A year ago, I went through a breakup that plunged me into an intense depression. The pain was indescribable. I was never quite the same person again. The experience fundamentally changed how I viewed myself through a more compassionate lens of humanity and altered the ways I showed up in a romantic relationship, creating a heightened state of hypervigilance towards my behavioral patterns necessary in learning to build a sustainable relationship based on mutual trust and respect. I made these personal growth changes through a body of self-work I painstakingly built for close to a year now. Commitment to self-work is a lifelong learning process that never stops as students of life. I deployed a multi-modal approach to focusing on personal growth, optimizing what worked, and adding on new modalities to accelerate my learning and growth, as depicted in this simple diagram below:
There isn’t a one size fits all methodology to self-work. You just need to continuously experiment with what works best for you, just scale what works and disengage from what doesn’t. My self-work modalities are divided primarily into non-clinical and clinical interventions that are meant to form a holistic approach canvassing four major life spheres: biological, social, psychological and spiritual.
I experimented with talk therapy, prescription drugs, positive psychology practices such as gratitude journaling, volunteering and more. My largest financial investments in self-work went to relationship coaching with Evan Marc Katz and my psychology coursework at The School of Positive Psychology (TSPP), both of which I’ve spent 5 figures on for each modality. Evan is a very good coach if you’re dating with an intention for marriage. Unfortunately, I had no substantial cases of note to discuss with him during our coaching sessions, and I felt that impacted the efficacy of our work. I wished I had engaged him sooner when I was in a relationship, because I think I would have benefited way more from his relationship coaching, as I didn’t need as much help with dating. As depressed as I was, I knew I had optionality in choosing who I want to share my life with.
To deepen my knowledge in psychology and to equip myself with basic psychotherapy skills, I enrolled in a TSPP course in Q119. After work, I spent my weeknights in night classes, cramming for assignments, making presentations, and reading voraciously on psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotional agility, and more. This has been a great investment of my time and I connected with like-minded students who are passionate about mental health care and understanding the human mind. I view psychology as a multidisciplinary transferable skillset: cutting across culture building in organizational development, understanding consumer behavior to form marketing strategies and the driving forces in behavioral finance. On a personal level, it has helped me form higher quality relationships with my friends and family, and unlocked valuable insights into my own behavioral patterns and the underlying core beliefs perpetuating them.
My Vipassana retreat was the last self-work modality I completed for the year. It is a 10 day silent meditation retreat, which is a large time commitment by general AL standards. However, it is a wonderful investment of time and I would highly encourage everyone to give this meditation technique a trial as it is completely life-changing. The tradeoff: Vipassana retreats are not holidays, but rather, a mental purification process that requires strong determination, self-awareness an equanimity to work diligently during the 10 days. This would be my 6th retreat since I began Vipassana 9 years ago, marking 60 days of intensive Vipassana practice to date. I always write long reflective pieces after every retreat as I always leave with new learnings from every retreat I attend.
Vipassana is “a way of self-transformation through self-observation”. An ancient meditation technique that has been preserved in its purest form by a long lineage of monks for over 2,500 years, its origins can be traced back to Siddartha Gautama the Buddha, who taught Dhamma (the law of nature, the path of liberation) and practiced Vipassana meditation to achieve mental purification, and eventually, enlightenment. Vipassana practice is based on the Dhamma teachings of maintaining perfect sila (morality), samadhi (mastery of the mind) and paññā (wisdom, or insight that purifies the mind).
The course structure is rigorous: students wake at 4AM everyday and meditate for 10 hours daily until lights out at 9PM. Each student is required observe Noble Silence and keep to themselves to ensure laser focus in their meditation practice. No form of entertainment is allowed, no electronics or reading materials, no yoga is allowed either. Student quarters are spartan, and we share dorm rooms in Kulim and communal toilets. One basically lives like a monk or a nun for 10 days. I have been waking up at 4AM for the past 11 days to meditate – and as a night owl, it felt strange that I could wake up at that hour feeling alert.
