We came in two cars. A white Honda Odyssey, the back row of seats kowtowed under great reams of toilet paper. Everything else—cartons of grapes, jugs of water, Tupperwares of cut fruit, all of our modern alms—in the trunk. The rest in a white Toyota Corolla. Two cars full of supplies and people for a weekend of living more with less. Not for camping, but for monkhood.

“You all will need to unload the car when we get there,” my mom said, patting foundation over her face in the passenger seat mirror. “I can’t move very much in this dress.” She was wearing a high-neck gold dress covered with embroidered flowers and tiny tassels. It was one of three dresses that she had sewn with fabric ordered from Burma months ago. She wanted to have options, she’d said.

It wasn’t dark yet when we arrived on Friday afternoon. The temple was shaped like a wide, flat U: the main monk’s residence on the left; a long connecting piece in the middle with the cafeteria and meditation hall on the first floor, separated by a driveway, and the retreaters’ dorms above; and a shrine room (formerly a farming shed) as the second prong. We parked inside of the U as the dorms cast a shadow over the parking lot. When we had first started coming there, in 1995, it was only one prong: Now, multiple waves of Burmese immigration and fundraising later, it was two.

My mom told us to change and get ready for pictures as she was pulled aside by her friend Mimi: a stout woman who seemed always to be at the temple as a volunteer. She was holding up two different hairpieces to see which best matched my mom’s hair color. Tonight, all of us would shave our heads, and I was not looking forward to it.

A coming-of-age ceremony, a Burmese bar mitzvah, a meditation retreat: I had called it all of those things to friends in the weeks before. It was a little bit of each but “more ceremonial slash familial than necessarily religious,” I’d qualified. We’d bargained with my mother for weeks to get out of it. We’re nearly thirty, my brother Nick reasoned. We’re adults. We didn’t want to shave our heads, wear monk’s robes, meditate all day. Maybe it is important to you, but we don’t care about religion, we said, armed with years of therapy.

We haggled it down from a week to a long weekend. My uncle Pawksa and my cousins would arrive from Boston late that night, and my mother was occupied trying to make sure they didn’t interact with my other uncle, Soe Aung, and his sons. Ten of us in total: me, my dad, my brothers Nick and Duke, my two uncles, my four cousins. One woman for whom the whole thing was actually for: my grandmother. My mother, one woman to hold the whole thing up.

We unloaded the Odyssey, then we unloaded our grandma and her wheelchair. She sat in the cafeteria with Duke, Nick, and me, her eyes fixed on my mother, her hair in a short silver bob. She often appeared dazed but was secretly assessing how to offend someone next.

Mimi greeted her, taking her wizened hands in her own.

“Do you remember me, Auntie!” she shouted.

My grandmother startled and then stared back, her eyes cloudy. Then something clicked.

“You got so fat,” she said, now laughing at the woman. “You’ve changed so much. I didn’t recognize you.”

Through the cafeteria windows, we could see the parking lot with our two cars; my parents were next door in the meditation hall discussing the ceremony. When my dad came back into the room, we stood up. “The monks are ready to shave you all,” he said. I looked at my hair in the front-facing camera one last time.

***

We sat in our formal clothes—white shirts, fancy longyi—in the meditation hall, where, on raised platforms, three life-size gold Buddha statues looked back at us, framed by pastel LED lights and glass flowers. When it was my turn, the youngest monk at the monastery brought me to a folding chair and instructed my parents to hold a shower curtain in front of me to catch the hair.

There was more of it than I thought—my hair, that was. It fell in soft clumps to the shower curtain. As he shaved me, the monk explained to me that this arrangement was intentional and symbolic. It was supposed to represent losing vanity. But I could think of nothing but my vanity. I couldn’t stop thinking about being bald. The last time I’d shaved my head for monkhood, I had been fifteen, about to enter high school, and it had been devastating. I felt oddly calm about it this time, resigned. I fixated on the florets of red twine in the carpet below me. I tried not to get any of the hair on the collar of my white shirt.

