The grief of losing your sense of self is like getting to Heaven and being upset they don't have your favorite flavor of La Croix
The old me has died and I miss her, but not that much
[Edit: I’ve posted a two-month update here.]
This is the first piece in years that I’ve written on Substack, for Substack, instead of on Twitter to be cross-posted here after the fact. There are several reasons for this: one being that it is the most personal one I’ve written to date and the public town square of Twitter doesn’t feel like the right place to put it, two being that it is the longest one I’ve written and I’m really pushing the limits of the long tweet format and the endurance of my followers’ thumbs, and three being that I no longer need to trick my brain into thinking I am composing a casual tweet to a group of friends in order to write. I will just say what I mean to say, without hiding behind plausible deniability or the assurance that my internet friends will receive my writing kindly. That is, after all, how I am choosing to live from now on: completely bare.
This post was written while listening to champagne problems by Taylor Swift.
I went on a meditation retreat a bit shy of two weeks ago. I say “went on,” but I really meant I did a combination of spectating and helping out, and was much more a staff member than a participant, but the details aren’t important. What matters is that on the last morning, during the last sit, I experienced what felt like a shift into a permanently new state of experiencing the world.
I could say a lot about what’s different, especially the good things. I could tell you about how it feels like there are no boundaries to my awareness, which now stretches infinitely in all directions like I am in a vast open space instead of my own room, the way every particle of my surroundings feels airy and any solidity of objects I perceive is dubious at best, the way it feels like 90% of my suffering is gone, how I am in a state of flow constantly and there is no “me” doing things and instead things are just unfolding on their own and I happen to be a curious observer, and how socializing is now effortless and I have no semblance of a social battery despite being a lifelong introvert. How colors are more vibrant, the world feels softer, and my body is overwhelmed with sensations of love and beauty from the moment I wake up to the moment I close my eyes to sleep, even when I don’t meditate, even when I don’t do anything.
But the most notable difference is probably that I feel the absence of a central node in my experience, the thing I used to consider “me” which was actually a ball of tension located roughly at the back of my head. This corresponded to an entity that would see things happening in the world and take it personally in some way, and feel a sense of ownership of what was being experienced. This ranged from the conventional definition of taking things personally (like being sensitive to criticism because it felt like it suggested something inherent about me) to subtle nonverbal motions like flinching from an uncomfortable stare or grasping towards shiny goals. This had slipped away suddenly and quietly, leaving my head completely quiet.
All of this was fun, novel, and exciting for about exactly six days. What’s more peculiar is that on day seven, none of that stuff went away, but my body started freaking out, because even though every aspect of my life was changed for the better and I even got a graphics upgrade to boot, it dawned on me that I would never again be able to experience reality as the old version of myself. The full weight of the transaction became apparent: the price I paid for being in this wonderful state was giving up the experience of and belief in my existence as a separate self.
It feels like she literally died. Not like, I took some psychedelics and my sense of self went away and I feel one with the universe but it will wear off in six hours and even if I have an afterglow it will be gone in one week max and then I’ll have my old eyes back. No, this is more like if you took acid and it just never wore off. Eventually you have to wonder, “Holy shit, am I going to be like this forever?” The lack of control and inhibition, the vibrant colors, the overwhelming emotions, the fuzziness and uncertainty, the feeling of being completely naked before the world like a child that had just been born—it was all too much, especially when I remembered how life used to not feel like that. I was assured that it wouldn’t be this overwhelming forever, that I would adjust, and I believe it, I do, but I’m not quite there yet.
I had experienced many “ego deaths” from psychedelics and meditation before, even watched that ball of tension corresponding to the self relax itself in slow motion with stunning clarity on a previous retreat—enough to alter my worldview and convince me that something like “awakening” is real and worth pursuing, but not deeply and persistently enough to have to grapple with the irreversible loss of how I used to filter reality and move about the world. There is a big difference between knowing the state of living without a sense of self is possible, and having that become your stable reality.
It feels almost exactly like grieving the loss of a family member or close friend. I had always struggled to view myself the way my friends seemed to, found myself habitually perplexed by what seemed to draw them to me. But outside the confines of my self, I could suddenly see all the things that were lovable about me. I saw for the first time how I would be remembered if I had actually passed away on that last morning of the retreat, and how I had been loved all this time.
