How Much Would You Pay for Inner Peace?
Meditation is a simple, free, and time-honored practice that focuses the mind, reduces stress, and sits menacingly on my daily to-do list like a terrible chore. Oh, I want to meditate, and I know I’ll feel better after I’ve done it, but the notion of spending quiet time alone with my thoughts has an appeal just under cleaning the gutters.
The effects of meditation are profound and positive, but they are also slow and gradual, which is why I say no thanks. I want a monastic level of inner peace, and I want it with the speed of a DoorDash delivery. I am American, after all.
So you can imagine my relief when I found out about 40 Years of Zen, a brain-optimization retreat that promises all the benefits of 40 years’ worth of meditation in only five days. It is the product of entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who is known as the “Father of Biohacking.” I know him as the guy who got me to put butter in my coffee through his Bulletproof Coffee brand. Participants in his 40 Years of Zen are promised “powerful, immersive neurofeedback and education” plus “biohacking and life-changing inner work to enhance your brain and life”—possibly to the point of being able to make sense of what all that means. Tuition is around $16,000, but they let me do it for free. A chance to optimize my brain, do some serenity maxing, and forge lasting connections with people who have an extra $16k lying around? Let’s do this.
The experience takes place in a lodge in the suburbs of Seattle. There were three of us in my cohort—an environmental lawyer from Spain, a banker from Azerbaijan, and me—and as we made small talk, I set my morning Bulletproof Coffee on what looked like a golden end table. “That’s a Leela Quantum Bloc,” our facilitator said. When I looked at him like a confused Jack Russell terrier, he explained that it’s a battery of sorts, and you place stuff on it that you want to fill with good vibes. “Go ahead and put your journal and pen on there,” he said. “We charged it up with gratitude energy this morning.” So right from the jump, I felt like an optimized version of my truest self: delighted and deeply skeptical.
That first morning, we each put on expensive-looking headgear to do some baseline brain mapping. The first thing I learned was that my alpha-wave brain activity is crazy high, a condition that is compatible with severe ADHD. This is a thing one could determine by engaging in the more analog practice of “being near me for ten seconds,” but listen: So far, the advanced neuroscience was batting 1.000.
The main work of the five days was a series of meditation sessions within individual sensory-deprivation pods. We’d sit in blackness for two hours at a stretch, headphones on our ears playing the soothing pink noise of the ocean, electrodes on our heads capturing our brain waves. In these sessions, we were instructed to do “resets”: call up a traumatic event from our past, speak honestly about the offense to an imagined version of the offender, and dig deep to find the gift within the experience. Once we’d done that, we were to mentally present our findings to our personal higher power—whether that be God, nature, or Denzel Washington—and let that power guide us toward forgiveness. By letting go of thought patterns that no longer serve us, we allow ourselves to “edit, upgrade, and turn off the voice in [our] brain.”
For the first three days, I worked these steps assiduously, and what the process allowed me to do was take several very expensive naps. The revelation came on day four. I’d been failing at putting a face on this higher power, just as I always had. The concept of a celestial authority has forever been a struggle for me, maybe because of my Catholic upbringing. The idea that there’s an entity that created the universe and controls all things but also wants you to be a little ashamed of yourself? It’s always left me a little cold. But just as I was about to succumb to the mental exhaustion and sink into another high-end snooze, it hit me: What if the guiding force of the universe is joy?
What I’m saying is that I decided to make my higher power a wig. An enormous blond wig, like you would see on a drag queen or Dolly Parton or a Dolly Parton drag queen. A visual manifestation of silliness and impracticality and exaggerated glamour. And the shit worked: My resets became easier to imagine, my forgiveness easier to give. I made peace with the fact that I’m happier when I’m living life with a lighter touch. Maybe that makes me an unserious person. And maybe the world needs unserious people.
I mean, look where the serious people have gotten us.
Ultimately, I don’t know whether any of the electrodes or space helmets or electromagnetic energies worked, but the old-reliable interpersonal stuff did. Over five days of group sessions, we three strangers shared our deepest thoughts and feelings in a way sometimes only strangers can. Something good happened at 40 Years of Zen. Was it $16,000 of good? I don’t know, but it’s something. Maybe it’s because I left my pen on a freshly charged Quantum Bloc extra long, but I left feeling grateful.
What I know for sure is that we’re going to see more stuff like this. Practices that were once relegated to the realm of the woo-woo are entering the mainstream, as trust in traditional Western medicine erodes from both ends of the political spectrum. The worlds of holistic medicine and extreme libertarianism have met. I’m now in a WhatsApp group for alumni of the 40 Years of Zen program, where a question like “How can I feel less depressed and lonely?” can be answered with “Check your living space for mercury.”
It’s going to be a weird few years.
Motion illustration by Paul Sahre
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