"I’m ready. Give me what you’ve got".

It was a statement I would eventually come to regret.

I had just gotten back from India, and after a somewhat powerful and, well, educational visit to an ashram, was feeling inspired to get down and dirty with my meditation practice. I spent three days with people who eat, breathe and sleep to meditate, and they regaled me with stories of their life-altering experiences and spiritual journeys. Never having been one to sit by and watch an adventure from the sidelines, I wanted in.

Now I was home, sitting in the office of my meditation teacher, recounting the stories from my trip and bubbling over with the sort of impatient enthusiasm that was customary when I discovered a new hobby. I loved it. I wanted to do it all the time. I couldn’t think about anything else. I was borderline-obsessed, and ready to jump in with both feet.

Growing up in my Jewish-American household, there was never a lot of spiritual value placed on spending time alone in contemplation (unless you count bathroom breaks during boisterous Passover seders or the annual Rosh Hashanah open house). We valued family and food; preferably together. Sure, there was that ’Silent Prayer’ part at Saturday morning synagogue, but I used that valuable time to crane my neck and see who else had come to services that morning. Meditation was as foreign a concept as bacon with breakfast.

Always one to explore new ideas, a passing interest in meditation solidified into my first real class in my mid-twenties. I struggled with the same things everyone else did: how do you even begin to silence your thoughts? What are you supposed to think about instead? What’s the point of this again?

I saw the intrinsic value in learning to quiet your mind and kept at it. It was like using a muscle I didn’t know I had; obviously the first time I flexed, it would be weak. I’d have to train and consistently put it to use if it were to get any stronger. The benefits I had been promised of better focus, a clearer mind, ability to live in the present moment, higher degree of concentration and perhaps, a spiritual connection, all seemed worth working for. But the part about "working" was always so much less appealing when it came time to practice. I preferred instant gratification. It wasn’t here.

I attended classes regularly and eventually started getting better at it. In between frustrating sessions of distraction, I experienced a couple of moments of peace and was comforted by a newfound voice inside my head that was wiser than I. The longest I was ever able to meditate in one sitting was 45 minutes. That seemed substantial enough.

India took things to a whole new level. Surrounded by success stories, I wanted some of their experiences for myself.

So there I sat, relaying all of this excitement to my teacher, and he saw his opportunity to strike while the iron was hot.

"Okay then," he began. "This seems like a good time for us to set up a retreat. It will be an individual retreat, run Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, up in the meditation room I have set up in the attic. Imagine it’s a cave in Tibet. Let’s pick a weekend".

Back peddle. Back peddle! Is he nuts?

Jim gave me a sliver of room to ’think it over’, but I knew there was no going back now. As terrifying as the idea sounded, I trusted him this was an appropriate next step for me. After all, there was a reason he was the teacher and I was the student.

Mindful travel - or, on another level, pilgrimage - involves two journeys: an external journey, the travel itself, and the sometimes-harder-to-recognize internal journey. It’s the power we discover in ourselves while overcoming obstacles. It’s what we learn when pushed outside our comfort zone, and how we grow as a result. It’s the new-found strength that comes in seeking out an experience, getting frustrated by barriers along the way, and finishing anyway. You can, however, have one without the other: External travel without the internal process is a vacation; it is no better or worse than a pilgrimage, but it is travel without consciousness. It’s also possible to have the internal journey while right at home. And this was the kind of journey I eventually agreed to embark on.

A month later, five days after my thirtieth birthday, I showed up at the house with a small overnight bag. My friends were getting ready for a night out at the bar, I was getting ready for a weekend alone, in near silence. Denial about what I was about to do was my best coping strategy; otherwise, I might never have made it there.

Few people can sit down for four or five hours at a time, close their eyes, and disappear into a state of concentration and bliss without a single stray thought entering their mind. Luckily, I wasn’t expected to perform anywhere near this kind of feat of superhuman proportions. Jim broke down my time the first night into bite-sized, half-hour blocks. First, I was instructed to take stock of my life so far. Easy enough. Then some singing along with a tape of monks chanting. A little weird for my tastes, but doable. Finally, a half hour of internal focus. Challenging, as always, but so far so good. It was already time for bed.

My alarm went off at six o’clock the next morning and I had my assignments. Some focused breathing. More chanting. Breakfast arrived (Iris’ cooking would clearly be the highlight of my stay here in the attic), as did my plan for the rest of the day. More half hour blocks of chanting words I’d never heard before, interwoven with breaks for meals and reading. I did as I was told, like a homework assignment. And like a kid in school, I didn’t really feel like doing it, but assumed I would eventually come to understand the value behind these tasks, even if I didn’t in the moment.

By the time lunch came and went, the initial adrenalin of this idea was starting to wear thin. I was chanting words in a language I’d never heard before; they inherently had no meaning to me, even though Jim explained their significance. I was doing my best to concentrate during the times of silent contemplation, but with each passing block my mind found new things to think about. Had I remembered to lock the door at home? Was anyone trying to call my oh-so-distant-and-turned-off cell phone? What was everyone doing tonight, this Saturday night, while I was locked in the attic like a naughty step-child? What did I have lined up to do at work on Monday?

