10 Days of Vipassana: Meditation, free, very cool — Part I
“Are you feeling subtle sensations on the skin?”
“I think so.”
“Good.”
“But sometimes I just think I feel something. How do I know I’m actually feeling it?”
“No need to overthink,” he says after a moment’s pause. “Just feel.”
Just feel. Not feel this or feel that. Not feel because or feel in order; no how’s or why’s or what’s. No modifiers, descriptors, or any further instructions.
Just, feel — the simple predicate.
Ok thanks, I say, bow my head, and walk out of the meditation hall. It’s a little vague, but I can see what he means.
It’s 12pm and the sun is brimming the sky. My eyes take a few seconds to get used to the light. Having just finished lunch, we are on a 90 minute break; students can now talk with the teacher one-on-one. In fact, the only time we can talk at all. No gestures or eye contact either.
A few other students are walking laps around the field outside. We’re not allowed heavy exercise, but walking is permitted. Daily movement seems to be a shared importance. I find a patch of grass under a tree, and sit back. The shade is nice and gentle. The grass feels like grass.
I’m at a 10 day silent meditation retreat. No talking, no heavy exercise, no reading or writing, no meat, no phones, no masturbating and no killing. It’s Day 3 of 10, and I don’t have that much to say; I’m still getting used to this — I think everyone is. Like unrelated sentences in a paragraph, we are awkwardly here alone, together.
Some 20 other guys and 30 other girls are also here in the same retreat. We wake up and start meditating at 4:30AM. The sun rises, we have silent breakfast together, then meditate again. Lunch, and again. And like this, we continue for the rest of the day until 9PM (~10 hours meditation/day).
Wow that’s a lot of meditation, I say. Yeah, it is, I reply. Haha, third person me says. Haha, first person me says. So what do you think about <Rabbit Hole 23>? This is how I have been passing some of the time so far.
Though, time has been more generous than I’d thought. The morning meditations go by quickly, and while Day 1 dragged along, Day 2 was better. Today time feels like it is moving as it should.
At any rate, not often do I get to sit on an open field and do a bit of nothing for a while. It’s sunny, and there’s just the right number of clouds in the sky.
Seven and a half days (~75 hours of meditation) remain. I wasn’t able to read much about the experience beforehand, so I’m not sure what to expect. A point of reference could have been useful. Not having one feels like I don’t know how far or close I am to something, as if I’m walking along a path with my eyes closed. Light is shining patterns on my eyelids.
The sun seems to have gotten a bit brighter since a few minutes ago. The other students continue walking circles around the field. One guy is dressed in a white robe, pacing with hands behind his back. Behind him, a guy wearing a golden sash across his torso. Behind him, a guy adorned with a grey beard down to his hips, rotating a bracelet of jade beads around his fingers.
Just kidding, they look like average people. Everyday shirts, everyday pants, everyday beards. Meditation has become more universal lately, so I’m sure not everyone here is a super yogi. Just the spiritually gifted, I think to myself, and grab my golden staff from the ground.
We’re not supposed to communicate, but watching them in this way, it’s hard not to wonder where they are from, or why they chose to do the retreat. If they’re experiencing the retreat in a similar way. If their thoughts, meditations are different. I guess it’s natural for curiosity to move around like this, but today more than usual. I’m just not sure if how I’m experiencing, I should be.
When I asked the teacher earlier, he said something along, “Whatever you feel, that is what you feel.” Yes of course, chenqui.
In any case, a personal goal may have been nice, something to align my experience towards. But nothing particular is coming to mind either. I suppose that’s just how it is.
No need to overthink. Just feel. True. At the end of the day, the retreat is a self exercise anyway. Everyone’s experience, by nature, will probably be a little different; there’s not much point in comparing or overwondering. No goals, no context, but perhaps in turn less biases and distractions. My experience is just my experience; I know what I know, and “whatever I feel, that is what I feel.”
I feel the patch of grass under my sweatpants, and a light brush of the shirt on my shoulders. The tree trunk holds sturdy against my back. If I pay attention, I can make out grooves on the bark. If I really pay attention, I can hear the Bhagavad Gita flowing through the universe. Out of nowhere, “Put Your Head On My Shoulder” by Paul Anka starts playing in my head, and it makes me want to dance. But I think that’s considered heavy exercise.
Every now and then, a light breeze comes by, and the leaves above rustle in response. Like a wave of applause between songs at a recital. A shower of sunlight filters through, each ray dancing around, unsure of where it wants to land. I’m trying to move my head so the sun doesn’t hit my eyes.
