The first I heard of the outside world, after seven days of silent meditation at an isolated retreat center in western Washington, was the glug-glug-slush of a Honey Bucket service truck slurping away a week’s worth of our collective shit.

Evergreen thickets and wide meadows surrounded the center, absorbing and diffusing any noise that might have wafted over from a neighboring farm. For a week I had heard only the sound of breathing, forks clinking during meals, tap water running and the various subtleties of still winter air. Now I sat on my pillow on the floor of the ultra-hushed hall, observing my vow, cracking up silently. There we all were: neat rows of obedient meditators, men on the left, women on the right, attempting to do to our minds what this sucker pump was doing to the outhouses in minutes flat.

Purifying the mind is a different ordeal for everyone, but the method is the same. Ten and a half hours of sitting still each day and our only task was observing the sensations on and in our bodies—anything from air moving through your nostrils, to stabbing pains between your shoulder blades, to a most odd and compelling buzzing blur-out that smears your body into the space it fills—and we were to do all of this without reaction or judgment. When your mind wandered or you fell asleep or some desperate emotion bubbled from your guts, you were instructed to simply return to active observation. It’s no rest cure. Purification is hard fuckin’ work.

All I knew about Vipassana meditation when I signed up for the 10-day course was that I wouldn’t be allowed to speak. Wouldn’t be allowed to read, write or leave the confines of the center for 10 solid days. Typically I can’t shut up. I talk to anyone about anything. Words stack up against the back of my throat and my mind struggles to time them with the flapping of my jaws. I talk to close the gap between my self and others, to mark the fleeting beauty that forms and falls apart over and over in endless variety all around me. Sometimes I talk just because I want to believe that my internal existence has some external value.

After seven years living with a lover who’d become my brother, I really didn’t know where I began and rest of the world ended. I had been swallowed by a suffocating assumption of our future together: perpetually improving our communication until we harmonized like songbirds in the concentric ripples of our marble bath. If we were always working to create a fulfilling relationship, then we must be making progress, I thought. If we were earnest, we might end up with something that would match our cozy yellow house, his corporate job, the leisure good fortune afforded us.

We were fused, as if by sandstone, and breaking apart never seemed possible. But I never wanted something built to suit the comfortable norm. The house, no matter how many layers of paint I applied, was my chosen prison. I could not trust his passion (for corporate carrots dangling just out of reach) and, worse, lost touch with my own. So we talked and time went by and erosion made smooth the grooves of our routine. Until all that talking and all that time had licked away our bridge, and we were tumbling, equal and opposite, finally as two, and just as one again, alone.

After the heaviest of sighs I was suddenly buoyant. The current was swift. I packed up my belongings, parceling them out to friends’ garages and half-empty closets.

No home. No job. No plan. Glorious emptiness. A self to find and fill. Deciding to put some distance between myself and Seattle (and the future I’d just detonated), I landed in small-town New Mexico, crashing with an old friend on the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge. The skies opened. I watched pink clouds trumpet across the mesas, like a row of mischievous angels had lifted their robes and bent over just beyond the horizon, farting into the wind. At night, millions of stars stretched the sky even bigger. My empty head drank in the expanse, and I felt the soft jolt of my heart coming back to life.

The locals partied day in and day out. Within their stupefyingly beautiful surroundings, individual insignificance is a matter of course. Crack another Tecate, throw a log on the fire. In all that space, words gain speed, becoming windy gossip. The locals take back their significance by creating intricate love hexagons and ruthless social geometries. Welcome to New Mexico, they grinned—salivating men and sexy, brash women—the Land of Entrapment. Within three weeks I was dishing dirt about people I knew only as abstractions. It was time to go. Time to shut up.

There are hundreds of Vipassana centers around the world, where students are fed and housed and guided in meditation at no cost. Until you have completed the full 10-day course and felt the benefit of the practice for yourself, you are not permitted to donate to the cause. Some centers are elaborate affairs with gilded stupas and room for gigantic congregations, but I saw no gilding in Onalaska, Washington. Just rust-colored shag carpeting, plastic chairs around folding tables, a few multi-bunk rooms and an airy group meditation hall. Teachers and volunteers keep the facility clipping along, while the students endure inward freak-outs, desperation, loneliness, crushing sadness, mind-numbing boredom, subtle contentment, cellular elation, peace. Of course, you know nothing of what awaits and there can be no prediction.

