10 days.
No talking.
No writing. You hand over all writing utensils.
No reading. You hand over all reading material.
No technology, barring CPAP machines or pacemakers. You hand over all phones, tablets, laptops, Kindles. Apparently people try to bring vibrators, occasionally. Even these are found, reported, handed over.
No communication with other meditators whatsoever: includes gestures, body language, sign language.
No eye contact, either.
No physical contact, especially no mixing of men and women.
No intense exercise, walking being the most strenuous allowed.
No tobacco, alcohol, other drugs. You must inform the teacher, too, on day 1, whether you take any prescription medications.
No practice of religious rites or rituals, and no religious accessories such as rosary beads.
No tight clothing. Nothing revealing or immodest.
This all sounds draconian. Trust me, it’s not. Serious meditation requires all of the above, I’ve learned, and a 10 day course is for serious meditation. The Buddha knew what he was talking about when he outlined the rules. Some people break the rules, unfortunately, to their own disadvantage. You can’t focus yourself on yourself when you talk to others, can’t dive deep when you focus on the shallow.
At this juncture I will say that if you are planning on attending a vipassana course in the very near future it would be advisable to stop reading now. Continuing won’t ruin your chances of success (only you can control that), but it will spoil some of the surprise encountered at the centre for the first time. Otherwise, read on.
DAY zero OF TEN
Everyone arrives at the meditation centre, a 20 or 30 minute drive outside of the city, around 3pm. About 25 people to start, 21 men, 4 women. Talking still allowed. You are led to your room, often a simple dorm with low beds and very thin mattresses.
In my case, I was brought to a 3-man dorm with so little insulation that daytime interior temperatures dropped below 0. I took a walk around the campus. The Leh Meditation Centre, of the S.N. Goenka Vipassana Organization, is perhaps the worst equipped meditation centre in the world. The buildings have “solar passive heating”, read: no heating. The toilets freeze entirely in Winter, yet people still use them, piling P&P into the bowls until they verge on overflow. No hot water except from strange solar water heaters that often freeze to uselessness. “Local toilets” are available, really not so bad if cleaned properly. The dining hall, a tin shack, gets so cold that boiling-hot tea cools in seconds. The meditation hall, a large shoebox room, was frigid at all times of day, yet still, apparently, “warm enough to be meditative,” according to our supervisor.
6:00pm strikes. We are herded into the dining hall, men and women, still talking, ready for our first briefing. A man named Pajur, the head supervisor, the logistical backbone to our retreat, introduces the other supervisors, all volunteers, who will be helping us throughout the week. Volunteers must have completed one ten-day course themselves, and do all physical work necessary for the meditators including the serving of food, refilling of water, and cleaning.
Pajur apologizes for the “lack of facilities,” stating that “no money” and “high mountains.” Fair enough. He then produces a large Bluetooth speaker, turns it on, and plays a track from his cellphone.
A deep, rich voice bellows, with a texture I can only describe as two tectonic plates grinding upon each other. The voice talks in Hindi for 25 minutes, dark an mysterious.
Then it shifts to English. The voice, slightly softer, begins:
“Welcome, students, to this 10 day Vipassana course. I am S.N. Goenka, your teacher. I shall go over a few formalities before you course begins. Before you enter your noble silence.
Mr. Goenka, a Burmese/Indian man who reintroduced Vipassana meditation to the world, would be our instructor for the week, completely from didactic audio and video tapes. He died a few years ago, yet his teacher legacy will probably live on forever. In our English 25 minutes he discusses the various rules for the course, provides reasoning, and explains that “should you want to leave the retreat, you must do so before day 4.” This last point gave everyone the fantods, one of many unsettling comments from that night. There was an air of determination, though, you could tell. No one was going to leave. I can certainly handle this, we all thought.
