To save the world, or to savor the world
The unexpected side-effects of meditation during my burnout recovery (burnout, part 11)
Last week I wrote more about what it’s like to be in silence for weeks — from my sleep patterns to the insights that I gained. It seemed like my burnout recovery was going very well, as I’d made the big decision to quit my startup and felt a sense of freedom. However, after getting back from Bali, I had some unexpected side effects from all of that silence and bliss, causing me to take a few u-turns.
1/ Too much of a good thing?
I sat in my studio apartment chair with my eyes closed and a Cheshire-cat grin on my face. I was about to record a podcast interview. The leap into a creative role was exciting for me, reminiscent of the year I spent writing and traveling pre-startup.
The podcast was technically something I was doing as part of my startup. This might seem strange since I’d decided to quit, so why was I doing this? It would be weeks or months before I could sell my business, so I figured if I should at least have some fun in the meantime. As you’d imagine, I found myself really enjoying it. The episodes were mostly around job interviewing, but also covered wider topics around emotional intelligence and even meditation. I had a blast interviewing the coaches on the platform. I’m not sure why I didn’t think about “having fun” before.
But that’s not why I was smiling.
I was smiling because physically, I was feeling good. And I mean real good. Every few hours I would get waves of warm tingling sensations running up my spine, arms or leg. It felt like my entire body was having an orgasm. This was an unexpected positive side effect from twenty days in meditation.
In his commencement speech to college graduates, David Foster Wallace spoke eloquently about what to expect in the real world: endless traffic, annoying people and a life of boring routines. How we choose to react to these frustrating or banal situations will largely define our experience of life.
..The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.
Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.
And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is…
I felt like I’d cracked the code that Wallace was talking about. When I’d be waiting for something like a podcast interview to start, a friend that was late, or standing in line at the grocery store — all of this time that would normally be irritating was spent in rapturous delight. It was as good as, or better than sex.
Although, to be honest, I don’t feel like I was making a conscious “choice” to see the good in the world, like Wallace talks about. Instead, my mind and body just felt like I was on Cloud Nine.
Certain meditation traditions talk about “absorption states” you get into called Jhana, which can be extremely peaceful and blissful. You can experience these states if you do a shit-ton of meditation. Actually, anyone can get into jhana states much sooner than they think, depending on the technique you do (one or two days of silent meditation will do it).
There’s a study that shows what happens in your brain as you progress through the jhanas. In the earlier stages, your opioid-system is actually activated, which explains my rush of tranquility. It’s like I was constantly taking the first bite of a chocolate-chip cookie and it never got old.
But I also wasn’t craving more of the cookie. Interestingly, the dopamine system, which makes you want things, is not activated during jhanic states. So, it did not feel like I was reaching for my phone and getting a dopamine hit reading Tweets or emails. While I don’t think the point of meditation is to “feel good,” one way to think about meditating is that it counteracts a lot of the scattered attention and the dopamine surges we get from our overuse of technology.
It’s also possible that I could have been recovering from trauma. In his book In an Unspoken Voice, Peter Levine, a pioneer in the field of trauma recovery and the developer of Somatic Experiencing therapy, says that these sensations are a sign that the body is healing and resolving traumatic memories.
Of course, it could’ve been both meditative bliss and trauma relief. After all, meditation is a well-studied treatment for PTSD. Whatever it was, it was awesome.
Awesome, but dangerous.
When you’re in the thick of your journey, you have to step out before you can digest and get perspective. It can take a long vacation to realize that you’ve had enough of your job, for example.
My mindfulness powers weren’t strong enough to give me perspective into this journey of meditative rapture and bliss. The point of meditation isn’t to just feel physically good, albeit it’s a nice side effect. If I were a monk secluded from society, it would have been fine. But with decisions to make that would impact my life, the downside of this would become apparent shortly.
2/ To save the world, or to savor the world
The author of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White, once said,
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
The days and weeks following the retreats, I felt myself alternating between these two camps. One day I would feel on top of the world because of the bliss. And yet I was extremely neutral. I really didn’t give a damn what I did. I’d be happy sitting on my couch and staring at the inside of my eyelids or working on my startup - it all felt nice. That is perhaps the flip-side of blissful states.
Other days, I felt a lot of compassion. I was deeply in touch with the suffering in the world — and my own suffering in the past — and had a strong urge to help others in any way I could. Around this time, I began to volunteer and started two meetup groups around my interests: a meditation circle and a fasting group. This was my way of connecting with others and sharing what I’d learned in the past few years.
I remember hearing some advice at the end of my last retreat. “Don’t make any big life decisions at least a month after you get back.” It takes time to digest and reintegrate, and it’s probably wise to settle back in before you quit your job, file for divorce and move to India. These wise words echoed in my brain.
And I of course promptly ignored the advice. Woops.
After giving my investors and cofounder a long speech weeks prior about why I was done with the business, now I found myself having second thoughts. Hey, what if there was a way to continue the business? All I needed to do was raise more money, hire the right team, and we could grow (sound familiar?). When I spoke to my main investor again to tell him my big U-turn, he was incredulous. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Yeah, definitely!”
But I was lucky. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to make the same mistake again.
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