What was surprising was that I missed the bad parts just as much, that they did not diminish how lovable I was, in fact they were part of the package that was me. Like when your loved one passes away and suddenly that annoying habit that used to drive you up the wall is what you miss the most: oh, what I would do to hear you nag me one more time. The silly neuroses I held and used to navigate the world suddenly seemed endearing and uniquely me, but completely inaccessible.
Never to the same degree, for example, would I be able to fret that I was running late to a party, because my new state is devoid of urgency and I can set the intention to get ready which adds it to the queue of tasks in my unitary flow state, but it happens when it happens and I show up when I show up, which in actuality tends to look like rolling in twenty minutes late to the function. I would not be able to frantically clean before guests arrive because I’m afraid they’ll judge me for being messy like I used to, but I still do some tidying up because it makes the space nicer even if it takes me twice as long. I still have discernment and awareness of all the things that used to stress me out, but without the stress part. Losing the pinball machine contraptions of my suffering has been pleasant and freeing, but disorienting and anticlimactic because I used to do a lot internally to create the feeling of okayness, and I suddenly didn’t need to do them anymore. My neuroses were out of a job.
But at the same time, I had been in so much pain. My ego or “self” was never the enemy. She was more like a tired, languishing dog that needed to be put down, an old friend who was suffering immensely but would stay with me until the bitter end, but if you looked at her with compassion you’d discover a moral dilemma in letting her live. I miss her, but I’m glad she’s gone. I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind about this part. In the meantime, there is the grief and the sorrow. There is the remembering, and the impulses that no longer have their targets. I reach for the familiar guardrails and find none. I roll over in the middle of the night and do not find myself there. But in losing myself I gained the entire world and the deep knowing that I have never been separate from it, that any belief that I was, was simply a matter of having had my eyes closed to the luminous nature of reality in a silly game of peek-a-boo. There has only ever been this, and there has only ever been now.
I still have a personality. I still have preferences. From the outside, not much has changed: my friends note that I appear more relaxed and social, but nothing has emerged that wasn’t already in me in a nascent form. At first I was like, “What kind of friends are you if you can’t even tell I’m going through one of the biggest psychological and emotional refactorings of my life?” But I get it: similar to how it’s a bit hard to tell when someone’s high, some things just aren’t as apparent from the outside looking in. This is a show put on just for me. Only I see the loss, because only I directly felt my suffering, and the subsequent relief from it.
The title of this post is pointing to the fact that everything is better after permanently losing my sense of self, but I no longer have access to something specific that is dear and familiar like my old habits of mind. It is ultimately a trivial complaint, a champagne problem of sorts, but a problem nonetheless. Let me whine for just a bit longer—Heaven can wait until I am unburdened by what once was.
Stray thoughts:
If you’re going through this, I’m sorry. But also congratulations. But also, sorry. It is a form of existential grief so deep you probably never even considered you’d experience it in your lifetime, because this phenomenon is specific, odd, and not something you can prepare for until it has already happened. Resisting it makes it harder, so I would focus on all the ways you’re bracing against experience and subtly relax into it. You don’t have to throw in the towel, but just notice the ways you’re putting up a fight and the unsatisfactoriness of it. And also focus on how okay things are even if you’re falling apart. Surround yourself with friends who still engage with you as if nothing had changed: they’re grounding even if they don’t understand what you’re going through. You’re not going crazy. You’re not going to fall through the floor. You are still you, just not the same one you’re used to. You will adjust, but it may take some time. And also, notice how it’s a little funny, although totally permissible, to be crying in paradise, and let yourself do it anyway.
There is an alternative way I could have framed this piece: instead of focusing on the death part, I could have focused on the rebirth, or having been reborn. There’s a lot I could say about this because it’s one of very few opportunities to partially experience what it’s like to be a newborn but with the awareness of an adult, but I’m not in a state to talk about that right now. I’ll just say it’s peculiar, beautiful, and overwhelming, and I mean each of those three things deeply. It’s also a little embarrassing because I’m stumbling around in naïveté and incompetence, but I can let go of those with the help of patience and self-compassion.