As an old student, I ate twice a day, once at 630AM and last meal is at 11AM, leaving a 16-hour fasting gap similar to intermittent fasting schedules. Meals are simple, healthy vegetarian fare. I don’t overeat and only keep my stomach half-full so I don’t get drowsy during meditation. The trade-off is that I go to bed hungry, but hunger is just a sensation that will pass eventually. One just becomes aware of that reality and just breathes through it calmly.The most important takeaways for me this year was learning acceptance and maintaining equanimity of the mind whilst being self-aware. Breakdown of my 10 days are as follows:
Day 0: D-Day Begins
The course manager took away our phones. We were given an orientation of the course and then sat for an evening meditation in the hall.
Days 1-4: Experiencing Acceptance
Anapana meditation (observation of natural breath) was taught, and I found myself struggling to accept that my mind has wandered, or that there is a pain in my leg forming into the 4th hour sitting in a lotus position. I was fighting myself, and not dropping into acceptance and surrender of the reality of the moment. My old habit patterns are still fighting to preserve my old ways of being – wandering thoughts, some abstract, some not so abstract. Memories. Dreams. Regrets. Fears. Sorrows. Joys. Tears. They all surfaced and collided with one another, jostling for my attention. And then there is the reality of physical pain, of having my legs bound in a static position for hours on end. The pain is screaming as loud as a megaphone, seeking to distract my mind at all costs.I kept thinking to myself – I need to FIGHT this pain. I need to PERSEVERE. That just caused way more misery for me and more pain, because I was in exact opposition of what I ought to be doing, which was to ACCEPT the situation I was in.
I managed to get less wound up by dropping that fight against myself, and in that moment, I experienced self-acceptance. Acceptance that I do have this pain in my legs, or that my mind did wander. Acceptance that I have gone away from my meditation for a little while, but now I have come back to the present. In this moment, all that exists is breath – nothing but bare breath. Those moments are pure, objective moments in perceiving reality as it is – free from illusions, delusions, cravings to wanted events or aversions to unwanted events – and this is the kind of insight that Vipassana practice aims to cultivate in our daily lives.Imagine how hard it was to maintain that kind of reality-based, objective perspective within the framework of our own minds, even for a few moments. Imagine what its like when we start perceiving events happening around us, every minute, every hour of our lives without that kind of objectivity. As a pessimist, I’d be filtering everything through a lens that is extremely unforgiving on myself and others – rigid, misguided, distorted, myopic – causing so much misery. It’s up to us to alter that lens to reflect change, compassion, love and acceptance within ourselves – which will then affect the way we see the world. The world is in effect a mirror of our own inner reality. We fight with others because we first started fighting with ourselves. Imagine what life would look like if we all started loving and accepting ourselves for who we are?
This particularly powerful insight of acceptance resonated with me in how Sheryl Sandberg coped with the loss of her husband. She bore a huge burden of guilt and grief, thinking that somehow his death was her fault. If only she was there, she could have saved him. If only she knew what was happening to him earlier. I, too, bore a similar burden of guilt. Had I known about the symptoms of depression and anxiety earlier, I would have been able to be a less negative person in the past. But no one could have recognized it for what it was because I was still high functioning – but all I saw was darkness and negativity. It took me a few good months to recognize depression and anxiety for what it was. Vipassana helped me with my acceptance practice in this part of my life – to accept that my mind had stayed in the past and accumulated this burden of guilt in the process. Now it’s time to bring my mind back to the present, where more battles await.
Day 5: Release the Krakens, but Don’t Feed Them
Vipassana was given, and students were taught how to work directly with their subconscious patterns, by actively engaging in objective observation of physical sensations within the framework of the body. An objective observation of our bodily sensations, no matter how imperceptible, whether pleasant or unpleasant – is one moment less spent in emotional reactivity, and one moment more spent in self-awareness and equanimity. The aim of Vipassana is to increase more moments in the latter state of mind. Reason being: it should not come as a surprise that our subconscious drives most of our emotional patterns, whether realized or unrealized, whereas our conscious mind cognizes and tries to interpret why we did what we did. This begets a similar analogy to how our communication is 93% non-verbal and 7% verbal.
Our subconscious is where our sleeping mental defilements, the krakens of our minds lie dormant, until they get triggered. The moment you start meditating at this level, your subconscious patterns get manifested in the form of pleasant or unpleasant sensations in your body. The more equanimous you are, the more effective the meditation technique is in lessening the reactive effect of these sensations in your mind. You would be able to observe pain as pain, not as “this pain which is associated with <insert limiting> belief which is preventing me from achieving <insert goal>.” Perpetuating these limiting beliefs ultimately result in maladaptive behavioral patterns that keep us in darkness, deep in the belly of our krakens. Amidst our doubts and fears, Vipassana helps become our light in the darkness. When we switch on the light, the darkness has no choice but to flee. I finally saw the krakens for what they truly are – as illusions of my own mind.
