A crackle on the radio… the silence has been broken!
WELCOME BACK!!! - The issue you have all (well, at least two of you) been waiting for… My week of silence in the Thai jungle. What an experience, 10/10 would never do again but glad (and honestly proud) I did it.
This past month has probably been the busiest of my travels. Between job applications, interviews and general admin, I’ve made it from the south of Thailand to Jakarta.
The following issues will cover Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. For now it’s all about the retreat and the chaos that followed…
Silence of the mans↗
Where does your mind go when you have no stimulation?
Where does your mind go when you lose sense of time?
Where does your mind go when you don’t register people as people?
Where does your internal monologue go when you give it, pure, undivided attention for a week?
They say that one’s mind can either be one’s best friend or worst enemy. Boy oh boy, if I learnt one thing, the mind is most certainly a force of nature and must be respected.
On the 30th of August I said my final goodbye to Bangkok after my time with Sean and boarded the overnight train down south.
I settled into my bunk and the conductor came through to work out who to wake up at which time. When I mentioned I was getting off at Chaiya he looked bewildered. The train was finishing up in Surat Thani where the vast majority of people (locals and tourists) were getting off as it is a major transport hub for the islands and the deep south.
I didn’t need waking up, I couldn’t sleep at all on that train and at around 4am the train pulled into Chaiya, a tiny station seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
I lugged my bags along the platform and got a good look at the surroundings, most of the people who got off the train were wrapped in the familiar orange robe: monks.
Grab didn’t work out there but luckily there was a man and a bike nearby and so I hopped on the back and asked to head to Wat Suan Mokkh, my home for the next week.
We drove deeper and deeper into the jungle and eventually stopped at a bunch of huts in a little clearing. ‘Wat Suan Mokkh Khrap’ he said. I had made it.
There was one guy sitting down, facing the wall who I could just make out in the darkness and over the next few hours more people started slowly trickling into the hall.
Registration was at 3pm and it was currently about 8am, I was famished and so left my bags in the hall and got a bike back to the station where I had spied some shops to get a last taste of normality and, more importantly, one last coffee.
Before too long it was time to return to the monastery but not before I had bought some, incredibly important, mosquito spray.
In total there were probably around 20 of us at registration time.
One by one we had to approach the table in the centre of the hall to talk to the retreat lead, an eccentric man who looked and talked like a mad scientist. It seemed like he had meditated far too hard and couldn’t find his way back.
Each of us had to have an interview with this man to make sure we were ‘of sound mind’ and knew what we were getting ourselves into.
I remember thinking then, ‘this seems like a bit much for a meditation retreat’. He was right. Warnings and advice were definitely needed.
The main thing I remember from my interview was ‘the wall’. A severe mental obstacle most people come into contact with in day 3 or 4.
Just like that goal number one was set for me: whatever happens, at least get to day 5.
After registration we still had a couple of hours before the retreat started which meant we could still talk to the other participants and sort out our bedding situation as well as sign up for chores (we each had to do a minimum of one a day).
As I was one of the first to have an interview I got a pretty decent pick of the chores and chose to sweep the dining hall after lunch which was significantly better than the dorm toilet cleaning one of my neighbours had to do.
Before too long we heard the first of the many (and I mean well over one hundred times over the course of the retreat) bells from the monastery’s tower, signalling it was time for all of us to begin the retreat properly.
The first thing we needed to do was hand in anything ‘distracting’. This ranged from, of course, electronics all the way to books, photos, even a notepad and pen. We were not allowed to make anything/document anything during our time, we needed to be purely present and nothing else.
I handed in all my books and devices (apart from my watch because I was interested in seeing my sleep score over the week but had to hide it in my room and only use it at night).
It was such a weird feeling not having my phone in my pocket, let alone anywhere near me.
After the forbidden items were taken in it was time to head to the meditation hall for the first time.
The lead detailed the daily schedule and outlined the rules and then we had a brief Q&A, though most people made statements rather than asked questions, just to speak one last time.
