If you've been thinking about going to a silent meditation retreat as your first experience with meditation, watch this video first.

So I've been meditating for about 25 years. I've had a daily meditation practice for over 20 of those years.

So I'm not speaking as a meditation skeptic. I'm not anti-retreat. In fact, I've hosted dozens of my own meditation retreats.

I'm not even anti-vapasana. I love

the idea of vipasana. I'm just coming at this from the perspective of someone who spent decades

actually meditating on a daily basis. And I want to share a few honest thoughts, especially if you're

someone who's new to meditation and you've been thinking

about going all in on one of those 10 days silent retreats as your starting point in the

practice. So here are three, we'll call them red flags that I want to walk you through up front.

And then I'll share one more at the end that to me is really the most telling that this is probably

not the best way to start your meditation practice. Okay, let's get into it. So first off, I want to

admit I've never been to one of those 10 days silent meditation retreats. Now, you're probably

wondering, like, how are you going to give us your opinion on the

silent retreat if you've never actually done it yourself? It's kind of like business. If you've been in

business for a while and you've never owned a restaurant, you don't have to necessarily own a restaurant

to know that restaurants are not the best type of businesses to start with. If you talk to a

restaurateur, you ask them a few questions

about profit margins and overhead, it becomes pretty apparent that most restaurateurs are struggling

to keep the lights on. And like that, people who are operating at the higher levels of

the meditation space can ask anyone a few questions about their practice, and they can pretty

much know if it's a great way to

start or if it's a not so great way to start. So regarding the silent retreats, the reason I've

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