295 - Doing the Inner Work: Learnings from Vipassana Meditation with Myriam Hadnes

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Myriam Hadnes, and with the Workshops Work podcast, I'm on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today on the show, it's only me, as I'm just returning from a 10-day silent meditation retreat called Vipassana. And I'm very eager to share my experience. And what the method is about is we speak a lot about doing the inner work as facilitators, team leaders, managers, anyone actually, and how beneficial it is for the work we do with groups. So I wanted to share one perspective on what it means to do the inner work from my experience with Vipassana. I hope you enjoyed the show. Yesterday I returned from a 10-day silent meditation retreat that's called Vipassana, following the teachings of Goenka. And it was my 5th retreat already practicing the same method. And since every time I've been doing that was transformative, I felt the real urge to share some reflections, insights, and also to share about the method. Because I realized that as facilitators, we often speak about the inner work. We have to do the inner work in order for us to hold the group. And then the question is, what does it mean, the inner work? How do we do the inner work? What is it? And when I speak about the inner work, it is What happens inside of us so that we can stay connected to ourselves and balanced and grounded, independent of what happens outside of us. So while the outer work is the content, the subject matter expertise, the methods, the activities, the inner work is who we are as a person and how we show up in the world. And I imagine it a little bit like being a tree. With strong roots. And if our roots are strong, then even if we're in a storm, we might shake, we might move, but we don't fall over. And that's why the inner work is so important. So before I share what my personal takeaways are and what the method of Vipassana is, also because many have asked me how it was and what it means and How it's possible to actually sit for 10 hours per day for 10 days in a row in silence without speaking, without reading, without writing. How on earth is that possible? And why would you do this to yourself? I was having the last meal at 11:30 in the morning until 6:30 the next day after having the wake-up call at 4 AM. But more about this later. Also, disclaimer, when I speak about the inner work of a facilitator, I also want to emphasize that it's not only about facilitators. I think everyone who is hosting groups, especially leaders and managers, and also parents, everyone should do the inner work because we are so used to be reactive. Something happens outside and We react, we shout, we get nervous, we are overwhelmed. And then, and this is how fights emerge and how we get into conflicts and have the impression that they're unresolvable. So doing the inner work is basically growing the capacity to get rid of our baggage, or at least to leave it at the door as soon as we step into a space with other human beings, so that we can be balanced and take decisions and actions according to our values and to what's right. And Instead of reacting to whatever triggers happen. Because as a matter of fact, we cannot change anyone around us. We cannot change any participant, any team member, any family member. We know how hard it is to change ourselves. So even if we want our dearest, our spouses or partners to change, we cannot ask them to change. We cannot control them. So the only thing we can change and that we can control is ourselves. And this is mainly important when we are working with groups. So there's always the difficult participant, there's always the difficult team member. And as a matter of fact is nobody is difficult when they're alone in a vacuum. We're only difficult in relationship to others. And usually it's not about the other person, but it's about us. So for instance, if I get annoyed by someone who is sharing their stories and taking a lot of space, air quotes, and has a story to tell for everything that pops up, I might get annoyed and think, oh, they're taking so much space and who is interested in these stories? And at the same time, someone else might feel very inspired. Same behavior, very different reaction. So is it about the person who's sharing their stories? No, it's about how it resonates or doesn't with us and the story we tell ourselves around this behavior. So if we're this person who gets annoyed, then we are suffering because we get this itch that we want to run away, we want to change them, we want to change the situation, we want to get out of it, but we cannot. We could, maybe we can stand up and leave, but under normal circumstances, especially when we are facilitators, we cannot. And then how do we find this balance to just stand there, hold the space, and know that this situation shall pass and stand our ground and continue to be compassionate with this person, understanding that they have a reason to share that. And there might be people who feel inspired. And if it's out of context or out of proportion, how can we— Help this person adjust to the situation in a way that feels kind and nurturing instead of passive-aggressive, so that we can really maintain the safety in the space. So this is in a nutshell why the topic today is so important to me, and there are different ways to do the air quotes inner work. We pass on a meditation. It's maybe an extreme form because it really puts us into isolation to introspect, to go inside, because we are not exposed to any other news, advice, input, apart of obviously the teaching of Grönka who designed the course. But there are many other ways to do the inner work. There are therapy and coaching, obviously, but there are obviously many other ways to do the inner work. And so this is not the one solution. No. It is one of them. But today I want to focus really on Vipassana because it has brought so much to my life and ultimately also to the life of those around me. Because to be very honest, I'm a better person when I meditate. So I did the last meditation retreat before the pandemic and have lost the