19-Apr-17. Tiruvannamalai, India.
It’s been a year and a half since I’ve been looking to experience a Vipassana course. Finally, this year the planets aligned. First time I heard about it was by watching an old movie called “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana” which documented the effects this technique had in many of the inmates of a high security prison in India.
I took the course at a new centre in the holy city of Tiruvannamalai in the state of Tamil Nadu, in India. My friend Courtney invited me and without hesitation I said Yes. Now it feels as if I came out of that centre ages ago! It was quite an experience. I passed through so many phases in there – every single minute was different from the other and I jumped constantly from wanting to run away to wanting to practice the technique very seriously so that I didn’t miss anything important.
But before I go any further I just want to give a little introduction…
Once upon a time there was a prince called Gautama Siddhartha who dedicated many years of his life to find himself. He knew there was something much deeper, which he was missing amongst the luxurious life he was living. He was searching for the divine, the creator, the God inside of him. Apparently he had been trying for a few lives already.
So this time he left everything behind to try many sorts of different ways – some of them quite extreme – and realized after all that even though these techniques helped somehow, none of them brought him close to what he wanted to discover. So, he decided determinately to stop them all and come up with his own way: He sat on a tree in the city of Bodh Gaya to meditate and observe the sensations in his body, and committed to himself not to leave this tree and not to change his position EVER until he had reach enlightment. And so at the age of 35, he did. And this is where the technique of Vipassana has its origin.
The main goal… is to Wake Up.
Having said that… This is my story, day by day.
If you’re not interested in my daily struggles its more than fair, so I’ve put a summary section at the bottom 🙂
- Day 0 – Arrived to the center.
I have 2 roommates and the rooms look pretty decent. The beds are like hard rocks, but I think I’ll be ok (how bad they can be?).
A little introduction and guidelines were given to us before we started.
So far so good… I can’t wait for the silence to start.
- Day 1 – Early start, bell woke us up at 4am.
4.30am: First meditation. The technique so far is observing our breath: watching how it goes in and out of our nostrils…. over and over and over again.
7am: Breakfast
8am: More meditation (zzz). What have I gotten myself into?
11am: Had the quickest lunch ever and went back for a nap. By then, I felt as if a whole day had gone by already. Is it really just 11am? We’ve been meditating for 5 hours already!
1pm: Meditation for 4 more hours (oh my God) with just a couple of 5-10 min break.
5pm: Tea time, which is basically our “dinner” made up of a fist-size of beans and tea.
6pm: Meditation for another hour followed by a discourse video about the technique explained by Goenka, the man who has been distributing these courses all around the world.
8.30pm: Half an hour meditation. Isn’t there enough already?
9pm: Individual questions, if any, to the supportive teachers who are just sitting there meditating with everyone, holding the space I suppose.
9.30pm: Bed time (yay!). Finally I’ll get to rest my body from sitting for hours. Oh no, wait… we have stone beds.
Gosh. Was that just 1 day?
- Day 2 – Why do I do this to myself?
I had a dream about my dad, a quite significant one. It’s the second one this week, the first one happened a night or two before coming here, and that one was even weirder. I think they are actually trying to tell me something. I’ll keep an eye…
Skipped breakfast and lunch – which left me with only beans and tea for dinner. The worst is that I don’t really care – I just want to leave. But everyone talks so highly about it! I don’t get it.
I miss food, friends, my own time. I feel like I’m in a freaking concentration camp.
- Day 3 – My period arrived (great).
… so I’ve been lying down most of the day. Skipped a couple of hours meditation and lunch.
Desperation, boredom. Is this all necessary? The day has been eternal. A day here can easily equal 3 of the ‘real world’.
Tea time has become my favourite time of the day. Too bad drinking a tea doesn’t last that long.
- Day 4 – They will teach us Vipassana today (finally).
Probably that’s why I woke up feeling much more alive and positive.
I catched myself smiling a couple of times. Maybe some divine support finally arrived.
I started taking some Moringa super-food powder so maybe it gave me some energy too. Within a few minutes everything can change of course.
The whole day has almost passed and no Vipassana yet. It can’t be true… I’ve been doing the very same thing for 4 days already! Ok relax; you have somehow survived, isn’t it? Lets wash some clothes, that’ll keep you busy.
Moon is almost full.
- Day 5 – Started the day happy and positive.
