For three months now, I’ve meditated for twenty minutes every day.
Personally, this is a big deal, as I’ve struggled to maintain a regular meditation practice for decades. I’ve resolved countless times to meditate daily, and fallen off the mindfulness wagon over and over again.
Three years ago, I began attending silent meditation retreats and continue to do so a couple of times a year. These experiences are important and transformational. Each retreat deepened my resolve to start a daily meditation practice. But, despite this increased desire, I was unable to do so.
Until now.
Excuses
Why has it been so hard for me to maintain a daily meditation practice?
One excuse is that my daily schedule is not regular. When I’m home, there is at least the potential to set aside a regular time to meditate. But I travel a lot. I’m just back from a four-week trip that spanned nine time zones, from Italy to the Caribbean, to Las Vegas. I average about two engagements per month that require travel. I might be up at 5 am to catch a flight, arrive late at a destination, and be intensely involved on-site for two or three days. There’s no regular “free” time in my life.
However, my travel for work and pleasure that creates an erratic daily schedule is a choice that I made. It makes it harder but not impossible for me to create a meditation habit.
Another excuse is related to my biorhythms. Over the years I’ve found I do my best creative work in the morning. Meditating early feels like it’s delaying starting my day. At night, my energy level sags and it’s difficult for me to maintain mindful habits. I’m tempted to relax over a drink and a nice dinner.
Finally, my experience of the benefits of regular meditation from retreats quickly fades. I remember that I felt inspired to meditate regularly, but I don’t experience the inspiration. And I lapse…
How have I changed my meditation habit?
I’m sorry. If you’re hoping to learn the secret simple trick that allowed me to finally sustain a daily meditation practice, I’m about to disappoint you.
—At the Vipassana retreats I attend, sitting and walking meditation sessions last for 45 minutes, and there are many such sessions every day. I set myself a far more modest daily goal of a single twenty-minute session. More sessions or a longer time are great but completely optional.
—While meditating with a simple timer, I noticed that my mind started wondering about how much time was left towards the end of the twenty minutes. (Somewhat pathetic, but that’s what I noticed.) So I switched to a free meditation app, InsightTimer, which can be configured to play multiple sounds during meditation. Adding a momentary wood block “click” halfway through tells my thinking mind that there are ten minutes to go, which helps quiet it. This sounds silly, but it’s helpful for me.
—Finally, while vacationing for two weeks in Anguilla last month, I broke through my self-limiting belief that an early morning meditation session would reduce my creative morning time. For the last few years, I’ve started my day there with a (now) forty-minute walk, down to Island Harbor and back. This year I sat on a bench at Falcon Nest and meditated for twenty minutes before returning.
(Here’s the panorama I saw one morning when I opened my eyes. Four island dogs in a neat but respectful oval around me.)
Since then, I’ve been willing and able to meditate for twenty minutes within the first hour I’m up.
What I have noticed since beginning to meditate regularly for the first time in my life
—I have more equanimity in my life. For example, after I rose early for a flight from Boston to Las Vegas last week, it was delayed for four hours due to the weather. I was surprised and pleased at how serene I stayed about this, compared to the persistent annoyance I would have felt in the past. There was plenty of time to meditate at the airport!
—Having said that, I am noticing how easily certain events bend me out of shape. My phone says the Wi-Fi password I’ve entered is incorrect, though I know it isn’t. My new MacBook keyboard switches unexpectedly into ALL CAPS. I fumble several times picking up a heavy piece of wood for the stove.
—I’m getting better at listening to people. Less likely to jump in with a response before they’ve fully shared. (Yes folks who know me well; there is still plenty of room for improvement. Sigh.)
Celebration!
I am happy that I’ve made this change that has eluded me for so long. Perhaps I will increase my modest meditation time in the future. Regardless, I like the effect on my life daily meditation makes, and this is evidence that I am still able to change my behavior through work and grace.
