In the basement of the Best Western where the retreat was being held, I found a reproduction of a famous image of the sublime by Caspar David Friedrich: a man at the top of a cliff, overlooking a vast vista, mist obscuring the landscape below. This particular reproduction was covered with a glass panel, set within a gold frame, and flanked by stock photos of glassy buildings. In its fusion of the mundane and the grandiose, the fake Friedrich sublime was cosmically appropriate decor: a transcendental experience in the armpit of America.

The weekend began with little fanfare. I said hi to my mom (who was a main organizer of the retreat), checked in, and changed into sweatpants. My friend Julie, in cargo pants and a white t-shirt, her hair in a short black bob, followed me into a room called Princeton. We both moved to Brooklyn after college, living a block from each other in Park Slope, where we ate edibles and went to raves and took walks in Prospect Park. This was the first time I had brought her, or anyone from my life in Brooklyn, to something Burmese.

We were instructed to sit on a soft mat and given three rules: breathe to the track, do not move, and focus on your nose. The track was prerecorded: the sound of the Aung Lan Sayadaw, the originator of this kind of meditation, just breathing through his nose, the audio grainy and speckled. Abstracted in this way, the breathing sounded like a saw moving back and forth over wood.

It wasn’t so bad at first. I closed my eyes. I placed pillows underneath my hands and my knees, knowing from last year that over the course of the next two hours, my hands would come to feel like stones, my legs like lead. I tried to keep my mind focused on the breathing track, to keep up with its tempo. The breathing was heavy, and it was difficult to match its intensity while remaining concentrated on my nose. I found myself dozing off, or wandering away, only able to stay with the track for a few minutes at a time.

After around thirty minutes, my legs fell asleep. At forty-five, the tendons in my back and arms vibrated. At what felt like an hour fifteen, a sharp pain appeared in my knees. I could not feel my legs, and I felt the pain lapping around my jaw. The Pali word for bodily sensation is wethena, both pleasurable and painful, but wethena also means something like “the fact of the body’s deterioration.” In Pali, when wethena is described as increasing it is said to “rise” through the body. This spatial description felt true. I was sweating now.

I wanted so desperately to move. If I just adjusted my leg, the pain would go away. If I just moved my arm, it wouldn’t be asleep. I could hear the monitors in the room telling us not to adjust, that this was a crucial time. They saw my struggle. I was told not to look down at the wethena but to keep my attention fixed up at the sensation of air moving over the tip of my nose. At an hour thirty, the wethena became elemental, all-encompassing. Around me, others raised the intensity of their breathing to account for the pain. I felt like crying. I started to feel anger, frustration. What was the point of all this futile, useless pain?

Since I was a child, I had been taught to meditate by my parents, and for as long as I have meditated, I have found it boring. But this was not boring. This was painful. I was surprised my mom was so hardcore. Apparently, she had practiced this specific kind of anapana, or “breathwork” meditation, from the Theinn Sayadaw (who had in turn learned it from the Aung Lan and Sunlun Sayadaws), as a teenager in Myanmar. During the pandemic, she had begun to revive a vein of it in the US. This was the second consecutive year the retreat was hosted at this Best Western off the New Jersey Turnpike, presided over by the Theinn Sayadaw himself, who had flown in from Myanmar, in a venue that I had helped my mother scope out. “It hurts a lot,” I tried to explain to Julie when I asked if she might want to come. “It’s not relaxing or peaceful like a fancy wellness retreat, but it is somehow profound in a way that I don’t yet fully understand.” That was why I wanted to come back: because last year, at around one hour and forty minutes into breathing to the track and not moving, my arms and legs searing, overwhelmed by a recognition of my body’s inevitable deterioration, I found that by focusing on the sensation of my breath, I discovered a small room in my brain where I could shelter from the rest of my body, like wandering a cold, dark wood and somehow, inexplicably, coming onto an oasis.

