Sometime during my last retreat, a solitary monthlong, I crossed 1,000 hours of meditation practice. I guess that makes me 1/10th of an expert? It seems as good a time as any to share some reflections and learnings from the path.
First, a short pitch
Sometimes when I’m hyping up meditation, I say things that don’t sound so exciting to the uninitiated listener, like rambling on about emptiness and no-self.
Probably the most compelling thing I can say to the meditation-curious is that prior to starting on the path, I was a depressed, anxious, and neurotic mess; today, I’m a very happy neurotic mess. A year before I started meditating, I’d been involuntarily hospitalized for being suicidal. Today, I wake up most days madly in love with the world, and most of the time it feels like it loves me too.
(Later I discuss some of the negative side effects of practice, but just to be very clear: you couldn’t pay me any sum of money to permanently revert to where I was even two years ago.)
An overview of my path so far
I started out in 2018 on the more corporate-wellnessy (“boost your productivity with mindfulness meditation!”) apps1, then graduated to Sam Harris’s Waking Up. Overall, I spent several years on this phase, though why I kept at it is a mystery—I don’t think I benefited at all from this period of my practice.
At some point I started going on retreats, and that’s when things really began to take off. I’ll list the most important ones here, each of which was a major inflection point in my practice:
In 2022, I was tricked into going on a Goenka vipassana retreat by my mom, who told me it would be a good and chill experience. It was not. (I wish this wasn’t so many people’s entryway into meditation, but that’s for another post.) Nevertheless, it did show me the enormous potential of intensive practice, namely that afterwards my thought volume both in meditation and everyday life permanently decreased by about 80%.
I went on an online Jhourney retreat in 2024, in which I did not jhana but did learn that Meditation Can Be Fun, which is a critically important lesson for anyone who’s ever tried to willpower their way into a daily meditation practice. To be clear: not the “bliss on demand”, which I failed miserably at getting, but the actual practice. How much can you enjoy this practice, right now? How about 10% more?
Several online retreats with Dustin DiPerna from 2024-2025 taught me that the full fruition of the path also requires being a Normal Human Being in the world.
Counterintuitively, it can actually be easier to be a celibate monk living in a monastery than a lay practitioner in the Bay Area in 2026. By completely constraining your life around optimal conditions for practice, it becomes much easier to have “pure” experiences of unity, truth, and bliss. But your practice is fragile outside its context, and likely not very beneficial to your fellow beings still trapped in samsara (depending on what your metaphysical views are).
You can instead cultivate a practice wherein all the messiness inherent to living as a modern human with a spouse, mortgage, and agentic AI startup appears as sacred as rarefied jhanic bliss, but this is definitely hard mode.
Not a meditation retreat, but important enough that I’ll include it here: Groundbreakers, Art of Accomplishment’s in-person retreat, demolished a massive psychic structure of self-hatred that was masquerading as spiritual self-negation.
My monthlong retreat with Charlie Awbery just ended a few days ago, so it feels a little too alive to fit cleanly into a backwards-looking narrative. I guess I could say that it showed me the inseparability of the sacred, profane, and mundane—and that from this perspective there truly is no problem to solve, as unbelievably pollyannaish as that once sounded to me.
But I could also say that the most viscerally excited I felt during that month was when I realized I could finally take full diaphragmatic breaths! (Note: your priorities may change in unexpected ways as you practice.)
There were other retreats with Tucker Peck, Delson Armstrong, Judith Blackstone, and other wonderful teachers who I’m probably forgetting. Also, like any good TPOT meditator, long stretches of doing the practices in The Mind Illuminated, MCTB, and Seeing that Frees (my absolute favorite meditation book of all time). But in general my practice has mostly been shaped like a series of long plateaus with occasional discontinuities where I go on retreat.2
Weird side effects that no one talks about
Shockingly, radically restructuring your entire psyche and mode of perception can have some undesirable side effects. Most discourse on the downsides of practice focuses on the really bad stuff, mainly psychosis. I won’t go into that here, though I’ve had my own brushes with it during dark nights. Instead, some of the weirder stuff that I’ve personally experienced:
Episodic memory: My memory has gotten significantly worse. Specifically, my episodic memory—my ability to recall and place particular events, from whether I’ve brushed my teeth to the details of conversations with close friends. My short-term memory is as bad as ever but no worse; I regularly struggle with 6-digit 2FA codes.