If the constant deafening mental chatter wasn’t annoying enough, the physical experience of this retreat wasn’t much more fun. A Tibetan cave it wasn’t: rather, it was Boston in December. I was cold. It was cramped. Mysteriously, I needed to use the restroom every single hour. It was like my body wanted out more than my mind did, and found any excuse it could to stand up, go downstairs, and take a break, even if it was for only three minutes at a time.

I tried my hardest to get through the exercises and make it to dinner. My mental chatter grew louder and louder until it burst into something far worse than a distraction: boredom. Boredom was like a gateway drug to hell. Once I allowed myself to acknowledge it, the floodgates opened for every other negative emotion in the book. I was annoyed. I was resentful. I was claustrophobic. I was stressed out. Finally, I was angry.

The anger was the bottom of my proverbial emotional barrel, and once I put my feet down, it covered everything like a sandstorm. I was angry at Jim for getting me into this mess. I was angry at myself for agreeing to it. I was even angrier at myself for not enjoying it. I wanted to be experiencing some sort of transformation. I wanted to feel some sense of peace. Instead, I was bored and distracted.

Dinner ended, and I was relieved to learn I only had one more hour of exercises to do before going to sleep that night. My day had stretched for over twelve hours and I felt like I hadn’t learned much. But it was almost over, and this was the longest section of the retreat. Knowing time to read, relax, and then sleep was approaching, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel and settled in for the final exercise of the night.

Although I couldn’t tell from inside my irritated mind, Jim explained that at this point of the retreat, I had reached a spiritual pinnacle. The last meditations of the night would put me as close to some sort of ’divine energy’ (did I even believe in that sort of thing?) as I’d be for the weekend. I didn’t feel close to any pinnacles (unless you count the top of the house), but what did I know?

My last assignment involved an internal contemplation, followed by intense concentration on a photograph in my little room. I was so excited when the time came to open my eyes and begin the final stretch of my endless day, I could barely wait. Finally the moment arrived, I flipped open my eyelids, and made contact with the photograph. I looked. And looked. And looked. Still unclear how this was helping anything.

Suddenly, something strange started to happen. The brightly colored silk scarf on the shelf turned gold. The color was rich, and started bleeding into other parts of the room. The walls turned gold, the furniture, and finally, the photograph. the whole room was monochromatic, bathed in a color I couldn’t quite describe or had seen before.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and opened them again. The room looked normal for a few moments before the gold seeped back in and blanketed my field of vision.

Assuming I was just exhausted, I gave up, read some pages in my assigned book, and passed out.

I woke up refreshed and ready to work. It was Sunday already! I could do this. I still didn’t quite trust this process, but wanted to try again. I worked my way through the exercises after breakfast, fighting like hell against everything asking me to give up. Every distraction, every discomfort, every hunger pang, every decision that meditation was actually bullshit. I pressed through it. By lunch, I was exhausted. The last exercise of the morning would be to watch and ruminate on a short clip of a movie about the life of the Buddha. I was just excited to be out of the attic on this cool December Sunday, and sitting on the couch in front of the TV brought me closer to an already-distant normalcy. Now if I could just convince Jim to let me watch the football game instead, this retreat would be perfect.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out the reason I’d been assigned to watch this clip. In the scene, the Buddha is on his path towards transformation, and the demons inside him keep trying to distract him from his task. He’s faced with his own vices, driven to discomfort by the elements, his personal sense of security under attack. And through it all, he stays focused on the task at hand, unendingly faithful in the pot of gold at the end of the meditation rainbow. I immediately recognized the battle I was fighting in the attic as a struggle against my own demons, doing everything in their power to block me from this experience. I didn’t really understand why, but at least I knew I wasn’t alone in my fight.

My relief was short lived. The last exercise of the retreat came after lunch, ending with the highly-charged task of exploring my "calling", if I had one. I expected to finally be rewarded for all my work, to feel some sort of guidance about the next steps I should be taking in life. Instead, I drew a big fat blank. I clamped down, convinced I just wasn’t trying hard enough, working myself into a frenzy. "COME ON WISER SELF!", I was practically screaming. "I’M AT PEACE! WHERE’S THE ADVICE?" Shockingly, I got nothing. The exercise had failed, and in my mind, the retreat had failed. Within minutes I was having a panic attack, and by the time Jim returned, I was on the floor in a flood of tears. I felt exhausted, defeated and confused. It was a battle, and I had lost.

We began debriefing about the weekend, and as we spoke, my vision of gold returned. Having never experienced such a sight before, I didn’t know where to put it, how to process it, other than to assume I was hallucinating. Jim did his best to convince me the retreat has been a success for one simple reason: I had completed it. I had showed up in the first place. I did what I was instructed to instead of napping the day away. I hadn’t left early. I had made it through, and should consider myself victorious on that fact alone. But by that point, my most resilient demons made sure I was giving myself as little credit as possible for what I had accomplished. Once I decided I’d failed, it was too late. The weekend was a disaster, and nobody could convince me otherwise, even when being told it’s furthest thing from the truth.

