Dr Frederik G. PferdtFrom Stanford & Google — To You

Ruchika Sikri @FrederikGPferdt - The most painful 20 minutes of my life

28 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:13

In this spoken reflection, Ruchika Sikri recounts a 20‑minute meditation session held on a Thursday at 2 PM in the Zaragoza conference room (Building 40). She describes the experience as the most excruciatingly painful twenty minutes of her life, marked by overwhelming bodily sensations, racing thoughts, and intense emotional turbulence. Initially, she tried to cope by moving, fighting, and becoming feverish, but when she stopped, the mental “demons” surfaced. As the session concluded and the bell rang, she unexpectedly felt a shift toward calm, leaving her puzzled about the sudden change. The narrative highlights the raw, embodied struggle of sitting with one’s inner chaos during meditation and the surprising emergence of tranquility at the end.

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It was the most excruciatingly painful 20 minutes of my life. I saw a sign on the Zaragoza conference room in Building 40, as if you would remember, where it said, "We meditate here every Thursday at 2 PM." And I walked in one of the Thursdays, and I sat there. And as I've mentioned before, you know, in my book as well, that it was the most excruciatingly painful 20 minutes of my life because I didn't know what was going on. And later I realized the agony Agony was like sitting with all of the craziness that is going on in our brain and our body, the sensations, the thoughts, the feelings. And the way we— I used to cope with it is to move more and fight more and be more feverish. And when I kind of just stopped, all of it was like the demons that just showed up in front. But towards the end of it, when the bell rang, I felt some sort of calm, and I'm like, What was that? Like, I was feeling so unsettled through these 20 minutes, but something shifted.