Meditation Day 4: Disturbances & Valley of Disappointment (August 6, 2025)
As I’m meditating in my hotel room, I’m disturbed by a loud recording of a local band (possibly from Budapest) playing a version of The Cranberries hit single, Zombie. When that song ends, the two twenty-somethings in said hotel room begin belting out the same song lyrics in a really awful karaoke style that took me straight out of my meditation. Welcome to Day 4!
Now that my hour-long meditation practice has been disturbed, my thoughts become rather loud internal judgements about how things are going on Day 4. I hear rhetorical super-judgy questions such as, “With more than 25 hours of meditation practice in the past 3 days, shouldn’t you be further along by now?” And “So much for UNCONDITIONAL inner peace if some bad karaoke is all that it takes to pull you out of your meditation practice. Are you really improving?”
Shut UP!!!!
I so badly want to yell “Shut Up!” to my now obnoxiously loud karaoke-singing hotel neighbors but partly to that really judgy judge inside my head at the same time. And then it happens. A new thought appears. A helpful one. “What would Micky instruct you to do if he were here with you right now?” The answer comes without much hesitation. He’d encourage me to notice my unspoken expectation about where my meditation practice should be on Day 4.
Yeah. Right. Who says I should be further along than I am? And then it dawns on me from my very own business development training. Hello and welcome, Bill! You just discovered you are in the valley of disappintment. Thank you, James Clear of Atomic Habits!
James Clear’s model “The Valley of Disappointment” from Atomic Habits
Aha! I’m thinking that this meditation retreat is linear; that my skills will grow in a linear way day after day. Even though I’ve never expressly said as much, I have an expectation that each day will be better than the day before rather than “Loving What Is” as Byron Katie teaches me to do. So there it is, and I shift to working on this skill instead: my expectation of how this is supposed to be working instead of how it actually is progressing each day.
What’s more, I can fully see that I’ve regressed. From an objective point of view, I’m not further along than I was yesterday. If anything, I believe I’ve slipped backwards when I wasn’t paying attention. And while Micky was happy to align with what I shared in our one-on-one session, he pointed out something even more important: a missed opportunity to work on my disturbances.
Working WITH My Disturbances
Cultivating inner peace doesn’t just happen. In fact, it’s really difficult to cultivate inner peace without having disturbances. So my very loud karaoke-singing hotel neighbors were serving me up with a precious gift that I just wasn’t seeing at the time it was happening. They were providing me with the condition by which I am invited to practice my unconditional inner peace.
Micky didn’t say, “So Bill, you can attain unconditional inner peace as long as you are in a quiet space and don’t have very loud karaoke-singing hotel neighbors nearby.” In fact, if I never encountered any disturbances, this would be a much more difficult week to practice my skills. So rather than seeking to avoid those disturbances, Micky is urging me to proactively seek them out. It will help shape and strengthen my meditation practice.
Next time, here’s what I’ve been encouraged to do.
Begin By Relaxing
In all seriousness, my very loud karaoke-singing hotel neighbors were not the problem. It was my reaction to their singing that is what I get to work with now and in the future. And this starts with my somatic experience. Whenever I come across an experience I don’t like, I tend to tense up. It’s a natural body response to anything unpleasant. In fact, it happens so often and so automatic that I rarely notice the tension happening.
From this day forward, however, the skill to develop will be to notice a disturbance and begin with relaxing. Ideally, to scan my body for where the tension is growing (HINT: It’s usually in my neck and shoulders) and just relax by 1-5%. This isn’t intended to be a “full body, just left an amazing Thai Massage” relaxation. Instead, it’s a conscious effort to relax my body just 1 to 5%.
And, if I can’t find where I’m holding tension, that’s okay too. I can use an old standby called, “Tense and Relax” whereby I tense up part or all of my body on purpose and then SLOWLY relax it back. Tense up again and slowly relax. Do that a few times and even if I don’t know where the automatic tension was hiding, chances are I relaxed it just a little bit through my whole body tense and relax.
Neurons That Fire Together …
Remember on Day 1 when Micky shared about Myelin? I summarized by saying “The neurons that fire together, wire together.” An oversimplification to be sure, but it works for my mental model of how the brain works as I increase my meditation practice and skills. So right now when I experience a disturbance, I have an automatic somatic body experience of tension. By consciously focusing on relaxing my body, I’m attaching my relaxation to my automatic tension response and over time these will cancel eachother out.
More to the point, it’s disturbances like these that I came to work on. Can you imagine if every disturbance after this retreat had me relax 1-5% more and build mental muscle that was constantly growing my inner peace? Wow. Seriously, I owe my loud karaoke-singing hotel neighbors a huge debt of gratitude.
Please sing louder and with even more locally flavored tunes!
I get to look at my near automatic response of “Shut up!” Sure while I didn’t say it out loud, how quick it was to rise inside my body. What’s that about? So much rich content to work with. From now on, any flash of anger or any kind of disturbance is my signal that “This is what we came for!!!”
Working on my own inner peace requires a certain amount of disturbances and that includes my own set-backs, expectations and disappointments. In other words (and I’m sure you guessed it), “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be!”