While exploring the New York City High Line for the first time in November 2017, I stopped for lunch in the Chelsea Market, passed the Apple West 14th Street Store, and on impulse went in to take a look at the Apple Watch Series 3 which had just been released. Though impressed while watching the original Apple Watch launch two years earlier, I was still wearing an inexpensive watch I’d purchased years ago in Zurich. This time I liked what I saw. Within 30 minutes I was the owner of a space gray 42mm aluminum Series 3. I added a space black Milanese Loop but passed on the cellular option.
As I write this, two months later, my Apple Watch has hardly left my wrist (you’ll see why later). Frankly, I’m surprised at its positive impact on my life. Let’s list the ways…
Fitness
From interviews conducted since the Apple Watch was released it’s clear that, originally, Apple had no firm idea about how it might be received or used. Today, the Series 3 upgrade and recent improvements to watchOS make it plain that Apple believes that fitness tracking is the key reason people buy their watches.
I am no fitness fanatic, just a guy in his sixties trying to slow down the effects of old age. But the Series 3 has significantly improved my ability to consistently carry out the modest fitness-maintaining activities I’d previously struggled to do on a regular basis. These days I walk, do yoga, and stack and carry a few cords every year for our wood-burning stove.
How it works
The Apple Watch’s basic indication of the amount of these activities is a set of colored rings that concisely display your desired daily levels of exercise, movement, and standing (i.e. not spending hours sitting in a chair without a movement break). Adding these to your customized watch face allows you to notice your progress every time you glance at your watch. The continual reminder, with the subtle motivation to close all the rings by the end of the day, really helps me to stay faithful to my modest daily exercise goals. Although I rarely have a problem taking breaks since my adoption of Pomodoro, I love how the watch buzzes my wrist with a little reminder on the rare occasions I’ve been too couch potato-ey (which means at 10 minutes before the top of every hour when it senses you’ve been inactive for 50 minutes).
For more precise tracking (not a high priority for me), the Apple Watch contains a good variety of fitness “workouts”. These monitor your efforts once the watch knows what kind of activity you’re doing, like walking, running, cycling, elliptical, and swimming (yes it’s waterproof). I do a lot of walking while typing at my treadmill desk, which means that the standard watch walking workout would be inaccurate since my arms aren’t swinging and my position doesn’t change. For fitness activities not included in watchOS, Apple has “Other” workouts that I can custom label (e.g. “treadmill”) and treat as if I was taking a “brisk walk”. (Apple recently introduced GymKit, which obtains accurate exercise information from certain next-generation gym equipment — i.e. not my ancient treadmill.)
Heart monitoring
A friend of mine was feeling under the weather recently. He finally went to the doctor where they discovered that his heart was beating abnormally fast — 130 beats per minute (BPM) at rest. He needed urgent treatment. The Apple Watch has an accurate continuous heart monitor that can be set to notify you if your heart rate remains above a given BPM while you’ve been inactive for 10 minutes. Graphs of your daily heart rate are available. They’re interesting to occasionally peruse and it’s unlikely that I’ll find myself in my friend’s situation without knowing about it right away.
In addition, I joined the (free) Apple Heart Study conducted by Stanford Medicine, which monitors my heart rate and rhythm. If an irregular heart rhythm (arrhythmia) is identified, the app will notify me. I’ll receive a free video consultation on my iPhone with the study’s board-certified, licensed primary care providers for further analysis. “In some cases, the doctor may recommend a BioTelemetry electrocardiogram (ECG) patch for additional monitoring. The patch will be mailed to you at no cost and should be worn for seven days. The ECG data gathered over this period will be used to determine whether atrial fibrillation (AFib) or another type of irregular heart rhythm is present.”
I appreciate the heart health monitoring that my watch provides.
Informing me unobtrusively via haptics
The watch generates different kinds of haptics. These are sensations created by tiny motors at the back of the watch that deliver real-time tactile feedback on the skin below. Haptics can feel like a gentle tap on the wrist or something more complicated. A consistent haptic indicates distinct notifications and situations. For example, if you’re walking to a destination in an unfamiliar city, Apple Maps can guide you there. Your watch can tell you when you need to turn left by playing two taps three times in a row, turn right by playing twelve steady taps on your wrist, and that you‘ve arrived at your destination by using a long vibration.