practice a little bit. So it was painful to go back, to say the least. And just to give you a glimpse into the impact, after the first Vipassana retreat, I quit my job and moved to Amsterdam. And after the second Vipassana retreat, I started my own company. So otherwise we wouldn't be here. So it's quite remarkable, and we'll see what comes out after this one. So Vipassana, what is it? I already shared that, um, it's a 10 days silent meditation where students spend 10 hours per day in a sitting meditation. The basis are Buddha's Satipatthana teachings, and every evening there is a 1.5-hour talk that helps the participants to put into perspective their experiences. And this reminded me very much of experiential learning, actually. When you first experience something, you are in it, you observe all kinds of things that are happening in your body, in your mind, and then in the evening you have a teacher who helps you to make sense and helps you to get words to what it is. So the main and core idea of the Vipassana meditation is that as human beings we are suffering Because we are either trying to escape something or we are clinging, trying to get something. So we want to get out of discomfort and we long for comfort, and because we're attached to something and we want to get out of uncomfortable situations. The main and most important insight is impermanence. That everything comes and goes. Sensations, desires, emotions come and go. And once we understand that, then everything will be better. We can get out of our suffering. So for instance, if we get angry or annoyed, knowing that this annoyance, this anger shall pass, will help us to feel better. So this is just breathe. center. What the difference is in this practice is that it is directly connected to body sensations. So the main premise is that everything that happens in the mind is directly connected to a body sensation. So whenever I think about something, something that makes me happy or something that makes me sad, there will be something happening in my body. And this is a law of nature, as they say. So basically what I came to realize is that Siddhartha Buddha was actually the first somatic coach. So all embodiment practices and coaches, that's basically what they say, that our body and our mind are clearly connected. The problem is that we are so busy all the time and we have such a central overload that we forget to, or unlearn to actually tune into our body and to hear or feel these signals. So for instance, when we get very angry, or when we're afraid or anxious, then we know that our heartbeat goes up, and maybe our palms get a little bit wet, or maybe we start touching our body and we want to get out of the situation. So we start to move. And this is at the basis. If we want to get out of the misery of reacting, being unstable and constantly falling into the traps of desiring something or avoiding something, we have to learn to sit with the discomfort. And in theory, very easy. Yes. If you have ever tried to get rid of an addiction— I've been a smoker since I'm 13. Yes. And now I'm 42. So last time I quit smoking was in August, and usually I fall back into my addiction as soon as stress levels get too high and I lack the possibility to self-regulate. What happens is that I have so much discomfort in my body and the need for the cigarette seems so high that I will react to this desire By starting to smoke again. And then people would tell me, you have to overcome, just wait it out, wait until 10, do something, distract your mind, and then it shall pass. Yes, this is true, and it is very difficult. What the Vipassana practice teaches is to learn to sit with this discomfort without reacting, and they take it quite literally. So what you will do during these 10 days by sitting in silence for 10 hours per day is to observe your body sensations over hours. And over time, you get so sensitive to your body that you feel the slightest tickling. And what will happen is that you will feel very strong physical pain different parts of your body. Some feel it in their neck and shoulders, others feel it in their, in their back or in their legs, depending on where you sit. You can sit on a chair, and believe me, even if you sit 1 hour without moving on a chair, at some point things will start hurting. And it is because we're paying so much attention to these body sensations. And the goal of this course is to Learn to sit with these sensations without reacting, but observing. So I observe that my foot falls asleep, and then how can I remain sitting with this sensation in equanimity without reacting to it? Then I will observe my foot falling asleep, and then eventually I observe my foot waking up again. I observe how pain comes and how pain goes. And believe me, it is very strong pain. So obviously you don't want to go into total suffering. So if it's unbearable, you will move. And over the days, as you practice, as I practice, it becomes easier. It becomes easier to recognize the pain for what it is. And also to realize that it indeed passes. And the beauty is that once you experience on a physical level how pain comes and pain goes, your mind will make the translation that, oh, with emotions it's the same. And one personal outcome or biggest insight was already earlier that if I have a bad day, I know that it's a bad day and it shall pass. I will go to bed and tomorrow might be a very good day again. Under normal circumstances. I do want to acknowledge that there are mental illnesses and issues, and there is depression that are serious. So to round that up, the method is that Vipassana is for anyone who wants to escape this conditioning of avoiding discomfort. And discomfort comes at all different levels. I was smoking. Speaking about the smoking, maybe at a very practical level, when we are facilitating and have someone have conflict in the group, or we are confronted to an emotion that feels uncomfortable from one of our participants, we want to avoid it, we want to run away, and we're— this is not serving the group. If we are a leader, we have to be there for the team, and we cannot control them. There are situations, conflicts, maybe