I was finally allowed to leave. In the days that followed I was hesitant to even talk about the retreat, as reliving the experience just brought back emotions tied to struggle and failure. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong. Words of encouragement from friends that my experience was normal, or even positive, went in one ear and out the other as I tried to just forget about the whole thing. Ironically, when I relayed my experience of seeing gold to Jim in later weeks, he tried to explain this had been a spiritual vision that I was so attached to having. Well, that was encouraging. It was no booming voice from the sky announcing my schedule of activities for the next five years, but it was something.

I eventually started piecing together what had really happened that weekend, and realized one very important piece of information: my retreat was just a magnified version of the struggles I face with myself every day. By stripping away my friends, work, colleagues, TV, the gym, and my cell phone, I was down to living with nothing but my demons and no distractions to protect me from them. No, I didn’t have visions of God or sit in meditation for 10 hours a day. I wasn’t magically converted into a prophet in 72 hours. Instead, I spent time with the rawest, most damaged parts of myself - my self doubt, anxiety, high expectations, and most importantly, deep-rooted fear of failure. Everything that stood in my way out in the ’real world’ was 10-fold blocking me in that attic; I just didn’t know how to recognize it. Worse, I didn’t know how to ignore it.

A year and a half passed before I was faced with the opportunity, if you can call it that, to go on another retreat. Luckily, this would be a shorter, less intense group retreat, and there would be no cold attic. I contemplated the decision, still slightly traumatized by the first experience but knew this time I would be better prepared. I’d started to recognize my demons for what they are, and not believe the words they always whisper in my ear. I still wasn’t necessarily more comfortable with the meditation itself, but knew what to expect. When I agreed to participate, I made the decision with only one goal: to, if nothing else, not self-flagellate. Not panic. Not judge myself. Accept failure in whatever form it might take. I would take this day one moment at a time, expect to see my demons, smile at them, and keep walking.

When the day arrived, I had butterflies in my stomach. The retreat would be in a beautiful home and I had claimed a spot in the loft, directly under a skylight, all for myself. This would be a shorter version of my previous weekend, so nothing was completely foreign this time around. We all dispersed to our respective rooms with assignments for the day, and the starting gun rang out. In reality, it was a Tibetan gong, but they sounded the same to my nervous ears.

Of course, I struggled. Concentrating is hard! I wanted Facebook. I wanted to shut off my brain with a healthy dose of reality tv. I heard the voices starting to chant, ’this isn’t working’, ’I can’t concentrate’, ’I’m bored’ - but instead of believing them, getting in their car, and going for a ride around the block, i listened, dubious, and treated them like i would any pseudo-friend with questionable ulterior motives: unconvinced. Distrusting. Unsure listening would do me any good. Not wanting to be duped a second time, I started ignoring them and continued what I was doing. Eventually, they started to quiet. I could still hear them, but they weren’t quite as loud. My entire day felt like a tennis match of the demons sending their strikes, and me lobbing them back over the net. With each strike, the tasks became easier; the concepts, more clear.

I began to understand: with any meditation practice, our personal demons, whatever they may be, are like static on the radio. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight to hear the music, or how closely you put your ear to the speaker, the static isn’t going anywhere. Only once you learn to recognize the static for what it is and understand how to turn it down can you begin to hear the song that plays beneath it. It was a truth I hadn’t understood during my retreat, and had spent the weekend jamming my ear up against the speaker, harder, and harder, confused as to why it wasn’t changing the quality of the sound.

The end of the day approached and we were at the part of the retreat that had previously broken me: exploring my calling. My heart started racing as I remembered not only my previous failure, but my previous reaction to failure. I prepared, planning ahead that if I was faced with my blank slate again, it would be okay. I would not let anxiety ruin this for me. Instead, I completed the exercise. I didn’t experience some magical vision of the future, but gained a bit of clarity around what I already knew about myself and maybe hadn’t quite acknowledged. It was miraculous enough for me.

For the rest of the short afternoon, the static was gone. I had conquered it. Although only an hour of the retreat remained, the exercises were powerful. In one moment of clarity, I wrote in my notebook, "Our demons disempower us to not take the risk of being who we really are. I no longer need fear and doubt; I only need to trust myself. I will be who I am, even it if means failure" and then I cried. This time, tears of release, tears of relief, because I knew it was true. This wasn’t just about this day, this retreat, this experience. This was true for every single day of my life. Every challenge, every relationship, every experience. I will be who I am, even if it means failure.

This stage of my internal pilgrimage was complete. I had climbed the first mountain that was just out of reach, regardless of how painful, and hadn’t given up. And the view from the top was worth it.

At the end of the day, I’m only human. I still get caught up in stories of people having overnight transformation, or going on retreats and experiencing the divine. I still want what they have. But I see how much I have already learned, how far I have come. I’ve worked for it and I’m proud. And if that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

Next Chapter: Panama: One Becomes Two