Unlike the beeps, rings, and loud buzzes from other mobile devices, haptics are unnoticeable by anyone except the watch wearer. Once I’ve set up my destination in Maps, I can walk there without ever touching or viewing my phone. If I’m eating dinner with friends I can choose whether or not to ignore a tap on my wrist. And if I want to see a notification, a discrete turn of my wrist towards me turns on the display. This is usually unnoticed by my companions and certainly less obtrusive than dragging my phone out of my pocket or staring at it on the table.
Haptics is a subtle new way to communicate. It has its limitations, but I find it a great improvement over the obvious intrusions of pre-Apple Watch digital devices.
Meditation
Last week I watched Walk With Me, a documentary about the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I learned that his Plum Village monastic community rings “bells of mindfulness”. When residents hear one, they stop all conversations and whatever they are doing and bring their awareness to their breathing. I like to meditate, and the Apple Watch includes a simple app named Breathe that reminds users every five hours (default) to take a moment to relax and take deep measured breaths. You can ignore the reminder or take a few minutes to bring attention to your breath, guided by a lovely haptic that provides a sequence of graduated speed taps to synchronize with your in-breath.
Breathe
The default Breathe session is one minute of seven breaths. However, the iPhone Watch App can easily adjust this to remind a user to breathe mindfully as often as every hour and fine-tune the number of breaths per minute and the number of breaths per session. During a Breathe session, a pattern on the watch face expands and contracts to indicate in and out breathing, but I find the haptic feedback sufficient to meditate on my breath with my eyes closed.
One can, of course, simply meditate in the traditional way with no gizmo telling you when to mindfully meditate. I like the Breathe app’s periodic gentle reminder to check what I’m currently experiencing and the opportunity to center myself and help bring me back to living in the present. Rather like the bells at Plum Village.
Little things that Siri makes easy and routine
Siri is so easy to use on my watch that I now routinely do useful things that were too cumbersome when I had to find and talk to my phone. For example, I’ll lift my watch and say: “Hey Siri, start a treadmill workout for 26 minutes”. Or: “Hey Siri, how cold will it get tonight?”
Messaging “hands-free” has become possible while my phone’s still buried in my pocket. I say: “Hey Siri, send a message to Celia”, and dictate it after the “What do you want to say?” response. Siri’s voice recognition is very good so there’s rarely a transcription problem with simple messages. The first time I did this while driving, Celia was alarmed until she discovered I’d never touched my phone!
Setting timers and alarms
I frequently need triggers (aka timers and alarms) to remind me of future things I need to do. For example, take a break (as per the Pomodoro practice mentioned earlier), go to the post office before it closes, check the wood stove that I left on updraft, make a phone call, etc. I used to use small digital timers to do this. But with Siri on my wrist it’s simple to say “Hey Siri, set a timer for ten minutes”, or “Hey Siri, set an alarm for 12:30 pm”. Siri faithfully reminds me with a haptic tap when my timer or alarm is due. I can stop it with a single tap or pause/snooze it with a slide and tap or a Siri command.
Setting triggers via Siri is so easy that I set many more reminders than I did before. This enhances my imperfect memory and improves the likelihood that I’ll actually be doing what I’ve agreed to do when I need to do it.
Sleeping
I wear my watch pretty much all the time, including while I sleep. No, the watch has not become a fetish object or a substitute teddy bear, but I’m taking advantage of a sleep app Pillow to monitor my sleep. It’s a fully functional free app, though you can pay $4.99 (which I did) to unlock a few extra features. As I age, my sleep quality has declined (at least it feels that way). Pillow provides an interesting window into my sleep, allowing me to explore the effects of bedtime routines, medication, etc.
I’ve learned, for example, that I don’t sleep as much as I thought I did. Also, I hardly snore (the app includes optional recording of sound via the watch microphone). The pretty graphs of my sleep state aren’t totally accurate — I sometimes know I was dreaming when I woke but the app doesn’t think I was in REM state. But day-to-day comparison is enlightening and helps me improve my sleep hygiene.
