The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

extraordinary. I discovered subtle sub-flavours in peanut butter I’d never have imagined might be hiding there. The Massachusetts winter sunset, viewed from the building’s main porch, was often so beautiful as to be almost painful. At night, I was sleeping more deeply than I could remember.
    And then it all went wrong. Without my noticing the precise moment of transition, the silence of the meditation hall became a combination of courtroom and torture chamber. For hours, I was attacked by barrages of negative thoughts and their associated emotions – anxious ones, guilty ones, worried ones, hostile, bored, impatient and even terrified ones – as if they had all been gathering, just out of sight, for years, waiting for this moment to pounce. Above all, they were self-critical. I was suddenly aware – and somehow all at once – of countless occasions in my life on which I had behaved badly towards other people: my parents, my sister, friends, girlfriends, or colleagues. Many of these infractions were relatively small in the scheme of things – harsh words spoken, relationships insufficiently nurtured – but they filled me with sorrow. Months afterwards, I would encounter Buddhist writings suggesting that this was a well-recognised early step on the‘progress of insight’, the stages through which a meditator is traditionally held to pass: it was called ‘knowledge of cause and effect’, and had to do with perceiving afresh how one’s actions always had consequences. The sorrow that accompanied these realisations, from a Buddhist point of view, is a good thing; it is the fertile soil in which compassion can take root.
    After about a day of this, though, I began to notice something. The situation in my mind was far from quiet or relaxed. And yet my constant efforts to return to focusing on my breath – to avoid becoming attached to thoughts or emotions – seemed to be having an effect. My vantage point on my mental activity had altered subtly, as if I’d climbed two rungs up a stepladder in order to observe it from above. I was less enmeshed in it all. As Shoma Morita might have put it, I was beginning to see it all as mere mental events, to be non-judgmentally noticed. Much of my thinking concerned the past or the future, but I was no longer being yanked off into daydreams or unpleasant memories; I was absolutely present, there on the cushion, watching the performance with something less like panic and more like interest. In some monasteries in the Zen tradition, a monk is charged with creeping up behind his fellow monks, and hitting them with a thin wooden stick, or keisaku, in order to snap them into exactly this kind of utter presence. They didn’t hit people with sticks at the Insight Meditation Society, but I felt like someone had. I was watching my own mind with total alertness.
    The strangest part, though, and the part that is hardest to put into words, was the question of where I was watching all this from. If I’d stepped away from being enmeshed in my thoughts, where was this point of observation? Nowhere? Everywhere? I felt as if I had stepped into a void. I recalled my conversation with Adina in the taxi, and Pema Chödrön’s advice about ‘relaxing intothe groundlessness of our situation’. It was suddenly apparent to me that I spent my regular life in a state of desperate clinging to thinking, to trying to avoid falling into the void that lay behind thoughts. Except now I was in the void, and it wasn’t terrifying at all. By the time the retreat drew to a close, I found to my surprise that I didn’t want it to end; I could easily have stayed another week. Moreover, I felt as if I were among friends. Even though I had never exchanged words with most of the other retreatants – and wouldn’t have recognised them in the street, given that we’d been keeping our eyes downcast – a tangible sense of