Everyone is then given the timetable for the week, the same every day. these courses, all run by S.N. Goenka, are standard across the world. Everyone follows the same rules, the same instruction. The only difference lies in facilities, but all are modest. Here is the timetable:
- 4:00 am Morning wake-up bell
- 4:30-6:30 am Meditate in the hall or in your room
- 6:30-8:00 am Breakfast break
- 8:00-9:00 am Group meditation in the hall
- 9:00-11:00 am Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher’s instructions
- 11:00-12:00 noon Lunch break
- 12 noon-1:00 pm Rest and interviews with the teacher
- 1:00-2:30 pm Meditate in the hall or in your room
- 2:30-3:30 pm Group meditation in the hall
- 3:30-5:00 pm Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher’s instructions
- 5:00-6:00 pm Tea break
- 6:00-7:00 pm Group meditation in the hall
- 7:00-8:15 pm Discourse in the hall
- 8:15-9:00 pm Group meditation in the hall
- 9:00-9:30 pm Question time in the hall
- 9:30 pm Retire to your own room–Lights out
You read that correctly – over eleven hours of meditation. That would mean over eleven hour of concentrated sitting every day, for 3 of which absolutely no movement is allowed. All the participants including myself were scared.
At 8:00pm sharp, notified by the screeching knell of a Ladakhi bell, we were called into the meditation hall. Walking into the hall marked the beginning of our “Noble Silence” and our observance of all the other rules. Every participant was assigned to a small, thin, square meditation cushion at some spot on the carpeted floor. These weren’t the plush, comfortable zabuton cushions I meditated with in Hawaii – this was hardcore. Participants are allowed to use supplementary small cushions, but none of us knew this the first night. At this point, though, we weren’t required to follow “addhithanna”, or the restrictions against any posture changes. At the front centre of the room was a small man clad in white robes, sitting crosslegged on a chair. This was our teacher, who turned out to be the least meditative person I’ve ever met, in rude terms: an asshat. But I get ahead of myself.
Goenka explained the basis of our work that week. Vipassana, the type of meditation we had all come to learn, wouldn’t be taught until the fourth evening, a delay on the basis that we “weren’t ready for such intense meditation.” As always, the man was right. I know this because very few of us could successfully follow our first task, annapanna, which means observance of the breath. We were told to just observe the incoming and outgoing breath, to focus on it objectively and without the use of visualized or mantra-based tools. To close our eyes and see reality as it is. There is nothing more real than the incoming and outgoing breath, nothing more true. It is free from bias (so long as you let it be) and free from emotion (so long as you keep it that way). We were told that “observing the breath” would be our path into observation of our deeper bodily sensations, a further path into liberation from our aversions and desires.
This all sounds very bloated, and you’re right to be a skeptic. I was too, and I still am, to an extent. But, as with anything, you need to surrender yourself to the process to make any progress. You need to trust someone or something that it isn’t futile, all for nothing. Meditation really isn’t different to mastery of an instrument: both require intense discipline, constant practice. Both require rolemodels, proof that success is within reach. Both offer improvement with a series of peaks and plateaus, persistence key. Most importantly, practice in both provides tangible results. You must have devotion, though, to something you can’t grasp right away.
After Goenka’s bulldozer of a voice subsided, we began to meditate. There was an ambiance of pure pain and discomfort in the room, highlighting the first undeniable truth of meditation: it fucking hurts. Whether it’s because your body is purging negative, pent-up emotions or sitting crosslegged is not a natural, human position is unimportant. The first challenge of a meditator is observe pain objectively, to stop identifying with the sensation and thus separate oneself from it, ultimately accepting it with peace. This is obviously easier said than done, although it’s one of the meditative tasks that doesn’t take years of practice to manifest. Within days serious meditation students are able to accept, even befriend their pain, and much of the psychical discomfort evaporates. Pain never truly disappears, yet we learn to give it less importance. This importance, focus on something like pain is where true suffering arises. Think about it: the more mental energy you give to a sensation the more fuel it has to manifest. This is why moody brooding is so dangerous.
Meditation is concluded with Buddhist chanting by Mr. Goenka, perhaps in the least musical voice ever. It sounded to me like car’s engine that had been filled with mayonnaise instead of gasoline, garbling and grinding. 9:00 struck and we were sent to bed.
I slept beautifully. Students usually sleep well for the first three days. Past that: good luck.