Ergonomics, comfort & ease of use
I’ve owned quite a few watches over the years. Whenever I’ve looked for a new one I’ve had a hard time finding a watch face I like. My criteria seem simple. An analog face that shows all the numerals, a second hand, and a readable day of the week and date. Sounds straightforward, but less than 1% of conventional watches supply this combination.
This isn’t a problem with Apple watches, which come with plenty of customizable faces. I quickly created exactly what I wanted (see the screenshot). You can have multiple faces for different circumstances available with a swipe. The one I use handles what I need at a glance.
The Milanese Loop
After years of wearing leather bands that eventually distort and fall apart, I love my Milanese Loop. It’s the first comfortable metal band I’ve ever worn. The infinitely adjustable magnetic metal closure is brilliant and works perfectly. I bought the Apple version. Some of the imitation bands that cost a fraction of Apple’s price have good reviews.
Charging
The watch is charged magnetically and charging is quick. I pop the watch on the inductive charger a couple of times a day for 20-30 minutes. Even though I’m wearing the watch almost constantly (see above) I’ve never come close to a low battery situation. While we’re on the topic, the $7.95 Spigen S350 Apple Watch Stand creates the perfect travel alarm clock as long as there’s power near the bed. I say “perfect” because the stand holds the watch vertically in Nightstand mode, where the time display turns off until it’s tapped or detects even the slightest motion/sound, and you can easily set an alarm with Siri.
Ways to interact
There are multiple ways you can interact with the Apple Watch (tap, slide, force touch on the watch face; press, rotate the Digital Crown; press the side button; “Hey Siri”) that initially felt complicated. However, getting the watch to do what I want has become fairly intuitive, though I occasionally fumble for a moment.
Notifications are convenient and completely customizable. I appreciate the automatic “do not disturb” feature at night. It’s easily turned on with a slide and tap while meditating or doing yoga. Even the watch’s “flashlight”, though dim, has been useful far more than I expected.
Limitations
The watch requires you to own an iPhone. Most functionality is only available when the phone is within Bluetooth range. This is rarely a problem for me, since I tend to keep my phone in my pocket, but might be inconvenient for some. (The LTE cellular model adds phone-free calls and messaging, but battery consumption is understandably high if used extensively and, of course, there’s an additional monthly carrier fee.)
There are many other apps available for the Apple Watch besides the ones I’ve mentioned, but I barely use them. Yes, it’s impressive that I can squint at a weather radar map on my watch, but the small display area really limits its usability to viewing limited information, like a short message or tweet. It’s also quite hard to pick a rarely used app from the cloud of icons; it’s easier to have Siri do it (provided I can remember the app name).
Conclusion
The Apple Watch Series 3 is a fantastic device that has had many unexpected positive impacts on my life. I hope sharing them will help you decide whether a device like this is valuable for you.
Can meetings where no one says a word exhibit significantly different interpersonal dynamics? After completing my third Vipassana silent meditation retreat (this one at the headquarters of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts), I’m gonna say: yes they can!
If you haven’t experienced a Vipassana retreat, here’s the program flow:
Registration, with some time for participants to meet and talk.
Housekeeping announcements, an introduction to the teachers, and format.
Enter “Noble Silence”. During the silence, which continues until almost the end of the retreat, participants avoid direct eye contact, reading, or writing and do not speak or communicate non-verbally.
Many sets of 45-minute seated, silent, focused awareness meditation, followed by 30-minute walking meditation.
Communal on-site meals eaten in silence.
“Yogi jobs” that support the retreat center, approximately 45 minutes per day. Typically these involve cleaning or food preparation. (I am now quite familiar with washing and drying procedures in commercial kitchens!) When necessary, minimal talking is allowed during your job.
Retreat teachers give talks / guided meditation / Q&A sessions, and may meet with participants individually or in small groups. When relevant, participants may talk during these activities.
