This article is about my personal journey and how being so far away and disconnected from the rest of my life put me in the place to grow internally. It was written while crossing the North Atlantic from Greenland to Spain, after a month of sailing along the coast of Greenland.
Introduction
What comes to mind when you imagine Greenland? Probably not a meditation retreat. When I was invited to join the crew on a sailing expedition headed to the desolate Arctic island, I envisaged days of dodging icebergs, backcountry skiing, and spotting polar bears. Apart from not skiing (the snow was melted below 2000m, thanks global warming), this fantasy was not far off, but that was only a fraction of the experience.
Meanwhile, an even greater adventure was underway, an existential journey to discover the boundlessness of consciousness. The remote, disconnected, fantastical island provided the perfect setting to plunge into the depths of the human mind. With 24 hours of daylight, time ceased to exist. The natural beauty surrounding us seemed too good to be true. What was real and what was a construct of my imagination? With time and internet becoming long-forgotten phenomena of the past, healthy habits began to develop. Instead of feeling stressed and rushed by an endless self-imposed to-do list, I flossed my teeth. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, I meditated. Finally, a much-needed opportunity to satisfy my own needs and focus on personal growth.
Instead of feeling stressed and rushed by an endless self-imposed to-do list, I flossed my teeth.
As the expedition went on, the greatest difficulty was not dodging icebergs, throwing up over the lifelines, or running from polar bears. It was overcoming my own grumpiness when spending every waking hour in a tiny, perpetually moving steel box with the same 4 people for over a month, without escape. This is where a regular meditation practice showed visible results. The purpose of mindfulness meditation is to train oneself to recognize thoughts and emotions as they appear in the mind. Rather than being lost in thought and reacting on an emotional impulse, it is possible to learn to disconnect personal identity from felt emotions, sit with them, and allow them to pass without judgment or reaction. The interconnected topics that my subjective journey centered around were tolerance, allowing emotions to flow, importance of self-time, and physical location. I still feel lousy pretty often and I’m far from being a buddha, but this trip has been very conducive to accepting that and learning to love myself regardless.
Photo by Magda Nykiel.
Tolerance
Inevitably, throughout the month, each of us felt a full range of emotions from very positive to very negative. It’s easy to be on edge when your bed moves all night, you’re seasick, cold, and struggling to prevent yourself from falling off of the toilet while taking a shit. In this state of mind, everything feels offensive and it’s tough to let go and not take things personally. Under normal circumstances, we would be free to escape the group and deal with those emotions however we’re used to, but there, we were forced to face them both in ourselves and in each other.
I realized that 7 years of spontaneous low-budget travel have given me a pretty high tolerance to physical discomfort but my willingness to put up with people who annoy me is underdeveloped. Until now, I always had the option to escape such people and meet a new group, make new friends. These ephemeral friendships were part of the beauty of traveling.
When I felt annoyed with everybody on the boat, I learned to notice my reactions (sometimes too late), did my best to embrace the experience of annoyance, and practiced letting it pass with as little judgment as possible (or, at least, letting go of my judgment as quickly as possible). With tolerance came peace of mind.
The most difficult part for me was not letting myself be frustrated by the moods of others. Forgiving others for their grumpiness when I feel they are being irrational begins with recognizing my own cynicism. Who’s the irrational one now? I’m feeling stressed and scornful based on my judgments of someone else for feeling down. Once I recognize that, I have more compassion. I didn’t try or intend to feel this way; neither did they. Emotions flow and the best I can do is allow them to continue flowing. With that understanding, my bad moods became shorter and less pronounced even in moments when the vibe on the boat was very tense.
Pro tip: Poop jokes always help to lighten the mood.
Allowing the emotions to flow
A major area of personal development is allowing emotions to flow, both pleasant and unpleasant. All my life, I have felt the need to appear positive. I’m afraid to appear negative in front of others for fear of them thinking/talking badly about me and for fear of inducing a dark energy on the group. This insecurity extends into my personal identity; I want to recognize myself as a positive, fun, outgoing, exciting person. I feel very insecure exposing my more depressive patterns of thought, not only to friends but also to myself.
When I’m in an exceptionally shitty mood, I stoke the fire by reacting to frustration or sadness with destructive words/decisions—which just intensifies the feelings to a point where I can no longer deny their existence, catapulting myself into a downward spiral of feeling bad for feeling bad. More often, I turn my back to the fire and distract myself with something else—this only partially works as the heat of the emotions linger in the background, threatening to flare up at any moment. I neglect to recognize that fact and feign happiness, not quite forcing myself to fully believe it and continuing to feel a subtle gravity that can drag me down for hours or days. Meditating is akin to isolating the fire and observing the beauty in the flames as it burns itself out.