critical feedback conversations that we want to avoid so much. But we cannot. So how can we learn to stand in the storm in our grounded presence and find the right words that come out the right way so that they come from a place of compassion, love, and support instead of ego activity, passive-aggressiveness? And My experience of this 5th sitting. And I must say, one of the sittings was actually a serving, which is an entirely different experience to be there as someone supporting the meditators and being in the kitchen and cooking for them, for everyone who cannot speak. But this is another story. Otherwise, this will be a never-ending episode, and I want to keep it to half an hour to keep it short and crisp. So I had— I must say that I walked into the retreat having an unresolved conflict that I had to leave behind. And it was really testing me because my mind was just circling around that and going through all the scenarios and everything that I could have said and should have said and didn't say and did say, and all the analysis of what has been said and hasn't And sad without being able to impact it. So that was— to observe where the mind is going and what horror scenarios our mind is able to create is quite spectacular. And to just sit with that without being able to communicate is already a learning. And interestingly, I went from being very angry, feeling not heard, judged, treated in an unfair way, to suddenly seeing the other perspective, understanding where the other person was coming from, and being open to have compassionate, constructive conversations. Not giving up my values and forgetting that the way how I was— how the person communicated with me was not okay. And still being open for this conversation. So my personal learnings. One is maybe very mundane, but it's beautiful to experience it. To be in this controlled environment where literally every day is exactly the same. You wake up at 4 AM, you start your first meditation at 4:30, you have breakfast at 6:30, you go to bed at 9. Every day is exactly the same. You do the same. There are slight variations in the method, but basically it's the same. There were days I was so annoyed with everyone. I wanted to leave. I thought I was done. I got what I needed. Why do I have to stay here? Everyone was just annoying. And this without speaking a word to them. A day before, I was over the top. I had the best mood ever, only saw opportunities, was enthusiastic, in a good mood. And the day later as well. And it just showed me that our moods are something that is happening inside that has nothing to do with the environment, with the context, how you're treated. It's simply— it is. There are days where we have mostly pleasant sensations, where we are confident, we see the positive and the glass is half full. And there are other days The glass seems half empty. We don't see opportunities and everything seems doomed. So when there is a bad day, recognizing and realizing, acknowledging that it shall pass, and let's reschedule everything that doesn't have to be done today to tomorrow or to a time when we feel better makes a lot of sense. So when we're in a bad mood and something happens, air quotes, to us, To recognize that our perspective might be blurred because this is just how we experience the situation. It is not the reality. The reality for me in the same situation tomorrow might be totally different. The reality of another person in the same situation is totally different. And this really helps to find this balance and equanimity. This too shall pass. Tomorrow I will be happy again. The maybe biggest insight from sitting in pain, and people might think, you might think, why would you do this to yourself? Why would you sit there in pain? Was that we cannot run away from discomfort. It will always be uncomfortable. Life is uncomfortable. And if life is too comfortable, we make it uncomfortable because that's our nature. If it's too comfortable, it's boring. And then suddenly we pick a fight. In a book, Oh, I wish I remembered the title. It's called the upper limiting. If everything is too nice, our brain reacts in a way that it's looking for challenges and it will question things and pick fights and find things that don't work. So there will always be discomfort. That's our human nature. So if we don't learn to sit with it, we will always be in this roller coaster of emotions, feeling overwhelmed and trying to fight the discomfort or to run away to numb it, get into addictions, Whether we are scrolling our phone or Netflixing or smoking, something to avoid the discomfort, but acknowledging that it will always be there. And there were moments where I just wanted to stop the meditation and leave. And then I realized, hmm, if I stop now, it will come back anyway. I can take a little break, but there's nothing else to do. There's no phone, there's no distraction. So the only thing that I can do is to follow the schedule. And it reminded me of life. We cannot escape life. It is uncomfortable. So we can distract us, we can avoid it, we can pretend as if something didn't exist, but at the end of the day, we have to come back and do the work. And this was a very good embodied reminder of that, as silly as it sounds. And sometimes I was sitting there and the pain was getting so big, and then I did move, and no matter how I moved, it's still— the pain wouldn't go away. Because it's not about the position, it's how I relate to that pain. And as long as I'm not willing to relax into it, but cramp and force it, it won't go away. And maybe an example that is more approachable is when we are— when we're outside in the cold and it's very cold, and then when we think to ourselves how cold it is, then we We'll tense all the muscles and we start shivering and we're just thinking of how cold it is. And if then for one second we just relax our muscles and think, oh, it's actually not that cold. Suddenly, if we are relaxed, it isn't that cold. So the pain very often becomes unbearable because we make it unbearable because we cramp and we tighten up. And in this situation, with this embodiment, we won't be able to see solutions. To find creative