Vipassana was taught to us last evening and so now I have something else to get entertained with during the long meditation hours.
I have so much energy today – someone give me a laptop to do some work! Or maybe some Rocket yoga? (I wish)
I broke the rules and started writing a bit. I also found some candy on my purse. I will break it down so it lasts for the rest of the 5 days.
Few hours after trying the new additions to the technique I started to get bored again. Is there something else coming? Is this it?
Towards the end of the day something good happened. I had an insight about what could be one of the main miseries I struggle with in my life. Misery is a word you hear a lot in here, since we are trying to get rid of that. Although sometimes it feels like we hear it a bit too much.
Today has been the first day I don’t feel like running away the whole day. Just maybe a few times a day, which is already an advantage.
Full moon day & half way through.
- Day 6 – I had a strange dream about my brother.
Woke up super sensitive and dropped a tear or two, but after a while that feeling left me and a sudden good feeling took over. My humor was notoriously good compared to previous days.
The painful chanting during breaks and meditation don’t seem to bother me today. Must be that my ears are immune already.
For the first time I managed 45 minutes without moving a single hair of my body or having any discomfort. Took a 5 minute break and had another hour of that and then again 1 hour and 5 minutes (yes, every minute counts).
I was excited, but after a bit I got bored and didn’t want to do it anymore. The last hour of meditation of the day, I had to actually be dragged out of my room (argh).
It was a good day after all. I re-discovered something that I already knew but that somehow it was made clear again today; and this is that doubt is really my biggest enemy. It doesn’t allow me to move forward… And this is a big one for me.
- Day 7 – Not many significant or strong thoughts today.
… except that I’m looking very much forward to the finish line. Although teachings say ‘No clinging’, so I’m trying to live by the moment… Omm.
We started using individual cells to meditate. They are ok. At least I can rest my back on the wall, for a change. But – no fans! Luckily the heat has been quite bearable today. The Earth is finally giving us a break.
Today I stayed a little longer after the last meditation to ask a question. I asked how does it come that by just observing our sensations we will suddenly become free? My main concern really, and specially after having worked with a different approach the last month, is that I believe that if we just observe our sensations but don’t look at whatever is coming with them, we then cannot liberate ourselves from it. Is this totally wrong? I told the supportive teacher that I didn’t feel any different after all these days of practicing the technique. She replied that I didn’t need to – that the most important thing is that I remain equanimous. I am super confused. Something is missing for me.
I can still see a full moon on the sky! It’s been 4 days already. What a beautiful gift.
- Day 8 – I notice a calm and quiet mind…
But I have questions. How to remain equanimous? Does it mean I should have no preferences at all?
Still 3 more days to go. Patience my dear, patience.
I noticed today something different at the end of the day. I think I am finally getting that the point isn’t just to notice the differences of the physical sensations of the body, but it’s about understanding that every emotion holds within an internal sensation. And as Goenka said, what we become addicted to is to the emotions, not to things or people, but to the emotions that those things or people trigger in us. So in a meditation I observed that when a certain thought aroused, pleasant or unpleasant, instead of focusing on this emotion, I immediately went inside to the sensation that was coming up with it (pain, pulsations, tingling sensations or whatever that might be). I identified it within the body, observed it and worked on maintaining that emotion – which was lying behind the sensations – completely equanimous by not feeling any craving or aversion towards it, but simply balancing it without allowing it to make me react or alter other parts of me – for good or for bad.
Whether if this is the right way or not, I feel I achieved something finally!
- Day 9 – The full technique was given to us.
It is a cloudy day – the first one that I don’t want to die of asphyxia.
I got to sleep a little bit better today and I can really tell the difference.
During the whole time here I’ve been having these sudden big smiles on my face, which have been showing up while recalling certain memories of events or people I love.
Today the smiles are not about memories. They are just a significant enjoyable feeling of knowing that we are almost there.
- Day 10 – Final day.
Last few meditations and bye bye J The silence is broken, which is the only thing I am actually disappointed about. But this is just my anti-social side speaking. Apart from that, I am freeeeeee! (or not).
Overall
Those 10 days at the center were for me mostly a torture. A constant thought in my head was repeating over and over again: why are you doing this to yourself? What did you get yourself into? Why, just why?