• • •

On our first full day of the retreat, Julie and I padded around the hotel in our sweatpants like children, amidst the fifty or so middle-aged Burmese attendees. Each session lasted two hours, and the first began at 4 AM. The next was at 8 AM, after breakfast, and then at 2 PM, after lunch, and finally at 6 PM, before bed. Eight hours of sitting and trying not to move. The stray Best Western guest would not be able to discern anything if they looked into one of the hotel’s conference rooms; they would see only a group of Asian people in a room called Princeton, sitting.

I saw my mom at meals, in another elaborate Burmese dress that she had sewn for the day, her bangs sweaty against her forehead, as she corralled a cadre of volunteers in yellow shirts to serve breakfast and lunch. The food was extremely good; my mom had found a lady in Queens, naturally, who catered Burmese food out of her apartment. It was served only twice, and, according to tradition, no food was to be eaten after noon. But on that first day, my mom threw rice crackers and Costco nut bars into a GAP bag and told us just to eat them in our room if we were hungry. She, like most of the volunteers, held every rule other than the three from the meditation (do not move, breathe to the track, focus on your nose) loosely.

It was during these off-hours that we made sense of what happened to us during the meditation. All levels of retreaters––the four-day beginners like Julie and I, as well as the nine-day advanced meditators––ate in the same conference room repurposed as the cafeteria. They asked us how we were doing, if we had surpassed our wethena yet, if we enjoyed the food. We were the youngest by at least two decades compared to most, and this made us minor celebrities, although they mostly attributed our precocity as a sign of my mother’s fortitude and influence. They were particularly interested in Julie, who they could tell was Chinese (most of us were Chinese-Burmese) and were intrigued if a) she was my girlfriend and b) what she thought of it all.

Meals were also when, I came to understand, the retreaters caught each other up on their lives. In the lead-up to this retreat, my brother Duke had texted me what he’d heard about the last one, held just a week prior. He wrote about a woman who claimed she was possessed by a demon, sticking her tongue out during the session; a group of three men who claimed they could tell the future; another woman who just went “crazy” and had to be driven home; and a Vietnamese woman who claimed that a hex had been placed on her lower back so that it would hurt when she tried to meditate, thus sabotaging her bid at inner peace. Everybody looked normal enough to me this time.

For Julie and me, the retreat was extraordinary for its content but not necessarily for its format; we had been to plenty of conferences. But it seemed for those around us, this Best Western in New Jersey was a four-day escape from their children, their jobs, and often their spouses. They were immigrants from Myanmar, like my mother, living in suburbs and cities scattered around the US. It was even more fun for the volunteers, who had already completed all five steps of the course and were now here to help out. When I said bye to my mom before our next session, she told me that she and some of the volunteers were trying to decide whether to visit that enormous Hindu temple off the Turnpike or to go swimming at the East Brunswick public pool.

• • •

I had found so many ways to cheat. I rocked my butt back and forth ever so slightly to alleviate the pressure; I let my mind wander to the phrases I might use to describe what was happening to pass the time. But in our next session, Julie and I resolved to try something different. Maybe we would try just doing what they actually said to do––not to move, not to think, and to breathe to the track.

The monitors spent most of their time correcting the intensity of our breathing, insisting that it be neither too light nor too heavy. The optimal breathing rhythm was around 135bpm (I checked), and the point was that it was just heavy enough that you could feel the air on your upper lip. We were told not to mark the inhale and the exhale, but just to note the sensation of air on that tiny strip of skin, to focus all of our concentration on that one spot.     

I steeled myself for the session, the last of the first full day. We decided to frontload the effort, to try very hard in the beginning to stay on the track and not give up. I had not succeeded in this yet. I thought that by frontloading the effort I could achieve what is called shu-zen, or “effortless, automatic breathing,” before the wethena got too strong; it was the oasis I had experienced so briefly last year, which I had described to Julie as a kind of runner’s high. I had entered brief periods of shu-zen before, but it was always tenuous. If it came at all, it usually came at the peak of the wethena, the last twenty minutes of the meditation, when the pain was almost unbearable.

