Global Wayfinding at ~2000-ish hours: a pit stop/self-report
Also a retrospective.
Introduction
For the past 5-ish years I have been practicing an unusual school of spiritual practice, called Global Wayfinding. Based on my rough calculations, I have recently passed a 2000 hours of practice mark, which based on my understanding, places me about 1/5th of the way towards the completion of it. (Though its a bit more complicated than that, as I explain in a later section.) I figured that this would be a good opportunity to take a step back and try to write down what my experience had been so far.
One of the reasons for writing this post is because I have not seen anyone else reporting on their GW progress, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be obviously useful. While the motivation for the practice has to a large extent been self-sustaining, there were definitely moments along the way where I felt like reading the experiences of others would give me some emotional support that I needed, or sense of broader perspective.
You will probably get the most out of this blog post if you are yourself a GW practitioner, or a “dabbler”, or in general familliar with the main protocol document that is the basis for the meditaion practice. I can’t guarantee that everything will make sense otherwise (though I can’t guarantee that it will make sense if you are familliar with it either… this blog post definitely took me places).
My rough timeline of practice so far
Note: this section is long and not very interesting, but it gives some general context on my life and how my practice evolved over time. If you just want to read about my thoughts on GW, feel free to skip it.
I feel like the problem with sketching out a timeline like this, is some combination of fallible memory, and sort of “different parts of my mind being visible at different times”-kind of vibe. Its possible (actually certain) that I am ommiting large portions of what was happening at given times because some part of my brain thinks it would not be conducive to proper functioning for them to be integrated into my current narratives. I am currently split on whether I endorse this tendency or not, I was leaning towards yes for a long time but lately I have been craving more inter-legibility in my life. (Probably one of the reasons why I’m writing this post.) Either way this is why certain periods will have more detail than others. (Well that and just wanting to get the post done and sent past the door.)
Also, probably for the above reason, a lot of descrptions of my practice will be mixed up with things that were going on in my life at the time. I wish I could separate the two more, but I don’t really know how. This is the only way I know how to write this, unfortunately.
Mid 2021 - mid 2022 (theoretical preliminaries)
I first learned about GW in the summer of 2021, when I saw it linked in the twitter replies of one Qiaochu Yuan. At the time I was practicing (or rather banging my head against) the Tibetan shi-ne meditation, as taught in the Aro gTer online course. I had been doing that for about a year, and went as far as to pay a monthly membership fee to recieve zoom teachings from one of their instructors (which wasn’t super helpful).
My first reaction upon seeing the protocol document was being mildly annoyed. I had commited to going with traditional buddhism for at least a year, but GW was so obviously better and more complete for me that I knew I would have to switch eventually. I did actually stuck with Aro gTer until the end of the year (mainly because I wanted to try their weird tibetan yoga), but I ended up giving up after that since I saw no further progress.
I didn’t actually start any of the GW practices straight away, since I had a certain understanding (not inaccurate, in retrospect) that I would have to change a couple of things in my life in case things go wrong when I meditate. There was a lot of warnings about that in the document, and also I understood on an intuitive level that a lot of things in my life were held together by extreme levels of self-coercion and internal slave-driving, such that if I tried to taper off I might fall apart and no longer fulfill my current responsibilities. I wonder if I actually delayed it by a couple of years, and made sure I make proper arrangements first (though I have no clue what these would have been), things might have been a bit better for me right now. I do think it might have held closer to “no-rushing, no corner-cutting” principle/spirit.
The reason this did not happen, is actually a silly/funny one for me. I told a friend about global wayfinding, and she booked some meetings with Mark and started practicing. I was really afraid she would “overtake me” in progress (whatever that means) and so I started trying a bunch of practices from the document, and lo and behold, I really hit it off with “ramp-up to practice p2”. It was crazy to try a meditation method that actually worked! It felt extremely vindicating.
Mid 2022 - mid 2023 (golden period/”beginners luck”)
The period that followed was wonderful. I was going through some tough period that was quite stressful (leaving uni, finding a job, etc.) but the meditation practing was helping me navigate that with much less suffering than I thought possible. Every time I sat down (or rather laid down, see the section of posture) to practice, I would get up feeling un-triggered, calm and slack-full (in the sense of having spare emotional and cognitive capacity). In retrospect, I think I was picking up a lot of low-hanging fruit/improvements to my well-being, and immediatly spending it on day-to-day problems. I wonder if it would have been more wise to try to hang on to it and invest them, or amortize bigger improvements that would pay of later. Instead, I was drunk with the idea of less-suffering-full life, and I started a new job with the intention of chilling out as much as possible while still remaining productive. I also spent a lot of that slack on smoothing out familly-related affairs (this I don’t regret as much).