Closing ceremony and the end of Noble Silence. Participants can then converse with each other. At longer retreats, Silence may be ended for the evening of the last full day, and reentered for the last few hours of the retreat.
Interpersonal dynamics
As you can imagine, opportunities for interpersonal interaction are pretty limited during these retreats. That’s how it should be, as the focus is on personal inner work free from the distractions and commitments of everyday life. I’ve written about the value of my first retreat experience here, and plan to continue to attend retreats for my own benefit rather than to connect with other participants.
Nevertheless, as a meeting designer, I noticed some interesting differences in the quantity and quality of interpersonal dynamics at the three retreats I’ve attended to date. Here are some relevant statistics:
As you can see, I judged that Vallecitos participants became quite highly connected over the 5-day retreat, even though we only had a few hours at the beginning and end to meet and talk. In comparison, I rated my 3-day Barre retreat at a very low level of connection, despite a comparable amount of potential connection time. And even though the Easthampton retreat was short — no yogi job, one non-communal lunch, and perhaps 30 minutes of non-silence together — I think that slightly more connection occurred there than at Barre.
Why these differences? Here are four factors I believe are involved:
1 — Frequency of random contact
Vallecitos has a single small main building (formerly a hunting lodge) with a meditation hall and dining room large enough for 50 people. We roomed in tiny nearby individual cabins or tents. Over our five days together, we saw each other frequently, eating meals together, and passing during daily activities.
Barre is a sprawling facility of multiple buildings joined by enclosed connecting hallways. My wife was on retreat with me, and we barely saw each other during the three days.
In Easthampton, 25 of us sat in a single small room. Except for lunchtime, we were all together the entire day.
Although during any retreat there is no conventional contact, one is indirectly aware of neighbors, and that awareness becomes a form of connection that increases with time and opportunity. The limited number of chance encounters at Barre, due to the layout of the facility, minimized this form of indirect connection. (This, of course, is a plus if you really want to concentrate on your own work for an extended period of time without distraction, but that’s not what I’m focusing on here.)
2 — Size of group versus time together
A small group of strangers is potentially more intimate than a crowd of strangers. The time spent together increases the indirect intimacy but, in my experience, the sense of personal connection fades rapidly with an increase in group size — I’d guess as the square of the number of people in the group. So our Easthampton retreat, though time was short, felt intimate because the 25 of us were all together most of the time, and Vallecitos was long enough for the 40 of us to recognize each other. At Barre, on the other hand, I barely registered most of the 100 participants and the sense of being part of a community was absent.
3 — Number of leaders
At Easthampton, our single teacher, Jesse, created a more intimate environment that felt more informal and intimate than at the other retreats. Jesse sat close to us in a small room and was easy to hear at a conventional voice level. At Vallecitos and Barre, the teaching felt more formal (Jesse was one of the 2 teachers at Barre). Barre required sound reinforcement because of the size of the room. The more teachers at the retreat, the more context switches we had when they were speaking. A compensating factor was that at Vallecitos we had an opportunity to meet in small groups with each of our 3 teachers, which improved our individual connection with them. This did not occur at Barre, where our teachers, though friendly with the large group were not seen outside the meditation hall.
4 — Meals
At Easthampton, the meditation center is situated in a large former factory, converted into a set of stores and businesses. We were free to have lunch separately somewhere in the facility.
The Barre dining facility felt sterile. The weather was beautiful so many people took their meals outside on the grounds. Surprisingly to me, there were few places outdoors for small groups to sit together. Consequently, I ate all of my meals by myself, with no one else around.
At Vallecitos it was sometimes too cold to eat outdoors, so we ate in silence in the dining room. I’ve described the remarkable effect this had on me in this earlier post. Even when the (stunningly beautiful) outdoors beckoned, chairs and rocks were arranged so people gravitated to sitting near each other, eating together in silence.
Conclusions
It may seem strange to be thinking about the level of interpersonal dynamics developed at retreats whose core purpose is to allow participants the environment, structure, and process to explore and experience themselves. But if meditation was easy, we wouldn’t need to create group retreats to support individual work; we’d just learn to do it by ourselves. Sustaining this work requires a community of spiritual practice (called sangha in the Vipassana tradition). Formal retreats like the ones I’ve described are a key opportunity to develop such communities.