One would think that meditation could only be a torture if you really do not want to look at yourself, if you are not able to sit and watch your thoughts without wanting to run away from them, or if you are scared to look deeper and find the root cause of your suffering. Maybe at a certain level all of those are true for me, but my main enemy during this time in there was boredom. I was truly really very bored.
The first 4 days all you are taught is Ana Pana meditation technique, which is basically just watching your breath – how it goes in and out of your nostrils. This is it. For 10 hours a day you just do that. I honestly don’t know how I made it up to the 4th day. After that they gave us more little by little. It was like feeding a baby: first giving us only mother’s milk for strong foundations, then some other liquids and puree, and only after, the solids came. I felt exactly like this, a baby in its growth stage.
On the first couple of days my thoughts were mainly about running away – 24/7. It really did feel like a concentration camp for me: having men and women segregation (which I personally preferred), being served the same food every single day, getting no real dinner and feeling so hungry every night before bed, having to listen to painful chanting recordings through the horns, not being allowed to read, write, listen to music, or having any other form of practice, i.e., yoga, stretching, running…
Because of all of this, I happened to nap A LOT. Sometimes my roommates needed to wake me up because I was sleeping so deeply I couldn’t hear the bell. Naps were my favourite part of the day too – they took me to a happy place and kept me sane.
All these first days I was really missing owning my own time, missing my friends, my comforts, good food, a few mundane distractions here and there. Yes I know, I’m naming just material stuff, exactly what Vipassana want you to detach from, but hey, they were really very hard days!
The rest of the days I just felt so bored, so out of energy, so desperate, so tired of having so little rest for my body. Every afternoon my upper back was hurting so much of being sited for so many hours, and sleeping in those stone beds did not help either. I felt really tired most of the time and I kept wondering if I would see some benefits at all after these 10 days? The technique is really good I think, but why the extra torture?
The main reasons I worked really hard to stay were because first of all, Courtney was there and without a word she gave me constant moral support and strength to keep going! And second of all for Goenka’s discourses at night, because when you listened to him it happen to all make a lot of sense. Your questions are answered as if he has heard you asking them. And then you get a kick, at least until the next day.
I am not saying the technique didn’t work for me. It actually did. After coming out of the center my mind had the most still, non-moving, non-thinking, non-anything best 2 days of my entire life. The moment I started to think something that didn’t involved the NOW, which means it was past or the future, it took about 10 seconds to effortless dissipate on its own, bringing me back to the beautiful present. This is really all we have. There is nothing about the past that we can fix. Yes, we can learn from it, but thinking about it and going around in circles is not going to help. Healing the past takes a different approach, I believe. And thinking about the future is so so pointless. I very regularly have these inner thoughts about what am I going to say, or how am I going to say it, or how am I going to react when this or that happens. This is so exhausting and generally it ends up taking me nowhere as the situations I imagined & wasted energy in, are never ever as I picture them.
Life is constantly changing. WE are constantly changing, by the second.
Goenka said it simply: we are masses made up of vibrations, and constant change. We have to accept impermanence. It is the most important thing.
So yes, I had a painful time in there, but I too gained a lot from these 10 days. It took me a while, but somehow I had a glimpse of how my mind can be and how peaceful and beautifully calm that state is.
I didn’t practice the technique enough to say for myself that there is another step to this, which I would think there is (obviously). But still I don’t see how vrittis <the fluctuations of our minds> can be eliminated by just sitting with them and observing, without actually actively doing something about them, with full consciousness.
Anyhow, I guess the only way to find out is to experience it and keep trying, with patience and consistency. One of the gold pieces of advice I got in there from the discourses is to stop expecting something special to occur and just accept the reality as it is.
This was also one of my main struggles. I was constantly expecting a WOW moment. If we really want it, it will eventually come, but at its own time. And our job first of all is to pay deep attention to the changes in oneself, little by little, and to take really good care of the practices and seeds we are planting within us. What do we want to achieve? And does my day to day actions and thought match with that? If we don’t pay attention to this, then how do we expect a WOW moment at the end of the day? It all should start from the seeds. It will bloom when it blooms and the way it should bloom. A good seed, with proper water and good care, will give us a good result. A bad seed, even if we give our live to take care of it, once planted it can only give what it has.
My personal suggestion to anyone who is curious about trying this out would only be: Do NOT believe anything I said, and go experience it for yourself. This is and would always be the only way to find out… Go, live it and discover your very own truth.
And remember, this too shall pass…
lifeyesbylaura 