Meditation ATTACK!

An alternative to meditation retreats

I asked a big group of friends, “raise your hand if you’ve ever had a personal breakthrough with a retreat, workshop, or psychedelic.” All of them except one raised their hands.

Then I prompted, “keep your hand raised if you were able to maintain that breakthrough when you got home.” All the hands went down.

This is the shape of our pathetic spiritual culture. We live disconnected lives. Then we escape from them with heightened experiences. Then we come back to our lives. These now seem even more drab and absurd. We’ve glimpsed what living in truth might look like, and this ain’t it.

What to do? Surely, we need some even MORE heightened experience. Surely, that will finally be the thing that fixes us! The *advanced* meditation retreat, the *even more* powerful psychedelic. “Just one more authentic relating workshop and I’ll finally be able to stay centered around my family.” Surely.

The main way I see people exit this addictive cycle is by deciding to live full time in some spirituality counterculture. Which...kind of looks like more escapism. I’m talking about the phenomenon of someone quitting their job in real estate to become a coach who coaches coaches who coach coaches.

This is not a personal problem; it’s infrastructural. For 99% of human history, spiritual life was woven together with everything else. The temple or church was often literally at the center of the polis. When Athenians drank ergot-laced kykeon at Eleusis, nobody needed to hire an integration coach.¹ The culture itself would have been the container.

By contrast, modern spiritual life is characterized by zero affordances for integration. You touch the infinite on 5-MeO, and three days later you’re in a passive-aggressive email thread about Q3 deliverables. You experience unconditional love for all beings on your weekend nature retreat, and by Monday you’re thinking “f*ck you motherf*cker!!!” when someone cuts in front of you to steal your parking spot. Sorry, there’s no church elder or fellowship anymore to help you with that integration challenge. Good luck!

It’s a bit sad. These days, if us city people are lucky enough to have a spiritual community, it’s often disconnected from our normal community (if we’re lucky enough to have that too). On the scale of human history, this seems like an unprecedented state of affairs? Our minds are no longer growing up in the cultural environment that they’ve grown up in since plausibly the dawn of mankind. We’re like a bunch of dolphins who decided to flop onto land and then forgot that we were born to live in the ocean. No wonder everyone is so anxious and depressed.

Of course, historically, religious communities were often oppressive. I have my share of friends who escaped from cult-like Christian communities. But still, Christianity got a lot of things right about how to weave together life and spiritual practice.

I started to wonder whether I could have my cake and eat it too. I recently went on a week-long jhana retreat with Jhourney (read my report here).

But I knew that I’d probably get back to the city and lose my meditative gains within a few hours. So, with great effort, planned my own integration day in advance.

The plan: a silent, day-long meditation attack from 11am to 11pm in NYC. A meditation attack is like a meditation retreat except instead of escaping your usual environment, you embrace it with your spiritual practice.

I combined it with my birthday celebration. About 30 people joined in throughout the day.

We meditated:

• In Times Square near a K-pop dance troupe

• At Grand Central Terminal, radiating love & kindness toward the busy commuters of New York

• In the subway (we meditated a lot on the subway)

• At the American Museum of Natural History under the giant whale in the Hall of Ocean Life (which has been my happy place since I was 6 years old)

  

Yes there were honking horns and human hubbub, and that was the whole point: to find practice in everyday life.

We practiced open-awareness meditation rather than concentration. Concentration practice is too fragile for a world full of noisy distractions. (IMO – I think American meditation culture went down the wrong path here). You need a practice which doesn’t block out chaos (since blocking out chaos is ~impossible in the modern day). You need one that metabolizes chaos into fuel for greater presence.

The basic meditation prompt was: “Invite an open-hearted feeling to color awareness.” So if you hear a jackhammer or a couple arguing? That is not a distraction; it arises within the open-hearted feeling.

Some of my favorite parts of the day were when we stopped meditating, and engaged the urban landscape with all the calm and joy that we’d cultivated. A few of these moments:

Listening to polyphonic choir music in a candle-lit chapel near Wall St. (If you can find “compline” in your city, check it out. Makes me weep every time.)

St. Paul’s chapel

Walking in synchrony across the Oculus to a playlist where each footfall landed on a beat. (Actually, this was one of the meditations, and the “meditation object” was the feeling of synchrony.)

Inside the Oculus in downtown Manhattan

Communicating nonverbally during the silent dinner at a food court. As a result, my table came up with a series of bizarre hand gestures. Eventually this turned into a 20-gesture sequence that we taught the entire group. It looked a little bit like that dance at the end of The OA.

⁠Moving to an absolutely insane Brazilian drum line at House of Yes. (Holy crap do Brazilians know how to party)

Dancing with this subway station saxophone man surrounded by dozens of dancing mechanical cats. It became quite a phenomenon! More and more strangers joined until we were surrounded by people filming. The saxophone man kept getting increasingly hype, especially when we started copying his dance moves. At the end he told us that we made his day! (He made ours too lol)

Anyway, steal this idea! I invite you to run your own meditation attack.² More generally, I invite you to stop beating yourself up about how hard it is to inhabit your higher self in everyday life, and to start building integration infrastructure. 🛠️

1. This claim is still debated by scholars (that there was psychedelic ergot involved in the rites at Eleusis). But I like the example because it’s less charged than Christian ones while still being foundational to our civilization.

2. You can duplicate my materials. Here was the Partiful invite. And here was the Participant Guide. Working with Claude was very helpful for figuring out the timing of things.