DAY one OF TEN
I very honestly remember our first morning with the clarity of someone who just awoke from general anesthesia. I remember being effectively shoved out of bed by a volunteer, piercing bells ringing, and led into the meditation hall. I wasn’t in a state of mind to get myself cushions and set up my preferred meditation position of seiza or vajrasana, one which I determined to be meant for my body type.
I truly have no recollection of our 4:30-6:30am meditation that morning other than the fact that I had a wild attack of vertigo at some point during the sitting. The room began to spin and I did that typical stabilizing-thing with my hands that all vertigo victims seem to do. Once the rollercoaster subsided I was it with a nuclear wave of nausea and, for the only time during the retreat, I felt scared enough to walk right out. I thought “if I’m having neurological issues, Leh isn’t the place for me” and very nearly asked to leave. I‘m glad I didn’t.
The breakfast bell rang and the 25 meditators wobbled into the dining hall, men on one side of the kitchen, women on the other. No contact. Each person had a seat associated with his or her meditation spot, at which (the seat) there was a metal thali, bowl, spoon, and cup. All steel, all freezing.
The starving men clambered to the front of the hall, where food was waiting on a plastic table covered in one of those stereotypically Italian-American white and red tableclothes. I remember the food offerings that morning – cold toast, rock solid butter, and luridly orange marmalade. And milk tea. That was it. I’d heard that the food at these meditation centres was excellent, and my disappointment was colossal. I remembered, though, that we were in Leh. Still, my mood was toxic.
We were each given two very thin slices of toast and about 2 ounces of tea. Not nearly enough food. A french man next to me, the only other white guy, was in an equally bad state, I could just tell. We needed food, nourishment. This wasn’t prison, after all.
I brought my food to my seat, began to bite. I was shivering uncontrollably, particularly my hands, and thought “Fuck. This.” After 10 minutes I began to warm up, my mood improved, food in my belly. That morning, I learned, experientially, the second undeniable truth of meditation: everything is impermanent. Every feeling, no matter how strong, will eventually pass. It is not forever. It may be fantastic or fantastically awful, for a time, but it invariably passes. This is a law of the universe, and understanding is key to vipassana meditation. I’ll explain why soon.
After breakfast I always visited the bathroom (an extremely unpleasant experience in such cold weather and such poor conditions), brushed my teeth, and jumped right back into bed. Both my roommate Yoshi and I had this exact same routine, and we took solace, I think, in having common priorities. Remember: absolutely no speaking. We couldn’t discuss our pains, frustrations, suffering with eachother. We couldn’t use others as emotional leverage, as justification for or verification of our miseries.
The 8:00 bell. Everyone herded back into the meditation hall, incredibly unhappy. Goenka’s voice, played via a button from the teacher at the front of the hall, telling us what to do. How to do it. These instructions were key to my (and everyone’s) survival: Goenka became our only friend, and he knew exactly how we were feeling. Almost every meditation session began with some remarks from Goenka, in his serious and somber voice, sometimes providing meditative objectives (every day this changed as we progressed down the path), othertimes offering nothing more than words of encouragement to “work diligently, diligently. Work persistently. You are bound to be succesful.” On that morning we were told to continue following our breath. B.n.: this is also ridiculously difficult for a first-time meditator. For anyone, actually. Your thoughts wander, your mind craves stimulation. You feel lust and hate and love and passion and disgust and you’re reminded of what you said to some dude in some classroom in some school at some point in the past that no one but you cares enough about to remember. Music plays in your head, incessantly, jingling away whether you like it or not.
The key thing is to return your attention to the breath whenever distracted, and to do so with no disappointment in oneself and no frustration in one’s practice. A “monkey mind” is what nature gave us, it’s natural to experience such distraction. The point of meditation is to transcend reacting to the emotions and thought we encounter during distracted meditation, ultimately freeing us from the shackles of the mind.
The first day was the hardest, for me. My body was screaming, as I hadn’t meditated properly in months (since Hawaii). Worse, still, I wasn’t sitting in my preferred posture. I was comforted by everyone else’s discomfort, though, comfort in feeling unalone. It wasn’t exactly schadenfreude, but certainly a derivative.
