What I’ve Learned from 20 Silent Meditation Retreats

The first time I ever went on a silent meditation retreat, 11 years ago, I thought I had entered the zombie apocalypse. After arriving and having dinner with my fellow retreatants, we went into silence. I had considered what it would be like to remain quiet myself for five days (hard, I figured) but not what it would be like to be surrounded by silent people.

The teachers encouraged us not to even look at each other (to focus on our own experience and avoid distractions), so people walked around with their eyes on the ground. We ate meals staring blankly at walls or soup bowls. Even sitting elbow to elbow in the dining room of the Southwest Colorado inn where the retreat was held, no one interacted in any way.

The next day, staring out over the pinon-juniper woodlands, I saw a sea of people plodding slowly in disparate directions as they practiced walking meditation. Step, step, step. It all seemed very weird.

Thus began my passion for silent retreats—haltingly.

I was inspired to sign up for the five-night retreat, organized by the local Buddhist community center, after taking a few beginning meditation classes. Pretty quickly I had seen benefits to daily practice. I wasn’t sure I knew what mindfulness was exactly, but just taking some time to calm my mind helped me manage stress, focus better, and feel more grounded. I figured more meditation, more rewards.

I’m sure there are many people who find retreat practice illuminating and nourishing right off the bat, but I was not one of those people. At first, it felt like a disaster. I didn’t realize that silent meditation really meant silent meditation all day. No extracurricular activities, except one daily 45-minute session of qigong, a Chinese breath, movement and meditation practice, and two short check-ins with a teacher over the course of the retreat. When I arrived at the inn, I looked at the posted schedule and paled:

6 A.M., wake up. Sitting meditation. Breakfast. Sitting meditation. Walking meditation. Sitting meditation. Walking meditation or qigong. Sitting meditation. Lunch. Sitting meditation. Walking meditation. Sitting meditation. Walking meditation. Sitting meditation. Dinner. Sitting meditation. Dharma talk. Sitting meditation. Walking meditation. Chanting. Sitting meditation until you’re ready to fall asleep.

I thought to myself, no arts and crafts? No journaling? The teachers advised us not to read or write, which could stir up unhelpful thinking, and to stay as continuously mindful as possible, even between the formal meditation sessions. Walking to the bathroom? Be mindful. Eating broccoli? Be mindful. Washing dishes? Be mindful.

At first, my mind bucked like a predator in captivity. In the deep quiet, there was nothing to stop my thoughts from racing at top speed, looping, roving, circling, meandering, searching, careening between past regrets and future hopes, pinballing between wanting and not wanting things but mostly hating everything, including myself.

Sometimes I’d see with clarity the same exact thought thinking itself three times in a row. Whose mind was this? Who was doing the thinking? Who was doing the watching? I dutifully ate my vegetarian meals in silence. I trudged along, joining the zombies, practicing walking meditation. I showed up to all of the meditation periods. But I wondered why I was there if all I was doing was suffering.

Around day three, after many tears and regrets and wishing I had never come, something broke. I was sitting in the barn-turned-meditation hall, my body aching, the afternoon sun dimming, the silence deafening, and something just released. The tight fist of my mind loosened its grip. The tornado of thoughts stilled. What was left was profound peace. Everything was clear, still, and calm, like an alpine lake mirroring a cloudless sky. Thoughts wafted by but they were clearly seen like the arc of a bird in flight. I didn’t have a vocabulary for a peace like this. I never knew it existed.

States of mind naturally come and go, but that time of stillness opened me to a powerful truth: there was so much I did not know about the mind and heart—not just my own but everyone’s—and taking a leap into the unknown could be beneficial beyond my imagination. I was humbled.

I was also intensely curious about what lay beyond my current understanding. I started attending retreats regularly in the Insight tradition of Buddhism. I traveled to centers like Vallecitos in northern New Mexico, Spirit Rock in California, and the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts for retreats, sometimes as small as 24 people and sometimes as big as 90. I started with retreats spanning between four and nine nights and gradually moved into longer retreats of a month or six weeks.

Accommodations were generally simple: a twin bed, unadorned walls, a place to put my clothes, maybe a sink. There was no entertainment but always good access to nature, whether alpine meadows, aspen groves, mist-shrouded hills, or woodlands aflame with fall colors.

Over time, I came to perceive the silence differently. It began to feel like a relief. I didn’t have to pull myself together for other people, not even in the subtle ways we subconsciously shape ourselves for another’s gaze. In a silence held in community, I actually felt less alone. There was a certain access to my own unedited realness, which allowed me to begin to make friends with my own mind.

People sometimes ask me why I keep going back, particularly on the long retreats, and what I learn or gain. They often seem genuinely perplexed. Sometimes I sense judgment or derision. “At a certain point, Kate, aren’t there diminishing returns?” a family member once asked me. (I shared that with two of my teachers and they laughed so hard they nearly rolled on the ground.)

I could certainly point to the measurable rewards Western science has turned up. Between 1966 and 2021, more than 16,000 studies involving mindfulness appeared in scientific journals, documenting benefits like reduced stress and anxiety, improved focus and clarity, better immune system function, lower blood pressure, and even decreased cellular aging and cognitive decline. One meta-analysis of 21 studies, specifically on multi-day meditation retreats, found significant positive effects on anxiety, stress, and depression, as well as moderate effects on emotional regulation and people’s perceived quality of life. Teachers and longtime meditators joke about the “vipassana facelift,” the visible change in people’s faces after retreat.

Still, all of these factoids feel inadequate in capturing the deeper benefit of sustained meditation practice. Even the question itself—what do I gain?—feels bound by a paradigm rooted in acquisitiveness, efficiency, and self-orientation. Perhaps a more interesting question is: What am I losing? And what am I offering?

One thing I have learned through meditation practice, on and off retreat, is just how fluid we are as human beings. In the constantly changing flow of my own mind, over time, I have noticed fewer moments of reactivity, judgment, aversion, impatience, frustration, greed, and self-preoccupation. In their wake, more moments of kindness, love, patience, perspective, calm, clarity, and care for others arise. It’s not a linear process, but the way I understand who I am is changing—in a very freeing way.

These are moments that I can’t graph on a life-optimization app or put on a resumé or meaningfully document on Instagram. Probably most of the time, no one notices except me. People tend not to see what is absent: the time I didn’t snap at my husband, the time I didn’t send a nasty email to my colleague, the snide remark I left unsaid. I have plenty of challenging moments, but compared to when I started meditation practice 13 years ago, I suffer a lot less.

If these retreats were only about my own mental health or wellness, however, I can’t imagine I would keep doing so many of them. But I know without a doubt that my practice benefits those around me. Western science bears this out. Research suggests that mindfulness, positive emotions, and even happiness are contagious. So is anxiety. We are affected by each other’s presence, whether we’re aware of it or not. Maybe peace within isn’t actually so separate from peace in the world.