"The Dream That Broke My Self-Righteous Anger" - The INtegration Chronicles
A Vipassana Integration Story
Welcome back to The Integration Chronicles! This month, we’re trying something different. My friend Vanna is putting me in the hot seat to interview me about my recent 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat. This experience was one of the most transformative of my life, and I’m excited to share the integration tools and breakthroughs that came from it.
Vanna: Let’s start at the beginning. What made you know it was time to do this?
Olivia Eden: I’ve been wanting to do Vipassana for years. I first heard about it in 2020 during a big awakening through psychedelic work, but I was far from ready then.
Every year I call in a word as a theme. This year, my word was integration. My ask was to really fully understand it, not just intellectually, but to embody it and have that real experiential understanding.
In April, I did an Ayahuasca ceremony. Both nights, I chose the same animal spirit card: the fire ant. The theme was gossip, aggression, combativeness. During the ceremonies, I got to experience the part of me that I call the Punisher, the part that really likes to punish myself and punish other people for any perceived wrongdoing. There’s a certain self-righteousness that comes with that.
For readers who don’t know my full story, I was born and raised in an international religious cult where punishment and discipline were very common. Every single hour of the day was accounted for, and stepping outside of that structure meant consequences. So I’m constantly toying between the little rebel child in me and the disciplinarian, Punisher, righteous anger type of spiritual shepherd in me.
After that ceremony, that shadow part of me felt like it was getting bigger. I was embroiled in more conflict than I normally am. For months, I would wake up with fire energy in my mind, in some type of argument with someone, needing to defend myself. I was clearly in this core wound trigger place, looking for safety, wanting to protect and defend, constantly looking for danger. Very uncomfortable.
On top of that, I’ve been a heavy caffeine drinker since I was very young. I like a big Nitro Cold Brew, 350 milligrams of caffeine. So I’m just wiring and activating all this fire ant energy even more.
In July, I started a book club with “The Way of Integrity” by Martha Beck. As we read, I had so much awareness come online. She talks about removing any dishonesty and lies from your life. The trajectory of shame is: we do things that create shame, that shame needs to hide, so that creates dishonesty. We start being dishonest with ourselves and others. Then that turns into stress, anxiety, activated nervous system.
Through that process, the biggest realization came online: integration is integrity. Integrity is wholeness. So where in my life am I out of integrity and not in wholeness?
Then I did the Miracle Morning challenge: waking up early, journaling, breathwork, gratitude, reading. It helped a lot, but there were still three or four fires continuously burning within me.
The last piece was my relationship. I had this gnawing sense that the relationship was not in full integrity with who I am and what I wanted in terms of having kids and family. End of August comes, the three eclipses all at once, and I had to have the conversation with my partner. Ultimately, we decided it was best if we separated.
Breaking up with him catalyzed this spiritual awakening, this desire to fully come into harmony and resonance within my mind and body. I had already been doing this legwork of relaxing my nervous system. I just knew it was time. I had 10 days of my schedule open up, which was a miracle, and someone encouraged me to just sign up. So I signed up.
Vanna: It was this intention at the beginning of the year of integration, and the universe brought you the perfect catalyst and series of events to get really uncomfortable.
Olivia Eden: Exactly. Integration is integrity. It’s all parts of us coming into wholeness, working together in harmony. Being in harmony is also my definition of spirituality. It’s either being in harmony or out of harmony. When we’re in harmony, when all parts are working together, we’re connected to spirit, to others, to ourselves, to nature, to the universe.
Vanna: Take us to the days leading up to Vipassana. How were you feeling?
Olivia Eden: I was excited but worried about two things: having to sit down for 10 hours a day and my back, and getting off coffee.
Just for context: Vipassana is a 10-day silent meditation retreat. No eye contact, no talking, no gestures, no phone, no books, no journals. Two meals a day, vegetarian, one at 6:30 AM, one at 11:30 AM. By noon, you’re done eating for the day. The idea is they remove everything you normally distract yourself with.
When you sit down to meditate, your mind is constantly looking for a way to pull itself out of being with itself. “Oh, you forgot to message that person. Go do that really quick.” Or “I’m really hungry. If I just had a little cracker, I would be okay.” Or “I’m so tired. If I just had coffee, I’d be fine.”
Through these 10 days, they’re training you to keep your focus on your body and what’s coming up in your body, and just to notice it. As you’re noticing it, notice where the mind goes for aversions or cravings, which Goenka calls sankharas.
He says many of us carry these sankharas with us. By the end of the month, you only have two or three that really stick out. At the end of the year, you have two or three that really stick out. Right before you die, you have a couple that are really sticking with you, and you’re going to carry those into the next life. Those sankaras are like deep grooves in a rock. Sometimes we have something come up and it’s like running a stick through water, you run the stick through the water and it immediately is gone.