A central aspect of mindfulness meditation is noticing moods as appearances in consciousness; rather than getting lost in the mental movie theater of thoughts and emotions, taking a step back and realizing that a movie is being projected on the mind’s screen. Recognizing my negative feelings, accepting their existence, investigating how the feelings taint my thoughts or affect my sensory experience, and unhinging my identity from them (i.e., I am angry → I am aware of feeling anger) has been a complex challenge every day of the trip.
RAIN meditation for self-compassion
Recognize what’s going on
Allow the experience to be there as it is
Investivate the sensations and associated thoughts with kindness
Non-identify with the experience
When I felt the necessity to pack up, move on, go somewhere new, I had no option but to recognize the feeling and wait for it to disappear. Sometimes, my companions supported my efforts to feel better by feeding me milk or cookies; other times, I ran away to my room to bask in my sorrows. Often, I meditated and felt better almost immediately; occasionally, I was too lost in emotion to snap out of it and it took hours to shift my perspective.
Overcoming the need to force positive thoughts, and accepting unpleasant moods as part of my human experience, remarkably, shortens and softens those moods. Instead of remaining bitter, meditating encourages a full clarity untainted by passed emotions. Letting go of judgments and accepting whatever appears in awareness as a simple factor of «being» is the basis of self-compassion, a main contributor to life satisfaction and an integral part of healthy relationships. It’s an incredibly difficult state to achieve consistently but, like any activity, strength builds with practice.
Here, I stoke the fire as Kit observes the beauty in the flames.
Photo by Magda Nykiel.
Importance of self-time
It has always been difficult for me to sit alone and do nothing when there’s an opportunity to do something—literally anything—else. Of course, when you’re open to new opportunities, there always will be something else to do. So, I never learned to be alone. The concept of alone time seemed intimidating, frustratingly boring, or just a waste of time. I spent the better part of 5 years traveling alone in the sense of embarking on trips without anybody that I previously knew, but within minutes I’d find myself surrounded by travelers in a hostel, meeting a Couchsurfing host, or striking up a conversation with a random hitchhiker at a gas station. I was fascinated by the outer world but intimidated by my own thoughts.
Overcoming this fear and understanding the importance of self-time has taken me years. Even as my appreciation and desire for self-time developed, I would completely forget about it the instant another opportunity popped up. This trip was the first time in my life that I made an active effort to spend at least 1 waking hour every day totally alone with no specific task to do, and it was incredibly valuable.
Allowing emotions to pass is much easier while alone without an impending to-do list, as is snapping out of an intolerant mood, bringing about feelings of compassion for the self and others, and stepping back to shift perspectives on the current situation. Spending time alone every day meditating, writing, or paddling the dinghy allowed me to be much more present when in the group and less caught up in my own drama. Yeah, I spent lots of hours alone behind the closed door of my 6 sq. m. bedroom, but I was never lonely, and the time I spent with the rest of the crew was of a higher quality because I made an effort to give myself me-time every day.
Location
“If only I were there, everything would be better.” It’s a common misconception that all of us are guilty of, a rejection of the present moment’s perceived troubles in search of greater satisfaction. I’ve fallen prey to this cognitive trap hundreds of times, blamed uncomfortable emotions on the situation in my current location, and believed that everything would get better by simply moving on to a new place with new people, new opportunities. Sometimes it works; it’s exciting to go somewhere new and a change in place can bring about a shift in thought cycles which leads to positive transformation, but, in the end, the place does not contribute to the experience nearly as much as we give it credit for. In my experience, any underlying anxiety or depression can be temporarily stifled by going somewhere new, but with time it reaches its inky tentacles right back out of the bubbling cauldron of emotion stew to ooze back onto the mind’s movie screen yet again.
It took me 7 years of traveling through over 50 countries culminating in Greenland, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in a mesmerizingly beautiful gallery of nature just about as disconnected from the stresses of society as one could possibly be, to finally ask myself the question, “is it really the place that I’m dissatisfied with?” The answer I found was no, this is absolutely the most incredible place I’ve ever seen; it is the gloominess enshrouding my thoughts that I’m dissatisfied with. Any place seems great when viewed through a positive lens and the exact same place can seem miserable when viewed through a lens tainted with anger, sadness, insecurity, anxiety, etc. When I become sick and tired of a place, the solution is not to change locations, but to alter the perspective.
Conclusions
Greenland was the trip of a lifetime in terms of both internal and external experiences. I hope that the lessons learned through meditation and reflection will remain in my memory as strongly as the image of watching an iceberg flip over for the first time and that you, the reader, have gained insight and inspiration to embark on your own inward journey.
The thesis of my internal experience is this: Sitting with my thoughts and sensations allows me to disidentify with them and perceive my mind as a floating cloud of consciousness, a space in which thoughts and emotions appear and disappear. Through meditation, the identity of the mind disengages from the subject of the thoughts and simply becomes the movie screen where thoughts and emotions are projected, the contents of which do not affect the inherent integrity of the screen itself. This is a massively liberating feeling.
For anybody interested in beginning their own meditation practice, I highly recommend the app Waking Up with Sam Harris.
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