Three hours passed with the speed of a snail. At this point in the course, days 1-3, you are still allowed to change your posture during the sittings. I wasn’t following this, though, and tried to keep my posture the same from day one. I did this because I knew, luckily, from my days in Hawaii, that comfort in sitting does come, it just takes a few days. I posited that I may as well suffer as early as possible into the course, leaving more mental energy for meditative improvement later on. This was a good decision, for me, and it made my least comfortable days 1, 2, and 3, as opposed to the most common 4, 5, and 6.
Time for lunch. Everyone was sweaty, silently shrieking, with a look fatigue I’ve only seen on post-birth mothers on TV. We were ravenous after our pathetic breakfast. Into the dining hall we went.
A simple lunch of rice, lentils, chapati, and some mixed vegetables were on offer. We loaded our plates high, despite instructions by Goenka to only eat 3/4 of our normal portions (he’s right: meditation is significantly easier on a slightly empty stomach). I ate silently, savouring every bite. Each mouthful was an IndoPak Warhead explosion of flavour. Every texture was unique, thrilling. This is a common experience at meditation retreats: no mental stimulation means basic things like smell, taste, sound, and sight are strengthened and amplified in intensity. My pain from the morning quickly subsided after eating lunch and I was again reminded of the impermanence of all such sensations. Don’t worry about the pain, the fear, the anger. Don’t identify with it. Don’t react to it. Let it pass. It always does.
After lunch there is another break during which almost everyone went back to sleep. At other centres, students take walks through gardens, enjoy showers, sit outside. Not at the Leh Meditation Centre. It was too cold to do anything except lie in bed, and even that involved decent quantities of suffering. I used to put in eye drops at the lunchtime break. Such a small comfort made a big difference.
At 1:00 we began the longest stretch of the day, almost four hours of nonstop meditation. Personally, my best work was done during this time, although everyone differs. I started sitting in the seiza position of my comfort, yet the pain was just as bad as before. The room was a nonstop symphony of rustling blankets and jackets, belches, farts. Lots of farts. Like a gastroenterologist’s clinic if every patient was fed liters of baked beans and then colonoscoped shortly afterwards, everyone at the same time. The room smelled horrendous after each post-lunch sitting, yet overcoming the olfactory discomfort was just another challenge of equanimity. We were told to be “equanimous” over and over again, told that equanimity is basis of vipassana meditation.
The postlunch sessions were usually productive, for me, but around 4:00, each day, my concentration was insidiously highjacked by background music. I’m not sure why. Every day, same time. It wasn’t loud or obnoxious but it destroyed my ability to enter deep meditation. It was always Elton John, singing “Goodbye, yellow brick uh-Roooad” or “B-b-b-Benny and the Jets,” and remaining equanimous about this was one of my biggest challenges throughout the week. I just couldn’t escape his silky, unctuous voice. I remember, on day 3 or 4, thinking “FUCK OFF, ELTON!” in a fit of internal exasperation. From all this, I experienced the third undeniable truth of meditation: all misery comes from inside, as in you are the cause of your misery.
Elton wasn’t here with me, trying to disrupt my thoughts. Elton didn’t do anything wrong, certainly nothing that caused me misery. I was the one creating my own misery, a sense of frustration manufactured entirely within my own psyche. No external sources directly cause your suffering, apart from straight-up torture. We feel sad, bad, when we internalize the words and actions of others, cling to them, ruminate, let them multiply within ourselves like colony of parasites. Yes, people should still be responsible for their actions and treat others well. But it’s important to note that other people are just triggers for the real suffering fermenting within us all, individually, uniquely.
Vipassana works to stop this misery-multiplication within oneself by learning to change the habit pattern of the mind. Away from reacting to negative sensations (letting them manifest) and towards observing them, letting them pass, not letting them control you (letting you suffer).
After four excruciating hours it was time for dinner.