During that time I had some video calls with Mark, and after hearing the descriptions of my practice, he carefully said that it sounded a bit like I was using my meditation practice to escape from something. At the time I dismissed him completely. In retrospect, I think he was exactly right about this.
Second half of 2023 (first signs of trouble)
Eventually though, I hit something. There was a specific moment that I remember, coming back from an office party at work, where suddenly the coping mechanism that I was doing before stopped working (and I think hasn’t started working since? Its very hard to tell. I am a different person than I was in 2023). This was somewhat difficult for me - on some level I was foolishly assuming/hoping, despite the warnings, that things would only get better from that point on. But I didn’t despair, and I assumed it was just part of the process. It was no longer possible to sustain the level of contentment with work and life that I was used to, so I struggled more. Insights/”steel cable mergers”1 became more rare.
First half of 2024 (relative goodness again?)
Eventually in Jan 2024 I got laid off from that job I which hated (and was planning to quit 3 weeks later) with a huge severance pay. This was a massive positive turn in my life. When I talk about 2022 to 23 being the golden period, this might have been true in terms of speed of progress. But it was this 5 months in 2024 when I look back and think “this might have been the happiest time in my life” (so far. I am an optimist, or so I tell myself). This is probably partialy due to the fact that I had most of the well-being “upgrades” I accumulated in 2023, a very supportive environment (I lived with 2 close friends in a peaceful town), and general lack of responsibilites.
That said, looking back at this period, its not clear to me that I was actually making any substantial meditative progress at all. I think part of it was that I developed a habbit of distracting myself with my phone at certain points in meditation. I know in possibly every single other meditation system this would be a no-brainer red flag/”don’t-do-this-c’mon”-thing, but GW is very non authoritative and generally embraces reverie and loosing yourself in thoughts when it feels natural. But, in retrospect, I think conventional wisdom is correct, it was a hindrance to my practice.
Mid 2024 - all of 2025 (welp, no)
Alas, eventually I had to find a job again, and thats when my problems started again. It took me a few months to erode the slack I accumulated, but it gradually happened, and to be honest was pretty hearbreaking. It was just watching the spark gradually leave my life, week by week. I was hoping it would come back after I quit, but I don’t think I still got it back completely. In the end, I only held that job for about 4 months, and by the end I was falling apart.
After quitting the job I wanted to try something new, so I moved to London and joined a residential tech incubator programme, which I thought was flexible enough that I wouldn’t burn out, and could give me some direction as to what to do next. That’s how I spent most of 2025. Lets just say it didn’t quite work out. Living in a big city by itself seemed pretty bad for me, to be honest, and I felt like in some ways set back my progress by a few years. Needless to say, not much meditation improvement happened that year - although at least I figured out to turn off my phone when I meditate, which was a kind of progress.
January 2026 - current (lets try to re-think what’s wrong)
On January 2nd I began a three-month winter retreat at a Theravadan monastery2, where I am writing this post from, currently. I have a lot of free time, not a lot of responsibilities, and its a pleasant environment. So I have some time to reflect on what to do next. I guess writing this blog post is part of that process!
Meta-protocol
Lets move to what my actual practices look like.
I have never actually done the meta-protocol as stated in the document.
The second note before the meta-protocol says to not force my mind to answer these questions if my mind doesn’t want to. Every time I have sat down to try to do the meta-protocol, my mind I have told me it doesn’t want to answer these questions in no uncertain terms. I have tried it maybe 3-4 times in the last 5 years. I am unsure if this is a failure mode or the technique working as intended.
That said, in course of writing this blog post I have had to think about some things adjacent to the meta-protocol questions, and since I allow myself more internal coercion when writing things than during my meditation practice, I will attempt to do a quasi-meta-protocol-thing in the later section “what do I actually do when I meditate”. Possibly the consequences of this will be disasterous and I will forever throw away the possibility of reaching enlightenment/asymptote within my natural lifespan. We will see.
Note on hours
On that very topic of natural lifespans.
Note: I wrote the below section while being slightly agitated. I feel better right now but I want to keep it as it is to preserve something. There might be something of a “shooting the messanger/scientist” vibe here. That said I feel like some of my frustration is not entirely baseless/unfounded, but its difficult to untangle for me. Don’t take it more personally than it is appropriate in your judgement, maybe.