At first, my efforts seemed to work. My breathing was loud in my ears. I felt like I was whetting the knife of my focus against a rough stone, the sound of air filling my head. I focused on that little strip of skin. At the hour mark, I thought I felt something lift, but I wasn’t sure. The only external way to prove that a sitter had achieved shu-zen was that they were not able to stop breathing at the pace of the track after the two-hour mark. I had seen others do this, breathing rapidly as if unable to stop after the timer went off. We still weren’t quite there, but the pain wasn’t as bad anymore, so I assumed I was arriving somewhere. I had to concentrate on not thinking, only on the sensation of air, to maintain it.

The monitor raised her voice, encouraging us to stay focused. No matter how young we might be now, she said, the truth was that the body was constantly in decay. If we hadn’t already, we would encounter pain, discomfort. The body was a house on fire, she said, sickness would tear out its windows. Age would rot its foundation. Meditation was the only way out.

Why was it so hard to escape? she asked aloud. I tried desperately to stay on track, to keep my mind in the shu-zen. The body will put up a fight when it feels that the illusion of its attachment to your spirit is under threat, she said. Distraction was inevitable, distraction feels good. Your thoughts are a shiny bag of diamonds. Beautiful, multifaceted, endlessly fascinating. But you are drowning. And meditation is your buoy. Don’t you want to save your life?

• • •

At an hour and forty-five minutes into our third session of the second day, at the peak of the pain, suddenly, I felt it. The wethena dissolved without warning. It felt familiar to me from last year, like slipping into a warm glove, or the room, as I metaphorized earlier. But this time it felt wilder and more unknown. At its edges, odd, expansive sensations shimmered. I thought I could sense other modes of consciousness, alternate software I might be able to install if I could just stay long enough, if I could just concentrate long enough on the tiny square in the space below my nose where the air came in and out, in and out.      

• • •

In the time between sessions Julie and I would lie catatonic on our hotel beds or wander around the suburbs of East Brunswick. The area was sandwiched between an expressway and the turnpike, and no matter which narrow sidewalk we traversed, we could not escape the sound of cars. We walked by a paper ad in Chinese for a grandparent babysitter.

The only book about Buddhism I had downloaded in the week leading up to the retreat was by a white person. I was ashamed to report that reading about it in the pages of a “real” book, published by a “real” publisher, was what made my parents’ crazy practices feel real, substantive. I cannot imagine a more diasporic experience of religion.

In this book, Jack Kornfield’s Living Dhamma (2010), each chapter is dedicated to a different “master of meditation,” half of whom, I was surprised to learn, were Burmese. Names that I had always heard my parents mention, Mahasi, U Ba Khin, Mogok, turned out to be eminent Sayadaws with thousands of followers, not just fringe figures my parents followed. I turned to the pages of Kornfield’s book between sessions to understand what was happening to me, and found the chapter on the Sunlun Sayadaw, the originator of the kind of meditation we were engaged in this weekend.

Born in 1878, U Kyaw Din, as he was first known, was a farmer in Sunlun Village in Myingaw in middle Burma. After an encounter with a mill clerk at the age of 41, who introduced him to Vipassana meditation, he began slowly siphoning off time meditating, until he found that he could no longer concentrate on earthly matters and wanted only to dedicate his life to understanding the world’s true nature. He himself was only partially literate, so it made sense that he would develop a method of meditation that was entirely accessed through the body. Compared to other forms of meditation, some of which entail extensive reading and reflection on the nature of the mind, Kornfield notes the paucity of written material around Sunlun’s method, its emphasis on praxis. He describes the Sunlun method as characterized through the use of sensation and pain, and requiring a “total effort to overcome pain and distraction.” He says that the Sunlun method is particularly useful for quieting an “agitated, distracted mind,” and that the enormous effort to sustain the hard breathing causes thoughts to be “blasted away like clouds before a wind.”