Our daily schedule was:
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Morning alarm at 4am
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4:30-5:30 first meditation
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5:30-7:00 yoga
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7:00-8:00 second meditation
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8:00-10:00 breakfast and chores
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10:00-10:30 meditation study
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10:30-11:00 walking meditation
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11:00-12:00 sitting meditation
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12:00-14:00 lunch/dinner (last meal of the day :/) and chores
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14:00-15:00 meditation study
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15:00-15:45 walking meditation
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15:45-17:00 sitting meditation
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17:00-18:00 monk talk
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18:00-20:00 tea (just drinks…)
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20:00-20:30 sitting meditation
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20:30-21:00 walking meditation
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21:00-21:30 sitting meditation
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Then finally bed time
The basic rules were:
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Absolutely no speaking or interactions (e.g eye contact, gestures) of any kind
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No electronics, books, etc.
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Barefoot at all times (although most people didn’t stick to this)
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No additional food
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No skipping sessions
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Do assigned chores
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Avoid the snakes and scorpions!
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And the most important one - be mindful in everything you do
After the Q&A the lead chimed the bell at the front of the hall and just like that, the retreat had started.
We didn’t have any meditation on that check-in day, it was already about 9pm when we finished the talk so we all slowly trudged back to our dorms in complete silence and darkness and tried to sleep on our concrete mattress and wooden pillows…
r i n g
r i i n g
r i i i n g
R I N G
R I I N G
OK!!!, fuck, chill, I’m waking up!
R I I I N G
That sound will forever haunt me.
At 4am the next day we heard our first wake up alarm.
It started as a very soft bell chime but the monk in charge would wack it harder and harder for 15 minutes straight to make sure we were all up.
I hardly slept that first night. Not only was the bed the most uncomfortable thing ever, but the jungle came alive and you could hear all sorts of sounds.
Weirdly enough, even though I’m not a morning person, the first session of the day was always quite nice.
You couldn’t see a single person in the hall because it was pitch black (the hall was outside, basically just a roof above a giant sandpit) and it felt like I was on a covert mission, hiding in the shadows.
The first session of the day always involved an extract from a book that the lead would read and then we would go straight into a meditation on that extract. To meditate on the extract of something you basically have to make it your ‘vision’ and be only aware of the ideas of the book, sounds a little wishy-washy but it definitely works.
Every so often in the hall you’d hear the sound of somebody re-adjusting their mat or trying to cross their legs the other way (which was so painful).
After trying to meditate but basically lowk getting a little extra sleep, it was time for the yoga.
These first three sessions of the day were always my favourite, always felt much better even though I hadn’t eaten since 12pm the previous day.
I think everyone enjoyed the yoga because it was literally our only break from meditation and stretching was muuuuuch needed after sitting cross-legged literally all day, every day.
What was really cool about it was that we started the yoga in the pitch black. After a bit of stretching we’d do sun salutations, and quite literally: after lying with our eyes closed, we’d open them to find the sun creeping into the hall. It really did feel like we had all welcomed the sun into the day, it was pretty cool.
Feeling somewhat reinvigorated, the sitting meditation session after that always went by pretty smoothly, partly because of the yoga and also because I knew afterwards I was going to be able to eat for the first time in 20 hours.
I found that during that session was always when I actually managed to properly meditate, reaching very relaxed states of mind.
The light always felt peaceful at that time too. I don’t think I have seen many sunrises in my life to be honest and definitely at least doubled my total that week.
After the bell rang there was one thing on my mind (meant to be nothing on my mind but oh well), food.
There was another rule: you can only eat when everyone is sitting at the table with their food ready.
That normally wasn’t a problem but occasionally someone would go to the toilet first or trudge back to the dorm to leave their lantern behind (as it was very dark for the first session of the day).
That meant not only had we not eaten in 20 hours, we had to sit for about 10 minutes with food right in front of us, waiting for someone to come into the hall.
We actually had another opportunity to speak here.
We all had to repeat back to the retreat lead a saying of grace of sorts. Basically saying the food is only for me, I will only eat until the hunger has subsided and no more etc etc.
The food was, of course, all veggie and relatively bland but occasionally the cooks would remember they were Thai and crank up the spice.
There was always bamboo tea available as well but it literally had no flavour, still it felt like coca-cola compared to the water I’d been having the whole week.
After chomping down brekkie it was time to wash our dishes and then do chores.
Fortunately, my chore was sweeping the hall after lunch and so I had a free hour and a half or so.