But no matter what angle I turn to, the rays still seem to find me. Sometimes they hang on the corner of my eye. Sometimes they drop just below my lip. After a few more head rotations, I acquiesce and let my head sit however it wants — the rays win. I close my eyes, and take a deep breath of the grassy summer air.
Eventually the gong sounds at 1PM, our cue to move back into the meditation hall.
Start again, the teacher says, and we start again.
Mid-meditation, I feel the post-lunch fatigue catching up to me. The teacher had warned against overeating earlier, but I may then have been stuck in Rabbit Hole 22. Ideally, eat at around 75% fullness, he’d said. You cannot focus if you eat too much.
No worries, lesson learned — try to stay with the meditation, I remind myself. But it’s always easier said than done. My mind drifts, and a lady on the other side keeps burping in 10 second intervals. Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s a burp or a fart. How is that even possible?
A bit distracting, but no need to judge or get annoyed. Observe but don’t react, I remind myself again; the point is to meditate in the current state, as it is.
For now, the task is to sharpen focus. Observe physical sensations on the skin, like heat, pain, or pressure. Almost as if noticing tastes on the palate. And in the way that a sharp tongue can make out subtle flavours, to feel the subtler sensations, the mind has to be sharpened.
The goal is not to look for a certain taste, else you might only find that specific one, falsely representing the whole. Worse, you might think you taste something that’s not actually there.
No need to overthink. Just feel. Don’t anticipate or ignore a sensation, be it pleasurable or painful, the teacher had said. You might get better at feeling that specific sensation, honing that particular edge of the mind, but that is not the purpose of Vipassana. You can’t pick out the good sensations, or block out the bad ones; being an observer means observing anything and everything — whatever is actually there, as it is.
In other words, the focus is on the ability to observe the sensations, and less about the sensations themselves. A good observer will naturally feel whatever they are supposed to.
The afternoon passes quietly, and we continue alternating between meditation and break, break and meditation. The quality of my meditations fluctuates a bit, and the lady in the corner still burps every now and then. 9PM passes by, and Day 3 comes close to an end.
Most of us spend some time walking around outside before going to bed. I find the same patch of grass in front of the tree, take a seat, and loosen my legs. The field feels a bit cooler, and the sun is setting in the distance. A thin pink layer of clouds sits before the horizon, like a screen from a shadow puppet play.
Across the road, the fields seem to be laying back cross-legged, savouring the evening silence. The fields behind those fields too. And the fields behind those. Before I realize, the air has grown crisper. And in the horizon, pink has made its way into fuschia.
A year ago, traveling around Japan in the summertime, I’d found a guesthouse to stay in the south of Kyushu (in Usa City, birthplace of Karaage) and made good friends with the owner. His name was Aki, and before opening up the guesthouse, he’d spent 2 years traveling around the world with his wife.
The world travel was cool and stuff, he’d said, but most importantly, were the 3 moments in his travels that changed him. He added a special accent on changed that can’t really be expressed in just italics.
Aki’s Big 3:
- Ayahuasca (Nice, I said)
- Total Solar Eclipse
- Vipassana
What’s Vipassana, I asked. Meditation retreat, free, very cool, you should do it, he said.
Ok, I was convinced. And a year later, I signed up for a 10 Day course in Alberta. Here I am.
I wake up on Day 4 at 4:25AM, and ‘Here I Am’ by Bryan Adams is playing in my head. I head to the bathroom, take a pee, and brush my teeth. Someone once told me to not rinse my mouth after brushing, but I gargle some water and do it anyway. The vanity mirror gives me a short perfunctory stare, and my dark circles seem to complain that it’s too early.
Day 4’s a tough day. I try to meditate, but I keep running into a slippery wall; the awareness slides around everywhere, without going anywhere. It’s frustrating.
When I feel like this — restless, or can’t really get into the meditation — I try telling myself to still sit the full period. It’s a soft rule to keep me in check; something like a babysitter, if you will. Conscientiousness is still the main driver, but someone is there to yell if I take a wrong turn.
From the start to end of each session, sit down, eyes closed, and meditate. Changing posture is fine, but I don’t want to open my eyes or leave the hall. In other words, meditate during meditation times. That’s what I came here for, anyway.