It’s training you to have your mind be like that water where something comes up and you just let it pass. As you’re sitting there, you’re noticing the aversions, “I don’t like it,” or the cravings, “Ooh yes, I like it.” Both create misery within us.
Meanwhile, I’m dealing with the sankharas on the surface, the fires that have been present within me. There were about four fires that every day were coming into my awareness. I’m having this whole fight, and my fire ant, self-righteous energy is coming online. I’m not backing down, I’m not finding softness. I’m trying to find clever ways to dismiss it, “Oh, that’s an aversion. That’s a craving,” naming it and trying to dismiss it.
Vanna: It’s almost like a distraction from the distraction.
Olivia Eden: Exactly. I’m so cognitively trying to be in control instead of just focusing on my body.
Vanna: What did you notice happening in your body?
Olivia Eden: Day one, everyone realizes they’re going to be sitting for 10 hours a day. We start with one cushion, but sitting for 10 hours cross-legged is excruciating. Every day, people are adding pillows. By day three or four, everyone has like 20 extra pillows.
Every night, Goenka gives a lecture for an hour. Night five, he talks about how we are not reacting to the pain. We’re staying in balance and awareness through it all. Something clicked into place for me. I was like, “Oh, the idea is not to move away from the pain, it’s to work with it.”
Right then he introduced that we’re not going to move for the entire hour. As much as possible, don’t move. Stay with your legs in whatever position they are, and whatever you feel in the body, just observe it and keep equanimity in your mind.
Morning six, I remove all of my pillows and go just to the bare cushion. As the pain starts to creep up my legs at like 30 minutes, I just start working with it and being aware. I’m like, “Those are just electrical currents in the body.” The pain stopped being pain. The pain just became electrical waves coursing through my body.
I finished that two-hour meditation session with so much vibrating energy. I felt like I was walking on cloud nine. I was like, “Whoa, I just unlocked this new awareness of what I can do with pain in the body,” completely neutralizing the way I feel it. It became a sensation, as opposed to something that had a negative connotation.
However, I’m like, “How does this relate to the fires I’m still fighting in my mind?”
You’re allowed to ask the assistant teacher questions in the evening. By the seventh day, I had to ask how they were connected. She’s like, “It doesn’t matter. Just focus on the body. Everything is happening first in the body. Just pay attention.”
Vanna: That was all you needed?
Olivia Eden: That was all I needed. Meanwhile, every night I’m having the craziest, most vivid dreams. Each night, I’m being played out a very specific scenario of something that would bring anybody out of their balance. In every scenario, I’m reacting in a very triggered and reactive way.
I wake up and I’m like, “Okay, that’s where all the fire ant energy is going, in my dreams, getting pulled out of balance.”
By day eight, I have this one big fire come up that I’m fighting. Then all of a sudden I’m getting shooting pain in my chest and all the way down my arms. It was so crippling that I had to go lay down and take aspirin.
But it clicked in a visceral way. I was like, “Oh, that is how it plays out in my body. That is what we’re doing with the fire in our thoughts, with the resentment, with the bitterness, and how it shows up in our body.”
Goenka says the whole point is to cultivate inner wisdom. There are three types: wisdom we glean from reading something; intellectualizing it for yourself; and experiential wisdom. It’s when you know through experience that this is the absolute truth for you.
What I realized is that our heart is pumping our life force through our entire body. So once the wisdom reaches the heart, it transmits that message everywhere else in our body through the bloodstream, through the life force. That is experiential wisdom.
Night eight, my dream reached its final climax. I had my computer bag stolen and I went into this house to get it back. The guy who took it said, “Sorry, I sold it,” and I lose it. The full-on Hulk comes out of me. I start smashing every glass plate and cup I can find, hurling them at these guys. I’m taking beautiful pottery and smashing it on the ground, breaking everything I can get my hands on.
Then I take hard plastic plates and hit them on the ground, but they just bounce. With each bounce and not shatter, I start deflating because it’s not giving me that same satisfaction. I walk over to another room and sit down on a couch, just seething, really upset.
One thing I should mention: when I’ve been in this righteous anger, this really upset place, it’s been so challenging for me to get softness, to cut through that to what’s really underneath. It’s such a huge firewall.
This tall guy comes over with these really big kind eyes. He kneels down right in front of me and looks at me with so much softness. He’s like, “Hey, I heard what happened to your computer. I’m so sorry. That must be so hard.”
I just break down and start crying so hard. I’m like, “It is. It’s so hard.” He puts the back of his hand on my cheek.
