If you had asked me how much experience I had in meditation prior to September 14th, my net worth in hours could have easily been counted on one hand. But between the 14th and the 25th, I shot from 0-100.
If I were to say that for 11 days, all I did was sit, eat and sleep, most would probably shoot me a look of envy and befuddlement, disenchanted with their 9-5 and dreaming of even one day where they could forego all responsibility and indulge those three heavenly symbols of laziness.
However, those 11 days have come to signify a significant milestone in my life, and comprise one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.
The term ‘Vipassana’ literally means ‘to see things as they really are’. While there are a zillion and one ways to meditate while active, using mantras or visualization, the Vipassana practice does not utilize what are considered to be “fantasies” or “fabrications” to achieve inner calm. In theory, this is all very straightforward: You close your eyes, and feel. Scanning from head to toe, you feel that itch behind your ear, that dull throb in your inner arm, that odd chill in your right toe, the headache, the cramp in your side, the happy tingling through your neck to your feet. You feel it all, and observe. Ultimately, the goal is to reach perfect equanimity with every sensation that arrises; don’t cling to the good feelings, it will pass. Don’t feel aversion towards the discomfort, it will pass. Remain equanimous, anicca, annica, annica (impermanance.)
However, theory and practice are very different things (duh.) As Goenka (the teacher responsible for Vipassana in the West) says, the Buddha could show people the paths and tell them the steps to take it, but people would still complain when they didn’t feel enlightened. You have to walk it. Similarly, I could sit and describe a white duck to you. But if you’re blind and reach out to feel this duck, you could very well think that the color white means soft. In short, my writing is going to fall short of conveying the experience because ultimately, it is something that you just need to experience yourself to really understand.
That’s my disclaimer. But because I like to write, and have this blog to document these very changes and growth in my life, I’m gonna gab.
Day 1: Registration
I drove out to Idaho a couple of days early and took myself exploring at Craters of the Moon National Monument. I was a bit out of sorts the entire weekend, partially feeling like I should be practicing some sort of drastic aceticism in preparation for the piety to come. However, on Monday, after unpredictable clouds thwarted my hiking plans, I took Leo’s words of wisdom and went to find a giant sandwhich, coffee and a place to gab people’s ears off until I had to go into the camp. I arrived at Sawtooth on the earlier end of registration and spent the couple of hours nervously talking with my fellow cabinmates, each of us curious to know if we’d had any prior experience with this sort of thing, and wondering what on earth brought us there to shut up for two weeks. After registration was over, we were given a tremendous dinner and one more hour of talk time before being called into a small meditation room one by one to receive our assigned cushions for the duration of the retreat. I remember, 5 minutes into our first hour-long sit that night, I thought naively to myself how relaxing and painless this was going to be.
Ha.
Days 2-3-4: But really, days 1-2-3.
I was no longer delusional by the end of day one. The schedule is TOUGH.
4:00am: Wake up
4:30-6:30: Meditate in the hall or in your own room
6:30-8am: Breakfast
8-9am: Group Meditation
9-11am: Meditate in the hall or in your own room
11-12pm: Lunch
12-1pm: Interviews with the teacher/Rest
1-2:30pm: Meditate in the hall or in your own room
2:30-3:30pm: Group Meditation
3:30-5pm: Tea Break
6-7pm: Group Meditation
7-8:15pm: Discourse
8:15-9pm: Group Meditation
A day of meditating from 4:30am to 9pm, feels like three. Lots of brain action happened in those first three days. Energetically, my space was very dark and crowded. My mind was jumping from planning for the future, to drowning in a memory managiary, to creating random cartoon illustrations. On the more mundane end of things, I had to restrain myself from plotting how I would begin this very blog, what music I would listen to first upon leaving, and what would be my first words once released back to the wild. I was also fascinated to discover that there are a LOT of hours in a damn day. This is quite a motivator for repurposing one’s time. Walking the small hundred-foot path to and from the lodge for exercise like a caged dog, I would sometimes feel like someone that “had to do time, to learn a lesson the hard way:” ‘I promise, I’ll never while away my hours on Facebook again!’ Contrary to the imagery that mindful magazines at your local grocery check-out line would have you believe, meditation is not graceful. You have 40 people sitting in a crowded room together with stomach gurgles and farts and coughs, and while the room is seemingly voiceless, the mind-chatter would probably be deafening if you could hear inside heads.
But amid the mental chaos, great knots of habit patterns and engrained memories were beginning to be untangled. Because we weren’t allowed to write, I began to notice how much distrust I had towards my mind’s ability. Because we weren’t allowed to talk, I was forced to be truly self-reliant and take responsibility for my emotions, as opposed to finding distraction within others’ perceptions of the experience. As memories of my adolescence arose, I dipped in and out of dark spaces. I had moments where I just sat in awe at the acknowledgement that this person could be so fully loved by someone. Those moments turned into deep gratitude and then gradually into empowerment as the practice took us deeper into the concept of impermanance. Everything is a constant flow of energy and sensation, so the past cluster of energy or kalapas no longer exists. I began to recognize all the areas in my life that I may have let go of on an intellectual level, but that I was still deeply clinging to within my body. Once I began to address that, I could feel incredible shifts in the acceptance I had towards myself and my reality.