The monk was only a few years older than I was, smiley and tan, a saffron-colored T-shirt under his red monk’s robes. Apparently he had arrived from Burma a few years prior, from a small village outside of Yangon, and he was just happy to be in America. We called him “Little Uzin.” “Uzin” because that was the generic term for a junior monk, and “little” because there was another junior monk at the monastery (“Big Uzin”). Only three monks lived at the monastery full time.

When it was over, Little Uzin told me to go upstairs to the dorm bathrooms to clean up and call over the next sibling. He wiped the buzzer quickly with a towel, and from his nonchalance I had the feeling that they did this ceremony rather frequently.

Upstairs, I got my first glimpse of the dorms. The facilities were bland without being sterile: dark brown carpets and cream walls, a long hallway divided by a central gathering space separating the men’s and women’s dorms. The women’s dorm led directly down into the cafeteria, while the men’s led to the meditation hall. Little Uzin and Big Uzin lived in the dorms too, even though the head monk lived in the house.

In the men’s bathroom, Big Uzin—mopey, with square glasses, but also bald—met us with shaving cream and a razor. He shaved my head down until it was bare: surrounded by an alien coolness, like someone had opened a skylight there. My skin was pale blue-green in the mirror, as was my brothers’. I kept running my hand over my scalp. It felt like Velcro.

I was allowed to shower, and I took a quick one, unsure of when I would be allowed to take the robes off again. My brothers, then my cousins, then my uncles filtered up, all their heads shorn. When they were cleaned up, we went back downstairs to the meditation hall. The head monk, whose name translates to something like “Intellectual,” told us to sit with our knees tucked under ourselves—difficult for most of us—in the position of the religious supplicant. I got tired of clasping my hands to my chest, so I let them droop.

“You all look the same now,” Intellectual said, looking out at all of our bald heads. My family has known Intellectual since he started the temple, in 1995, the same year we came from Burma to New Jersey. He has always felt like a permanent fixture of the place, like the ornate wooden chair he sits on or the big oak tree next to the parking lot.

“And madam looks … celebratory, as usual,” he said, looking at my mom in her sparkly dress.

She laughed.

“It might be about your monkhood, but it’s a fashion show for your mom,” he joked.

And then the prayers. A slush of scriptic Pali and the vernacular Burmese. I could pick out a phrase here and there from my parents’ informal Sunday school sessions, but the rest I let wash over me, thinking about my hair. The first time my brothers and I did a temporary monkhood was in Myanmar in 2015. We lay like puppies in a kennel in the single air-conditioned room at the monastery in Yangon, staring at the bamboo ceiling. I remember getting a monk to teach me how to read and write Burmese because I was so bored without my devices.

And then the prayers were done. My mom changed out of her dress and started to prep for the party tomorrow. The Uzins showed us how to tie our robes. We walked back over to the cafeteria, the same as before but somehow different. We had emerged on the other side of ceremony.

Tomorrow, at the party, we’d become full monks—an official contract, another set of prayers, receiving our symbolic alms bowls—but tonight we were in-between. We sat with our grandma until it was time for bed and let her run her hand over our Velcro heads. It was dark outside now, and the suburban lawns of Manalapan, New Jersey, viewed from the windows of the monastery, were emerald.

***

The next morning, five monks came from out of state to officiate the second part of the ceremony—three from New York, one from Canada, and one from elsewhere in Jersey. While relatives and my mother’s friends gathered in the courtyard, we, the monks, sat in front of our symbolic alms bowls in the shrine room waiting for our names to be erased.

The shrine room was the second prong of the U that made up the complex. I remember, as a kid, it was always freezing or boiling hot in there—a converted farming garage with poor insulation. It was less in use now that the new meditation hall was built, but it was here that they stored another three hundred small gold Buddha statues, all of them lined up carefully on shelves against the back wall, tiny gold placards with the donors’ names shining below them.

“Ah, yes, Simon,” Intellectual said. He sat with his legs crossed, his eyes closed. When you become a monk, you lose your civilian name and are granted a new one in Pali, the language of scripture. Little Uzin and Big Uzin have monk names, and civilian ones, too, but my parents never used them—they were too junior for it to matter. Actually, for as long as I have known them, I just assumed that Little Uzin and Big Uzin were their names.

Little Uzin crouched nearby, poised to write our new names on the contract. The other five monks sat quietly.