At Vallecitos, I had some wonderful conversations at the end of the retreat. When I go there again I hope to meet some of the friends I made during that short period. So, though building community through the development of intimacy and connection at silent retreats is not a core goal, it’s important to the growth of the practice. I offer these observations in the spirit of supporting a practice that is important to an increasing number of people.
For five days, forty of us lived in silence, meditating in the Vipassana tradition. No talking, no reading, no writing, no phone, no internet.
Before this experience, I had never been silent for even one day of my life.
What happened next?
A totally unexpected outcome was that I fundamentally changed how I eat. Mindfully eating in silence for five days allowed me to learn how much my body really wants to eat. It turned out to be a lot less than I’ve been eating most of my life.
When I was younger, I could eat anything and not put on weight. At thirty, something changed, and I gradually became overweight. Over the years I tried various approaches to eating less. Most of my efforts had a temporary effect, but they were essentially efforts of will—always a struggle—and I remained at least ten pounds overweight.
Now, three months later, I am at my lowest weight in thirty-five years. My Smart Body Mass Index is now in the normal range. And, to my surprise, this practice remains easy for me to continue.
What can we learn from my experience?
Experiential learning is the most powerful kind of learning! Five days of mindful eating reprogrammed my lifetime pattern of applying external strictures — eating certain foods, avoiding others, disciplining myself to wait until a set time to eat, etc. — to one where I eat from what Jan Chozen Bays, MDcalls a sense of cellular hunger rather than other kinds of hunger such as eye, nose, mouth, stomach, mind, and heart.
Five days of experiencing what I mindfully wanted to eat trumped years of attempting to teach myself what and how to eat.
What else did I learn?
Prolonged sitting meditation — focusing on my breath for forty-five minutes many times each day — was a new experience for me. I became aware over and over again of the games my mind continually plays. Sometimes, I found my thoughts drifting to scenes from the past or imagined situations in the future; sometimes, I found myself in a blurred dreamlike state. Each time I noticed my mind straying, I brought my awareness back to my breath.
As you might imagine, it’s hard to do this, but the practice has fascinating benefits. Besides the mindful eating outcome, I feel more connected to my experience of the world, more able to flow with what happens, and more in touch with the suffering and impermanence in my life. The latter may seem an unlikely benefit, but seeing more clearly what exists (we all suffer, we all die) is transformative.
A lot of people think that meditation is about attaining a blissful state. That’s not the whole picture for me, though there were wonderful moments during my five days, especially while experiencing the beauty around me. Rather, being closer to what life is actually about — both the joy and the suffering — is what the retreat gave me.
In addition, the retreat reinforced my experience that we are the stories we tell ourselves — further deepened by the observation that we’re telling these stories to ourselves in our own minds all the time!
Did you ever stop talking for five days?
My retreat experience was fascinating, hard, and wonderful, and I now plan to participate in one or two retreats a year. I recommend the experience, even though yours will surely be different from mine.
While exploring the New York City High Line for the first time in November 2017, I 
stopped for lunch in the Chelsea Market, passed the Apple West 14th Street Store, and on impulse went in to take a look at the Apple Watch Series 3 which had just been released. Though impressed while watching the original Apple Watch launch two years earlier, I was still wearing an inexpensive watch I’d purchased years ago in Zurich. This time I liked what I saw. Within 30 minutes I was the owner of a space gray 42mm aluminum Series 3. I added a space black Milanese Loop but passed on the cellular option.
I’ve owned quite a few watches over the years. Whenever I’ve looked for a new one I’ve had a hard time finding a watch face I like. My criteria seem simple. An analog face that shows all the numerals, a second hand, and a readable day of the week and date. Sounds straightforward, but less than 1% of conventional watches supply this combination.
Charging
Can meetings where no one says a word exhibit significantly different interpersonal dynamics? After completing my third 
