I turn my phone on airplane mode and place it in the glove compartment. I’m nervous. Why am I so nervous? My dad hands me my bags. I hug him. “See you in 10 days?” I say it like a question. He looks at me amusingly, a slight unease there too. “You’re going to be fine,” he says assuredly, whether it’s to assure him or me, I’m not sure.
“So why are you here?” The girl across from me at the dinner table asks. She’s wearing black-rimmed glasses, and her dark hair is tied back tightly in a ponytail. Her eyes are wide and searching. She seems to be about my age.
“Um, I don’t really know?” I answer truthfully. I arrived home from the midst of the tree-planting season two days ago, leaving behind financial security and a plethora of friends and familiarities. Why was I here? All of a sudden, among strangers, about to take a vow of silence and meditate for 10 hours every day for the next 10 days. The absurdity makes me want to laugh out loud suddenly. The realization that I have no idea what I am getting myself into settles deep into my bones. Wait, hold up here, what was I doing? Everything is all fun and games until you’re actually doing the thing you said you were going to do. I don’t even know what Vipassana is?! And why is it free? Was I about to become indoctrinated into a cult or religion? Anxiety curls itself like a genie around my stomach.
“Well, you’re really lucky to be here,” she responds, cutting through my nervous thoughts, her warm smile comforting me more than she could know.
About fourteen women are sitting around me. Ten are new students, and three of them are returning. One woman said that this was her seventh time. Seventh?! They separate the men and women during the 10 days. The only time we are in the same vicinity is in the meditation hall, where, as you might have guessed, we all meditate.
There is a diverse range of ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. An anticipatory, nervous, and excited energy buzzes around us as we eat our light dinner of salad, rice, and tofu. We’re in our last moments of conversation, and yet, chatter comes in fragments and quiet questions. People’s minds are clearly elsewhere, perhaps like mine, wondering what the hell they had gotten themselves into.
After dinner, I go to my room. There’s no window… Well, there goes another surge of stress. I tell myself it’s fine, who even needs a window when you’re eyes are closed all day meditating, right?
The room is small, simple, and clean. There’s a bed, a lamp, and a broken alarm clock. I fold my three sweaters, three shirts, and three pants on the shelf. I put my toothbrush, toothpaste, and moisturizer on my bedside table. I have no books, no journals, no pens, no phone, no computer, no trinkets. Who am I without these things? Who am I if I’m not a writer, a reader, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a traveller, a music lover, a collector of pens, a collector of bookmarks, postcards, rocks and shells? I wonder this to myself as I lie on my bed and stare at the white ceiling. Who am I with no one perceiving me, or talking to me, or even smiling or frowning at me? I think the overall question on my mind is: who the hell am I?!
They told us that we have no responsibilities here, other than to follow the instructions clearly laid out for us every day. The only thing I have to do for myself is shower, take myself on walks, and eat the food that is prepared for me. I feel like I’m in a play pen (or prison) for some hidden part of me, like a wild animal that is being coaxed out from the dark bushes.
A gong rings, startling me. Yes, a gong. When you hear a gong here, it means you need to either be in the dining room to eat or the meditation hall to meditate. Pretty simple. And yet, the fact that I have no phone to double-check the schedule or the time is throwing me off.
I let the manager know (the only person we’re allowed to speak to in case we need anything) that my alarm clock is broken. I guess I sound tense because she goes, “Keeping track is a big thing for you, isn’t it?” Ok ma’am, no need to read me like that. She goes to get me a working alarm clock.
We have our first meditation session that night. When we enter the meditation hall, we enter our vow of silence. They line us up outside the door. The students who have completed the most Vipassana courses are seated in the front, and the order proceeds from oldest to youngest thereafter. I’m the second to last in line. I smile at the girl behind me, and she whispers, “Good luck” as we enter the meditation hall. “You too,” I whisper back.
…
It’s impossible to speak about everything that happened during the next 10 days. One, it would take too long, and two, a lot of what happened and what I learned, I think, is best left for someone to experience themselves if they ever end up taking a course like this (which I believe everyone should at one point). But I feel a need to at least attempt to give this experience justice. Here we go!
What is Vipassana? The direct translation is to “see things as they really are”. It’s a way of “self-transformation through self-observation”. They explain to us that it “focuses on the deep interconnection between mind and body, which can be experienced directly by disciplined attention to the physical sensations that form the life of the body, and that continuously interconnect and condition the life of the mind.”
When they told us this in the beginning, I nodded in understanding, thinking I understood. Well, I didn’t. I thought I did, but everything changed once I experienced it. And to me, that is the crux, the breakthrough, the ‘aha’ moment. Experience. You’re not intellectualizing or philsophizing or experimenting; no one is telling you how you should feel, how you should act, or why you should be doing this or that. There is no mantra, no god or goddess, and no specific visions. You’re not even learning anything new. As you practice, and as you sit there, day after day, hour after hour, moment after moment, with just mind and body, your mind and body, you begin to understand.