Intellectual opened his eyes. He seemed to pick a name for me seemingly out of thin air: “Wuritha,” a word in Pali that even my parents didn’t know the meaning of. It was a formality, seeing as I was only to be a monk for a few days.

Intellectual told Little Uzin to scribble down the name, but he seemed flustered, unsure of which contract belonged to which person. He shuffled the pages once, twice, trying to find some clue. We sat watching. Finally, Intellectual grabbed the contracts, scribbled my name down and tossed the page back to him.

I felt bad for Little Uzin—he was apparently Intellectual’s real-life nephew, and the dynamic had not been entirely nullified by their monkhood. He smiled sheepishly as Intellectual took the rest of the contracts and wrote the names down himself.

After all ten of us received our new names, one of the visiting monks took us aside to explain the next part of the process.

“You will be asked to confirm that you are here of you own volition. That you are not sent by any other entity, that you are not running from something, and that you are not a slave,” he said. “When they ask, just say yes.”

“That we are slaves?” Duke asked.

“No, that you aren’t.”

We stood in our robes, holding our alms bowls, and Intellectual worked down his list. We confirmed that we didn’t have leprosy or any unseemly or incurable rashes, that we weren’t under any sort of crippling debt, that we had the permission of our employer and our parents. I learned later that the diseases were a historical holdover; people used to believe the monks had healing powers and flocked to monkhood just for that. The proclamations were meant to weed out the opportunists from the devout.

Then came the abstentions. If Buddhist laypeople abided by five, monks were supposed to follow over two hundred. The highlights were: no eating after noon; no reading for pleasure; no purchasing, selling, or owning objects; no perfumes; and no sexual contact with “men, women, or animals”—a listing I found surprisingly progressive.

We processed out into the courtyard, where our relatives and family friends dropped things into our alms bowls: toothpaste, soap, snacks, various vitamin containers. Now that we were officially monks, we supposedly owned nothing. We pooled the materials in a big pile in our dorm, looking at the Irish Spring soap, tubes of Colgate, and tubs of vitamin C—enough for weeks, maybe years. We would donate them back to the monastery. I had brought my electric toothbrush and my skincare, my vials of Aesop and Kiehl’s moisturizer.

***

Twice a day, at 6 and 11 A.M., we “received alms” in the cafeteria. Honestly, they were lavish. My mom had planned the meals months in advance, and now she was cooking and preparing with the volunteers in the kitchen. Typically, alms might look more modest: chickpeas and rice, a vegetable soup. But my mom had prepared a spread catered to any kind of culinary craving that might arise: various Burmese curries, ten different kinds of cut fruit, Burmese biryani—but also sparkling water, soft cookies, and acai berry juice from Costco.

She was now wearing a shimmery green dress, inset with panels of a plaid Burmese pattern. This was the party, part of the reason why we were doing this in the first place. We sat in the cafeteria, greeting guests.

I was getting used to the monk’s robes. They were a dark red maroon. In the past, they would have been dyed this color from used clothes, but these were stiff and new. I wore one bolt of fabric around my waist and a second one that could be used as a kind of shawl or a hood, depending on the temperature. There was also a delicate, marigold-colored string that I was told I needed to wear even in the shower because without it I would “slip down” back into humanity.

Relatives and family friends filtered in and out, taking pictures with my mom and coming up to each of us to comment on whether we had gained or lost weight. Intellectual informed us that we would convene in the meditation hall at 3 P.M., after the guests had left, for our first session. We hoped the guests would leave late enough that we might not have to meditate at all—but around three thirty, we trudged into the meditation hall.

“Please sit cross-legged,” Intellectual said, sitting on his ornately carved wooden chair in front of the Buddha statues, facing us. Little Uzin and Big Uzin took their places next to him on their floor cushions.

“Begin to monitor your breathing,” he said and closed his own eyes. I sat, uncomfortably full from the party, my stomach taut against my robes.

Intellectual asked us to mark our breathing with the words “in” and “out.” Even though I have been meditating since I was a child, lately, I’d preferred to do the nonreligious version through Headspace or Calm. It was practically the same—Vipassana meditation—but for productivity and stress relief instead of the pursuit of enlightenment. I felt less encumbered when I meditated through an app, less freaked out by the religious aspects, but now that I was here, at the temple, I realized they were more similar than different.

