Last week, I completed a four-day walking meditation retreat.

Today, I'll share how it went.

What it is: Inner Walk

When I tweeted I was in Koh Phanang, Thailand, an audience member suggested Inner Walk.

The concept is simple:

For four days, you walk for four hours backwards and forwards along a 15-metre concrete platform. You’re barefoot. And you don't know the time.

The practice was founded by Buddhist monk Prah Orlan, who just passed away this month. The talks about the experience here:

It was a brutal but awesome experience.

Before I share my revelations, let’s discuss why it works.

Why it works

If you're familiar with meditation, you’ll understand the underlying principles.

You and I are running around with a mind full of chatter. We bounce from one activity to the next with zero space to think. We’re constantly stressed and anxious as our thoughts pull us around like puppets on a string.

We undervalue quiet, peace, and solitude.

Especially in Western society, we’re so wrapped up in the rat race.

The core benefit is disconnecting from your thoughts.

Meditation is observation. Observation leads to understanding. Understanding leads to change. People try to skip ahead to the change part without doing the work, but that’s like sticking a bandaid on a gaping wound—it ain’t gonna work.

The speaker likened meditation to a glass of muddy water. Only when you let things settle do you begin to see clearly.

Why walking?

4 reasons.

1. Cognitive benefits. Walking increases clarity and creativity (there’s a reason many great minds swear by it).
2. Easier to keep going. The longest I’ve meditated before this was one hour. Moving helps you not fall asleep.
3. Turning brings you back to the present. A bit like ‘follow your breath’. Except if you forget to turn at the end of the platform, you’ll fall off. This was a nice prompt to catch thoughts faster.
4. It hurts. You see your mind make many excuses. Your feet hurt, you don’t know how long is left, your back gets sore. Interesting to watch.

Intensity helps

I usually do 10 to 15 minutes of daily meditation.

And often that’s just staring at the back of my eyelids while my mind does cartwheels waiting for the timer.

16 hours 3 months of work in 4 days. You peel away your thoughts like layers of an onion. The resulting clarity is profound. Everyone had different benefits depending on their state, struggles, and journey of awareness.

I’ll share 5 thoughts that stuck with me (the final point being most important).

First, I finally understood the tangible benefit of meditation.

1. You can’t trust your intuition if you don’t think clearly

‘Follow your intuition’ is good but flawed advice.

Why?

Because your gut will lie to you if you don't understand what is real.

I'll give you an example. My intuition told me from day one that dentistry was the wrong career. I didn't enjoy the work. But sunken cost bias, the illusion of security, fear of failure, and fear of uncertainty kept me from quitting.

My monkey mind was more powerful than the truth.

The result was poor judgement—doubling down on a career when I should’ve been building a new one. I’ve made many such mistakes in my life, but less so recently since making clear thinking a priority.

Meditation might feel pointless, but the results sure as hell aren’t.

2. Fear is real

The older I get, the more I realise fear is life’s biggest challenge. Everything you want is on the other side of it.

So for the past year, I’ve told myself it isn’t real.

It’s helped me make bolder decisions, begin travelling the world, and break my foot (don’t jump off waterfalls).

But after hurting my arm quadbiking 3 months ago, I’ve had chronic nerve issues. My arm is much weaker and typing hurts. This has been terrifying because it is the same symptoms as my neurological tumour—which I had surgery for 14 years ago.​

I thought I finished worrying about that shit, but each day I began to dread something more sinister than a trapped nerve.

What I learned:

When you renounce something (like I did with fear), it still controls you. Maybe even more so. When it does happen, it hits that much harder.

I’ve since updated my model.

Fear is real. But it is not fatal or final. It is an emotional stress response, and you get to decide how to respond.

And if you want a great life, how you respond is everything.

3. Positive mind, positive outcomes

I don’t believe in woo-woo stuff. When someone tells me I can manifest my way to a million dollars, I write them off as a loony.

But this practice reinforced the power of reframing.

When you think positively, you make better decisions. You’re more fun to be around. You have more energy. These things create positive outcomes, which lead to more positivity. The inverse is also true. Negative thoughts are a breeding ground for negative outcomes.

In this way, manifestation is real.

For example, I stopped stressing about my arm after day 2 of walking. And 2 weeks later, it feels much better. The symptoms are similar, but my interpretation is not. Which means I’m back to writing, training, and feeling good.

I already had an intolerance of speaking negatively. You should never complain about things outside of your control. But I’m doubling on joy in 2025. Your thoughts and words create your reality. Curate them well.

4. The game of life is a test of incentives

Naval Ravikant has been living rent-free in my head for years with one idea:

The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

I now realise that the test of stupidity (of which I have failed many times) is how poorly you respond to incentives.

And we’re tested constantly.

For example, picking a career you hate because it’s high status. Or sticking in a relationship because that person is attractive (even if they’re not your cup of tea). Or working with a sucky client because the pay is good. Or eating like shit because it feels good in the moment.

These are all stupid short-term decisions that lead to long-term hell.

Behind every bad outcome, you’ve made a bad decision along the way. Awareness helps you resist the tug of poor incentives.

And on that note…

5. Society has got success wrong

I am addicted to hard work. Partly because I love pushing myself, but more likely because my self-worth is wrapped up in an idea of success.

But since reading books like Awareness by Anthony Demello and Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti (highly recommend both), I realise how backwards we have it.

You and I are running on a capitalistic wheel.

From birth, we’ve been told to think a certain way, chase a certain goal, and believe a certain ideal. We’ve boxed ourselves in with the language we use, the media we consume, and the company we keep. Even the idea of freedom is warped—most people think getting rich is the answer. But that’s not freedom. That’s just being a bigger rat.

These days, I care less and less how good I look. I care how good I feel.

Here, society’s definition of success falls short. Just look at how tired, stressed, and discontent we all are. We’re constantly chasing the peak without realising behind the mountain lies more mountains.

My definition of success is to be free, calm, and content.

Not in some imaginary future (because you have no clue how long you have left to live).

But right here, right now. Every day. Doing things for the joy of doing them. Not hedonistic joy, although I don’t mind the occasional 6 am stumble home, deep-seated joy—what the ancient Greeks called Eudaimonia.

This might sound idealistic, but if you’re smart (or at least not stupid) and willing to work hard, you will get what you want from life. Especially with the Internet.

Why on earth would you waste this opportunity chasing stupid, meaningless prizes?

I’m not suggesting capitalism is bad. It’s the best model we have.

Nor am I suggesting it’s easy to master a creative skill, build a fulfilling business, enjoy great relationships, and find inner peace. In fact, with the dopamine-fueled, comparison-driven world we live in, it’s never been harder.

But you get one shot at life.

Most people waste it chasing things they don’t need to impress people they don’t know (who are just thinking of themselves anyway).

The most important step of achieving success is defining it. But first, you must remove your conditioning, and that requires deep thought and reflection. It’s like removing dirt from a window. You can’t see reality until you do the work.

On that joyful tone, let’s wrap things up.

I hope you found this useful (or at least interesting). Please check out those books—they’ve changed my life.

Christmas is the perfect time to put down your phone, enjoy the present, and spend more time thinking.

Catch ya next week.

Kieran