I Sat In Silence For 240 Hours - Here's How It Changed Me Forever

Have you ever thought about going through your entire life having never once been present with your own thoughts? When someone said that to me, I was like, holy shit, I need to change that. So I signed up for a Vipassana. I feel like I've finally had enough time to sit with my thoughts after sitting in silence for 10 full days to be able to now come in front of a camera and share my experience. I did a 10-day silent meditation retreat where I wasn't allowed to talk. No reading, no writing, no exercise, no music for 10 full days. It's called Vipassana meditation, which is the meditation practice that I did. It was a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Delaware. And when I showed up on the first day, you basically just hand in your phone. They give you your room assignment and then you're given what is now the curriculum for the next 10 days. But before I want to get into any of the details about what actually went on when I was there, I want to talk about what actually prompted me to even want to sit in silence for 10 days. So I have a friend Luke who did a Vipassana meditation, who posted about it on Instagram, and I came across it and was super interested. And I had one thought, which I'll pose to you if you're watching this video. Could you imagine going through your entire lifetime having never been present once in your own thoughts? We live in a world of chaos and distraction. You're either talking to someone watching something, listening to something, on your phone, always distracting your mind. And yeah, sure, maybe you've meditated for 30 minutes before, or maybe you do it every day, or you turn your phone off for one day at a time. But I realized that that isn't actually being truly present in your thoughts. And after talking to Luke, I realized even further that going into a 10-day silent meditation retreat is essentially a sensory deprivation where they are taking away as many outside factors as possible to allow you to quiet your mind, to actually be in your thoughts, to not only learn a lot about yourself, but to experience mental stillness. So what Vipassana meditation is, to be clear, this is a practice that has been around for thousands of years at this point, and the idea of the practice itself is to retrain the habit pattern of your mind. So all the sensations that you get in your body are either through feelings of aversion, anger, or craving and clinging. So the idea is that when you meditate and you're in a deep meditative state and you tap into your subconscious— I don't know if you've ever meditated before— you have maybe gotten this weird, like, gross sensation in your leg where you're, like, sitting for a while and you want to move because it's very uncomfortable. Or you have, like, this very euphoric feeling that you get attached to that you don't want to go away. Those sensations that you have when you're in a subconscious state of meditation are past experiences in your life that that are resurfacing in the form of sensations. The idea is that throughout this meditation practice, if you can retrain the habit pattern of your mind to remain equanimous and aware, to not react to these feelings, it will essentially allow you in your conscious life to live a more fulfilling life because you are not reacting to these feelings of aversion and craving, which ultimately lead to misery. So the idea is that throughout 10 days, you allow yourself to minimize as much distraction from the outside world to learn how to observe your respiration and really tap into a part of your mind that I would say 99% of people have never experienced before. I can say that now, having done it. And one of the other important lessons to note here is that while you might understand what I'm about to share from an intellectual level, it doesn't mean that you'll be able to relate at an experiential level because the feelings that you can extract from doing a 10-day silent meditation retreat and the places that your mind will go, it's not really something that will do justice by just articulating it through words. But the point of this video is really for me to just share my experience and the key takeaways that I got from doing it, and ultimately help you decide if it's something that maybe you want to explore. So when I talked to my friend Luke, his advice to me was to go into this experience blind, because if you hear about someone else's experience, it might create some sort of expectation for you when you go into it. So I preface this in saying it's important for you to know that, right? Like, this video, the importance of it is for me to share my experience for someone who might be interested, but just know if you're someone who might be super influenced by what other people go through, that it's okay if you want to stop watching at this point forward. I'm not going to necessarily share every single detail, but I will share the general curriculum that we followed, and then I'll get into my key takeaways from the experience itself. So as I mentioned, showed up on the first day, handed in the— our phone, and they gave us a curriculum that we were basically going to follow for the next 10 days. Wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning. From 4:30 AM to 6:30 AM would be a group meditation. From 6:30 AM to 7:15 7:15 to 8 AM you had a break time so you can either go for a walk or rest. A group meditation from 9 AM to 11 AM was a solo meditation, and then from 11 AM to 11:45 was lunch. 11:45 to 1 was a break time. That was also the only opportunity throughout the 10 days to be able to talk. You could actually schedule a 5-minute session with the assistant teacher to be able to just talk about your practice to make sure that things were going as planned. Plan and to ensure that you were aware of the things you should be aware of to make sure that you can extract as much out of the experience as possible. And then from 1 to 5 PM was another group meditation and then a solo meditation. From 5 to 5:45 was a tea break. So you would have tea and fruit for first-timers. 