The first few days are tough in the sense that your brain is all over the place. I found myself having flashbacks from the most random and bizarre dreams that ranged from when I was ten years old to last week. Or visions of some insane conjuring from deep in my subconscious. The things I was seeing were so absurd I found myself having to hold down the laughter at what the fuck my brain was doing. It was as if my mind was furtively trying to grasp at anything that could distract me. But by the fourth or fifth day, as I learned not to get frustrated with how fragmented my mind was, and gently redirected my attention back to the task at hand over and over again, things became quieter and quieter. Like a thunderstorm slowly moving further and further away. Of course, the images never completely went away, but it was remarkable how they decreased from hundreds a minute to just a handful.
…
Our schedule had us waking up at 4 am, meditating for 2 hours, breakfast at 6:30 am, meditating from 8-11 am, lunch from 11-1 pm, meditating from 1-5 pm, light snack and tea from 5-6 pm, meditating from 6-7 pm, discourse from 7-8:30 pm, then meditate from 9:30-9 pm.
A lot of people may wonder, “how the hell do you sit there for 10 hours a day?” Well, you just sort of… do? You really have no choice, and I think it’s best to think of it that way. To not allow yourself even the smallest connotation that you will leave before the 10 days are up. Promise yourself that if nothing else. And I think you’d be surprised at how time passes.
The first days, you’re basically training your brain to pick up on subtler and subtler sensations going on in your body. You start on a larger area and continuously narrow your attention to something smaller and smaller, until you’re spending an entire day meditating — 10 hours —picking up sensations on just the space above your upper lip and below your nostrils.
It isn’t until the fourth day that they teach you the full technique of Vipassana, as your brain has now been slowly trained to feel more subtly. Then from that day on, you’re starting from the top of your head and moving down your body, not leaving any area out, before you reach your toes. And you do that, again and again and again and again.
I thought the most challenging part would be dealing with boredom and what my brain would conjure up, or maybe an itch here or there that I would have to ignore. When really, I was very much busy figuring out how to observe and move through pain. Everyone experiences things differently. After the silent vow was over, some people spoke about how numb they felt, how they didn’t feel much, and how, with each passing day, they felt less and less intensity. Well, my experience was not that. I felt… a lot. And I don’t even want to say pain, because you begin to understand that it’s not pain, but just really, really intense sensations. As our teacher would say, unpleasant solid blocks. I remember one time thinking, “ok, so it may feel like my leg is being sawed off, but that’s ok, totally fine, just move through it Robin.”
In the first few days, you’re allowed to move when you want. The meditation hall during these initial days is filled with sounds of movement and shuffling as the minutes tick by. I remember on day three, when we were supposed to just focus on the sensations on our upper lip, and my knee started hurting, I thought to myself that I think I figured this technique out, it must be that if we just focus on one area of the body that wasn’t hurting, we should be able to tune out all other unpleasant sensations, and that we just get better and better at tuning out everything that didn’t feel good. I felt so good about myself, like “look at me! I figured it out, soon I won’t feel any unpleasant feelings!” NOPE. I soon learned, on the fourth day, as we were officially taught the full technique of Vipassana, that this is the opposite of what was about to happen.
As you move through the body, the entire body, you may come upon sensations both pleasant and unpleasant. You learn to observe in a detached way, so that you are neither craving nor feeling aversion to any sensation that you come across. On the fourth day, they also introduced these meditations, which occur three times a day, each lasting one hour, called the Sittings of Determination. Meaning, you better not move a muscle or Buddha will be disappointed. No no they didn’t say that, but my brain did. And so, now, not only was I incredibly determined not to move or open my eyes for an hour, I was being told to not only go past the unpleasant sensations in my body, but to go into them, to feel them, to equanimously observe them. And let me tell you, when 45 minutes is up and you have 15 minutes left, and your legs, back, or knee are screaming at you, you still don’t move an inch. Or people as stubborn as me don’t move an inch. In the beginning, I didn’t understand what the point of this was. Why feel so much discomfort when I didnt have to? Why put myself through this extreme pain? Why not move when I want, have a peaceful meditation, and get on with it. But I learned why, I experienced why, and maybe one day you will to!