If you know me personally, you probably know this firsthand from listening to me excitedly tell you the same fact for the third time, and never remembering the time we did that thing. I’m not sure why this one doesn’t get talked about much3; it’s probably one of the more common negative side effects I hear about from other practitioners.
Relationships: Relatedly, my object permanence with humans has decreased precipitously over the last few years. Although I enjoy being around people far more than I used to, I rarely miss them if they’re not around, because they simply don’t come to mind unprompted. The processes that used to spin up “I wonder how X is doing” or “I should respond to that text” just don’t happen much anymore.
I actually prefer being this way! I still consciously make an effort to replicate friend permanence by writing down names to check in on, because I don’t want my friends to think I don’t love them.
Sensory stuff: Mostly HPPD in the form of minor visual snow, which has been ongoing for the last 2–3 years. This is pretty standard and often fixable. Also, mine came from fire kasina practice (basically staring at a candle flame until you hallucinate), which you can just not do.
And some weird auditory stuff: ever since my first retreat, I’ve had absurdly high-fidelity songs get stuck in my head very easily, sometimes just after one listen, for days or even weeks until something else displaces it. Kanye’s “Heartless” was stuck in my head for about a week on my last retreat because I heard the first few bars play from someone’s phone. Thankfully the meditation gods blessed me with a banger, but it was still pretty distracting.
Kriyas: I sometimes involuntarily experience shakes or spasms during intensive practice. It usually doesn’t feel bad, but I was pretty self-conscious about it when it first started happening.
The woo model of kriyas is that they’re caused by blockages in your energetic body, and that once those blockages are worked through, those kriyas subside. The slightly less woo version is that your body is releasing stored trauma. This basically fits with my experience—a specific spasmodic pattern will happen hundreds of times until eventually it doesn’t, and then I’ll have a sense of letting go where I hadn’t realized there was previously tension (both physical and psychological). Then it starts anew with a different pattern elsewhere in the body. If you’re having kriyas and don’t want to, I’ve heard that TRE can help.
What I wish I’d understood earlier
Unfortunately, there’s no generic path that reliably works for everyone. However, there are definitely skill trees, or at least skills that make other skills much easier to attain.
The early Buddhist skill tree goes something like:
Ethical discipline -> concentration -> insight into impermanence, suffering, and no-self
Later Buddhist traditions take the fruition of that path as a prerequisite, and from there you develop insight into nondual awareness, and then bring that out into all aspects of life.
This progression is generally a good one. In a classic metaphor, concentration and insight are likened to using a candle to explore a cave. The candle, concentration, needs to be steady and unwavering if you want to use it to closely examine the interior of the cave (gain insight into reality). Ethical discipline, which doesn’t get talked about much in the West, makes it easier to sit quietly with yourself and concentrate.
It’s also definitely the case that “more advanced” skills also make more foundational skills easier; Romeo Stevens has a great post about that here. In my experience, most Westerners don’t get interested in Buddhist ethical discipline until they’re already pretty serious about meditation, and then they find that it goes surprisingly deep.
There are more nebulous parts of the skill tree that I think are useful to know about because they can occasionally save you a lot of time and/or stop you from uselessly spinning your gears. Things like:
Realizing that Meditation Can Be Fun: mentioning this again because it’s so important. If you don’t like practicing, you won’t practice. Even if you feel good afterwards, it’ll always have the vibe of forcing yourself to eat your veggies, and that will slow you down. So throw the whole skill tree out the window, and just do the practices you like doing, at least at first.
Learning how to run experiments. Another Jhourney infoblessing!4 This deserves its own post, but basically learn how to try things, see if they work, and iterate. This doesn’t need to be super systematized, and eventually you’ll need to learn the skill of just trusting yourself. However, as an advanced beginner, being able to explore a technique with at least some understanding of what the technique is supposed to do for a reasonable period of time, remaining open to being surprised, and seeing if you like the results, is a valuable meta-skill to have.
Systematically rooting out limiting beliefs around meditation, in part by checking your understanding with a teacher or more advanced practitioners. This is obviously a much bigger topic, and probably some of the limiting beliefs that are ostensibly about meditation are actually the Big Problems of your psyche dressed in elephant yoga pants. Others may be simple misunderstandings of what meditation is “supposed” to be like. For instance:
“Meditation progress is supposed to be linear”: hahahaha, no.