Sometimes, though, the wall is extraordinarily slippery, like someone slathered on a strange mixture of oil and goose fat, everywhere. Why would someone do that? The knife of awareness does not cut through, no matter how hard I try (or perhaps the knife itself, is not working). The mind slips around, like a baby, trying to grab whatever it sees; sounds in the room, the breathing of people beside me, random thoughts, anything but the meditation. The physical sensations are nowhere to be found.
And at these times, I feel a strong urge to exit the session. Open my eyes, stand up, and walk out of the hall to get some air. I’m not meditating right now, after all; it doesn’t make sense to sit in frustration.
Let’s go, come on. It’s just a break, the urge yells (or sometimes whispers). Time away will help me better come back to the meditation, it adds, hands raised as if holding dinner plates. True, I say. Very reasonable. My body seems to agree too; my eyelids start pulling apart, my buttcheeks try to lift off the floor.
But my babysitter will shout at me from the background, albeit quite quiet for a shout. The words seem to come from far away, and only if I pay attention can I make out the full message. It’s a part of progress; just stay and sit, for a little longer.
The Urge shoots my babysitter a dirty glance, and Babysitter says what’s up. None of us are really getting along.
At the end of the day, I can’t imagine taking a break to be a bad thing in itself. I just worry the consequences of succumbing to the urge. Break one of my rules, and the rest of them might go with it.
In this way, I try my best to continue through turbulence. The urges are still hard to resist. They pop up sporadically and pull on my attention, like threads fixing onto a marionette. If I actively think about them, they get stronger. Try not thinking, and I end up thinking even more. There’s no winning.
At noon, I visit the teacher again. He says to smile and welcome the challenge; no need to entertain these urges, or even fight them. Let them do their thing, while you continue yours. Just observe — as if they too, are separate sensations, part of the meditation.
Always a little cliche, but I guess that’s the nature of this kind of thing. So I try. When the urges come, I try to observe, as I would a sensation on the body — just feel. Sometimes it doesn’t really help; they get stronger, like steam pushing against a glass lid, and no amount of observation seems to quell the heat and pressure. But sometimes if I observe for long enough, they get weaker too. And sometimes, they eventually weaken just enough, and disappear.
Like this, Day 4 eventually passes. Day 5 is better, but Day 6 is even worse. Day 7 is okay, and Day 8, Day 9, all come to an end.
When Day 10 ends, so do the rules of silence. Finally, all of us who have been meditating alone together, are now just together, together.
Come to think of it, we’d spent every bit of the past 10 days with each other, but were really just now meeting for the first time. Dalton is in his second year of med school, Nick just graduated high school. Dan had just quit his consulting job and is starting at a startup in a few days. Renaud works part-time at a cafe and makes his own music.
Some guys are in their 40’s, some are in their 60’s. One guy says that the spiritual part of meditation has done him a lot of good. One guy mentions that he wanted to try Vipassana for chronic back pain. One guy talks about his experience with addiction.
Daniel and Frederik, two Danish college students, flew in from Copenhagen just to do the retreat. Wow, someone says.
The centres in Europe were all waitlisted, Daniel explains. Alberta’s just happened to have space.
Ok but why, someone asks.
The Danes pause and look at each other. Seemed cool, Frederik says.
After each grabbing a mug and taking turns filling our tea (sometimes filling each others’ tea, now that we are allowed to interact), we gather around a single table in the dining room. Ten days of silent eye-contactless meals passed by here, where plates and cutlery played as the sole audio track of this space. Sometimes the silence felt too silent. Sometimes it was okay. In any case, as the teacher put it, to go a little deeper, you need a bit of solitude and quiet.
As we seat, the mundane realization comes to me: people are talking. But of course they are. No need for it to be a realization; people talking is a natural occurrence, no matter where I am. A sound that is just rightly there, like the breeze that accompanies a walk at dusk. Yet it comes with a slight strangeness, a temperature I can’t find the right words for.
“That was different from what I’m used to,” Aman, an Indian guy from Saskatchewan says.
What do you mean, I ask. The silence, the food?
“No, those were okay.” He takes a sip from his mug and slowly lays it back down onto the table. Aman started learning meditation in India decades ago, so the silence, food, and sittings were habitual, he explains, with a varying array of hand motions. “The food was actually quite nice,” he adds, eyebrows raised. It’s the meditation itself that was different.
In previous meditations, he’d been taught to use mantras, visualizations, or focus on a point on the forehead. Vipassana, however, calls for none of the sort. There is no guided narrator, and no visualization to help with the meditation. No relaxing music, no incense, no embellishments.
