The Mindset Mentor - I Meditated For 10 Days Straight

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Episode 637 - Yep, it's true. I did a 10 day silent meditation retreat and I learned a lot in the process. Listen to this episode to find out what I learned and also learn how to meditate better! Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/robdialjr/ Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to the Mindset and Motivation Podcast, one of the top motivational podcasts in the world. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we come out with a short, to the point, no BS episode to help make massive changes in your mind and transform you from who you are now to who you want to be. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast starts now. Welcome to today's episode. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another episode. And if nobody has told you yet today,

nice butt. Just kidding. No, really though, it is a nice butt. Nice one. Good job. You must be doing those squats. Last but not least, I have an exciting announcement for you guys.

This is the very last time this is going to happen, but I am going to be changing the name of this podcast in the upcoming weeks. But I want to prep you guys so that you can hear this over and over and over again. So if you go and type in the Mindset and Motivation podcast, you can't find it. You know that the podcast name is changing to the Mindset Mentor with Rob Dial. So write it down in your journal. Don't forget it. The Mindset Mentor. Because what I realized is that there's a lot more mindset in this than motivation. If I want to be known for something, it's to help people with their mindset. So the new podcast name is The Mindset Mentor with

Rob Dial. There'll be a new logo. You can actually see my face on the logo. So if you've never seen my face before, you can see what I look like. And I'm excited to change the name over. So nice butt, number one. And number two, the podcast name is changing to The Mindset Mentor. But let's go ahead and dive into today's episode. Today, I'm going to talk about my 10-day silent meditation retreat and what I learned from it. And then also what I feel you could probably learn from it as well. So when I talk about the 10-day silent meditation retreat, people always think that I'm crazy. And most people usually say the same thing. Oh, I could probably do three days.

I could probably do two days, but there's no way that I could do 10 days. Do they offer two or three days? And the funny thing is they don't. And the reason why is because usually your breakthroughs don't start coming through until about day six, seven, eight. So you've got to be there and allow yourself to decompress. But what do I mean by a 10 day silent meditation retreat? And what do we do? And what did I learn there? So

basically 10 days on meditation means that for 10 hours, approximately out of the entire day, we meditated. We woke up at four o'clock in the morning, we meditated, and you're completely silent, which means you can't talk to anybody. You can't look anybody in the eyes. People always ask, why is that? And the reason why is because you don't realize how much you can actually talk with your eyes, how much you can gesture with your eyes, all of that. So you're not supposed to look anybody in the eyes. You're not supposed to read. You're not supposed to journal. You're not supposed to do any working out, any of that stuff. It's just a inward journey to the extreme. You can either be meditating in your room. You can meditate outside. You can meditate in the meditation hall. There's three actual hour-long sessions throughout the

day where you're required to be in the meditation hall. Or you could walk outside, go for a stroll, you know, five-minute stroll around the small property that they have. Or if you wanted to, you can go to your room. And if you go to the room, there's nothing on the walls. It's just blank walls. There's nothing to stare at anyway. So what do we do? So first off, you get fed twice. It's completely free to do it. It's all donation based, but you get fed twice and that's breakfast and then lunch. And then for dinner, instead of having a dinner, you get a ginger tea. Now, the main thing that I would say that I learned from this the most is, is what they teach. They teach a Buddhist philosophy. And every night you get about a 45 minute to an hour long discourse where they play a video from the teacher, uh, that he died

like 10, 15 years ago. And, uh, and something new every single day about meditation, about impermanence, about Buddhist philosophy, all of those things. And you start to learn how to let go of your materialistic world a lot more. So I would say the main thing that I got from it is the idea that Buddhists teach of anicca, which means impermanence. You know, if you look at, you know, I'm not permanent, you're not permanent, we're all impermanent. Everything around you in your physical world, everything that you've ever seen, every person you've ever met is impermanent.

