Lessons From a Bird
October 17th, 2025
Photo: Bizzy Webb
Writer: Lily Lev
Editor: Alexa Kessler
10 days. No talking. No eye contact. No phones. No books. 4:30 am wakeups. 12 hours of meditating. And me alone with my thoughts.
During my semester abroad in Australia last semester, I participated in a 10-day silent meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery in Khon Kaen, Thailand. While I anticipated it to be challenging, I didn’t quite appreciate how much mental energy it would require. The daily routine was as follows: wake up to a gong at 4:30, chant in Pali (a language used in ancient Buddhist texts) with the monks at 5 am, meditate for two hours, participate in an hour yoga session (a lucky addition that is not included in most retreats), meditate for three more hours, eat one meal, listen to a Buddhist teaching, meditate for another four hour session, hear a talk from the monk, and meditate for another two hours before going to sleep.
The meditation sessions were split into two types. We began by learning “concentration meditation,” the goal of which is to quiet the mind and focus on the breath. This is the meditation I was most familiar with coming into the retreat, but doing seated and walking concentration meditation for hours on end for the first three days was a battle with my ever-thinking mind. I would rarely get more than three focused breaths before a to-do list or irrelevant thought clouded my brain. But, whereas in the past I would have quit the meditation session once I had the slightest distraction, these long sessions trained me to sit with my thoughts, and refocus my breath, even though this intentional refocusing was happening more than the time of clear meditation itself.
The next type of meditation, and the focus of the retreat, was Vipassana Meditation, meaning insight. To practice this meditation, you simply “note” whatever thought, feeling, or emotion is dominant in your stream of consciousness at any given moment. My brain during most Vipassana Meditation sessions looked something like this: “Sitting. Pain. Anger. Bird. Anger. Hungry. Sitting. Thought. Hungry. Tired. Pain. Sitting. Bird. Anger. Bird. Anger. Bird. Anger. Bird.” Day five was particularly excruciating when my back was numb from sitting, and the sound of a bird chirping outside the meditation hall pierced through every attempt at focus. At first, I noted it the way we were taught: “Bird. Bird. Bird.” But the sound didn’t fade into the background – it only persisted and penetrated all other thoughts. The sharp, repetitive chirp consumed the entire two-hour session. Each chirp felt like a personal attack, a deliberate attempt to test my willpower. If the bird stopped, I could finally meditate. If this one external thing were to change, I could be at peace.
Yet, the birds continued, and so did my anger. Even so, I forced myself to sit there, to not move, to make it through the session and note “Bird. Anger. Bird. Anger.” Eventually, the chirping slowly faded. It became peaceful. When I wasn’t forcing it away, it naturally took up less presence in my brain. The sound itself hadn’t changed at all - it was my relationship to it that shifted. Throughout the rest of the retreat, I felt lighter, finally realizing the power of my mind and the tricks it could play on me.
These ten days didn’t turn me into an instantly calm person. I still get impatient, overwhelmed, and think a million miles a minute. But it did remind me to take a breath. To let things pass. And that my mind is not always telling me the truth. To let the bird just be a bird, not my enemy.