My hand twitched. My shoulder ached. Boredom is an elemental feature of meditation; it sets in on the legs first, manifesting as a desire for change. It fixates on the smallest pain in your back, and the release of dopamine that arises from shifting your position a centimeter to the left, teetering from left butt cheek to right butt cheek. There is a heat to sitting still. But the sitting, at long intervals, can become euphoric, even transcendental.

I had experienced this only once. In a Best Western conference room connected to a Hooters off the New Jersey Turnpike two years ago. A meditation retreat organized by my mother. Theinngu meditation is distinct from Vipassana meditation in its engagement with rhythmic breathwork, which can have extreme physical effects. There are only two rules: do not move, and breathe to the track. Three hours at a time. Somewhere around hour two of not moving, my hamstrings began to vibrate like the low end of a baby grand. My hands gnarled, the pain in them flat and insistent. Full-grown adults around me were crying, sweating. For the first two days, at the peak of the pain, I’d move an inch, and it would allay a little. And then it would be back. The monitors wandered around, repeating the rules. Do not move. Breathe. Only on the last day, when I managed to follow the rules in what felt like a Herculean amount of restraint, did I have a breakthrough. My legs felt like they might burst if I didn’t move. My pelvis was sore from sitting for so long; my body was wracked with sharp pains, and it hurt so much that I made an involuntary yelp. I started to cry, but I did not move. And I did break into something like a euphoria: a clear and free and blue release of pain; a hidden attic I hadn’t known existed in my brain, where it was now—at least a little—more comfortable to be still than to move.

I had always thought meditation meant slipping into a state of nonthought. To become catatonic. But really, meditation is being distracted, your mind going all over the place, and just noticing it. At its most extreme, it can mean feeling excruciating pain and just deciding to notice it. To mark pain with the word hurts, over and over again, until it goes away.

***

Most of the day, my brothers and I would lie horizontally in our dorms, sleeping, trying not to use our phones.

Intellectual took a hands-off approach. He was a believer in the Vipassana school, not Theinngu, so he did not set a strict schedule or mandate that we meditate outside of the prescribed hours. It was up to us. But his indifference seemed to leak into our thinking: Should we be doing more?

I was turning thirty in two months, and this weekend was another stop in a slurry of reflective activities leading up to my birthday. I would be turning the age my mother was when she moved to the United States and had me, and this felt like something I wanted to commemorate. I had the idea that, as I crossed the threshold into a new decade, I would emerge a sleeker, more unabashedly idiosyncratic person, wrung clean of my Saturn return.

I wanted to plunge into my psyche. I wanted to carve away at it. A couple months earlier, I had started EMDR therapy. My therapist asked me to bring up painful memories as I followed her finger across the Zoom window from left to right. This was to help me reassociate them, a procedure first developed for Vietnam War PTSD victims, now used for general patients. A few weeks after the monk ceremony, I would do ayahuasca at a house upstate, part of a retreat led by a couple from Brooklyn, with five strangers. It would be another software reset, a crack into the system of my body.

My parents used to have us meditate every Sunday, for as long as I can remember. Now I was beginning to see it on a spectrum of reality-altering techniques, from psychedelics to breathwork to plant medicine. Maybe I wasn’t all that different from the legions of thirtysomethings who, shunning religion, found themselves grasping for a spirituality, or at least its trappings: baubles of astrology, crystals, psychics, and tarot.

It made me think of a conversation I had with one of my mom’s friends on the day of the ceremony. I was sitting in the cafeteria with her, freshly shaved, as people came in from the parking lot for lunch.

“You know, my son came here once before, too,” Auntie Soe Soe said. Her hair was dyed blue-black, curled thinly. The gold lamé of her dress was taut around her midsection.

She turned to grab her tea. I was curious—this was a story I hadn’t heard before. Apparently, at age fifteen or sixteen, her son had gotten it into his head that he wanted to join the army. The family was beside themselves, but there was no talking him out of it. When he was finally deployed a year later, he got scared. But he couldn’t back out—he’d signed the contract. So Auntie Soe Soe called my mom.

