Mott in his indomitable serenity had a way of dropping conversational bombs as casual asides. “You know tomorrow is Ne Suschij?” He asked on my penultimate afternoon at Wat Klagonwan. Considering no one else spoke English, no I had no idea what was happening tomorrow so I asked him to elaborate.

“Tomorrow we do not go out to ask for alms, the villagers come here to make merry.”

The extra two hours of morning rest sounded agreeable. Making merry sounded, well, like merry ‘ol time. But then Mott dropped the bomb, “. . .and we will meditate from 9 PM to 4 AM.”

9 PM to 4 AM! I’d been proud that in the course of the week I’d managed to sit still for two hours of vipassana meditation twice daily. Now we were upping it to seven hours past my bedtime? I gulped at the thought of it, but also welcomed the opportunity to take my meditation practice further. It was the only time that the monks, novices, and nuns meditated together, a weekly community challenge of endurance and invitation to go deeper.

I lasted until 1 AM, but then joined the nuns novices and monks who left the hall for a walking meditation around the grounds.

I’m totally going to step on the centipede, I thought as my bare feet touched the midnight road still warm from the previous day’s heat. In seven hours of silence, the mind is anything but quiet. It struggles to focus, but the daily endeavor of focusing it is well worth the effort. It is the beginning of building a healthy relationship with yourself and the world.

I hoped to continue these exercises in stillness well beyond my stay at Wat Klagonwan. My back seemed to show some subtle improvements, but I wouldn’t be leaving the temple free from pain like I hoped to upon my entry.

But I felt more centered, more focused and more forgiving of my failing body. When things are fully functioning, we forget we even have a body. Mine has been mostly faithful over the years, and my present problem was mild bump of pain and a sprinkle of uncertainty when compared with the pernicious struggles throughout the world. I would only learn later that this very day an earthquake was shaking Nepal.

Such was my train of thoughts during the seven hours when I shouldn’t have been thinking at all. But I let these thoughts to come without pushing them away, because I felt I’d need the perspective they were building the coming weeks.

Read more from my series, “Being Buddhist in Thailand”