All of the trees are going to be gone one day. All of the buildings are going to be gone one day. There is nothing that lasts forever, including your problems, your pains, your issues, everything that happens. So once you learn this and it takes days and days and days to finally get into the deep teaching of understanding and permanence, it starts to make a lot more sense. So day one through three, the only thing that you do in meditation is this. You go in, you get as comfortable as you possibly can, you don't move, and then what you do is you focus on the breath going in and out of your nostrils, just the feeling of the breath going in and out of your nostrils. That's it. And that's what will literally start to drive some people crazy because some

people are so used to distraction. They wake up and they distract themselves for 16 hours straight. There's a really good quote I heard the other day that said, all of man's issues stem from the fact that it's the hardest thing in the world for him to do is to sit in the room alone in quiet. And so the first three days is literally just focusing. And what you notice, and if you've ever meditated, you'll notice this as well, is that your brain, you'll try to focus on something and then your brain will do what? It'll go to another thing and you got to bring it back. And then it'll go to another thing. You got to bring it back. And that's what it teaches you to do. And not to judge the fact that your brain is going all over the place, not to have emotion attached to it, but to just notice, okay, I'm not focusing on my breath anymore. Let me go ahead and bring it back to my breath. And then it goes off somewhere

else. And you say, let me go ahead and bring it back to my breath. The first three days is just that. Day four through seven, they teach you how to focus on different, how to scan from the top of your head down to the bottom of your toes. So you go from the top of your head down to the bottom of your toes, and you just focus on every little sensation that you can find in your body, you know, the different places. And so you're going to go from top of your head, you go down your face, you go down the back of your head, you go through your neck, you go down your chest, you focus on your back, you go down your left arm, you go down your right arm, and you go down your left leg, your right leg, and you

just focus on any little teeny tiny thing that you can find whether it's you know your breath coming out of your nose whether it's uh you know your shirt on your your chest whether it's you know one of your hairs moves that was folded under another hair and you can feel that little movement but the secret of it is that you actually can't move again so when you sit down for an hour-long meditation you can't move until the end of the meditation is what you're supposed to do. Like you're supposed to just stay there. And this is where it really starts to get tricky. And the reason why is because if you've ever been in any position for an hour straight, you start to notice little pains. You want to just adjust just a tiny bit, but they teach you not to. And the

reason why is because that pain that you feel is impermanent. Anicca, it will go away. The point is to feel that pain and to just allow it to exist. Don't wish that it wasn't there anymore. Don't wish for it to go away. Don't get pissed off because you can't move. But just literally notice the pain and just allow it to exist. And it will eventually go away.

Notice the pain and just allow it to exist and it will eventually go away. And the reason why this is so key, at least for me, was if I'm able to focus and notice the pain, but then say, okay, there's the pain. It's there. There's nothing I can do about it right now, but it will eventually be gone and I can focus on something else. If you cannot react to pain, that's the most deep animalistic part of your brain, the running away from fear and pain part. If you can not focus on pain and you cannot react to it, well, the next time somebody cuts you off on the road, you're not going to react to that either. It'll be much easier to

not react to all of these things. And so it's teaching you to master your reactions to the external world of everything that's happening around you. So day four through seven, they teach you how to scan your body. And then day seven through 10, they teach you how to scan your body and then go actually through your body to try to feel the internal organs move, everything that's inside of you, and try to think of your blood vessels, think of every aspect. And I don't think I've ever had more appreciation in my entire life for this incredible body that we're given and all of the crazy stuff that it does until I started going through this. And I think I had a pretty high appreciation for it in the first place. But what's cool though, is that it teaches you,

man, like I can feel everything. And you think about the way that your brain's working. You think about the way that your tongue moves inside of your mouth And you think about the way that your brain's working. You think about the way that your, your, your tongue moves inside of your mouth. You think about the way that your throat's designed. You think about your heart beating. You think about the fact that your heart would just beat supplies blood to every single extremity, every, all the way down to your fingers, all the way down to your toes. You can start to feel literally, you can feel your heart beating in your fingers and you start to get this real deep appreciation. And for me, you know, I, I am a super calm person. It's very hard to make me mad. I rarely ever get mad, but for some reason, day seven, like I hit this block of just complete rage that I've never had.