Just kidding. There’s no dinner at a vipassana retreat. This is S.O.P. Students are served tea, fruit (no fruit for us – we were fed small bowls of puffed rice and peanuts, rice to peanut ratio 10000:1) and water. That’s it. On this first day I stuffed myself, taking enough rice to constitute a supper. I was just hungry.
One hour break. I used to use this 5:00-6:00pm break every day for “listening to music”, an activity consisting of me, in bed, trying to reproduce entire works of music in my mind from memory. This worked, surprisingly, and brought me great comfort on some days. I stopped doing this on day 6, though, as I realized it was disturbing my nighttime meditation. Also, I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t remember the main melody of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto mvt. 1.
Another bell. Everyone exhausted, just wanting to relax, sit back, have a beer. No beer, here. No chairs, actually, either. Your only solace is yourself, a shockingly weak support, we all learned. Like a bench with one leg.
6:00-7:00 meditation was usually a disaster for me. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t enter that deep meditation state that is one of the most satisfying things on earth, even though one enters it for just seconds every hour. I learned to stop calling my nighttime meditation a “disaster”, since that misses the point: being that any meditation session, whether “deeply meditative” or “capriciously distracted” is a productive meditation session if the meditator remains equanimous. Unperturbed, relaxed by the distraction of the mind.
The bell tolled. Time for the most important part of the day, the Evening Discourse. At this point the English-only speakers were sent into a small room with an old C.R.T. TV. The room was freezing. I had to sit crosslegged on the middle of the floor, since everyone else was occupying the space against the walls for back support. You couldn’t squeeze together, too, since physical contact was forbidden. I was okay with suffering for that night, unsupported, on the floor. I assumed someone else would take my spot the next night, in a sort of back-pain-sharing rotation.
A volunteer entered and played a DVD.
S.N. Goenka, old and somewhat Jabba the Esque appeared on screen. We could tell that this was a taped speech from a course run during his lifetime, probably in California (he visited California, specifically, to open the first vipassana centres in the States).
A terrible singer, not the greatest looker, but an unbelievable orator. As soon as he began to speak you knew he could see right through you,. feel your pain, understand your frustrations. He knew we were struggling, he knew just what to say. He knew he became our only external comfort, knew that we needed his guidance, helpful words.
The discourses themselves were fantastic. Simple, clean, and logical. Goenka (and the Buddha) placed immense emphasis on the non-supernatural ideology of vipassana meditation, a scientific try-and-you’ll-see attitude about everything we were doing. He explained that it was normal to feel skeptical, good, actually, and that such an attitude should be held throughout the course. There were no “rites and rituals” here, he said. Results-based. This was all music to my ears and especially so because I had read quite a bit about vipassana meditation last year. He was corroborating my thoughts, comforting my lack of ease.
He also said that the worst was yet to come. He said that days 2 and 6 are notoriously the hardest, with the most students leaving after 2. I was a bit scared, anxious, but mostly curious. I decided, there and then, to completely surrender myself to the process. I would endure the pain, knowing that, by next week, it would be over. I would follow the Noble Silence rigorously. I would not give up.
After the hour-long TV discourse we meditated for another 30 minutes. At this final session of the day Goenka gave us the new meditation instructions for the next day, tomorrow, and explained the technique.
Off to bed. I slept soundly, again, on day 1. I remember, though, dreaming some horrible dreams, ones I shan’t even recount for your reading pleasure. i just can’t.
DAY two OF TEN
Another horrific morning, but slightly better than the day before. I felt sick because of one particularly disturbing dream I had and carried this into my meditation sessions that day.
Breakfast was better than the day before, which was (the day before, that is) a truly cruel mealtime offering. We were given a hot porridge, I think. Note that all meditators had to wash their own dishes at a little sink at the back. It’s hard to maintain any sort of line, etiquette, system when you can’t talk, gesture, even look at other people.
We reentered the meditation hall after the breakfast siesta.
Four empty mats. Four people had already left. Everyone has their own reason, I’m sure, and it’s true that meditation isn’t for everyone. But four deserters after breakfast was a lot. Horrible, I know, but I felt a sort of egotistical strength in having stuck it out longer than those four poor fellows. I wouldn’t give up.
