than you think, and gaslighting can be more corrosive than people can imagine.
Second is that silence is an essential tool to quiet the turbid lake of the mind so you can actually see what's going on under the surface of the water. In a world of so much stimuli, it's hard to ever know what's really going on in your own head--fleeting thoughts, tasks, impulses are frothy waves that obscure the more subtle currents that may be affecting you.
At work, this means people often solve problems reactively. You may wait for people to stop talking so you can immediately insert your opinion. Or you may not speak up because there isn't a moment to verbalize a more nuanced thought.
Whether alone, 1:1, or in groups, good leaders need to create quiet.
Moments of reflection to still the surface of a problem, see what's underneath, and solicit the nonreactive wisdom needed to solve a problem most effectively.
Lesson #3: Break daunting tasks down into manageable chunks.
After your first hour of meditation, your mind won't help but think "how the hell am I going to do this for 119 more sessions?" Ten days is a LOOONG time when you're counting breaths. And each second stretches even longer the deeper you get into any sitting, as the pain begins to flare up.
But you'll begin to take it moment by moment. Get through 15 minute chunks at a time. Then one hour chunks at a time. Then mornings, afternoons, and evenings at a time. Then days at a time. And eventually you'll make it to the final bell on day ten. This chunking is critical to maintaining morale and motivation through the seemingly unending torment.
Whether at work or in your personal life, you're likely working through at least one daunting challenge. Maybe a project you're procrastinating or a skill you want to get good at. And if you happen to be a people leader, that's how your employees may think about projects you assign them. The secret is breaking up big goals into bite sized pieces. Into tasks that are approachable, finite, and can be celebrated upon completion. You'd be amazed how high a mountain you can climb when you take it step by step.
Lesson #4: Create effortless systems.
A fascinating thing about these retreats is that they run automatically. One or two dozen people can eat, sleep, wash, meditate, do laundry... all in collective facilities, without a word to each other (or even eye contact). How?
When you arrive, you'll notice a rigid schedule telling you where you need to be and when. A bell will indicate when you have five minutes to get to the next thing. In the mess hall, food is a buffet line, and you'll wash your own dishes. Requests are handled through a paper form. Every part of the system is designed using non-verbal communication, cues, and clear processes to minimize your decision making and preserve mental clarity.
In a way, workplaces should strive to be similar: create effortless processes that sidestep the inconvenience of language and automate decisions. Set up cadences for regular decisions that need to be made or outputs that need to be created or reviewed. Build systems to collect feedback on ideas, syndicate new proposals, and make important decisions. Ideally these cadences and systems can be offline or require only message-based input. Don't let your teams waste time on process or get distracted by verbal interactions--where indirect speech, subtext, or risk of distraction is high. Preserve their mental clarity for solving the pressing problems.
Lesson #5: Build cathedrals, don't make bricks.
This form of intensive meditation kind of sucks. It's laborious and painful, but also tedious. It requires tireless concentration, but is also an exercise in humility as you're endlessly reminded how little control you have over something as basic as your own mind.
But there's a story in that:
A man came across three stonecutters and asked them what they were doing. The first replied, “I'm making bricks.” The second kept on hammering while he said, “I'm doing work to feed by family." The third looked up with a visionary gleam in his eye and said, “I'm building a great cathedral.”
Adopting a mindfulness practice isn't sitting in quiet boredom while noticing your thoughts. It's controlling your ability to react to the world around you. It's having control over your outlook, your mood, and your ability to find joy in experiences instead of suffering.
So much of work feels like tasks whose effect on the world feels indirect, at best. The best leaders create positive environments by constantly reminding and inspiring their teams to think of the cathedrals.
Lesson #6: Tame the elephant.
Elephants are widely considered (and mythologized as) the strongest animal on earth, but also one of the most destructive. They can lift 6,000kgs (~7 tons), and kill ~600 people per year.
So how did the first wild elephant get tamed? Starting around 2000 B.C.--the story goes--some crazy South Asians would hang on trees, jump on young elephants' backs, and hang on for dear life as the animal rampages through the forest at up to 30 miles per hour. After a couple hours of expert balance, persistence, and branch-dodging, the driver--also called a Mahout--waits for the animal to calm and tire. The mahout can then bring it food, and show they mean it no harm. As domestication practices advanced (and elephants began to self domesticate through proximity), elephants gave people the power to conquer the world.
Taming your mind can feel similar to the Mahout's bull ride sometimes, but the outcome can be just as powerful. The genius of the human mind comes from its chaos and creative associations. But you can't let it run wild, or else you'll find yourself, drained, distracted, and directionless.
