Last week I wrote about my fateful decision to throw myself back into my startup, despite the warning signs of my first burnout episode. Even though I thought I had recovered and improved my habits, it wasn't enough. A toxic combination of poor decision making, bad luck, and emotional dishonesty led to a second, even more devastating burnout. I was at my wit's end, not knowing where to turn or what to do. In my darkest hour, I decided to go into prolonged silence.
1/ Chewed up and spit out
I had hit rock-bottom. My second attempt at the startup seemed to be going well for a year, but resulted in a second burnout episode. My co-founder had left, our revenue was declining, and my body and soul were in pain. I had ignored the advice of a great mentor and those around me. The realization of how wrong I'd been was just dawning on me.
And yet, I hung on to a thread of hope. Most of the team was still there. We still had cash from our investment that would last us a few months. Maybe there was a way up. I was stubborn, a trait that both hurt me and served me well at times.
There's a certain amount of energy you put into a business or project. After that upfront effort, the project is either complete or the business hits traction/reaches escape velocity. Or, you find a way to make it sustainable. The feeling I had was that we had some traction, but it wasn’t enough to get us to that point. I'd burned through all my energy reserves, got a second wind, burned through that too, and was now done.
The most painful part of this experience was no longer the startup itself. I had hired a good team to handle marketing and operations, and my second cofounder was a competent developer. On a day to day basis, I didn't have to put in tons of work. The more painful part was that when I did, the business didn't move forward very much. It was like trying to fill a leaky bucket.
Yet another painful— and scary — part was my physical and emotional instability. This second burnout episode lasted for a month, and was a little bit less intense but similar to the first one: extreme fatigue, anxiety, shortness of breath, moodiness, not to mention no more coffee or alcohol (they would make it way worse). Seriously, I did this to myself again? It was all too familiar. Man, I was getting tired of this shit. And I wasn’t getting any younger.
Desperate for answers, I booked a ticket to a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in Bali at the newly opened center. Little did I know, this would be the start of an intense journey of self-discovery. The insights and revelations I experienced during those first ten days were so profound that I immediately signed up for another retreat, followed by a couple of shorter ones.
And before I knew it, in 2022 I had dedicated over 25 days of my life to a journey of silence and introspection. While these retreats weren't consecutive, they were relatively close together, and I maintained a daily practice of two to three hours of meditation in between retreats. These days in silence would push me to my limits and test my resolve. Ultimately, they would lead me to make the tough decisions I had been afraid to make and to a greater understanding of myself.
2/ Shaking the snow globe
The meditation center was in northern Bali, a stone's throw from the island's second largest mountain, Mt. Batur. I'd just finished a three-day quarantine at a hotel in central Ubud and wrapped up everything I needed to do before going offline.
The taxi driver picked me up and we began the one hour or so journey through winding hills and little villages. I noticed every house had a temple. My driver Puta told me they were called "sanggah," where families made offerings to the gods. Bali was a spiritual place. I felt it in these temples and the smiling faces and the smell of incense almost everywhere I went.
The center was unassuming, as you'd expect from a 100% donation-based facility. It had a large hall filled with cushions for meditation, a dining room, a small path for walking meditation, a shared shower space, and tiny rooms that barely fit a single bed. Segregated by sex, of course, as you didn't need more distractions. This was a place where you were surrounded by others, but where you were effectively alone, confronted with nothing but your own thoughts and emotions.
The day started at 4:00 am and ended around 9pm. The timetable was more or less the same every day.
The rules were simple and strict:
No talking
No eye contact
No reading or listening to music
Breakfast and lunch, no dinner
On the first day of the retreat I meditated for 10 hours, focusing on my breath. There was nothing spectacular, just lots of thoughts racing around in my head. What will I do with my startup? What am I doing with my life? What's for lunch? Do I smell curry? Every time I got lost in a thought, I would bring my attention back to my breath. I did this countless times. The first day or two is usually about calming down the mind before you start the "real" work. It was like shaking a snow globe and waiting for the snowflakes to settle before you could see what's inside.