The day went on. Two other men left, one going straight to the hospital for altitude sickness, the other crying, in a taxi, back to his hotel.
I was working hard. I don’t remember much about this day. Minimal distraction. Not much Elton John.
That night, when it came time for the discourse, everyone ran to the walls of the TV room for a spot. I was shocked – no one was willing to share the responsibility. Anger and, honestly, hatred began to boil in my mind, thinking “these people… so selfish… so arrogant… so inconsiderate… I’m so much better, considering I assumed we could do a rotation right from the start… horrible people…”
Toxic thinking. Again, I took my seat in the centre of the room. I brooded, feeling more pain from my ruminations than my back itself. Important to note.
I slept well. No dreams at all.
DAY three OF TEN
Nothing to note. Still basic annapanna breathing meditation. I was noticeably improving, no placebo. I was able to sit still, unchanging, with only medium discomfort (an improvement) for an hour by this point. I also noticed that a few people had copied my posture. It’s a bit unorthodox, but is much better for shorter men.
That night, again, no one budged to give me a seat for the discourse. I couldn’t believe it. Again, I roiled in anger. Unpleasant.
I slept mediocrely. Not terribly, not well.
DAY four OF TEN
Another normal day, except for the afternoon, when we were taught, in a nonstop two-hour sitting, proper vipassana meditation. The reason we had come.
Vipassana, meaning “insight”, allows the meditator to see reality as it is. To see the moment here and now, unclouded by judgment, bias, emotion. This sound mystical and arcane, but it’s not. At it’s core, vipassana teaches you experience all of the sensations going on inside your body. It teaches you, in a series of body scans, to feel the most real reality you can, that is the itches, tingles, vibrations, shivers, pains, pressures, etc. manifesting themselves all across your body. Uncontrolled by thought, impulse environment. Just there, existing, whether you like it or not.
And vipassana, eventually, teaches you to stop reacting to these sensations, to observe them objectively, so that when an emotion arises, a different type of sensation, you have the strength to observe it, too, and prevent it from taking over. These emotions are the buildings blocks of our suffering, multiplied when we react to them.
An example. Let’s say you’re on the street. A man walks by, insults you. You feel anger. Anger, complex, is an unpleasant sensation. You react to the anger by trying to quell it, that is to satisfy it, that is to punch the man who insulted you. It’s a truism that violence is never the answer, and now you and your verbal aggressor are worse off than before. Your mind runs wild, angry, hating, because you decided to react to the initial anger, and now you’re in a spiral of misery. A bottomless bucket of suffering. There’s no way out, really, other than just waiting for the feeling to pass. But it will be harder, now, that you’ve identified with the anger.
So, vipassana works to use basic bodily sensations as a method of practicing this non-reaction, this equanimity, in a safe and controlled way. Deciding not to scratch your nose upon feeling an itch seems like a trivial pursuit, but such resistance does transfer to stronger sensations such as those characterized by anger, hatred, passion. After all, emotions are just very complex sensations, hard to place. That’s why we can feel them, distinguish them. They, like simple sensations, will always pass after time. Their common thread is their impermanence, their rising and falling.
At it’s nucleus, vipassana theory (and, therefore, original Buddhist theory) posits that all suffering on earth is caused by craving and aversion. We’re always stuck between the deadly pair, and they really are the root of all our misery. We crave what we don’t have, deluded by the fact that whatever it is we crave won’t bring us lasting satisfaction: this realization is crushing, always bringing suffering. We averse what we consider to be damaging to our selves, our egos, always fearing a reality that will never come, entirely unnecessary suffering. We’ve all done it, this needless worry, anxiety, aversion to what will never come.