“Not even on retreat?” Especially not on retreat.
“I’m scared of turning into a bliss zombie who sits around and jhoons all day!” I have never seen this happen to literally anyone
“I will lose my ambition.” Actually, possibly yes, but only if you choose a path that’s incompatible with being ambitious. Also, meditation tends to reveal and augment what’s realest in you, not turn you into who you wish you were. If that prospect scares you, perhaps consider why.
“Stream entry/awake awareness will fix me!” Counterpoint: 1, 2, 3
“If I were further along, I wouldn’t feel angry/horny/jealous/ashamed.” Difficult emotions can be the path.
Wonder: that which naturally reveals itself when your limiting beliefs loosen. No matter how good you think things are, they can still get better, along dimensions you didn’t know existed. Awakening in Vajrayana is traditionally described as infinite.
Also, you will learn to love the woo. You will unironically start believing in chakras and reading case studies on reincarnation. If you’re a staunch materialist like I was, you may be dragged kicking and screaming into it, but it will happen nonetheless. An example: Realization Process teachers can tell where in your body your attention is, in fairly high resolution, even over Zoom. I watched the creator of RP do this with someone without even looking at them, as effortlessly as though she were describing the color of her shoes.
Personal individuation: assuming you know you want to continue living a semi-normal existence in the regular world, part of the spiritual path involves sitting with the question of who you want to become on a relative level. If you have clear answers, even in the form of negations (who you don’t want to become), make sure your spiritual path is compatible with your personal goals. Many paths when traveled seriously, especially those that trace their lineage to monastic Buddhism, may not be. (I’ll be exploring this in a forthcoming post.)
Loving dharma experientially: this isn’t really a skill, more like an acquired taste. This is maybe a mildly spicy take in my corner of the internet, but reading dharma books is not practicing the dharma. Going to your sangha where everyone sits in a circle and talks about their feelings the whole time is not practicing the dharma. And writing an overstuffed Substack article about dharma is definitely not practicing the dharma.
Those things can be done as practice to great effect. You can be deeply inspired to practice by a sutra or a dharma shitpost. I owe a great debt to countless dharma writers and tweeters.
But real dharma is only and completely experiential. The more you can fall in love with the intrinsic joy of discovering what all this is, the more deeply your path will unfold. As some random forum poster once memorably said, “If you’re hungry, don’t eat the cookbook.”
Get in touch with the part of you that desperately wants to be happy, that yearns to know just one true thing, that could trust life exactly as it is. Practice from there.
Part two, on choosing a path, is here.
Thanks to Nick Cammarata, Kasra Koushan, José Luis Ricón, and Sam Stowers for feedback on earlier drafts!
Headspace, Calm, and the guided meditations you get aggressively spammed with on Insight Timer.
While this seems pretty common, there are also plenty of people who have had big awakening-type experiences without ever going on formal retreat. However, almost everyone needs lots of practice hours to get those experiences, and retreat can be significantly more effective per hour than a short daily practice.
Since I wrote this, there’s actually been some heated discourse on this topic thanks to a joke tweet by Nick, which came from us talking about a draft of this article. So I guess it’s working! Several teachers and advanced practitioners have commented that they’ve experienced this as a phase, and eventually your memory returns or gets better, e.g.:
Despite not practicing the jhanas, I’ll always shill Jhourney as an excellent resource for beginner meditators. It’s my default answer when asked, “where should I go on my first retreat?”
Beautiful writeups lately!
A note on visual snow: I am skeptical about its status as a “disorder” or “hallucination”; AFAICT the visual field simply has a dynamic grain or texture, and this can be noticed. This can become a problem if a person sees it as a problem, obsesses over it, or feels anxious about its meaning. And many do, unfortunately. Same with flashing lights, fields of color, and warpy or “breathing” vision.
After years of meditation, if I relax my visual field and attend there, this all happens. I quite enjoy it. I also have sympathy for the people disturbed by it. It’s very good that warnings about sesnsory changes like this are more widely communicated lately to people interested in meditation and psychedelics (regardless of whether we label these results a form of clarity or a persistent hallucination).
Love.