I’m doing something a little different this week. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sydney Slavitt — a core member of the Dharma Gates programming team, and the person many of you know from running our retreats — to ask her about how she first encountered the Dharma and how she came to work for Dharma Gates. She very generously shared the whole story. This is an experiment in the kind of content that might go out on the Substack, so please let me know in the comments what you think. You can listen to the full conversation in the audio above. What follows is a lightly edited transcript. The first time anyone told me the truth - Miro: Let’s start at the very beginning. How did you first encounter the Dharma? Sydney: I grew up in a family where meditation practice wasn’t super strange. My aunt and uncle are both long-time meditators. My mom is a therapist, and when I was in middle school she was getting really into mindfulness-based stress reduction — she actually had me take an MBSR course in high school. So I had a lot of peripheral contact with meditation. Then my junior year of high school, I was in a world religions class. We were reading the Bhagavad Gita, and I remember very distinctly feeling differently reading that than I had reading the Torah or the Bible earlier in the class. It felt like it was touching on something I hadn’t encountered before. And when we shifted to the Buddhism unit, the very first class my teacher Jim Barron put the Four Noble Truths on the board. I remember feeling like that was the first time anyone had ever told me the truth — very explicitly. I had this feeling of, what have I been learning in school this whole time? Why have we been wasting all this time talking about things that are kind of true and kind of helpful, when someone could just lay it out like this? I looked around the classroom to see if anyone else was freaking out about what we were hearing — like, is anyone else realizing this is it? But everyone else seemed to be having a regular Monday morning. So it landed somewhere in my system, but I didn’t take it up seriously then. I was at a very college-oriented private school in Philadelphia, so I spent the rest of that year doing all the crazy things high schoolers do to get into college. A hard first year at Wesleyan - Sydney: I got into Wesleyan and I was so excited. I thought, this is going to be it — I’m going to be an adult, make a bunch of cool friends, get into art stuff, have an awesome time, just be a happy, free young person doing everything I’d wanted to do but couldn’t while living at my parents’ house. Miro: So the Dharma was not high on your list of priorities at that point. Sydney: No. I just wanted to be cool and have fun. And then I showed up to college and I was seriously disappointed. I started experiencing really intense social anxiety — I’d had anxiety before, but not in a way where I felt scared to enter a room with my peers, terrified of what people were thinking about me. I felt really untethered. I’m a very social person, I’m motivated by being around people I like, and I just felt lost and alienated that first year. I had a couple of good friends early on. One of them, Tamar, had taken a transcendental meditation class during her gap year, so she had a practice. We’d talk a lot about meditation and different states of mind and consciousness and reality — all those cool things. Miro: Sangha. Sydney: Yeah. Talking to her, I started thinking, this can actually point to more interesting things about reality than just… science. So that freshman year I was living in a forced triple — a dorm room meant for two, but they’d squeezed in a third bed, and I was the one in the middle with no personal space whatsoever. When I was really not feeling good, which was pretty regularly, I’d lie in bed under the covers with a YouTube guided meditation going, just trying to have a few moments of a more settled body and mind. Looking back, I’m like, whoa, that really helped. It really changed the course of things for me. It didn’t feel like it then — it was hard to see — but it was like putting little drops in a bucket, slowly changing the course of a ship. Miro: Any YouTube channels you want to shout out? Sydney: (laughs) I was totally into the psychedelic-vibe stuff — deep meditation with electronic music, “deep breathing for peace and freedom.” Silly stuff. But it got me somewhere. It moved me somewhere. Adin, and learning to be with herself - Sydney: Tamar and I would occasionally go to the meditation club at Wesleyan, Wesangha. I didn’t totally vibe with the club at that time — I was still an intimidated freshman girl, and most of the members were junior and senior boys who were well established in it. I was like, this isn’t my group, these aren’t my people. But I did meet my friend Adin through that network. Adin was a very different type of person than most