Since I was always on my phone, and now I had no phone (or any entertainment), I was anxious. I had to get used to the sensory deprivation and being alone with myself. Whenever we have an uncomfortable emotion, we typically reach for a distraction — phone, food, games, exercise, sex, conversation, whatever. This was a dopamine-detox at its finest. And as my mind calmed down, anchoring on the breath, there was a heightening of my senses. I started to feel what I had been denying myself.
By the fourth day, I was in tears. We'd started the main practice, which required you to scan your body from head to toe, noticing each sensation.
When I observed these sensations in a more "balanced way" without reacting to them, I noticed that I could begin to really observe what they were without my usual filter. Our filters are ways that we see the world, and are mostly a result of our conditioned reactions. When you feel a pain in your leg, you might automatically react to it by thinking “I want this to stop and go away!” This is useful, obviously, in the case you hurt your leg and need to seek medical attention.
But it can also make the pain worse. The saying goes:
suffering = your pain * your reaction to pain
In other words, we create a lot more suffering for when we can't accept things as they are and start to react excessively. I discovered that once my mind was in a more calm and balanced state, I still felt the sensations in my leg, but my suffering was drastically reduced. Eventually, my leg pain completely went away during my meditation.
True understanding comes from the raw, unfiltered experience of the present moment. It requires us to sit with our pain (physical or otherwise), to feel it fully without reacting or getting caught up in a web of stories. It means acknowledging the heat, the pulsating, the tension, the prickling, and the vibrating that makes up the reality of our sensations. Only then can we begin to see the world as it truly is. (I know, it’s easier said than done, but one must try!)
These filters don't just affect our physical sensations; they also play a major role in our emotional world. The physical sensations in our body are directly linked to emotions – often the strongest ones in our stomach, chest, throat and back.
For example, one of the biggest emotional filters is our drive to succeed. There are different reasons we're driven. We tend to think it's a natural drive, when it can in fact be a reaction to something else. I heard a quote once, "Most of the drive for success is driven by insecurity."
I wondered if this was true for me. Why did I continue my self-flagellation in the startup world? What was I trying to prove? Who was I trying to prove it to? These questions raced through my head as I tried untangle the knots.
3/ Mopping up the sh*t
As I delved deeper into my meditation practice, I was bombarded by a deluge of emotions. It wasn't just a cathartic release, though — there was also an intense feeling of bliss and euphoria. The physical pain of sitting for hours seemed to melt away, and I found myself effortlessly maintaining a cross-legged position for hours on end.
But the strangeness didn't end there. I began to experience psychedelic three-dimensional visions and a rush of energy, like electricity coursing through my veins and certain parts of my body vibrating at a high frequency before starting to dissolve. What the hell was happening to me?
In Daniel Ingram's book, Mastering the Core Teaching of The Buddha, he talks about the 16 stages of insight. These are steps that a meditator takes on the path to awakening that have been mapped out in various Buddhist traditions. The 4th stage of insight is called "Arising and Passing Away," and is characterized by most of the experiences I was having at this time: intense shaking, electricity, contortion, bright white lights and so forth.
Everything that had happened to me in the last two years of my life came rushing back— the pandemic, losing a baby, going through burnout, the fear of failure. These were emotions that I hadn't fully processed yet. They were locked, or trapped, in my body and were finally coming out.
For two days in a row, every hour of meditation felt like a trip down memory lane. It was freakin' exhausting. I wondered if these emotions and funky sensations would ever stop. From my perspective it was "distracting me" from making progress in the meditation technique since I was just getting snot all over my shirt. During the lunch hour, I went to the teacher for advice.
"Before you can get to the good stuff," she said, "Sometimes you have to mop up the emotional shit first." There was a lot of emotional baggage I was carrying around. Clearing through or mopping up all of this was necessary work to do on my journey. She was right.
4/ The serpent
After the large waves of emotion subsided, I felt a sense of quiet peace and stillness engulf me. For a bit, everything felt like it was going to be okay. This feeling was short-lived. The next day, a serpent appeared in my mouth.
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