“And she said to send him to the monastery. Become a monk for a few days. Give him a foundation before he goes. And he did. I really think it saved his life. Well, I mean, he came back pretty rattled regardless. He went a little”—and she turned her finger over her ear—“crazy, you know.”

“The point is, it might have been much worse if he hadn’t come. We told him to hide in combat. To meditate. Close your ears. Say the tenets over and over. ‘I will not kill. Send loving kindness to your enemies. I will not kill. Think well of your enemies.’ He came back, got his GED. Still meditates sometimes. Went to Drexel for engineering. He’s fine now. Just some screaming at night.”

***

On the last day, we sat in the cafeteria with grandma and watched Little Uzin weed the landscaping.

“Don’t they have people to do that?” Nick asked my mom, who was packing up the leftover food.

She looked outside to see what we were talking about. Little Uzin wore a saffron-colored beanie on his head, his monk’s robes bright against the greenery as he trimmed the dead branches off a hydrangea bush.

We turned around when my grandma said something.

“What was that?” we asked.

She pointed outside. “U Sakkain,” she said.

We all turned to her. “Is that his name?” Duke asked.

“I think so,” my mom said.

“Does it mean something?” I asked.

My mom shrugged.

We watched him drag a bag of soil out from a garden shed. We sat quietly for a while, drinking Costco acai berry juice. I wondered if Sakkain meant something quirky like Intellectual’s Burmese name did, but neither of my parents had any idea.

After a while, my mother sat down, having finished packing. She turned to us. “Your grandma is the one who wanted you to do this,” she said, still looking out at Little Uzin. “I’m doing this for her. So thank you for doing this for me.”

We nodded and then looked away, embarrassed. Outside, Little Uzin stopped to take a break, sitting on the parking lot curb.

“And I think they do have people,” my mom said. “For the garden. He probably just likes doing it.”

It made me wonder what the monks could really do and not do. We were going to be monks for only a few days; they had subscribed to it for the rest of their lives.

Sitting there, I remembered something that happened the first day, when Nick realized he had forgotten his meds.

“Can monks drive?” Nick had asked my mom.

“I’ve definitely seen monks drive,” Duke said, helping my grandma into a chair.

“Oh, but I feel like they’re usually driven from place to place,” I said.

My mom, in pajamas, was putting food away.

“You’re not supposed to …” she said, arranging Tupperware in the industrial fridge. “… But it’s probably not a big deal,” she sighed. “But find Little Uzin and ask?”

We knocked on the door to his room, which was in the hall where we were also staying.

I looked to my brothers, our heads still blue-green from recent shaving. Little Uzin emerged, smiling, his phone horizontal on his palm, a video paused. His glasses were low on his nose bridge. We asked him if we could drive to get the meds, given we’d just entered into monkhood.

I tried to imagine what it was like to be him, having decided in your twenties to become a monk for life and finding that monkhood would then take you to New Jersey, where you would become the groundskeeper and assistant monk to your uncle.

He shrugged and said sure, returning to his cot. I had seen him on previous visits to the monastery, trimming bushes, watering plants, taking out the trash. I wondered if he had also come out of familial obligation or if he’d come because he wanted to leave Burma. What did he make of New Jersey? I was surprised he was allowed to have a phone, and I saw it only briefly, but it looked like he was scrolling through Facebook Reels, like the rest of us.

That night, Nick, Duke, and I got back into the white Toyota Corolla, minding our robes as we shut the car doors. The turnpike was dark and featureless. I had the impulse to turn on some music, but we silently agreed it would be better not to.

When we arrived, the only light on in the house was the lamp my dad had placed on a timer to trick any potential robbers into thinking we were still home. We grabbed the meds, a second dress mom had asked for, and my uncle’s inhaler. I stood briefly in my room, getting ready to go back to the monastery. It felt strange to be back home. We had been away only a few hours, but the house seemed different.

“Imagine someone looks over at us,” Duke said, in the passenger seat, as we hurtled back over the turnpike to monkhood. “Imagine they turn over and just see three bald dudes. Three monks, riding through the suburbs.”

Simon Wu is a writer and an artist. He is the author of the essay collection Dancing on My Own.