Equinox Meditation Retreat
In a Virtual Reality Community
Routines help, especially in insecure and unpredictable times. The routines we construct stake out a little order where there isn’t much.
When we go somewhere new, or don’t go anywhere because of a pandemic, we establish new routines very quickly. There must be some value.
Sure enough, just Google something like, ‘Routines Helpful’ and you’ll immediately see that the Jury came back on this one a long time ago and unanimously reported, ‘Yes;’ for all the obvious reasons, that mostly come down to cultivating a sense of control or at least some degree of agency.
Except for one counter-thread. Scanning the first few Google result pages, I could see that for every five references extolling the virtues of Routines, there was one reminding us to break them.
That’s Life isn’t it? You find something everyone agrees is good, and then you find out you’re supposed to break it sometimes. Break it how? How often?
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What if you don’t feel like it?
Well, sometimes we get lucky and we get bored with our routines. We are actually motivated to make some change. After meditating in one style for over 25 years, I decided to change that daily routine with a new style. Recovering from chemo might have had something to do with it but it was an easy and even enjoyable change to make.
I can’t think of any other stories like that for myself. Usually when my routine has changed, it wasn’t because I chose it. The brand was discontinued. We moved. My work hours changed. So I adapted to those externally-driven routine disruptions by developing new routines as quickly as possible.
What I’m trying to do now is something different and something I haven’t ever consciously done before. And I’m 72.
I’m trying to disrupt my routines periodically whether I want to or not, by my choice, or my illusion of a choice that we call, ‘agency.’
The Equinox Meditation Retreat is Exhibit A
I did it yesterday, my second scheduled disruption of this nature. My first was on the Winter Solstice, back in late December, 2020, when I stepped away from my routines and meditated instead. It seems like a very long time ago already and I was deeply back into a set of daily routines I love.
Time to disrupt them again. Not to change my life. Not for any stated objective other than opening up to new possibilities with a partial system reset.
Plus, there’s another dimension. Like many other people, I have found meaningful connections in an online community during the pandemic. My plan for periodic meditation retreat disruption is personal, but I wanted to make it easy for anyone else in the community to join me if they felt like it.
The term, ‘online community’ is a little misleading. Our community, EvolVR, is not physically co-located and it relies on the Internet, but we feel completely present with each other every day since we are based in VR and in constant contact through our Discord server.
Allowing for other members of a VR community to be part of the experience led to the design I used for the Solstice and again, with some modification, for the Equinox.
It sounds crazy at first, but I love it and even expanded it this time:
- Six blocks of three 16-minute meditations, at three-hour intervals throughout the day; 6am, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm
- First block is on Zoom, second in VR, third solo in your own meditation space
- Second and third blocks always start at :20 and :40 past the hour, so 16-minute meditations leave a comfortable but not leisurely four minutes to shift.
- Each VR meditation is in a different world.
The design obviously tilts toward the social, toward giving others the option of joining two of the three meditations in each block. If you’re going to have 48 minutes of meditation in an hour, why not just sit there and meditate for 48 minutes without going in and out? Why be social?
No reason.
Meditating for 48 minutes is an amazing experience which I have done once in forty-five years of daily meditation. Long meditations, and why or why not to do them, is a topic I am not qualified to address. Whatever they are about, it’s not what I was about on the Equinox. Even if no one else came, this was the format I wanted to try.
People did join me whenever I could be joined. Not a lot of people, but I didn’t want a lot of people. It wasn’t an event and I wasn’t hosting it, so I didn’t post it publicly — only on the EvolVR Discord server.
Meditation is fundamentally a solitary experience. But anyone who has ever meditated in a group knows that the proximity of others makes a difference. Their presence is palpable and that presence is conveyed through Zoom and even more so in VR.
For me, the design meant three different experiences every hour, which I knew would motivate me and help me want to keep being disrupted.
Still, on the day before, when I anticipated having to get up at 5:30 am and make my way through the cold, dark and drizzly Pacific Northwest to get to my computer place, I was not full of joy. Who knows if my resolve to disrupt myself would have waivered, but I had committed myself publicly in my community, so that was that.