5:45 to 7 o'clock was a group meditation. And then from 7 to 8:15 was a discourse where you'd watch a video talking about a different component of the practice. And then 8:15 to 9:00 was a group meditation, lights out at 9:30. Sounds extremely daunting. Someone listening to that who has never done it before is probably like, oh my God, I can't imagine. Because you are effectively meditating for anywhere between 9 and 10 hours a day. In between, you have 2 meals, as I mentioned, and then you have a couple opportunities to like go for walks or to rest. As someone who lives in New York City in a very fast-paced environment, I run my own company, which is also extremely fast-paced, and I'm around a lot of people that are very ambitious who are also very fast-paced. The concept of being able to turn my mind off and be in this state of essentially calmness and quiet in my own mind for 10 days, really hard to fathom. Having done it, I realized that A lot of us are just a product of our own environment. When you are put into that scenario, although it might seem very daunting, if you lean into it and embrace it, it allows you to just be really in tune with your body and your mind. The way that I would describe it to you is if I were to try to tell a wild dog to sit, why would it listen to me? You've never trained it to sit before. Your, your mind works the same exact way, right? Like if I tell you right now to close your eyes and to breathe through your nose and try to observe your respiration and think about nothing but your breath, your mind is probably going to wander in like a couple seconds because you've never been trained to do so. So the idea is that if you're doing this for 10 hours a day for 10 days straight with no other distractions, you're eventually going to be super in tune with your body and your mind and your sensations, and you allow yourself to quiet your mind, which will then basically resurface experiences from your subconscious, which manifest into these sensations. Where you have the opportunity to essentially sit with them and work through them. And ultimately, this is an opportunity to basically strip your ego away entirely and confront reality as it is. I think oftentimes we find ourselves living in a society where you play a role based on the people that you're with. You put a certain front on because people have expectations for you. This is the one situation in your life where there is no expectations. Your ego is completely stripped away. It is you versus your mind. There are other people around you, but you can't talk. You can't make eye contact. Imagine going into a dining hall every single day for 2 meals. I sat next to the same person for 10 days in a row for 2 meals a day, technically 3 because the 3rd one we would— we were able to have tea and we did not exchange a word with each other until the 10-day practice was over. Imagine what goes through your mind. Think about all the conscious thoughts you have. Multiply that by like a million and then think about all the subconscious thoughts that manifest in the form of sensations through your meditation practice. And obviously those thoughts are also running through your mind. What this experience essentially allows you to do is think about everything in your life and honestly to confront things that you've never wanted to confront in your life, whether it's trauma, whether it's relationships that went sour, whether it was people you mistreated. It allows you to think about the relationships in your life that you value, to ensure that you're spending time with the right people, to ensure you made the right decisions. And even think about it like professionally, are you spending your time on the things you want to be spending your time on? I found that an experience like this really allowed me to escape from all the external factors, to really just be with me and my own thoughts, to ultimately learn a lot about myself, understand why I am the way that I am, understand where there are maybe pitfalls in my life that I want to improve, to ultimately use this mechanism as a way to confront front maybe some of the challenges that I was facing. And while the discourse that is shared with you is basically as if you want to become a monk, I recognize that if I just walked away from this experience even 1% better, that it would be a net positive for me. And if there are any habits or realizations I had that I can carry back into my everyday life, I think it would make me a better son, a better friend, a better partner, uh, both romantically and professionally. And I realized that this was probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but at the same time, the most rewarding. It is the definition of delayed gratification. One of the things I did after this experience was sat down and journaled about it. I waited a couple days before doing so because I had a very volatile mind, and it was pretty jarring coming back into, you know, everyday life. You go from not looking at technology to 10 days to opening your phone for the first time. And so many thoughts are going through your head. So I sat with it for a couple days and then wrote down my biggest takeaways and finally feel comfortable enough to share them with you. So I'm just gonna go through my journal one by one and read what I consider to be the biggest takeaways from this experience. And I'm gonna— the order, the order in which I'm gonna read these takeaways that I wrote in my journal are not necessarily in order of biggest takeaway to Smallest takeaway: it's just the order in which they came to me and I wrote about them in my journal. So the first one: you will evolve into the person you tell yourself you are, even if it's not true. I subscribe to this narrative that I was a chaotic person because I thought the idea of it was fitting, because I lived in a busy