Meditation trains you to notice the sensations, emotions and thoughts being processed by your mind, which gives you the ability to concentrate deeply, avoid distractions, and stay in control. Good leaders can use this to channel their creative energy (and their teams') in the right context, focusing on only the most important problems worth solving. With the right guardrails and prioritization, this maximizes leverage. And good leverage--as we know--can open many doors.
Lesson #7: Begin again.
The infuriating thing about meditating is just how easily your mind wanders, despite how concentrated you think you are. You'll focus on your breath, or your body, when a tiny morsel of input floats across your field of awareness. A sound of a bird. The sound triggers the image of a bird. The image triggers a memory of last time you went hiking. The memory triggers frustration with your friend who you once went on a hike with... and next thing you know you've spent five minutes simmering about a friendship in jeopardy, and you forget you were supposed to be meditating!
But now you're frustrated. You'll refocus on your breath. But you're irritated, your fuse has shortened, and momentarily you're bound to find yourself spiraling again into some other thought or frustration because emotions always trigger thoughts.
But in that moment, you have a choice. And the best Vipassana teachers will use a phrase that embodies this choice:
"Begin again."
This concept evokes acceptance and equanimity. Accepting yourself and your mind for how it behaves, and maintaining a neutral orientation to your thoughts. Don't revel in the nostalgia of memory. Don't indulge cravings for things to come. Don't linger on frustrations or your own inadequacy or distractibility. Accept, and begin again.
Good leaders know how to accept failures, clear the slate, and tackle something fresh. As critical as it is to learn from failure, professional rubbernecking (which I'd characterize as "lingering without learning") never did anyone any good.
Lesson #8: Put the human first.
The big question you may have coming out of a retreat like this is how to integrate practices you learn into bustly daily life. How can concepts like acceptance, surrender, detachment, non-striving possibly be compatible with the ambition, competitiveness, and drive that many talented people want to bring into their work? And how can leaders create psychologically healthy and harmonious work environments, while still hitting OKRs? Don't we need attachment and desire (to results, targets, etc.) in order to be successful?
But you'll learn that they are compatible, in fact. And the secret?
Love. (corny, I know, but give me a minute)
On the last day of the program, you'll be introduced to Loving-Kindness meditation, also known as Metta. It's a technique that dials-in feelings of love, compassion, and forgiveness, then radiates it through yourself and then others (family, friends, strangers, challenging relationships, etc.). The method trains you to not loathe others' shortcomings, and to forgive others' misdeeds or inadequacies as ignorance or circumstance, respectively.
In the workplace, the power of this idea changes the focus of objectives or targets away from the success of the organization, and toward the success of its humans.
What does that mean? An organization is merely that--an organized group of humans. A company's objectives represent the outcomes of roles served by individual humans. Practicing Metta reminds us that a company must design targets around the development goals of its people. If you miss a target, it's either because
you set it too high, given your level of talent in the associated roles, or
you hired the wrong people in those roles, for the level of output you need to get done.
Either one of those is a management failure. And each can propagate a toxic environment that implodes employees' self worth and undermines a organization's ability to operate predictably.
If you hire correctly, designing objectives around an individual's capabilities and development WILL align organizational performance with the personal growth of the individual. When that happens, you unlock two things:
The ambition to succeed comes from the individual's love or dedication to self improvement and the company's mission (NOT from a fear of missing targets)
The failure to meet targets is better ascribed to uncontrollable circumstances to be met with equanimous acceptance (VS perceived inadequacies which will torment the individual)
This is the foundation of a culture that can be healthy (harmonious, accepting, human-centric, loving, etc.) but also uses a passion for growth and/or mission to stay ambitious and high-performing.
Finding Your Practice
For those of you still daunted by the prospect of something like this, don't be. There's many alternative formats similar to the Dhamma retreat described above, but that are a bit less spartan. That said, people in the intensive retreats tend to discover that they're stronger than they think--and fewer people drop out in the first few days than you would expect.
This is an experience that changes lives (and has already changed many).
Ten days of anything won't turn you into a super-leader. Within a few weeks of the experience, the sharpness of your mindfulness will fade, and the habits of irritability (if you had them before) will mostly return. And each one of these lessons may take a lifetime to master.
But an experience like this can give you a taste of what life could be like with better awareness of your mind, control over your reactions, and loving support of those around you.
I think that's a journey worth taking a first step.