That first break was always nice, normally I’d do some self-care (washing, laundry, etc) for a bit and then use the one luxury we had available…
A little further into the jungle and away from the camp you could see steam rising through the trees.
There happened to be a collection of hot springs right in the monastery grounds!
These were hooooooot springs though and in the already 35+ degree heat and crazy humidity I could only stay in for a minute at a time before becoming faint.
It was a saviour though, I could sort of switch off and, in all honesty, got closer to properly meditating in that than I did in the sessions…
I would normally do 1 min in 3 mins out about three times and then head back to the dorm and splash myself with the cold water before I heard the dreaded bells again.
The next sessions were a real slog to get through and just involved more trying to sit still and cycle through thoughts.
Instead of just listing out the rest of the typical day (pretty much the same thing) I’ll skip to the most interesting parts.
After the sessions and the lunch break (which I did my sweeping chore after), it was time for by far the gnarliest portion of the day.
We had around 4 hours of near continuous meditation. Genuinely the most bored I have ever been in my life.
The worst thing about it is - you can’t even go through the shared ‘trauma’ of the retreat with others as you can’t speak or engage with them.
During the later days I had to pretty much physically stop myself from talking to people in between the sessions, it just felt so wrong.
Anywhoooo, after the back to back to back sitting, walking, sitting it was time to hear what the monk had to say.
Of course he was a Brit.
People have asked me what convinced me to leave early (left on day 7 instead of 10). Honestly it was this monk mainly.
He was so stuck in his ways and on his high horse that it really put me off trying to get to his level of ‘mindfulness’. He would spend the whole hour shitting on the state of the modern world and the younger generations.
Yes - I agree the world is far from ideal but it seemed like he saw negativity in everything. It sort of forced me to look again at monks. Are they chasing this ‘enlightenment’ or simply running away from the world.
For this monk it seemed like the latter. It also seemed like he had spiralled deep into a sort of dpdr (depersonalisation/derealisation) which I myself have been spending the past 2 years trying to get out of so I knew it when I saw it.
He gave the example of wanting an ice-cream.
‘You’ don’t exist until you want something. Your ego wakes up with desires and disappears when you are satisfied. Everything we want in this life is fake and reality isn’t even real, we have to go against our natural desires and the like. He just kept on repeating for the full hour, every day, how bad our primal urges are and how we have created everything - a flower shouldn’t be beautiful, that’s just our perception.
Yes I know lad, but why should we make it not beautiful? I could look at a sunset and just see a combination of colours as a direct result of the sun hitting the horizon or I could look at it and see natural beauty, even knowing it came from a basic interaction and has no meaning.
Above all though, he seemed genuinely and thoroughly miserable in his life.
I get that we are meant to get rid of desires so we can be free but if I can manage to ride the rollercoaster of up and downs that life has, why shouldn’t I take my time enjoying the highs instead of trying to get back to the base?
There are always going to be lows in life. That is far more inevitable in life than the highs. Of course the one truth is our impending and unpredictable, death.
Now throughout my life, if I have times of genuine, or even just a little bit, happiness and joy, why the fak should I not enjoy that?
There are most definitely bad days but if you don’t even let the good days in what sort of life is that?
That was honestly my main takeaway from the retreat and I sort of had an epiphany on night 6. I had made it through the wall on day 3 (which was beyond awful, properly had auditory hallucinations and so much pent up energy and also crushing fatigue) and was actually proud of myself.
I remember looking in the mirror that night and thinking, maybe my true test is leaving early, not following the program.
Maybe I was only wanting to stay for the rest to prove to the others I could do it, I don’t actually need to do it.
And so, after lunch on day 7 I took what I thought before was the walk of shame to the office and asked to leave.
It was a weird feeling, it all moved so fast compared to the rest of the retreat.
There was a tuktuk ready to pick me up within minutes and I got my electronics back.
I climbed into the back of the tuktuk and didn’t look back.
Onwards, to the real world.
I was straight to the 7/11 and got some snacks and an ice cold sprite before a 3 hour journey to the town of Surat Thani.
The post-retreat week was all very spontaneous, I decided to just hop on the local night boat to an island. Kinda being unaware of where it was going until it had set off, but that didn’t bother me, I just felt like I needed to move.
I met a guy who was pretty much the polar opposite of the monk. A young lad who was building custom bluetooth speakers, trying to sell them to the bars on Koh Tao.