opportunities, but because we are so focused on the pain and what's going wrong. And the moment that I realized that, and I learned to relax into the pain and to observe it for what it is, and to realize that I can just sit there and meditate with the pain, knowing that it will pass. Either during the meditation, at some point it will just go away, or after the meditation, as soon as I can stand up and walk a little bit. And this mental capacity of sitting with the pain literally is not finite. I could do this over and over again for 10 hours a day if I was in a good place. There were other days where it was more difficult to just let go of this cramping and the forcefulness. But as soon as I did, I could get up, walk for 10 minutes, come back, sit in the same position, and meditate for another 1.5 hours over again. So when we are in difficult situations in life, we can trust that it shall pass. And as soon as we relax into it and don't see just the pain, Then we'll find solutions. And that's where we will— when we are talking, for instance, about conflict, the moment where we give up to focus on our ego and how badly we've been treated and how unfair all of that is, the moment we relax that and look at the situation as it is, then we'll find solutions and conversation. And 2 last learnings, and I think I could talk about this for an entire day, but I don't want to bore you. One other learning was the inner wisdom, the trust in the inner wisdom. As I mentioned, it's 10 days without speaking, reading, or writing. And of course, in an ideal world, I would've sat there and meditated for 10 hours per day, which means that there are no thoughts and I only observe my body sensations and I only observe my breathing. But in fact, My mind is very busy, and I think everyone's mind is very busy. And that's okay, as long as we don't judge ourselves for it, as long as we sit with equanimity. So I realized that while there were some challenges I faced before leaving, and I would ask people and look up solutions and read books and constantly seek for answers outside, And suddenly realized that the moment where I don't have access to all these outside sources, I will find the wisdom inside. And suddenly there are great ideas coming up because all the experience that I've accumulated over the years, all of that becomes accessible suddenly. And this is a wonderful way to win confidence into what we know and also to build the stamina and what we stand for. And back to the inner work, if we know what we stand for, what our values are, what our goals are, so easy to communicate it. And everyone will understand our boundaries or our communication if it comes from a place of integrity and strength and confidence and enthusiasm. Yes. And although there were moments where I just wanted to steal a piece of paper and a pen to write down all these amazing ideas that my brain created, but I couldn't. And one beautiful learning is that the good ideas stay. And I would never run out of ideas. There are always more ideas than can be implemented. And I don't need to write them down. I don't need to repeat them like a mantra. The really good ideas, as they have emerged and evolved over time, as soon as I break the silence and have access to the notebook, the good ideas will be there. The good ideas will be implemented. And that's also wonderful and very empowering insight. And that's why I can strongly recommend you to do that. So in a nutshell, why is Vipassana meditation so recommendable for facilitators, but also team leaders, managers, parents, everyone, is because it helps us strengthen our self-awareness. of our embodied self-awareness. If something happens in the outside, what is the ripple that I feel in my body? What is the sensation that goes along? And am I able to sit with this discomfort, to let it pass, so that I can then act instead of react from a place of compassion and wisdom? And I think that's a quality that everyone needs who works with groups. It helps us to train our patience, to wait for things to pass. And trust me, I was battling with impatience during the sitting, restlessness. I just wanted to run away and this to end. And to observe that and to see where this comes from and where else in my life I have observed impatience and how it has been a challenge for me and how now Knowing how to better sit with impatience will help me in many different ways, also with groups, and to remain mindful when the storm is happening outside. As I mentioned in the beginning, being a tree with strong roots so that, yes, we might dance with the wind, but we don't fall over. So while other methods might teach us how to ignore triggers or how to avoid getting triggered, Usually it has a lot to do with avoiding, pushing away, and then it will come back. It's like a volcano. You accumulate all these microaggressions. But with Vipassana, the idea is to really eliminate all these negative emotions, negativities, resentments, aggressions, anger, and to really clean up. our inner baggage so that we can show up as our true compassionate self towards ourselves and others. So yes, this was me and my experience after Vipassana. Hopefully you get inspired. Usually I say that Vipassana is like a calling. At some point you'll get it and you will feel that it's your time to sit. There are Vipassana centers all over the world. I think there are over 300 centers in every country. of the world almost. And I hope this was insightful for you, that you maybe got some inspiration either to look deeper into meditation or into other practices to really do the inner work so that we don't have to be the slaves of our triggers and can communicate and coexist with more harmony, and that we can hold space for groups. with the strength and integrity that they deserve and that our work requires. Thank you. Thank you for staying tuned and for listening until the very end. I hope that you found the inspiration and the wisdom that you are looking for, and I hope that you will subscribe to the show so that you never miss any of the interviews with another inspiring facilitator. From across the world. 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