Mark wrote in a temporary note in 2023 (about 2.5 years ago as of writing this article) that he believes that the 10k hours estimate for the process might be an undershoot, and that his current revised estimate is “like 17,000-23,000, maybe”. This to me is very distressing and rugpull-y. (I know from reading his old blog post that his original estimate was 2,000 hours, but it has been 10,000 the entire time I have had contact with the document).
I would like to remind you that Mark, among other things, discourages people from having children during the practice and gives a plethora of warnings regarding personal relationships, etc, that generally indicate that you want to be done as soon as possible. Thats aside from the fact that, you know, many of us practice meditation in hopes that it will help us with specific deep problems, and the number of hours gives us a rough upper bound on when we can expect to deal with those problems. (I remember there being a part in the protocol which seems to imply this would usually happen towards the later end of the practice period for the deep stuff, but I can’t find it now, so I can’t tell if this was meant in a “usual case” or “worst case” sense. I read it as “usual case”.)
I do get that figuring out the number out is an empirical process and obviously not something that Mark can control, but it does leave me feeling like something could have been done better here. If it took me around 5 years to achieve 2k hours (while orienting as much of my life as I could towards practice!), I could expect to “asymptote” in another 20, when I’m 47. If the actual number is 23, it would take me around 55 years, and I would be 82. I’m sure you can see the fucking difference. At this point, would it have been better to not see these glimpses of a better life, if I know I wont truly achive them until I am very old and about to die? (I feel that way sometimes.) Does it mean I should give up on having children at all? (I would like to have children.) Maybe this comes across as whiny, but I do feel the need to express this, since I feel like these are valid concerns.
In any case, even though it has been almost 3 years since this note has been added, Mark still haven’t updated any of the parts of the article that say 10k hours, so maybe he changed his mind. Who knows. I sincerely hope this is the case.
A lament about subtle muscle tension/somatization
Note: also a frantic/agitated section. Please adjust accordingly and read the update note down below.
If you thought the last section was very complain-y, this one will be as well, but maybe for more grounded/reasonable reasons. I feel like there is a strong limitation or a flaw in the protocol as its currently written, specifically around subtle muscle tension and what Mark calls “somatization”. Oh sure, there are a lot of warnings about it. I’ve read them all, five years ago. At first I was like “huh, I wonder what that means”. Then at year or two later I was like “oh, there is this subtle tension in my head when I practice, I guess that’s what it was talking about. I’ll try not to do it.” Then I was like “oh no, I think I have been doing the tension all along, and its getting worse. How do I stop??”. And that was about 2 years ago, and I never figured out how, and it just kept getting worse. Right now, its not quite painfully yet, most of the time, but it does result in frequent headaches when it gets worse. Its usually worse after meditation or after reading for a long time (though that might be an unrelated cranial/eye tension thing - though I do feel like they feed off of each other somewhat). Sleeping seems to reset it and I feel normal in the morning.
At this point I basically don’t really know how to function without meditation. I’m not sure if I knew exactly how to before either, but I got used to a level of comfort where I can use the mediation to downregulate and I basically don’t know how to do that naturally. (I didn’t know even back before I started, it was something I explicitly researched a lot before I started GW, and nothing I tried worked. Looking back I see why most of the methods would not have worked, or also produced more tension elsewhere in the body.) So my cycle right now is something like “spend one or two days being chill and meditating as little as possible, until you get a headache, then drink some coffee for 3 days and read a lot of books. Then when you can’t sustain the energy to live in samsara anymore, chill out and meditate. Repeat.” This doesn’t seem very sustainable, but I don’t know what to do, because I feel like the protocol doesn’t tell you what to do when you’re in this situation at all! Whats all the warnings for then?? Literally only actionable advice to reduce the tension I saw was to supplement vitamin D and K2, which I already do because its winter and I live in the UK.
Later Update:
When doing double-checking for this post, I did see one portion tucked in at the end in one of the sections on somatisation that could be interpreted as more direct remedial instructions of the kind I was looking for:
In any case, real change comes from, when safe, not even exactly inclining or going towards, though that’s often gently ok (if no grinding or jamming), but something more, like, hanging out with; keeping company; being patient with; low-pressure, loose, ok to drift away for a (long) time, almost incidentally “staying with,” when you do; neither moving towards, nor moving away; not amplifying nor facilitating, nor pushing away, nor trying to reduce or diminish, if safe; let it/things/all come to you, relax and let go as best you can, arrange yourself to let the body move you… This patient, patient, in its own right revealed order order, un-rush-able, undoes it self, takes care of itself, comes to you, sometimes scary, sometimes soft, somethings big smears and sometimes the tiniest, most intricate things, encountering, encountering, encountering.