Snow covered the center grounds when I arrived, my belly knotted and queasy. I handed over my cell phone, laptop, wallet and keys to the smiling woman at the entrance, but surreptitiously kept my journal in case of emergency. I dropped my bag on my assigned bed and immediately took off to inspect the grounds, my anxiety mounting. Not talking sounded like a mind-bending challenge. Agreeing to stay within the tight boundaries of the women’s dorm, dining room and walking pasture for 10 days seemed downright insane. Talk about entrapment. My thoughts and snow-crunching progress were interrupted by the sound of a bossy gong, as would happen several times a day for the next 10 days.

Our schedule was rigorous: a wake-up gong at 4 a.m., a begin-meditation gong at 4:30 a.m., a breakfast gong at 6:30, a begin-again gong at 8 a.m., a luncheon gong at 11 a.m., a begin-again gong at 1 p.m., a tea break gong at 5 p.m., a begin-again gong at 6 p.m. and lights out by 10 p.m. And that’s not accounting for all the gonging that allows you a short rest or leg stretch every couple hours.

After the tea break on my first day, I lay on my foam mattress and felt hot salt tears fill my eyes, run over my temples and into my ears, cursing my curiosity. Walking loops in the pasture became my coping mechanism. A gong would sound, releasing me from my seated torture and I would beeline to the pasture, rocketing around the perimeter twice before going in for meals. I would walk right up until the gong told us to go back to the hall. The snow melted out. Mud thawed and a boggy patch formed in the path. Cobwebs froze each night and sparkled in the morning light. A narrow, blackberry-choked stream edged the pasture, and little white signs were strung at intervals, “Course boundary. Do not cross.” I fantasized about the tremendous gift I would give myself if I lasted six days: I would jump the creek! I would jump and know true freedom, and then I would jump back, renewed. The moon waxed, waned. A flaming sunrise greeted me one day. The pasture, which seemed so oppressive initially, calmed me. A universe unfolded within its network of paths. I never had to jump.

Though I did spend the third early morning session contemplating how I would escape: If it was raining I would stay until lunch, load up and then thumb it toward the highway. If it was sunny, I’d leave after breakfast and walk, untroubled by the weight of my duffle bag, all the way back to Seattle if I had to. The thought was absurd. I knew my stubbornness would keep me captive. If all these other people could get through this looking like damn Buddhas, so could I. My mind was closed to meditation as I began the course. In my arrogance, I felt I didn’t need to slow down and be still for such lengths. I already got the picture. I didn’t need silence to teach me compassion, didn’t need austerity to reveal equanimity. Didn’t need to pass through endless cycles of physical pleasure and pain to let go of craving and aversion.

Yet something profound took shape throughout my sitting. It blew apart what I knew and formed a rift—a welling spring, a pool, a growing ocean—and this filling flood of awareness was somehow familiar. My intuition merged with my physical senses as they feathered out from my body, and swam into my core. I felt my soul’s past yoked to my present and a duty to my future stronger than any responsibility I had felt before.

You could call it my moment of suction. A murky fear darted in the shadows, tried to save itself, slippery darkness disappearing down a crack in the bedrock of my brain. But it was too late. Passionless monotony stood no chance against me. I had joined forces with consciousness and time, the spandexed hero of my very own comic book daydream. Suddenly the hero of my very own life, I have unruly experiments and exquisite risks to tend to. Now I walk everyday with as much reverence as I mustered in that pasture—slowly, taking time to be in my skin. Enjoying the world as it appears through my senses.

Not long after the meditation, and before I found a roost to really call home in Seattle, I visited my mom in California for a few days. She is an encouraging and supportive woman who does not want to see my talents wasted. I told her I was engaged in experimental nomadism. That the world was too full of words already. That I liked the message of the meditation and just wanted to be quiet for a while.

“I guess I’m living in my own little bubble,” I half-apologized, defiantly.

“Well, that’s good,” she countered. “If you didn’t live there, no one would.”

I can’t think of a truer or better revelation for any of us millions of bubbles all sudsy and roiling.