On retreat in Mexico with my friend and colleague Nick
Since learning to meditate, I've made huge incremental change in my behaviours and attitudes, but day to day it can be hard to see any changes.
It's been when I've been on meditation retreats that I've made some of my more obvious step changes.
On retreat, we practice a Vedic technique called Rounding, which is a way of super changing the benefits of meditation.
A Round is a one-hour sequence that includes about 20 minutes gentle yoga, five minutes of breathing exercises, 20 minutes regular meditation and about ten minutes lying down in shavasana.
The yoga and breathing open us up to go deeper in meditation and the lying down allows us to integrate the experience.
I run half-day sessions where we do two or three rounds but to get the most out of it, you go away for a weekend or longer. If you build up to it, you can do up to 14 rounds in a day.
This clears out a lot of the built up stress in our systems and can work through deeper stresses than you’d be able to reach in regular daily practice.
Because this can be such a powerful practice, we only do it in controlled conditions – away from demands and with an experienced teacher who isn’t Rounding themselves.
I've had some of the clearest insights about my life and had the perspective to make significant changes from these experiences.
By the end of my first five day retreat, I decided to completely change my approach to dating.
I'd been taking a scattergun approach, dating as many people as I could – seeing what I could get, having fun and playing a numbers game. No one stood a chance as there were always more dates being lined up.
I changed this to only go out with people I thought there was a long term potential with and took things slower with coffee dates instead of getting smashed.
After a seven day retreat in Mexico a couple of years ago, I had the clarity to give up drinking.
It's something I may well have come around to without the retreat, but it was the retreat that gave me the perspective, the lift into a higher than usual state of consciousness that enabled me to make the change.
Having a high state of consciousness or being enlightened isn't a binary thing – it's not that you've either got it or you haven't.
It's more like a percentage. How enlightened are you today? For me at the end of a retreat I might be an 85% – nothing can ruffle me, I'm full of insight and wisdom.
If I've had a terrible night's sleep, I’m sick or when I used to be hungover – maybe I’d be more like a 5%.
With meditation and with advanced techniques like Rounding we have a tool to change where we are on the conscious spectrum, which is a truly special gift that most people never have access to.