I woke up sobbing so hard, gut-wrenching crying, and had the first big emotional release of the whole experience. I knew on a visceral level what compassion felt like and how you get there in that moment. That’s what I needed to know. That’s what I needed to experience…. compassion for me when I was freaking out and in full-on rage. When he did that, it all came into place. After that, anytime an old fire would come up, I could find softness and compassion almost right away.
Day nine is when they taught us the Metta meditation, “May all beings be happy, may all beings be free.” It connects you to the heart and allows you to visualize it for everyone. I could bring up everyone’s face that I had been holding in this place with fire and just have so much love and compassion. It helped fully integrate this fire ant energy that had been taking over my life for the last year.
Vanna: What has integration looked like coming back into everyday life?
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Olivia Eden: I successfully got off caffeine and haven’t been drinking coffee since then. My nervous system has been calmer. I’ve been doing the metta meditations every day to stay in that heart space.
Goenka’s whole thing is: don’t create new sankaras. If you do not create new sankaras, the old ones will begin to fall away. Anytime I’m feeling my mind go to “I don’t like that,” I just move back into neutrality.
Ram Dass said, “The great way is not difficult, without any preferences.” I’ve been playing with that a lot.
I’m not on social media. Social media is cravings and aversions on a loop. I’ve been doing what I can to avoid adding new sankharas. When I have a little trigger come up, I allow myself to feel that, but then move back into compassion as quickly as I can. Now that I have such a visceral, experiential understanding of what that looks like, it’s so much easier for me to get there.
Vanna: Is there anything else you’re really wanting listeners to know right now?
Olivia Eden: Yes. The most important takeaway: Suffering is universal. We all know that. It’s the one thing that connects every single person on earth, suffering, the inevitability of unwanted experiences.
Therefore, the solution has to be universal. The solution has to be something that everybody can connect to. Everybody can connect to the body and the breath. That’s it.
As long as we continue to bring our awareness back to what is happening in the body, because it’s all happening here first, we can transform our relationship with suffering.
I invite you: notice what your mind is reaching for, what it’s grabbing for. Before you grab your phone to scroll, just notice.
If I just put the phone down and notice what is going on in the body, what am I avoiding feeling? What am I distracting myself away from? You start to create that mind-body connection and notice that it’s all happening here first. We’re all avoiding sensations, or we’re all trying to feel something.
I’ve decided to power off every Sunday, from Saturday night to Sunday night, to give myself one full day without that constant pull of distraction, to be with myself. Just trying to find small ways that are doable and manageable to integrate this understanding into my life.
Vanna: This has me thinking about all the ways I distract and wondering what I’m either avoiding or trying to feel. Because what we really want is to feel in the body. We may want the money and the car, but we want the money to feel safety and the car to feel elevated. We want all of these things to feel.
The question becomes: what does it look like to start with “Well, what am I feeling currently?” Because if I don’t know where I’m at right now in a moment, then I’m already so disconnected from actually having that feeling.
The Body Scan Practice:
Everything happens in the body first
Notice sensations without labeling them as good or bad
Pain is just electrical currents—stay neutral with it
This builds equanimity and breaks reactive patterns
Understanding Sankaras (Deep Grooves):
Old resentments are deep grooves in the rock of your psyche
Don’t create new sankaras by feeding aversions and cravings
Notice when your mind says “I don’t like it” or “I like it”
Move back to neutrality and let it pass like water
The Three Types of Wisdom:
Intellectual wisdom (reading, learning)
Analytical wisdom (does this make sense for me?)
Experiential wisdom (knowing it through your body and heart)
Metta (Loving-Kindness) Meditation:
“May all beings be happy, may all beings be free”
Visualize people you struggle with and send them compassion
This dissolves fire ant energy and righteous anger
Technology Detox:
Notice what you’re reaching for before you scroll
Ask: What am I avoiding feeling?
Power off one day per week to be with yourself
Social media is cravings and aversions on a loop
The Compassion Gateway:
When rage or resentment comes up, ask what’s underneath
Softness and compassion cut through the firewall
You can’t think your way there—you must feel your way through
Olivia Eden is the founder of The Integration Chronicles and Tap Integration. She recently completed a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat and successfully detoxed from caffeine. She continues her daily practice of metta meditation and body awareness work. This month, we’re exploring how integration is integrity—bringing all parts of ourselves into wholeness and harmony.
DISCLAIMER: This content is for educational purposes only. The discussion of psychedelic substances is presented in the context of integration and personal development. Always consult qualified professionals for therapeutic support. The use, possession, and distribution of many psychedelic substances are illegal in most jurisdictions.
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