Time and again, I’d had energy workers mention to me that I held a lot of anger and fear in certain places in my body. As these knots started getting worked with, I noticed how many of the communication conflicts in relationships with my family and others probably arose because I was responding with this old energy, associating from those angry and fearful identities rather than from the person I am now. At the end of a long day, these moments ultimately left me in awe and gratitude for choosing to come.
Day 4: Hell
And then you just have those days. It’s exhausting on the brain to try to wrap your head around the constant duality of “this is the most incredible experience ever! I fucking hate it here! when can I leave?!” By the afternoon of day 4, I was experiencing my first truly stir-crazy moment, laying in bed on our “rest period”, which meant laying still without my eyes closed until the moment we had to go sit still with our eyes closed. These times would come with varied intensity and I would find myself counting down the time in a thousand and one ways, trying to make the duration sound more tolerable. But then once again, a small reflective theme would come up and I would realize that there’s not much else I’d rather be doing.
Another thing that got me through these moments was my heightened awareness to the natural world around me. I’ve always respected and loved nature, and try to walk around with eyes wide open. Yet my attentiveness is always sullied by time constraints or social pressures to divert your attention elsewhere, or even because of some sort of worry that I’ll appear to be “trying too hard” to be “into” nature. But all of those concerns are stripped away at Vipassana. Without a second thought, I would find myself pausing on walks to pick up a pinecone or rock, or examine a branch. I would lay and watch the incremental shifts in light for what seemed like hours. And the chipmunks! I’ve never watched chipmunks so closely in my life! They’re absolutely fascinating creatures. Their speed is the land equivalent to a hummingbird, seemingly teleporting from one place to the next with so much as a twitch of their leg. These daily respites helped me through just one more hour.
And then we would go sit for our group meditations, and I’d reach pivotal moments that would carry me through just a bit further. And then we would reach the end of the day, which always concluded with a video discourse given by Goenka. These were precious moments. A very wise, very humorous and relatable teacher and storyteller, Goenka would make the whole room burst into laughter. While we couldn’t talk, these animated reactions made me feel human again and gave us insight as to the effects the practice had in life outside of our ten hours of daily sits.
Day 5: Hump Day, and going rogue
At the half way point, I went a bit rogue. Not only did I sleep in past morning meditation, but I took advantage of the fact that the sign-up sheet for bathroom clean up was left with a marker hanging from it in the bathroom. From that day forward, I began to acrue a small pile of paper towel jotted with brief notations.
While day 5 was equally difficult as day 4, I stumbled upon another big chunk of self growth that day. It was the day I really began to let go of the person I’d been in the past. This involved thoroughly exploring my detrimental relationships and feelings towards my family. And as I began to disassociate myself from those times, a loosening occurred in my gut. While there is still plenty of work to be done, I think that the retreat showed me just how much of my heath concerns are exacerbated by emotions.
This was the day that I also moved more from partying with my bad self to giving sort of small pats on the back for ways in which I recognized I already upheld a lot of the values and beliefs that Vipassana emphasizes, from the active compassion to sitting with sensation, to observing versus reacting.
As we approached the last few days of the retreat, my mind definitely became more and more restless. I had praised myself for tapping into large themes and become newly motivated for things to come. Now I wanted to take all of that energy and go “dododo.” It was hard to remain in a calm mind during group meditations, and many of the sessions evoked large physical stress responses in my head, primarily right between my eyes, and my jaw. It was uncomfortable and is obviously an area with which I need to learn to become more equanimous. But as Goenka says, these ten days are just a small step on a long path. I was not meant to accomplish enlightenment in two weeks.
On the morning of the tenth day, we were allowed to break from noble silence. All of the realizations and wisdom I’d felt attuned to came crashing when I began to listen to others, finding that I’d gotten more roped into wondering about others as the days wound down and had lost that quiet center in myself where the real work was supposed to be taking place. We continued with group meditations that day, and I used the opportunity to refocus and tackle my naive sense of pride.
On the morning of the 11th, as we said our last chant, I was bothered that I still felt a painful tension in my face. I should be elated! We’re done! It wasn’t until I was driving out in my car, that the acknowledgement of all the changes I’d undergone began to hit. Things were different. Despite the brain chatter and the moments I strayed from meditation to miss someone or plan something, despite the physical discomforts I was feeling, I had this sweeping inner calm underneath it all. Stopping into town to get coffee, I had no idea how it would feel to be amongst crowds again. And yet, I glided through the room like no one else was around, feeling in perfect control of my space. The same calm carried over into a conversation with my mother, leaving no underlying irritation or misguided communication.
On the ten hour drive home, all the thoughts and emotions flooded my mind and yet I still had no outlet after two weeks. When I arrived in Packwood, the buildup had manifested in all sorts of physical sensations, from chills to nausea, to shaking. I made a fire and dinner while waiting for Leo to get to town and once he made it, I just rambled and rambled as we both just lay on the couch, him a physical wreck from a cold motorcycle ride and me crazy from all I’d been holding in. But still, an underlying calm.
I do not want to reach enlightenment. I am an emotionally driven being and don’t mind it. I know that I still have plenty of digging at the roots of the themes tapped into in Idaho. But now I have tools and a framework for understanding those issues and a paradigm that keeps them in my awareness. Every time I sit to meditate, and every time I observe versus react, is a moment I am removing old Sankara or “sin” from my life.
“If you can take 10 lbs off your head, take 10lbs. If you can take 90lbs off your head, take 90lbs.”
Bahvantu Sarveh Mangala
May all beings be happy.
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