(Daniel Ingram, when writing about equanimity, says something like “front of hand and fingers in contact with the water, maintains contact as the water undulates, back of the hand never gets wet.” (I think that’s not exactly what he said, but. It might be a classic analogy, or something he formulated, not sure.)
takes care of itself, comes to you
And, of course, still, sometimes, you’re trying stuff, experimenting, playing with auxiliary practices, main practices, reading, exploring teachers and systems, and finding the ways in which you’ve already been doing that thing or already know how to do that thing, in a way that’s just right for you.
Having spent the last couple of days trying to practice taking these as instruction, I’d say that the results are ambiguous. On one hand, it does feel like in some sense progress, in that I am no longer inducing a state where I am pushing away some feeling and covering it up with tension (assuming that this is in fact what I was doing before, which it now seems like but Im not 100% sure). It now feels like I am actually feeling the emotions I am feeling, but as if from behind a slightly pierced veil, so that they not overwhelm me. (I might have misunderstood what “partially dipping the hand” is supposed to be a metaphor for, if that’s not what its supposed to be.) This feels like an improvement, in that I actually feel emotions coming and going in real time, which I previously only read about in various meditation instructions. It also reduces my ability to use meditation to escape unpleasant feelings, while retaining its ability to relax/reduce tension in the body.
On the other hand, I still get the cranial tension, although seems like in different parts of my head (charitably: maybe its spreading the tension to resolve the knot?). It also “feels not perfectly right” (although for the first couple of times I did it it “felt really right”). As a result I’m still not sure if I’m doing the right thing. At least it gives me some room to explore nearby mental moves.
Also its in an obsucre-ass part of the book, only once, and I’m still not sure if I’m doing the right thing or doing it right. I think my criticism in this section stands, the anti-somatization techniques should be emphasised more.
End of update note.
So, to reiterate, despite knowing waay ahead that somatization is bad, and having been concerned about it for years, I still failed to avoid it, nor can I really stop it now. If it wasn’t for my utter inability to downregulate, I think I would just stop meditating for a year or two and see if get myself out of this hole. I might still try that anyway.
A note on posture
During the last 5 years, I basically spent almost all of my time meditating in a laying down position on the floor, with a soft carpet/blanket underneeth, usually with my knees raised and my feet on the floor. I would occassionally use props such as chairs to raise my feet higher and reach positions where my spine would be more comfortable. Generally I felt that that contact of my spine/back muscles with the floor was quite important for meditation, since it allowed me to kind of feel where my muscles are, or where the tension is. (It also felt pretty good for my spine, at least unless I laid for too long. Its still my favourite “reading a book/tablet” position.)
In the last month or so (since I have moved into the monastery) I have been experimenting with an upright sitting position, with 2-3 zafu pillows between my legs (I have thick legs). (AI chatbots tell me this might be called “hero asana” in yoga.) I’ve adapted this because it seems like the sitting position that is the least painful for me, at least as far as my legs/lower half of my body goes. Its still a bit difficult for my spine. I’m pretty sure I am sitting correctly spine-wise (I used the instructions from the book “aligned, relaxed, resilient” and experimented until I got it right) but I know from fMRI scans that I have a slight spinal disc misalignement so thats probably why.
Its difficult for me to sit longer than 15 minutes in this position before I have to lay back down. However, when I do, I feel like its actually quite worth it. It makes me more “aware in the moment” (to use a meditation cliche), but the main benefit is that its very easy to notice when some part of my bodymind is out of balance and sort of attend to that. Once I leave the monastery I am planning to “attack” my spine problem with exercise/physical therapy until I can sit in this position for longer, since it seems promising.
What do I actually do when I meditate
In the last couple of weeks (since December) I have been experimenting with p1 and getting I think some decent results (though it feels a bit tension-y). Aside from that, roughly 100% of my practice has been p2, or to be more precise [the ramp-up instruction for p2] (though from the first year onwards it all happens at once/interleaving instead of going step by step, so perhaps I have ramped up by now).