And what they say is that, is that when you don't react to an itch or something, you know, if you don't react to an itch on your skin, um, if you don't react to an itch on your skin, it's a Sankara is what they call it. A Sankara is a past energy that you're holding onto. It's coming up to the surface and by not reacting to it, to it, you're letting it go. If you react to it, you're making it deeper and creating another Sankara is what you're doing. So for me, I must have had something stored really deep. It took days to get out. Cause on day seven, it was like complete rage. And I kid you not for some reason, I was in so much pain. My back hurts so much. And I got so pissed off in the morning. And I was just like, this sucks. Why am I here? This is the stupidest thing. And I was just like, I was like, this is dumb. I'm not going to leave. I knew I wasn't going to leave. So I was like, I got three

more days of this crap. I don't want to be here anymore. And then we went to lunch and I cussed every single person out in my head. I was like, screw that guy. Screw that person. I was saying the F word. I wasn't saying screw, but I was like, screw this person. Screw this person. I was just like, piss. I was like, screw this food. And the food's incredible. It was all amazing, organic, vegetarian food, vegan food, actually. But I just hit this point where I was just raged for like three hours and I didn't hit anybody or throw anything, but it was just like this internal rage. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to go back and I'm going to meditate again. And I went

and meditated in the, the allowing it, the rage to exist, not judging the rage, just letting it eventually get out of me. It got out of me. And then it was just these huge breakthroughs and nothing happened. Nothing, nothing crazy happened that made me go, Oh, this is my breakthrough. It was just like the rage was there. I accepted it. It was gone. And then it was, I could meditate from instead of meditating for an hour, I started meditating for two and a half hours. And I got to these points of just like the most joy and bliss that I've ever felt in my entire life. And I was doing apps. Like I was at the point where I was sitting with my eyes closed and it was like on the verge of tears. Like I can't believe how amazing this world is and this life that I'm was given and everything that I've been blessed with, even all of my

struggles and my challenges. And there was nothing. You couldn't give me a million dollars that would have made me feel better than I did in that exact moment. So that's why they say it takes 10 days. Sometimes you get your breakthrough. Sometimes it takes day nine, day 10 to get your breakthrough. So for those of you that are out there and you're listening and you're like, I actually might want to do this thing, but I don't want to do it for 10 days. It takes 10 days before you start to get the real results. Mine was day seven is where I finally got the breakthrough. And then day eight, nine, and 10 were just three of the best days of my entire life. And so I wanted to bring this up to you and let you guys know what it is because Vipassana

is absolutely free. It's V-I-P-A-S-S-A-N-A. And you can Google it. There's over 350 centers across the United States. It's absolutely free. It's donation based, which is really cool. You can donate as much or as little as you want to. And what they say is, listen, the reason why you're here, you're here for free and you're eating for free and all of this is because someone else before you decided to donate. So if you want to donate as well, whatever your heart desires, donate that and it

will be appreciated. So what's cool about it is it costs absolutely nothing. All you have to do is literally, you can't look at your phone, you can't journal, you can't read, you can't talk to anybody, you can't look anybody in the eye for 10 days. You know, if an emergency comes in, obviously there's an emergency contact where they can call in if something happens. So, you know, you're not completely disconnected where if something happens in your family and you have to go back, they can call into the Vipassana center and they can let you know, and you can leave, but it allows you to go and completely disconnect. Cause if you think about it, when was the last time you completely disconnected from everything, not talked for a few days, not talked to anybody, just focused on yourself. And what it really is, is a complete

reset. And so then people always ask me what I do it again it again? Yes. And I'm going to try to do it yearly every single year, because I think that, you know, I've done, I've done a lot of plant medicine and with plant medicine and with Vipassana, I think that the two of those together are the perfect combination to really help somebody reset in different ways. But I am going to do it yearly. If you're interested in it, I would a hundred percent look it up. It is amazing. And if you're trying to get better at meditation, it is the easiest way, well, easiest and hardest way to get better at meditation as well. That's what I got for you guys for today. So if you like this episode, please share it with someone that you know and love. And I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single

episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and hope that you have an amazing day.