How do I know it won’t come back? It might, partially, I don’t know. But given that I’ve experienced this in the past and this time it feels different, my intuition tells me there’s a permanent element to it. Even if it does though, the grieving I have done won’t magically be retracted. The grief is there because of lingering attachment. After processing the grief, my relationship to my “self” even if it does return resembling the old one, will be cleaner and I will be able to welcome it without grasping or creating more suffering. So I’m not too worried either way.
How did I trigger this state? I intentionally left out details of what practices I did and the retreat I went on because this was meant to be a report of my emotional state instead of a guide of how to get to this state yourself, but I understand it’s also helpful to know. I will probably write more about this separately, but in summary: I did 5 years of casual mindfulness meditation focusing on the breath, used psychedelics for emotional healing, then took up serious meditation (noting/dry insight then switched to concentration meditation/jhana practice) and that’s been going on for about 4 years. I’ve been on 4 retreats (two of which, including the latest one in question, were with Jhourney and the other two with Tucker Peck), each of them lasting 3-7 days, and was specifically in a two hour sit in 8th jhana when the shift occurred. My whole process has been slow and integration/therapy-heavy instead of grinding on the cushion so any meditative shifts I encountered tended to be pretty smooth (i.e. devoid of serious adverse effects). My daily journaling practice of 9+ years has been indispensable for emotional processing, and I also familiarized myself with a bunch of therapeutic modalities like Internal Family Systems, Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, Gendlin’s Focusing, Enneagram, imaginal work, knowledge about attachment styles/codependency/cPTSD/personality disorders/memory reconsolidation, and a million other things. I’ve never had a therapist or meditation teacher, though I feel well-supported by a community of practitioners and people who are teachers.
Should everyone go through this? To be honest, I’m not sure. It is one of the most drastic system-wide updates to my consciousness I have ever experienced, maybe the single biggest one. The grief apparently doesn’t happen to everyone and even if it does it’s painful but temporary, and the benefits are impressive and permanent. It was worth it for me specifically because I grew up with extreme levels of psychological suffering and getting out of Hell has made life worth living. But most people I meet, although they still suffer nontrivial amounts, can live decent lives without ever getting curious about deep therapy/meditation/introspection stuff. I sometimes joke that I had to do a decade of emotional work to have a fraction of the well-adjustedness of my college roommate who grew up by the woods with Golden Retrievers and parents who loved her and each other. There’s also the matter of personal interest: if you think there’s potentially something there for you down this road, it might be worth checking out.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I’m going for a walk after this to admire the trees.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I got so interested that I wanted to ask some questions. I'll add them below here, feel free to answer or not answer any or some of them
1. Daydreaming: Do you still daydream (outside meditation)? Like do you get caught up with a thought and then realize it afterwards? How is it compared to what it was before?
2. Insight: For example I assume at least previously on occasion you perhaps had an idea of what to write in a blog post (or to your journal) while you were at a place where you can't start writing, for example during a walk outside. How would you act on that before and is it different now? Like if it was something you thought was important, would you start planning and organizing the idea in your head during your walk shifting the focus from e.g. admiring the trees to this "insight" work (if you were conscious about it) or end up "daydreaming" (if it was happening without you particularly noticing it at all)?
3. Meditation now: Does meditation feel different now? I assume you reach deeper states more easily now. Have you changed your routine now?
4. The moment when the shift occured at the last sit in that retreat. Can you elaborate on that particular sit. You have a decent amount of experience it seems, so I guess you did not have much monkey mind on that particular sit? I guess prior the shift, you had been in the "emptiness" for a while, or how would you describe the sit if you still remember it?
5. How about how were you before the shift happened. How was the day before the shift, how about the shift-day's morning and the day until the final meditation. Everything went like before and you felt not happier or being in the "flow" or anything? Anything special?
6. Grief: Does the number in "90% of suffering is gone" come from the grieving of the old you? When you are grieving the old you, does it mean there is still an ego left in you, but it's just much weaker, or is this grievance something different?
7. I'm also curious if you had taken psychedelics near the time the shift happened or if it's a long time since you last had any. Also would you consider taking psychedelics after the shift?
You captured so perfectly the liberating existential grief I am feeling as I reinvent myself after the end of a ten year relationship. Thank you for the reminder to “focus on all the ways you’re bracing against experience and subtly relax into it.” This identity without a “central node of experience” reminds me of both the pain & possibility of diasporic identity which by its very nature is diffuse — belonging everywhere and nowhere — depending on how you frame it.