Now, it’s the day after.
I know that no one, including me, is interested in a detailed description, fascinating as the whole thing may have been. What I’d rather do is summarize two ideas that rose to the surface over 288 minutes of meditating.
Meditation is Inherently Disruptive
I mean this at every scale. Most days I don’t really want to meditate. I’d rather, at some unthinking level, get on with the next things I have to do right now, real things, not just sitting there.
I’ve learned to notice that voice but not get engaged with it because I’ve also learned, over time, that I tend to feel better all day long if I start out with a meditation. What gets me on my bench is not Enlightenment, which I’m not sure I even want, but feeling better. Totally selfish.
I think it works at least partly because I don’t want to but I do it anyway, chosen daily disruption.
Then pulling back to larger stretches of time, I see how the practice of meditation has disrupted the hold of unconscious forces in me that influenced my emotions and my emotional reactions. It’s not just me — greater emotional self-regulation is frequently cited as a long-term effect of meditation. I would say that meditation achieves this effect by disrupting existing relationships between specific personal categories of stimulus and response.
Claims have been made about the potentially disruptive effects on much larger scale human relations if, for example, only 1% of the people in a given area meditated regularly, or together. Like the topic of Long Meditation, the amazing idea of affecting the noosphere at scale isn’t something I feel qualified to comment on.
Getting in Sync
So what if it’s the Equinox? Do I think some resonance with the moment of light-dark equalization adds a special sauce to the meditation?
Yes, I do believe that the four Equinox and Solstice days are non-arbitrary occasions in the annual cycle that our ancestors went to great lengths to mark accurately. But just because people from Stonehenge to Angkor Wat thought these days mattered, what difference does it make to me, to anyone, now?
I don’t think it’s pragmatic as it once was, like, when to start planting. I think it’s more familial, like birthdays and anniversaries. Since we don’t appreciate each other as much as we should, we use non-arbitrary occasions like birthdays to make up for the shortfall. Maybe Equinox and Solstice are something like that, reminders that we are parts of a bigger family, whose meaningful dates matter to us.
If so, I’d like to help myself remember by making it an unusual day.
Because of the unique attributes of VR, anyone can carry the sense of being in sync with the larger natural forces into a world-hopping program. The Worlds I chose for the six VR meditations during the day were natural quiet and beautiful places that created their own presence, added their own character to the experience of meditating there.
For the Equinox, all six Worlds were ones I built. I didn’t follow a strict temporal sequence through the day and thought more about what each place might feel like for myself and other people at certain times of the day …
6:20 am pdt Small Lake at Sunrise
9:20 am pdt Mars
12:20 pm pdt Coral Reef
3:20 pm pdt The Bayon, Angkor Thom
6:20 pm pdt Land’s End, San Francisco
9:20 pm pdt Zen Garden
All of the images here — the sunrise, Mars, and the coral reef — are equirectangular, flat JPG representations of 360 degree images that fully enclose someone viewing inside a VR Headset. I record images like these myself and have built several worlds based on them. I also download them, as the first three in this article are, sometimes for free and sometimes for a small fee.
The opening image, from Novato, feels like a beautiful warm beginning from the inside. On Mars, in the morning, I feel like an explorer. The coral reef is just whacky — you’re underwater, inches away from large plants and animals.
As the day moves on, we move next to the balcony of The Bayon, a 360 picture I recorded in Cambodia with huge sculpted images of the compassionate Buddha all around. Then Sunset at Land’s End in San Francisco, and finally, the entirely-synthesized world shown below, EvolVR’s Zen Garden World, built by Alan Chao.
I probably had too much fun and socialized too much to make any progress toward Full Liberation. But since I hear there’s nothing to attain anyway, I’ll probably stick with this program until it doesn’t disrupt me any more.
I also write a brief and occasional e-newsletter about anything but VR, called Plain Thoughts.
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