He invited me to drink on the deck of the boat as we begun the 12 hour journey to Koh Tao.
I think that was one of the first conversations I’ve had in recent memory that felt completely unforced, I had got a sort of clarity from the retreat that I can literally say anything in conversations, thinking does nothing.
There was another guy next to him who seemed to have gotten way too high who actually turned out to be his dad which was quite funny. The little nightcap helped me nod off and in the morning I awoke in the port of Koh Tao.
As this is quite a long issue already I’ll quickly sum up Koh Tao and then leave it at that.
Super nice island, although obviously very touristy. I found a nice beach to have a nap at and, for the first time on the trip, actually fell asleep properly in public and also booked a hotel by just walking up with cash, felt pretty cool lol.
I also booked a bike for a day and a snorkel set, zooming around the island and managed to see some little sharks and amazing corals before lowk crashing my bike even though I was going like 2mph.
It wasn’t even painful, just super awkward. I was at a junction with a bunch of traffic behind me and I was trying to turn right but literally drove straight into the wall loooool
SKIP IF SQUEAMISH (it’s not that bad but just in case)
Luckily there was someone close by who helped me out and I popped into the shop to wash off the cut and figured I could wash the rest off in the sea.
Biiiiig mistake, it was fine for that day but as I got the night boat back a couple of days later, my foot became increasingly swollen and started to look pretty gnarly.
I had bandaged it up but around a week after I cut it I got an increasingly painful throbbing pain and decided it was time to check out the hospital.
I had only gone and got an infection.
It got a thorough clean and I was put on IV for 30 minutes and then a week’s course of antibiotics, fun times.
I stayed in the town with the hospital - Hat Yai. Very nice place with literally no tourists but fortunately for me, a good hospital and good links into my next country!
In the next issue I’ll cover the whole of my time in Malaysia as I need to make up some ground, currently 2 countries ahead in Indonesia!!
Hope you are all well, thank you so much for reading!
Thought↗
The whole of this issue has pretty much been a thought but something I started thinking about recently:
‘Over’thinking gets you nowhere. The retreat made me realise this. During the first few days all of my thoughts felt so important and like a to-do list to get through them. By day 5 though the thoughts were exactly the same and I could pretty much predict the whole thought process if I started to think about something, I knew I got no new ground covered by thinking.
I think that realisation has actually been a major event. I now know that to change my situation and, hence, change my thoughts I cannot do it through thinking. It must be done through action. When you take action, sooner or later, you need to stop thinking and start doing.
Thinking is typically seen as ‘intelligent’ or ‘observant’, I think I’ve realised those labels don’t actually belong. There is something far more intelligent about doing something without knowing fully what it is rather than going round in circles. You can’t think your way exploring a new place, you have to physically trek around and discover.
I wonder what’s down that road - let me think.
I wonder what’s down that road - let me look.
It boils down to an identity shift - are you a thinker or doer?
Album of the issue↗
I’m just realising now that the title is in monastery, maybe it was meant to be.
The first long journey I had after the retreat I reached straight for my headphones and I’m not sure why but I was in the mood for some Future. This is the first mixtape/album of his that I properly listened to and so I crunched through it on the way out of the jungle.
If you have heard Future before you may not think he goes too deep in his lyrics as most of the time he just lists random drugs. A little under the surface though and you will find that even ‘monsters’ have struggles.
In this album he embraces the label given to him, a toxic, drug-abusing, arrogant rapper and spins it on its head. Think a little about the hidden meaning behind the tracks and you discover it’s far more than a typical rap album, it goes deep into his mind and creative process and is actually very vulnerable.
From the very first song (Radical) you are transported into what I like to think of as a villan’s lair and it feels like you are stuck there for the majority of the album with the booming 808s and tight hi-hats & snares in typical trap fashion. That is, until you get to the beat switch in Throw Away and the album suddenly reveals it’s deeper level.
I have 4! Standout songs from this album, in no particular order:
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Throw Away (gets super vulnerable, make sure you listen to the beat switch)
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My Savages
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Hardly
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Codeine Crazy (goes through his addiction)
Please don’t write it off just because you have a preconception about hard trap or Future as a person, give it a proper listen and if you don’t vibe with it at least listen to the whole of Throw Away.