neighborhood, always liked being around people, move a million miles a minute in every area of my life, possess an all-in mentality, and struggled to sit still. For some reason, I thought it's a characteristic of ambitious people. What I realized from 10 days in silence is in fact I'm not that person. I do enjoy solitude and can slow down to operate with more presence and intentionality. The realization is actually that us humans are products of our own environment. It might take more intentionality to alter your surroundings because it goes against your habit patterns, but exposing yourself to different environments is when you learn who you are. I'm not a chaotic person, I'm just super committed to maximizing my opportunities. So in a fast, ambitious place like New York City, I'll lean in. But put me in nature, I'll also watch the trees and lean in just differently. And the thing I'll reference from this experience, uh, going off of this takeaway, is the outdoor walks that we had every day. I swear to God, I feel like I'm qualified now to give a course about squirrels. I would stand and watch squirrels for like 20 minutes at a time, because when you're in nature and your sensations are amplified, right, like my sense of smell, sight, uh, hearing, etc., because there's nothing that's distracting you. You start to just take in everything around you and observe reality as it is. And while I've always lived my life in this narrative that I'm a super chaotic person and thought it was a cool thing, I realize it's completely not true. And if you just label yourself something and keep telling yourself that it is true, eventually you'll manifest it to be the case. And so I think that takeaway through this experience basically made me realize that you you really should just observe reality as it is and don't make judgments or tell yourself things that aren't true. Just let it happen as it should. Second takeaway: everything in life is impermanent, and when you realize that and internalize it, it will change how you react to situations, both positive and negative, who you spend your time with, what you spend your time on, and how you let the outside world's perception of you impact you day to day. The most crucial part of impermanence— our own life. If you've wanted to pursue that new hobby, post that thing on the internet, make that career switch, or cut that relationship out of your life, but fear prevents you, just remember that feeling of fear is impermanent, and so is the emotion someone else might hold about the situation. Create a life worth living. That might be the most powerful takeaway that I had, because when you're sitting still for on and off for 10 hours a day, obviously you have these moments where you're like, oh my God, it's never going to end, when am I going to get out of here? And one moment you're thinking about how long it is, and the next moment you're staring off into nature, and the next moment you're sitting eating something. The idea is to just understand that everything is impermanent, and I think that is One of the most important takeaways from this video is by observing your breath and just paying attention to it, you forget about these fleeting feelings, right? So if you're bored, if you're nervous, knowing that that feeling of boredom or those feelings of nerves will eventually dissipate, but actually trusting that that's truth through experience, it allows you to just react a lot less to situations, whether they're those that will make you super angry or those that make you super happy, knowing that they are going to go away at some point. Remaining equanimous is a way to just allow you to live a more fulfilling life because you don't let that volatility result in disappointment. Takeaway number 3: we underestimate how much our present and future selves are dictated by how we reacted to situations in our past. Every experience, positive and negative, gets buried in our subconscious, which will influence how we see the world. This takeaway can sound woo-woo, but until you experience deep meditation and these experiences start coming back to the surface of your body in the form sensations into your mind with vivid detail. We underestimate how much our present and future selves are dictated by how we reacted to situations in our past. I recounted the time my chair was pulled out from under me in the cafeteria in 9th grade in front of the entire school, and I dropped my food everywhere. Humiliating, obviously. Big deal in the grand scheme of things, no. But did that memory subconsciously influence how I responded to future situations? Probably. When you make peace with your past, both with experiences and people, it makes for a more harmonious future. This realization or takeaway made me realize that there are a lot of moments in my life, both conscious and subconscious, where things happen and you react a certain way and you don't think of it again, but it actually impacts you a lot, right? Like I talked about the experience of having my chair pulled out from under me in front of the entire school, which was quite humiliating. I also have another experience that I've never shared before publicly, which was basically after my freshman second year of college, my assistant coach on the hockey team called me to basically tell me that I wasn't big enough, strong enough, fast enough, my shot wasn't hard enough, I had a bad attitude, and I should take a long hard look in the mirror and decide what kind of person I wanted to be if I wanted to come back and be on the team for my second year of school. Obviously, hearing something like that after spending 20 years of your life trying to get to that position is the most deflating thing a coach could tell you. And yeah, some people might respond to negative feedback, right? Some, based on your personality, will take the negative well versus positive. For me, I realized that that experience created such an insecurity inside of me of never being good enough and always making