Vipassana suggests that when we stop reacting to our sensations we stop identifying with them, stop craving or aversing them. This lack of identification removes said sensations from our conscious sphere, slowly, and prevents any clinging or attachment to them which, ultimately, leads to more craving or aversion. Once a person has learned to ride the fine line between supress and express, has learned to just observe, they’re no longer trapped by the shackles of emotion. They’re able to decide how they want to treat their emotions, traits, virtues, and live a life free from craving what might be and aversing what might not, ultimately achieving permanent peace. This is vipassanic liberation or enlightenment, a point of unbounding equanimity. A place where a meditator can experientially, as opposed to intellectually, understand the origins of their misery (which is what I’ve displayed, intellectual understanding, in explaining the technique to you. Not enough to free me from my emotional fetters.).
It just makes sense. Bodily sensations as a direct path into controlling deeper, more complex emotions (which are really just multifaceted sensations). This is the genius of the technique, the psychosomatic gold that the Buddha struck 25 centuries ago.
That’s not to say that a 10 day retreat brings enlightenment. Obviously not. Who knows if such a mental zone truly exists. That’s not the point. Any amount of proper vipassana practice brings emotional relief, an uncluttering of the deep rooted complexes of the mind. This progress was obvious to me, everyone else at my retreat, and the thousands of daily practitioners across the world.
By day four I couldn’t sleep. I just couldn’t. My mind was zooming with memories, horrible thoughts, comments, insults, etc. as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was reminded of horrible things I’ve done to people in wave after wave, almost too powerful to handle. I cried a bit, remorseful. This is normal. Most students can’t sleep well past night four because the beginning of proper vipassana digs an emotional geyser within oneself, only placated after a few days. Said geyser is dug by the profound if unintentional introspection that vipassana brings (remember: vipassana is just feeling your sensations and remaining equanimous towards them – there’s no active memory work or “searching” for emotional complexes. Such things just bubble up, as they do in normal life), and that the geyser is powerful there is no doubt.
Another reason that the emotional geyser is built during vipassana is that the brain, hungry for food just like a stomach, is fueled by your reactions, since such a neurological machine loves having things to do, plans to formulate, revenge to satisfy. This is why the mind wanders so much during beginner meditation; it is hungry for anything to do, think about, engage. When the mind is starved of all reactions, food, by the practice of vipassana, it begins to feed on itself, and the resulting sensations and emotions are the product of combustion of all your pent-up memories and trauma. Everything starts rising to the surface; you’re reminded of them; you can’t sleep.
Mr. Goenka said that students “having trouble with sleep” should not panic, stress, but rather remain equanimous like they would during meditation, and to treat sleep like a low-intensity meditation session. Although this method didn’t help me sleep, it definitely aided my relaxation. Plus, it meant 7.5 more hours of meditation practic
Again, that night, no one gave me a seat at the TV. They knew my back was hurting, I could tell. But no one gave their seat up. For some reason, though, I wasn’t upset as usual. Strange. My back didn’t hurt that much, either, that day. Strange.
DAY five OF TEN
I remember being able to stop identifying with legs pains for the first time, on day five. It was profound. I can hardly explain it, but as soon as I separated the pains from my own precious construction of “self” the intensity lessened dramatically, still there but completely bearable.
The night of day five, too, was special. Again, no one gave me a seat at the evening discourse. As if in an epiphany, though, I felt no anger, no frustration, realizing that this internal tumult I felt about not getting a space on the wall was entirely created by my own pesky mind, just begging for me to react. Begging for food, since I’ve been starving it of reactions for the past two days. This realization gave me the foresight to observe, objectively, the pains I was feeling during the TV discourse, remaining equanimous. Of course, the pains subsided, and, because I wasn’t ruminating about my “selfish” and “inconsiderate” co-meditators this time, my mind had no fuel for negative thought and, therefore, couldn’t make me suffer further.
I realized, too, that I was the youngest person in the group and probably deserved a spot on the floor because of my healthy back. My comeditators weren’t being malicious; their backs just hurt more than mine.
I got a taste of the mental clarity vipassana provides (provides with continuous effort, of course) in that very room, and imagined how I might have approached various conflicts in my life from different angles, having known what I know now. No reason to pout; a good future lies ahead. A far less confrontational future lies ahead. it’ll be better for me and the people who I thought to be my “aggressors’“.