It is just you and your awareness, at its rawest, barest, level.
“Like an organic carrot straight from the soil,” he says, pretending to take a big bite of a big imaginary carrot. “It’s a very pure form of meditation. No fertilizer, nothing extra.”
Nothing extra — like mantras or narration, I ask.
“That’s right. No extras. They can help you focus, but might also change the meditation. People are afraid of GMOs and pesticides and this and that nowadays. Maybe there is change, maybe there is not. Who knows? But if you want to be sure, take out what is not needed, right? And you get exactly what you are supposed to. A carrot that is just a carrot,” he smiles. “Nothing more, nothing less. In Vipassana, at least.”
A carrot that is just a carrot, I repeat. Sounds like something the teacher would say.
Aman laughs, claps his hands above his head and bows. In self-satire, I think. So I laugh too. Hoping it was indeed self-satire, and that I did not just disrespect his humble namaste.
Then what about your other meditations, I ask. Are you going to stop doing them, if they’re less pure?
He looks at his mug, as if something interesting is happening to the tea. “I don’t think so,” he says. “They’re different. Narration, visualization, mantras — extra variables, sure. Not as pure as Vipassana, but sometimes you don’t need it so pure. They have a different purpose.”
I nod and take a sip of tea, waiting for him to continue.
“For example, meditations for anxiety, meditations to improve focus, or to relax. Guided meditations, visual meditations, mantras, even counting breaths. They are like different exercises that give different benefits. Or train different muscles, if you will. Vipassana might give these benefits too, but not as its main purpose. The other meditations are more tailored to those benefits. Does that make sense?”
Yes, I say.
“Vipassana is simple,” Aman breathes a sigh, in the same way when someone overcooks their food. “But it is difficult. Adding extra variables can help narrow down what to look for. Look at this part of the dish, look at that part of the dish. It is more specific. And being specific can be very helpful. Helps you focus better. But in Vipassana, there is nowhere specific to look. The dish is given to you, and it is on you to ask yourself, what do you see?
“In any case,” he opens his hands to me, as if delivering a parcel, “it’s the first time I experienced a meditation like this. Almost like exercising for the very first time. Or doing a pullup for the very first time. You know?”
I know. Pullups are not easy, I say.
“Not easy, not easy. And all this time I had been taught to do it in my own way. I jump a little, kick my legs, swing up, and it works. It works for me, I can do a pullup like that. For 30 years, David, I did pullups like that.
“But here in Vipassana, I am told no jumping, no kicking! No swinging! I have to do it just hanging like this, can you believe it?” He raises his hands high in the air, as if holding up an advertising banner. “Like this! And to be honest, it was quite difficult. A big change for me.”
I see. It can be harder to relearn something in a different way than to learn it from scratch.
“Yes, exactly. It means you have to give up some of your way, at least, temporarily. So you have room for the new way.” Aman pauses, takes his mug in his hands, and lays it back down. “To be honest, in the beginning, I thought, I am just trying this out. With an open mind, of course. But at the end of the day, if my way works for me, then perhaps it’s enough for me. There’s no need to change.
“But a few days in, I realized, if you don’t swing or kick, this new pullup is training different kinds of muscles. Ones that I was not using before. Maybe subtler muscles,” he says, with a strong ‘T’, “not only of strength, or power, but ones that are just as important.”
Interesting — maybe because you are now using the full range of motion.
“Full range of motion, as in, training all the muscles?”
Something like that. You are training all the muscles that the exercise means to train.
“That’s a way to put it. You could say Vipassana is using the full range of motion,” he says with a quick pause. “In fact, in these past few days, I would often think a similar thought. Maybe Vipassana is meaning to train everything.”
Vipassana is trying to train everything?
“Yes. In the way you said, full range of motion. This meditation is very simple. It is just observing physical sensations. Put a dish of sensations under a microscope, and observe them, right?”
Right, I say, wondering where he is going with the changing metaphors.
“A big dish, perhaps, I don’t know. But a dish nonetheless. What you get is what you get. That’s all. You see what I mean?”
I think so, I say. A carrot that is just a carrot. Vipassana is just the dish and sensations, and nothing else.
“Exactly, exactly. And you, the observer, of course. But nothing else. Meaning, to do the exercise properly is perhaps, to observe the entire dish. Each and every part. Otherwise, it is not Vipassana.”
You don’t want to ignore any parts of the dish.
