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It was a little after 5:30 a.m., a cold dawn in June, and I was sitting on a meditation cushion in a big red barn in the Hudson Valley. A dozen other people sat with me in deep silence. Hundreds of birds began to sing in the meadows and trees. In the distance, we could hear livestock and machinery, the sounds of a working farm waking up.

I had not looked at an email, chat, headline, news alert or tweet for several days. What a strange situation for an editor who leads a breaking news team at The New York Times.

I had dabbled in meditation off and on for many years, but my practice deepened in 2015 after I became editor of the Express team, now a group of 23 journalists around the world who cover breaking news at all hours. That was also the year I began regularly attending retreats organized by a small Zen meditation center in Manhattan.

The news cycle is relentless and taxing, often involving stories of profound human suffering. The week before this retreat was busy enough: An Iowa building collapse left people dead and missing. Rosalynn Carter received a diagnosis of dementia. The Pentagon banned drag events at military bases. The season’s first tropical storm formed in the Atlantic. And, in a lighter moment, the Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned a new champion.

I am rarely far from a screen or free from the pings of devices. Working with other news desks, the Express team tracks competitors’ articles, social media posts, alerts from police and emergency agencies, and other sources of news. Unplugging from all of that is both thrilling and scary, like stepping off a 100-foot pole into the unknown, to borrow a Zen metaphor.

I have learned to trust that the news will get reported, but it was not always easy being off the grid. Right after my first weeklong retreat in 2015, I saw a front-page headline about the mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston, S.C. It was horrific, and I felt that peculiar journalist’s pang of not being there for an important story. Since then, we’ve covered more mass shootings than I ever imagined possible.

During this retreat, smoke from wildfires in Canada turned the sky orange over New York City, and former President Donald J. Trump was indicted. I could smell the smoke. I learned about the indictment later.

For seven days, from sunrise to sunset, I was among serious meditators sitting still for 25-minute periods, punctuated by 10 minutes of walking meditation on a country lane. We took breaks for meals, exercise and, gloriously, daily naps. We were expected to refrain from speaking, passing written notes only when it was unavoidable. For my work assignment, I made the salads for meals, chopping vegetables in silence with the rest of the kitchen crew. For part of the week, I was also the timekeeper, ringing a bell to start and end meditation periods.

Unchained from the internet, I wandered the grounds and woods and stared up from a hammock at treetops more vividly green than I had ever noticed. I was usually fast asleep shortly after 9 p.m.

Co-workers and friends who do not meditate imagine a serene experience. “Have fun!” they say, with a touch of envy. But meditation is hard work. There is the physical discomfort of remaining as still as possible, despite itches and aches. And then there is the mental effort of focusing awareness on the breath while the mind serves up plans, memories and emotions, not all of them pleasant.

And just as you finally relax, a fly lands on your hand.

Slowly, with enough practice, you learn skills that allow for greater focus. “Leave your front door and your back door open,” the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki used to say. “Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”

Meditation also helped me through the Covid-19 pandemic, even though the retreats were over Zoom. (You may be amused to know that even Buddhists forget to mute.) Back in the newsroom these days, I’m more able to take a beat amid the stress of breaking news. (But I have not attained perfect equanimity, as people I work with on deadline will agree.)

After the first day on the retreat in June, thoughts of work slipped out the back door. One exception: In a talk, a teacher quoted with approval from a recent Science Times column by Dennis Overbye, who reflected on predictions that in 100 billion years the universe and all sentient beings will be no more. Some physicists, he wrote, believe this grim fact of universal impermanence should free us to “concentrate on the magic of the moment.” I was doing my part.

On the bus ride home, I felt calm, yet energized. I did not worry about my full calendar, the hundreds of emails waiting in my inbox or the end of the universe. The week ahead would bring fresh headlines, many of misery — more wildfire smoke, contaminated strawberries and deadly tornadoes in the South.

But for the moment, everything was OK.