My mom showered Julie with compliments; I joked they thought of her as the Lisan Al-Gaib from Dune, because she was able to sit for two hours in just one or two tries, which often takes people months to accomplish. I might have chalked that up to her physical health and mental fortitude, but they said she had good parami, that her karmic balance from past lives was so positive that she could encounter little resistance now. Of course, most of us did find resistance, did experience lots of pain, and this pain was understood as the byproduct of clearing our karmic debt, liquidating the parami that sought to impede meditation.

Why pain? Why should this process not be accompanied by pleasure? Kornfield reported another metaphor to answer this question, passed from the Sunlun Sayadaw. If you were swimming downstream, with the current, he said, trying to grasp at a wildflower on your way down, you may have only one chance to do so. But if you were swimming against the current, you’d have multiple chances to grasp at the flowers. Pleasurable sensation runs the risk of carrying one away with it. Amidst pain, one is more alert, more likely to be able to pluck meditation’s flowers.

What the method was supposed to allow us to see, the Sayadaw said, was the illusion that our bodies were ours. Kornfield described the ultimate goal of the practice as one to “chip at the notion of ‘I’ again and again in these struggles with unpleasant sensation.” I had wondered if we were being hypnotized, but in fact Kornfield suggested that meditation was instead a form of “dehypnosis.” We were being shown the true condition of our body: its deterioration, its constant state of change, its eventual path towards death. This would be a grim realization, but it would come with consolations: the Sayadaw said that when we achieved real shu-zen, and eventually could experience “raw consciousness” without the fetters of thoughts, it would be a sensation more euphoric than anything else. It was what kept the meditators returning for nine-day, even twenty-day sessions, the reason they were so willing to endure so much pain.

• • •

I go to CrossFit six times a week. I’ve taken psychedelics and MDMA; I’ve done an ayahuasca retreat; I practice yoga. What did that really mean, that the body was a house on fire? More often, I considered my body a house to be renovated, one to be made endlessly sleeker, more comfortable, and healthier. The threats of my deterioration felt theoretical rather than lived. Julie and I are young and beautiful. When the monk asked our age, we told him we were about 30, and he said that we were the age that Prince Siddartha, the Buddha, was when he first left his palace and encountered pain and suffering for the first time. He said we were at the peak of our physical form, an ideal time to practice this technique. It made me feel that meditation was a kind of live memento mori, that our bodies were the decadent, luxurious flowers at the cusp of decay in those beautiful Dutch paintings.

This practice, and this retreat, asked something novel of me: to treat the body as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry. To treat the body as a site of research as fertile as any field of academic discovery, in a way that no school had ever suggested to me before. While I had approached the theology with skepticism, what I felt in my body was real. I had felt it even if I still didn’t have the right words for it. I had found shu-zen. The veil between the physiological and the spiritual––the two systems I had to explain what had happened to me this weekend––had begun to degrade.

By Monday, we were ready to leave. We met with the Theinn Sayadaw one last time, so he could assess our progress, and he      declared that we could proceed to the next stage of this meditation, which no longer required the intensive breathing. He bid us farewell with a prayer of forgiveness for the anger that emerged in the pain and for any mistakes made by the organizers.

On the train back to the city I felt disoriented. I couldn’t imagine listening to music or watching a video on my phone, how overstimulating that would be. I wanted to stare into space.

When I got to Penn Station, I stood on the subway platform, waiting for the downtown train, and my eyes began to water. I felt a sense of lightness pass through my body, followed by involuntary tears of joy. I messaged Julie. Was she feeling this too? Is Buddhism stronger than drugs? I chalked it up to a delayed release of oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin after three days of forcing myself to sit still. That certainly made sense. But perhaps it was something else, an ongoing question that my body had only begun to answer.