sure that I was doing the most to overcompensate. And that experience and that realization was the first time that I felt like I was able to confront it as it really was and come to peace with it. Like, I don't resent my coach anymore. I'm very at peace with the situation, but I'm grateful that I was able to uncover where a lot of that insecurity was coming from. All right, takeaway 3: the deepest, most profound thoughts and ideas in your mind are stuck behind a world of distraction and consumerism. It's well known that many successful artists will attribute their craft to seeking boredom as a vehicle for breakthroughs, and on the intellectual level it makes sense, But until you can relate at a deep experiential level, you won't be able to fully understand. I'm not talking about 30 minutes of meditation or turning your phone off for a day. I'm talking about full stimulation deprivation for an extended period of time because it will sharpen your senses, let you observe reality as it really is, and dig through layers of thought to curate space for the gold. We have millions of conscious and subconscious thoughts every day that get convoluted and distracted by the world around us. We live on overdrive and overstimulation, but get desensitized into assuming it's normal, but it's not. Trust me when I tell you, walking in quiet nature and observing your breath for 10 hours a day taps into a part of your brain you can't access because of your phone, advertisements, books, among many other things. We're fed signal after signal, which trumps independent, unique thought. Deprivation leads to breakthroughs. I know that a lot of people have heard that takeaway before in the form of how artists seek boredom as a means to be creative. And while I understood what that meant, I can truly internalize that now. Going away in nature, disconnecting from technology, and quieting your mind and getting a lot of the thoughts that are on it out of it allow you to face reality and think creatively without there being so many external inputs is ultimately the takeaway that I had through doing this experience. Takeaway number 4: The single most important decision you'll ever make is who you choose to spend your life with. In 10 days on a solo mission will force you to pressure test that. To a degree that you never have before. If I could distill that well-known point down into more specificity through my lens, it would be this: spend your life with someone who is open-minded and fully aware and supportive of your dreams, someone who shares the same lifestyle choices as you, fierce loyalty, and the person that you want to introduce to everyone in your life. It's the biggest superpower. When I met Julia, every single bucket in my life has improved. I honestly don't have much more to say on that takeaway other than when you know, you know. Confronting the reality as to why you're with someone, it will answer all your unknown questions on if you should spend the rest of your life with that person. Takeaway number 5: nobody else can do your inner work for you. I believe it's hard to know your level of self-love until the only thing you have is your thoughts. It's very easy to go through an entire lifetime without confronting ourselves because most people don't want to. You can survive unwavering dopamine hits, but that won't give you the truth. With 10 days of silence, it will become obvious what's stopping you or holding you back from the next level of self-love. But people are too scared to wait for that delayed gratification. It was the hardest yet most rewarding experience in my life because on the other side of a painful few days were the obvious signals I needed to recalibrate in areas of my life that felt off. If you've watched my videos before, you know that I'm someone who likes to do extreme things, and I like to push myself to just see what's possible. And I would describe this experience as probably the hardest thing I've ever done, yet the most profound. And the concept of delayed gratification is so real because there were moments every single day throughout 10 days where all I could think to myself was, oh my God, when is this gonna end? I'm never gonna make it through. But pushing to the other side of it by far the most rewarding experience in my life. Takeaway number 6: every human on the planet should have the privilege of experiencing how powerful the mind is at least once in their lifetime. We are conditioned with limiting beliefs and let fear stop us from exploring. I barely meditated a day in my life before embarking on this journey, but on day 7, when I could— actually, I don't know if I want to share. I feel like sharing the pinnacle experience is probably the only thing that I'm not going to share in this video because I feel like that will be the thing that you will seek and come to on your own. Just know that it happened to me on day 7. Takeaway number 7: always lead with empathy because you never know what others are going through. When I met a few people on the last day, I realized that despite the fact that externally you see a bunch of people sitting peacefully with eyes closed and hands crossed in a meditation hall, it does not mean the mind is as quiet. By being surrounded with such a diverse group, my worldview greatly expanded because I could never begin to imagine the trauma that some people are dealing with until hearing the stories. I would say this is one of the most impactful takeaways from this experience. When you walk into a meditation hall specifically, as I mentioned, everyone looks the same, right? Like they're all sitting cross-legged or straight-legged, hands either on their knees or hands crossed, eyes closed, peacefully breathing. What you don't realize until you're part of that is the spectrum of thoughts running through every individual's head at any given time. Extremely different. You have one person who is working through childhood trauma that is surfacing in their mind that makes it extremely hard