No sleep.
DAYS six TILL nine
I worked incredibly hard on my meditation, every hour of the day, making sure that I never “gave up”, which in a meditation context means submitting to your wandering mind and just chilling for the rest of the sitting. No. I sat, sweated (meditation can make you sweat, even in our subzero hall), swore under my breath. I was bored, often, but I didn’t submit. I’m proud to say that I stuck through, improved, and I’m proud of my comeditators for doing the same. Most of us didn’t feel intense pain, even during the mandatory no-movement one-hour sittings towards the end. Well, we all felt pain, but we weren’t consumed by it any longer.
Very little sleep on all these days. Days 8 and 9 dragged like garbage barge, yet, I knew, like everything else, that they would come to an end.
DAY ten OF TEN
The tenth day marks the end of Noble Silence. After the morning meditation everyone leaves the hall and begins chatting ferociously, laughing, crying with joy, enjoying the fundamentally human necessity of socializing. It was so good to finally talk to my comeditators – we had gotten to know eachother, our idiosyncrasies, so well in the past 10 days, no talking necessary. It was explosively cathartic to share person stories of that week, our struggles and successes, yet I noticed that I only had good emotions to expel, many of the bad having come out during the week of serious meditation, stopping me from falling asleep.
I knew, too, that the serious meditation was over. You simply cannot concentrate in an environment where the silence has been broken. I’m still not sure why that is, and I reflect on it to this day. Regardless, our serious work was done for the week, and it felt spectacular to be finished.
We survived, undeniably the hardest 10 days of most of our lives. David, my seatmate, who I’ve now befriended for real (that is, with words), told me that he spent 3 days in a high-security Mexican prison and that the conditions and rules at the meditation retreat were stricter and more unpleasant than at the prison. I don’t doubt it.
Conversely to a traditional prison, though, almost everyone came out of the retreat a better person. I absolutely know that I did, or at least that I’m working on a path that will bring me there. We try to observe our emotions objectively, now, avoiding any and all harmful reaction. We consider that our misery is all internal, self-driven, and that blaming others really just delays placation. We see our sensations now for what they are, impermanent, and try to stop clinging to them: they just won’t last.
Obviously, like a musical instrument, daily practice is necessary for upkeep and improvement. And it’s not easy. They suggest one hour in the morning, one hour at night. Honestly, I’m going to try do this. It’s a major commitment but I know from prior experience that a clear mind improves productivity in every other daily task, so a two hour investment isn’t a time sink. Realistically, I’ll probably end up doing 1/2 an a hour a day, which, sorry to say, is better than nothing.
I’m not looking for full enlightenment. I’m not trying to become a Buddha. I just want to feel slightly less trapped by my emotions, employ compassion and kindness as my new form of reaction. It’ll be better for me and those I interact with. I think that’s a reasonable goal, and I’m going to try.
Reflection
A coherent reflection about my 10 day journey isn’t possible since I’m still grappling with many of the things I’ve uncovered. I learned about myself, my deepest complexes, and how other people are really just the same. I’ve learned that, deep down, we all love no one more than ourselves. I’ve learned that with time and effort we can change the habit pattern of our minds. I’ve learned that my foremost addiction is one to music: I just need it, I crave it, on a level deeper than I’d ever expected. I’ve learned that everyone’s stomach grumbles and that, if accidental, a public fart really isn’t the worst thing in the world.
I’ve also learned that vipassana meditation isn’t some secret recipe for living a better life. People already know this stuff, the root of craving, have written books and Bibles and Torahs and Qurans and Vedas and movies about it. The key difference is that vipassana gives you a place to start, and I’m lucky to have found it.
David Foster Wallace expressed many universal truths in this passage of Infinite Jest, truths that I’ve only begun to understand experientially through meditation. The passage is about the realizations one has upon living in a drug addicts’ halfway house, but may as well be the mental chronicles of a 10-day vipassana coursegoer. He wrote:
“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts…
That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do.
That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape.
That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.
That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.
That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.
That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.
That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.
That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.
That it is permissible to want.
That everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”