people I met at college, which was refreshing. Miro: How was Adin different? Sydney: Adin walked around campus without shoes, and would often non-verbally come up to people and really get in their space — asking to be engaged with in a physical, non-verbal way. Really radical embodiment. I found it so refreshing when everyone else was so caught up in their own anxiety spins that no one could even engage with each other. Adin would come over and show me a picture of a buddha, or read me the Heart Sutra over dinner and just go, isn’t that crazy? He was sprinkling heavier-hitting Dharma into my landscape than I’d ever encountered, and he was so far outside the normal social sphere that I found it way more interesting. That was mostly my sophomore year. After my freshman year, I’d seriously thought about transferring. Miro: It was that bad? Sydney: My mom came to pick me up at the end of freshman year with no idea how bad it had been. We went out to dinner and I just cried at the table — “I hate it here.” And she said, “Well then let’s get you out. You don’t have to be here.” I spent the summer back at my summer camp with wonderful friends who grounded me back into remembering who I was. And I decided, okay, I’ll give it one more try. When I came back sophomore year, my friendship with Adin began, and I came back with a very different attitude. It wasn’t as needy — I need people to like me, I need to find my group. It was more protective of my own energy and time. I was taking a yoga class, and a lot of my free time I’d just be in my room doing yoga, or putting on music and dancing around, or meditating, or drawing. Miro: Wholesome states. Sydney: (laughs) There may have been some weed involved — it’s Wesleyan. But really taking time to be with myself. If I was feeling sad, just letting that be there. If I was feeling good, letting that grow. So going out stopped feeling like I needed something from the social situation. It felt more like, I’m at a capacity where I can be in this, and if all it is is being there and then I’m done, that’s not a failure just because it didn’t gratify me. Miro: There’s a kind of tyranny in needing friends and not being comfortable with yourself. You’re a slave to your situation if you can’t just take the night to hang out with Sydney, alone. Sydney: Totally. And that was without a real practice — I was at the very early stages of exploring what practice could even be. Freshman year it was so hard to be with myself; it just felt uncomfortable and strange. Sophomore year, it started to feel like maybe there was something to learning how to be with myself. The first retreat: five days of silence - Sydney: At the end of the fall semester of sophomore year, Adin invited me on a Dharma Gates retreat. Miro: What year was this? Sydney: Fall of 2019. Dharma Gates had only started doing retreats in spring of 2019, so this was basically their first year. I knew about Dharma Gates because Aaron — the executive director and one of the co-founders — had been a senior my freshman year, and Nicky, another co-founder, was also a Wesleyan and Wesangha person. So I’d heard about them through the ecosystem. At that time Dharma Gates seemed like an organization that just brought young people to monasteries — which is still what we do, but back then it felt more like they were coordinating school field trips. Miro: Was this one associated with Wesleyan? Sydney: Not quite. The very first Dharma Gates retreat ever was just a group of Wesleyan students going to Dai Bosatsu Zendo. Mine was a bit more official — Dharma Gates had just gotten their 501(c)(3) status and had a small budget. I don’t know how big, but enough to run two retreats on basically no money. It was like, let’s go all in on these retreats and see what happens. So that retreat was January 2020, hosted at Zen Mountain Monastery, with an outside facilitator leading meditation and some relational practice. Five days of silence — which I’d never done. For those of you who know me more personally than just through my Dharma Gates role: at that point in my life, silence was a slightly ridiculous idea. I can be a very chatty person. Miro: Nary a moment of silence, much less five days. Sydney: (laughs) A family friend heard I was doing a silent retreat and said, “Whoa — you’re going to need to do a Jewish retreat afterward where you just talk for five days straight.” So I went, in the winter of 2020. I remember feeling intimidated entering the monastery, the zendo — seeing all the monks and residents sitting there, the room so still. It felt like I was getting squeezed into a straitjacket. I didn’t know how to sit still, my mind was wild. Zen Mountain is not playing around. But near the end of the retreat there was one moment where all the tension and tightness just gave a little — a flash of hope that this practice could actually transform what experience was. I wasn’t experi