“Right. And you don’t want to get too attached to any part of the dish, either. No part of the dish is favoured or unseen, and every part of the muscle is being trained, as they are meant to be trained. Your muscle of meditation, muscle of awareness, in its full range of motion. A pullup just like this.”
What you’re saying is, Vipassana is exercising every part of the awareness.
“That’s what I think. Down to the subtler awareness. The subtler muscles. Maybe because you and I are not used to using them.”
I nod again and take another sip from my mug. Now that the tea has cooled, a longer sip than usual. Maybe because you and I are not used to using them, he said. Why’s that?
It’s an interesting way to understand Vipassana. I’m not sure if we are just purely intellectualizing the practice, but it does make me question my own approach to meditation, at a more fundamental level. After all, Aman seems to be tackling a question of the purpose of what exactly it is we are trying to do. And perhaps a bit of analytic discussion pairs well with 10 days of experiential practice. I still don’t completely understand what he means by subtler awareness, but I decide not to ask.
The sound of mugs lifting off and on the table fill our silence, and the voices of other students in the background now seem more natural. Like a painting on the wall that has always been there. I’m not completely sure what I was feeling before.
“Anyway,” Aman adds, as if reading my mind, “maybe it’s not important to think so much.”
Maybe not, I agree. But I see what you mean. In Vipassana, you’re trying to see everything.
“You’re trying to see everything,” he nods. “The entire dish. As clearly as possible.”
You’re trying to see everything, I repeat to myself, once again. That’s a big challenge. After all, how big is a dish that holds everything?
At any rate, Aman is right — no need to think so much. At least for now, maybe it’s not necessary that everything is seen at once, but more that everything is observable. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is being ignored. I suppose in that way, the lens doesn’t give a warped view of reality. Every part of the dish is in the field of view. And over time, surely it will become a bit clearer, and “seeing everything” might get a bit easier.
While we shared certain sentiments, Aman’s experience turned out to be quite different from mine. How he approached each session, how he felt from day to day. How he interpreted some of the lessons. In certain moments, I had to question whether or not we had really taken the same course.
I guess that’s not totally unexpected. Everyone tastes things slightly differently, after all. In different sequences, with different nuances, and with different adjectives. Everyone’s experience is different, and our conclusions are our own.
A trite statement, of course. One you could easily throw around in any type of situation, and would bounce around flippantly, pretending to fit itself into the scene, never really planting anywhere. After a while, it might then just roll off into the distance without anyone noticing, never to be remembered again. Though as if bounced straight into my hands, right now, it seems to bear a different weight than usual.
Come to think of it, I’ve never been great at separating others’ experiences from my own. Expectations always seem to play with my experiences, consciously or unconsciously. Whenever I hear about someone else’s experience or opinion, it hangs somewhere, like a dim light in the corner of my mind. I can’t seem to turn it off. If someone tells me a wine tastes like boogers, then unfortunately I am now tasting booger tinted wine.
Looking back, I’m kind of glad I came into this blind. Less lights in the corner, colour tints or weird shadows. Carrots that are just carrots, and the taste of wine sans booger. In some sense, a chance to see the dish as clear as possible. You only get to experience a novelty once, so it’s nice to experience it as it is, and have some surprises along the way.
But if you haven’t done Vipassana and want to, you might blame me for taking the blind experience opportunity away from you. I don’t really have a good response to this, so I hope you either don’t mind a few spoilers, or you can filter away my experience and thoughts from your own. And I guess, being aware of those biases is almost as effective as eliminating them. Which is what Vipassana is about anyway. Seeing things as they are.
Written verbatim on the Vipassana website: truth and insight — to become fully liberated and levitate into the sky.
Other students ask if I will continue to practice, now that the retreat has ended. I’ll try, I say. I think I understand the technique, and I’m aware of the practical benefits. Truth and insight might still be a bit abstract, but I can see how meditation helps in the day-to-day. Patience and discipline. Sharpened focus, control of emotions, and self awareness. Healthier habits (mental and physical), and better sleep. Helping heal psychosomatic and chronic pains. Improving relationships with people, of past, present, and future. And a deeper understanding of other things in general. What things, I don’t really know yet; maybe these are part of insight. I guess they come in different ways for different people. And they take time to surface.
But even within these 10 days, I’ve definitely felt some kind of immediate change. A change I can’t yet tangibly see, but can tangibly feel, like the sunlight on my skin. It’s subtle, but very here.