The meditation hall grew quieter and quieter, with less shuffling, moving, coughing, and snoring (multiple people had started snoring on the first day). Although you weren’t communicating with anyone in the room, you could feel the progression, the deepening, the expanding. We were all sitting in complete silence, in our own worlds and bodies of deafening distractions and sensations, learning how to detach and observe. By detaching, I want to be clear that it’s not about numbing things out or learning not to feel; you’re detaching from reacting to the things you feel. And as you learn not to feel aversion towards the unpleasant sensations, you equally learn that it’s just as hard not to feel attached to the pleasant sensations. Because as your technique deepens, some people experience extreme sensations of euphoria, where your entire body can become waves of pleasant vibrations. When this happened to me, it felt like I entered the cavity of my heart. I know it sounds slightly insane. But I literally felt like I was inside my heart, or my heart had risen into my brain. I could feel every inch of my body, the surface and within, as waves rolled through me, as the beating of my heart pounded to a deafening beat. There was no end or beginning, no barrier between mind and body, all I was was billions of atoms vibrating, changing, evolving. And I felt it. All of it. And as I sat, silent and unmoving, all I could think about was how lucky I was to experience something like this.
…
I thought that a silent meditation would be an interesting experience, where maybe I could figure out some things/questions in my life. An opportunity to get off my phone and slow down. But slowly, inch by inch, I began to see that most of the questions, anxieties, and fears melted away. That everything… seemed not to matter so much. And what I was left with was the understanding, through experience, that everything is so much simpler, so much more vibrant, so much more magically logical than I could imagine.
When I spoke for the first time, I couldn’t stop smiling (even more than usual). Even though I didn’t necessarily know these people (barely even their faces, since we weren’t allowed to make eye contact), I felt a profound kinship with them, and it was intensely gratifying to finally be able to share the experience we had just all had. One woman said during one meditation that she was imagining what each of us did for work, and she said that she thought I was an “adventurer,” which made me smile. So I was being perceived even if I thought I wasn’t contributing anything to be perceived. Except, I guess that by just existing, who we are is constantly revealing itself with or without our permission. You may as well say fuck it and exist the way you want to then!
Annica. A term that our teacher repeats over and over. Impermanence. Everything, everything changes. Nothing is ever the same. Not one moment is ever the same as another. Our bodies, our minds, are different bodies, different minds, with every breath, with every moment. That pain you feel, that sadness, that suffering, will pass. That elation, that pleasantness, that euphoria, will pass. How do you live with that? How do you figure out who you are if nothing is ever the same? How do you continue to exist, to find meaning, knowing that it will all end, and then, all begin again?
…
When my parents picked me up on the morning of day 11, and I hugged them, and I felt their skin on my skin, and I felt the depth of what the touch of someone you love feels like, I couldn’t help but let tears well up in my eyes. When I first listened to music, I couldn’t believe the beauty of sound I had taken for granted. When I laughed, I could feel what laughter does to a body. The giggles filled every atom, moving like a ripple of golden light. When I looked at my phone for the first time, I could immediately sense both the craving and aversion move from my body and mind, and when I saw the news, the dread and sadness appeared in hallow caves throughout my chest and stomach These sensations are always there, we just aren’t fully conscious of them. But they’re there all the same. And once we can recognize how these sensations make us feel, it can become our choice in how we react to them. In what we do with what we feel. And what a beautiful and terrifying thing to learn that what we do with what we feel is a choice! A choice that, I believe, can dictate the trajectory of our lives.
This experience was hard. Probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It took my mind and body to a place it’s never been before. It showed me that the simplest thing you can think of doing, sitting and feeling, is perhaps the most profound thing a human can do. And it was a privilege, an absolute privilege to experience it, to have the time and resources and opportunity.
Nothing is ever complete, nothing is the end or the beginning, nothing is the answer, but what if we could gain a certain element of peace in our lives? An undertone of certainty that everything is going to be alright. What if instead of layering unhappiness and blame and misery on others, and therefor ourselves, we instead, looked inside. Maybe when things become simpler, more clearer on the inside, we are able to face this world with more resolution and kindness and peace.
Vipasssana; seeing things as they really are. And so who really am I? Well, I can only be nothing and everything. I’m a moving mass of bubbles, with a name given to me when I first entered this planet, Robin. Each atom of Robin is receiving and reacting to every little and big sensation that this mass of bubbles comes in contact with. I respectfully decline to cling to an identity, as if that is what is keeping me afloat, as if that is why I am here, why I am existing. With a smile on my face, I let go of the buoy, I’ll sink to the bottom. It’ll be scary at first, I’ll have to learn how to breath under water. But I have a feeling, that what I’ll find will be boundless expanses of peace and happiness. And not just mundane peace and happiness, but the type that clings to nothing but the certainty that everything will change. Time is forever moving, birth is behind me, death is infront of me, but what is here, right now, is life, my life. And what a beautiful thing that is!
Still have questions? Still want to know more? Then maybe that is the universe’s way of telling you something. Words can only do it so much justice, the experience is there though, waiting for you. How hard could it be, its only 10 days!
Thank you Robin for that beautiful piece…of you!
Beautifully written
Loved to read it. Such an interesting experience and very well written 🙂
Saudades