Left unchecked, the more insidious part of keeping up our illusions is that we won’t realize the magnitude of the emotional damage we can cause to ourselves or others once our krakens come alive, until its too late. The krakens feed off fear, all kinds of negativity. The best way is to starve them out – by stopping the generation of fear, hatred, ill-will, and other negative emotions. How? By remaining self-aware and equanimous. Be aware of the krakens’ existence but discharge the fear and negativity through the lens of objective observation. The longer we are in an equanimous mindset, the faster the krakens will eventually weaken and die out over time. Of course, such a simple universal law of nature can be very difficult to apply in practice, as illustrated in the next 2 days.
Day 5-6: Fighting the Enemy of Self-Doubt
I was hit by a bout of bad period cramps on Day 5 which left me light-headed and in a lot of physical pain. Guess Buddha didn’t say anything about killer menses. I felt like writing off that entire day because I felt my meditation practice was just crap. Working with other subtler sensations aside from pain was a big struggle for me. I was very aware of the pain, but my equanimity kept getting overwhelmed over and over by the pain. It was an extremely frustrating day for me. On Day 6, the cramps eased up, which I was thankful for, but now I had to deal with the mental pain of self-doubt. I was in fight mode again, fighting to keep my body still during an addithant sitting. I felt like I couldn’t carry on and my mind wanted to flee the situation. As a result, I started doubting my ability to meditate, which triggered a negative pattern of self-judgment for not being able to focus well on my meditation. It was a downward negative spiral that was an all too familiar habit pattern of my mind that is constantly too harsh and critical of my own best efforts. At night, I went to bed, exhausted out of my mind over the past two days, unsure of what the next day will bring.
Day 7: Breakthrough
I woke up at 4AM feeling an expansive sense of calm and tranquility. I could focus and concentrate my mind easily. Nothing seemed to take away my equanimity that day. I tested my mind with distracting thoughts. They just melted away as I continued to focus on my meditation. Sensations changed, came and went, but I was still able to maintain the same level of self-awareness and equanimity. My mind remained in this calm, restful and equanimous state long after the lights went out at 9PM. It was the best rest I had given to my mind in 2 years since my last Vipassana retreat.
Day 8-10: Maintaining Equanimity
The next 3 days were spent in active meditation and reflection on finetuning my meditation technique in an urban environment. I realized that in the past, I was able to observe sensations easily and sit with them, but I lacked the equanimity to discharge my emotions peacefully. Instead, I continued observing my sensations with building resentment, multiplying my misery by suppressing my suffering. As a result, my meditation resulted in rumination, and eventually, self-sabotage or external projection of my negativity when I could not suppress it any longer. The opposite of such negative reactivity is equanimity. Reactivity is linked to achieving instant gratification of what the ego craves for or avoids. This reactive part of the ego is defined as the “id” by Freud – it is child-like, instinctive, craves pleasure and avoids pain. Wrapped around the concept of ego is what is defined as me, myself, and I. Reactivity stems from the ego being unable to self-regulate or detach from its fixation of its cravings and desires to fulfill what the “I” wants, which is ultimately rooted in self-interest, self-centeredness, self-preservation. The opposite of self-centeredness is selflessness. By maintaining an equanimity practice, the state of selflessness becomes easier to embody, which leads to acts of unconditional love. The missing key to my practice was always in maintaining my equanimity, without generating further traces of craving or aversion when sitting with sensations.
For the rest of the retreat, I never achieved the same level of mental clarity I had in Day 7, but I accepted it smilingly. This was equanimity in action in my life – maintaining the balance of my mind, no matter what the vicissitudes of life brings.
Day 11: From Brightness to Brightness
On the last day, we were assigned cleaning tasks around the center. I scrubbed the kitchen floors and helped out in the meditation hall. The students quickly found their voices again and all of us started making friends and sharing our life experiences. I felt peaceful and content, like I was in a safe harbor with other deeply spiritual friends, about to embark on our next adventure in life with more mindfulness and more clarity.
As we move forward in 2020, may all beings be happy and blessed.