I have an anectode to say on this topic - some time last year I mentioned this to my therapist (she’s a TPOT therapist who has actually heard of the GW protocol before I started working with her) and she assigned me as “homework” that I should go through the other practices and pick one and practice it that week. I don’t remember which one I chose, but the end result I was an emotional wreck that week and I got some very nasty emotional backlash. So for now I focus on p2.
Now, if I were to answer as to what happens when I actually do it, I’d say I just do all the ramp up to p2 stuff until I feel like I have some small degree of eqanimity. (This might be a retroactive observation based on what happens next.) Then I notice that some train of thought, or some feeling I would normally flinch away from, can be realized/felt/accepted to a degree I would not usually be able to in daily life. This usually happens 0-4 times in a given 1-2h sitting3. I usually can observe with my conscious mind what the thought/concept/empotion that I would normally flinch away from, and update based on that intellectually. My assuption is/has been that this is what people “get” out of concentrative meditation, this kind of non-overwhelmy conbtainer for processing stuff, but for me this happens without any explict contentration, if anything with kind of loosing in thoughts/disociation. This might be some horrible misunderstanding. It did made me process a whole bunch of crap and helped me in my life though!
In general, I think this is somewhat simillar to the classic Romeo Stevens formulation of Theravadan meditation, where he describes the meditation loop thus:
Concentration meditation gives rise to a mental state where the mind is very calm and inclined to neutrality. Of the same sort you’d want in a good judge.
Insight meditation makes one aware of the causal links in the perceptual system between physical sensations, feelings, and mental reactions.
Sankharas are the stories and story pieces that get reexamined and refactored as a result.
[…] Concentration puts you in the ideal state for insight.
Insight stirs up Sankaras.
Examining Sankharas riles up the mind, eventually leading to a desire to do some more concentration in order to calm down and keep making progress.
Again, I don’t think I am doing any “concentration” as I understand that word anyway. (Its not like focusing on a problem, or piece of homework at school, or even writing this blog post right now.) But I am definitely reaching “a mental state where the mind is very calm and inclined to neutrality” (compared to my usual state anyway), and it has those further positive effects that he describes. I wonder if that means that “concentration” as such is optional, or just one member of a category of “containers” for practice? Would be slightly embarassing if no one in Buddhism figured that out for 2500 years. 4
Conclusion
I remember, back in 2020 or 2021, on the wave of my interest in Tibetan buddhism, I read Ken McLeods’ book Trackless Path. I don’t think I got much out of the Dzogchen poem, but a part of of introduction has stuck with me, about how he spent 20 years, from a meditation retreat in 1983 to another one in the early 2000s, completely unable to do any meditation practice and spiritually stuck. In an introduction different book, Waking up to your life, he puts his attitude towards spirituality this way: “My own path has been and is a long struggle with very few shafts of light on the way. I’m not even sure that the path has an end.”
When I first read this, I thought, “Wow, what a looser. This could NEVER happen to me.”
And my reflection after writing this post, is that while I haven’t wasted spent 20 years yet, that is still on the table, and unfortunately the description he gave resonates to a surprising extent. (To be fair, my life before meditation sucked too, so I haven’t exactly lost anything, except the respect of my familly and my professional career, and lets be honest I would have lost those things anyway the way my life had been going. No major regrets, maybe.)
That said, the shafts of light, when they do appear, are really nice and I wish I could stay in them longer! And I think I see some room for improvement, so maybe this doesn’t have to end on a sour and solemn note. Sometimes people just spend their years of meditation badly and then improve. For example, they learn to turn off their phone when they meditate.
So, here is to another [inderminate number] of hours of meditation. May it be joyous and worth it! And the rest of life as well.
Thats what I called the feeling in meditation when some tension suddenly resolved, leaving behind slack. Its framed that way at one point in the book.
At no point I had to declare what kind of meditation I am actually doing, so I suspect they may think I’m doing vipassana. If another retreatant asks me about my practice, I just say I’m doing a “body scanning meditation”, and describe my progress in general terms, and they seem agreeable. I’m actually not sure I’m not doing the same thing as they are, fundamentally, anyway. In any case, the only “meditation” where much is expected of me is the “washing-up meditation”, which I do dilligently.
There are parts of my life, like now, when 0 dominates, and other ones when the median was 1 or even 2. Though 4 would always be an ususually good one.
More likely explanations: its discussed somewhere I’ve never heard of, the thing I think of as concentration is some narrow shape that other people don’t do when they “concentrate”, I am nearing the limits of what can be accomplished using my “container” and “concentration” scales better. Probably all 3 to an extent.