A 10-Day Silent Meditation Retreat Totally Altered My Life

At 4am on my very first morning, lying on a thin mattress in a shared dormitory in the Japanese countryside, my inner voice was anything but peaceful. It was loud and demanding: what the hell am I doing here? I was forty-one years old, the only non-Korean working in the Samsung Chairman's office, and I had just voluntarily given up my phone, my voice, and the ability to make eye contact with another human being for ten days.

To understand how I got there, you need a picture of the life I had left behind. Seoul in the summer of 2009 was intense. My career was full-on, and while I was successfully climbing the corporate ladder, a deeper spiritual longing had been quietly calling to me for years. Raised Catholic in Belgium, I had grown uncomfortable with organised religion and felt increasingly drawn to Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism.

My true motivation to pause my busy life was rooted in a memory from 1987, when I stood before Paul Gauguin's masterpiece in Boston, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Those existential questions lingered in my unconscious mind for decades, eventually boiling down to one profound inquiry: who or what am I?

The opportunity came through my older brother Peter, who had completed a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat in Belgium, inspired by my American friend Uday. He spoke highly of the experience. Booking my own place felt like what I call a "green gummy bear" moment, a leap far outside my comfort zone. I had zero meditation experience. I was committing to sitting in silence for ten hours a day. Astonishingly, my Korean boss approved my request for ten days off.

I flew to Osaka, spent a night with a dear friend, Morimoto-San, in Kyoto, and then made my way to the remote cedarwood retreat centre.

The experience

The rules were an immediate shock. Noble silence (no speaking, no eye contact) was absolute from day one. We slept on thin mattresses in shared dormitories, ate only vegetarian meals, and followed five strict Buddhist principles, including not killing any living creature. Even mosquitoes. There were a lot of mosquitoes.

The lows hit almost instantly. My body had never been asked to sit still for hours at a time, and it didn't take kindly to the request. I struggled to find a position I could hold for more than ten minutes. My mind, far from going quiet, became a flood of chaotic thoughts: a childhood cycling accident, farewell dinners, random memories I hadn't visited in years. When I closed my eyes, I was met with vivid, bright white visual images that looked like outer galaxies.

The hardest part of each day was the one-hour motionless sit in the afternoon. A burning pain would build in my leg that felt like slow-motion torture. I failed to sit through it every single day, until the very last one.

The turning point

Slowly, through the teachings and hypnotic chanting of S. N. Goenka, I began to observe my breath and scan my body and, with it, discovered the present moment. The mental noise started to settle. I began to simply look at my thoughts and emotions rather than be swept along by them.

The biggest breakthrough came on the penultimate day. When the burning arrived in my leg during the motionless sit, instead of fighting it, I let it be. And to my complete astonishment, the pain disappeared. Not because I pushed through it, but because I stopped resisting it.

On that final day, we practised Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, extending compassion first to ourselves and then outward to others. When noble silence finally broke, I felt an incredible lightness. Connecting with my fellow participants, I felt like I was floating on soft clouds in a bright blue sky.

What I learned

During those ten days, I encountered two fundamental Buddhist laws that have stayed with me ever since. The first is impermanence: the understanding that everything (every sensation, thought, and emotion) simply comes and goes. Nothing is as permanent as it feels. The second is equanimity: learning to observe what is happening without immediately reacting to it, and letting go of the ego's need for control.

The changes were immediate. Back in Seoul, my wife noticed straight away. She said my aura was different and that I looked physically lighter. I found myself less agitated by the small frustrations of daily life. I had been an angry, aggressive driver; almost overnight, I became a mindful one. Looking back, the old behaviour was a pure waste of time and energy, entirely self-inflicted stress.

It took another twelve years, stepping away from my executive career and the loss of both my mother and my brother, to finally build a consistent daily practice. But the seeds planted in Kyoto never died. Today, meditation is an anchor in my life. It has taught me that I am not my thoughts, my emotions, or my worldly ego. It has given me access to a still, borderless place within myself, and shifted my life from one lived mostly in my head to one lived fully in my heart.

It has given me the clarity and strength to tap into my creative energy, which led to the publication of my first book: a highly personal collection of twelve connected stories about embracing the unknown, written from the heart. Finally, to paraphrase the words of the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh: when someone shouts at me, I try not to get upset but realise that he or she is suffering and that the suffering is spilling over. They don't need my angry reaction. They need help.