10 Days of Vipassana

In February 2009, I attended a 10 day vipassana meditation retreat. The following post is what I wrote about the trip several weeks later. In terms of the theme of this new blog, this seems like as good of a place to start as any.

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Everyone keeps asking me when I'm going to write about my 10-day silent meditation retreat. It's been two weeks since returning home and, if I'm going to be honest about it, I've been avoiding it.

Funny truth that I've known about myself for some time: every time I have some kind of profound, potentially life-changing occurrence in my life, I run the other way and pretend it didn't happen, hoping it will go away. Funny thing about that, too: it never goes away. It might for a while, until I completely forget, and then it comes back twice as potent as before.

The whole point of attending a 10-day silent meditation retreat was to come to grips with all the things I've been running from. Let's face it. 10 days. No talking. No tv. No radio. No mp3 player. No phone. No email. No books. No paper. No pens. Take away all of that and suddenly there is nowhere to run. There is no choice but to face it, because it IS going to come up. Guaranteed.

That wasn't my only purpose in attending. I wanted to learn to focus my mind better. To use it as a tool instead of letting it use ME as a tool. I took my first meditation class four years ago, and have been meditating on and off for the last two years. But it seemed like there is only so much progress one can make while dealing with the interruptions and distractions of everyday life.

In meditation, it's interesting to observe the workings of the mind. There are two things I struggle with, which are the most common thing any meditator struggles with: "monkey mind" and "sinking mind". Monkey mind is where your thoughts are just endlessly chattering on with no rhyme or reason. Every thought or emotion that pops into your head just sucks you right in and you're off on tangent after tangent. Sinking mind is the opposite. To me, this is almost a trance state. It feels like being stoned. It's a very dull stupor. You mind is not at all active. I wanted to learn how to better control my mind and stay out of these two states.There's one more reason I did it. I wanted to see if I could.

When I first arrived, I got registered, dragged all my belongings to the room that I was to share with five other women, and then set off to explore the retreat center. I met all my roommates, as well as people who were staying in other dorms. It was interesting to talk to them and hear why each person was there. It was surprising how many people had never meditated before and were taking the course to learn how. I mean, that's a hell of a way to learn something - commit to doing it nonstop for 10 days straight? I started by taking a class at the community center, and I only made it to the first three classes, dropped it, and didn't start meditating again until two years later. So their dedication to learning the practice was impressive to me.

The first three full days were dedicated to the practice of anapana. In this practice, you focus your attention on the breath, paying attention to the feel of the breath entering and leaving your nose. Once you master that, you move on to focus on the triangular area from your nose down to the upper lip, and the feeling of breath in this region. Once you master THAT, you focus on ANY sensation in this region, whether it be itching, tingling, pain, twitching, whatever. As the sensations arise, you try to remain equanimous, not reacting, not judging, just noticing what's happening.

This sounds easy, but just give it a try for five minutes and you'll quickly realize that you truly do NOT know how to focus your own mind. The mind gets bored easily and wanders off. Sometimes it takes a LONG time to even notice your mind has wandered off, and then you have to just calmly bring your focus back to the breath without judgment. That's the hard part. WITHOUT judging yourself. Whatever happens, happens. That's okay. Just remember to come back to the breath.

Now, I've been doing this for two years, so I was fairly aware of how frequently my mind wanders and am fairly successful at noticing quickly and returning to my breath. But I don't typically meditate for long periods of time, usually just a half hour a day. I'll go on half-day or full-day retreats of 4 to 8 hours of meditation, but that's only once every couple of months. But THIS retreat was 6 to 8 hours of meditation per day. That's a LOT of time for your mind to go a-wandering.

Every evening, there was a 1 - 1.5 hour discourse about the technique practiced that day and what things were likely to arise. But it was funny. Sometimes I had difficulty understanding the Goenkaji's heavy Indian accent. For the first three days, I was quite concerned about what I'd gotten myself into because he kept saying, "Focus your mind on your own desperation." My own desperation??? Every time he said it, I started to panic. It was the fourth day before I realized he was saying RESPIRATION. Oh, what a relief! That makes SO much more sense.

On the fourth day, he introduced vipassana meditation. Building on the basis of the breath and noticing any sensations, you begin to do a very slow body scan, sequentially. Scan from the top of the head to the toes and from the toes back to the top of the head, noticing any sensations that arise and also noticing if there was a particular body part that you could NOT feel any sensations. As you scan through your body, stop and focus for a minute or so on any part which feels a particularly strong sensation or no sensation at all.

The point was to notice the sensations without reacting to them with aversion or clinging and, by doing so, to understand that everything in life is temporary. Good or bad, all things in life eventually come to an end. It's our mad attempts to avoid the bad things and cling on to the good things that cause all human suffering.

This is a very interesting concept to me. Pain is inevitable. Pain is physical. But SUFFERING is mental. Suffering doesn't start until we attach the mental thought to the pain, "I don't like this and I wish it would stop right now." Suffering even arises when we are happy if we begin to think, "This is so great, I hope it never ends."

The pleasant tingling that I feel in my hands as I body scan, this eventually will end. It might not feel like that the next time I scan. And the sharp radiating pain in my spine will also eventually end. But while it is here, I may as well just pay attention to it, since it is my current reality.It's amazing what kinds of things come up in the forefront of your mind as you are sitting there paying attention to your bodily sensations. Some of them were expected - I knew there was no way that I wouldn't think about the last two years, the on-again-off-again relationship with my ex-boyfriend. But I realized that most of my psychic pain from these repeating events came from my own clinginess and wishing things were other than as they are.