to do this, and the person next to them might be thinking about comedy skits or coming up with jokes, laughing to themselves. It's really crazy because you can't talk to people throughout these 10 days. So every time we'd come and go, come and go, you start the same way and you end the same way, but everyone's journey throughout it is so different. Like, I had certain hours where I could sit for an hour and not of muscle and it was very manageable. There were other hours that I walked out of there completely sweating, actually in pain, but everyone walks out the same way. So all you think is, oh my God, I wonder if you were thinking the same thing I was or feeling the same thing I was. But you learn about this experience is that it's unique to you. So even if you're still watching this video and you're learning something from it, just know that although you might understand it at the intellectual level, it does not mean you're gonna understand it at the experiential level. And if anything, I hope this video inspires you to explore what your mind and your body is capable of, but don't think that you're gonna have anything close to the experience I had because you won't, because our past, present, and futures are very unique to us. Last takeaway, retraining the habit pattern of your mind to remain equanimous and aware during sensations of aversion and craving will make you a better entrepreneur. You knew that every single video was gonna end with something related to founders, 'cause those are the people that are listening of my videos. At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is a series of macro outcomes driven by micro decisions. Better headspace to make decisions, better decisions, better outcomes. That was by far the craziest thing I've ever done in my entire life. And I thought about it in terms of like, what are the tangible things that I've done differently since I did this experience? And there are a couple noticeable things despite the fact that it's only been a couple weeks that I'll share with you. First one, I stopped sleeping with my phone in my room. Because I didn't have a phone for 10 days, I realized that every single day, if you set your alarm on your phone and it's on your dresser next to you and you wake up and the first thing you do is grab it, it's very natural. All of us do it. You open your text messages, your emails, Instagram, every single notification, and all of a sudden you are just flooding your brain with all sorts of signals where your brain just goes into overdrive before you even have a chance to like wake up and settle into your next day. So sleeping with no phone in my room is a new habit that I've adopted. I have not slipped up for a day. I have a battery-powered alarm clock, and I wake up and try to start my day with anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes of meditation. It's important to note that I'm not super strict about it, right? Like, you have to have a little bit of grace with yourself. Of course, ideally everyone can do it for an hour in the morning, an hour at night, but your life happens. That's not reality for me based on all the other things going on. And then I would say the second most tangible thing that I've carried into my everyday life is basically being able to catch myself in moments where I'm about to get aggravated or getting too fixated and excited about something. This concept of knowing that every feeling is impermanent, it's something that I've really tried to embody to be able to just not get so stressed out about things. And I'll give you a fun anecdote. Uh, 2 days after I got home, I have this piece of art that was hanging on the wall that my mom made. It's basically all the hockey sticks from college and all my teammates. She basically took all our sticks and built a piece of art out of it. That fell off the wall, landed on top of 6 wine glasses, all shattered. The entire kitchen was destroyed. And for those of you who know me personally know the past version of Ben would have absolutely freaked out, called a bunch of people, been anxious all day and not been able to get anything done because I'd been so hyperfixated on that. Despite the fact that 4 days later it would have been gone and I would've been over it, but I would never have been able to get back all those hours of frustration and of being unproductive. In that moment, I actually stood there and was breathing for a couple seconds, took out my phone, texted Julia, and I was like, "I just wanted to know, this picture fell off the wall, shattered." And I was able to actually not overreact because it's impermanent, right? So I think it's just the self-talk and the little habits that you carry into your life are the biggest takeaways for me. My advice to you, if you're interested in doing it, number one, you'll know when your time is to do it. It's an extreme undertaking, right? Like disconnecting from the world for 10 days, you need to make sure that you have the ability to do so. And the other thing I would say is don't underestimate yourself. Don't talk yourself out of it. Understand that getting to know your mind better and getting to know yourself better, I think, is a net positive experience for every single human, whether it makes you 1% better or 100% better. I don't really see a world where it makes you a worse version of yourself if you can actually stick out the 10 days. So to close this thought out, I 10 out of 10 recommend everyone should try it at least once in their life. As to when, that's for you to decide. That was probably the most vulnerable video that I've put out to date. Um, it feels good. It feels like a weight off my shoulder. I feel like I'm starting to warm up to really letting you guys in to, to seeing what the other side of my life looks like, and I'm excited to keep sharing videos. So I would appreciate it, as someone who's very new to this journey, if you could like, comment, subscribe below. We'll be back with another video next week. Peace.