Another expected "issue" was the feeling of isolation that has haunted me since childhood. Feeling different than everyone else, like an alien in my own family. Not believing what I'm taught to believe because I never experienced it as something real (and feeling like something must be wrong with me because I couldn't). Seeing a different way to live and to be, but living in a world that is blind. There's nothing like 10 days of silence to bring up the anguish of feeling alone in the world!

But the practice of observing bodily sensations helped me to deal with these things as they arose. I was able to step back from the thoughts and emotions as they came up and just observe. Observe the changing qualities of my breath, my heart beating faster, tightness in my chest, etc., knowing that this too will ultimately change in time.

Some unexpected things came out in my dreams. I had MANY dreams, disturbing in content but empowering in their outcome. Some of them had to do with past relationships, things I thought I was over but obviously my subconscious has a differing opinion. In each of my dreams, in the last few minutes of the dream, I faced a situation in which I normally played the role of the victim, and took control of the outcome.

It wasn't an easy experience. There were several days when I walked on the walking paths, the monkey mind going crazy within, reciting to myself over and over, "I want to go home, this is stupid, I want to go home." I argued with myself a lot. Told myself cruel things like, "He's never coming back because you are stupid and pitiful and you will be alone forever because nobody else will ever understand you like he did." Judged myself on the days I couldn't settle my mind. Cried by myself in the woods. Screamed at myself (in my head, of course) on the fourth day after vainly attempting the previous three days to silence the never-ending loop of ABBA songs playing in my head. Pent up, denied emotions flooded to the surface.

And then I kept reminding myself, "Whatever happens is okay. It's what's supposed to happen." Eventually, on some days anyway, there was silence and the world became much clearer. Raindrops glistened on pine needles, heavy and ready to drop at any second. Bald eagles soared overhead. Robins poked their heads in and out of blackberry bushes. Deer came impossibly close to me, showing no fear. A million stars twinkled down silently. My boots crunched the freshly fallen snow. And a man standing silently in the middle of the men's walking meadow began juggling snowballs, which nobody seemed to notice except for me!

I suppose there was never COMPLETE silence, but ABBA made way for Strauss and Beethoven. Things slightly more calm....or at least, lest verbally noisy. That's progress.

I also became much more aware of the workings of my own body. I never realized how loud digestion is until I sat quietly in a large room with 70+ people, listening to ALL of us digesting. I became acutely aware of all the qualities of spinal pain in my pinched nerves; the dullness right at the center from which sharp flames of fire radiated down my arms and legs. I could feel my spine slowly shifting to the right as the days progressed and the accompanying painful shifting in my hips and shoulders. I watched as my legs went numb and then blood came throbbing back.

I sat through it all, just observing a phenomenon which normally would have sent me crying to the chiropractor immediately. Actually, I went straight to the chiropractor before I even went home, and he was shocked that I could pinpoint exactly the vertebrae from which all the pain was radiating. I wasn't reacting to the pain anymore, though I could tell it still needed to be adjusted. And I thought of a book my friend Robert gave me for my 30th birthday called The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. Bob Sarno, who theorizes that many of today's chronic/repetitive motion injuries actually are a physical manifestation of an unprocessed/repressed emotional problem. Hmmm.

The very last day was devoted to preparing ourselves to go back out into the noisy, messy world. The meditation sessions all day were focused on learning Metta (loving-kindness), with the instruction that all vipassana meditation sessions should end with at least five minutes of developing a feeling of loving-kindness toward all who inhabit this earth....because when we went home the next day, we were going to need it. :)

Students were able to talk to each other again, comparing experiences. Everyone had at least one bad day, if not more. I wasn't the only one to hear, "Focus on your own desperation" the first few days. :) But the sound was just overwhelming. Mealtimes seemed chaotic. I could no longer really taste my food because my attention was drawn here and there by this or that bit of conversation.

The drive home was stressful. Cars zipped past me on the freeway. The radio was too loud. I kept turning it further and further down before shutting it off completely. When I went back to work, I was overwhelmed by the sounds of phones ringing, the buzzing of the fluorescent lights, and the incessant tap-tap-tapping of my own fingers on my keyboard. I wanted some time to just kind of digest everything that had happened, but I was whisked here and there for belated birthday dinners, my cell phone kept ringing, people came to my cubicle non-stop to inquire about my retreat.

But now I've been home for two weeks. I've only meditated a few times, when I should be doing it for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. It's really hard. There's traffic going by. The refrigerator buzzes. My new neighbor and her boyfriend talk really loud. The furnace rattles.

These are all just excuses, though. Because I'm running from it, again. Because if I continue down this path, I will have no choice but to learn to let go of attachments to the past, unrealistic daydreams about the future, and all those other things that make me miserable.

Wait. They make me miserable? And I want to hang on to them? It's a comfort thing. I think we're all afraid of being happy, truly happy. So we make ourselves miserable because it's what we're used to.

Which leads me to the greatest insight I had during my retreat : We're all pretty much certifiably insane.

You've probably heard Einstein's definition of insanity, "Repeating the same action over and over, but expecting different results." Our thought patterns really are random and the connections between them, if any, aren't all that logical. We say the most horrible things to ourselves. We think the same thoughts over and over and over all day long. It's mindless repetition. We let our minds control us instead of controlling our minds. One of the only things that separates us from the "crazy" people is the ability to tell the difference between inner and outer dialogue and an ability to keep the two separate.

Think about it. You see a man on the street arguing with some invisible person, he's obviously insane. But how many times do you argue with yourself while trying to make up your mind about something? Now imagine how people would react if you verbalized those thoughts. He-he, you're a nutball!

There you have it. Ten days of silence to figure out that I'm a nutball, you're a nutball, we're all crazies. And to stop suffering from the insanity, it's going to take a lot of internal work.