My Vipassana Journey

What an absolute trip. After many years of hearing about Vipassana I really didn’t expect what I got. I had been advised not to have any expectations, but that didn’t help either. A 10-day Vipassana experience seems to have a way of chewing you up and spitting you out the other side, albeit a bit shinier, clearer, and with a whole new understanding of what pain is and how to control it - both physical and mental (or at least that’s what happened in my experience). The following is a bit of a run down of my journey, written in the days after I was set free. 

Despite being someone who has a keen interest in the field, I had known very little about Vipassana before I went in. What I did know was that “vipassana” (with a little v) means “insight” or “seeing clearly” in Pali, and refers to meditations that create insight about the true nature of things. Vipassana meditations illuminate, and have an overarching broad, open focus, which allows insights to arise. They sit on the other end of the meditation spectrum from samadhi practices - techniques that are about concentration and generally have a narrow, pin-pointed focus. To be honest I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about how this one school of meditation had kind of hijacked the word “vipassana” and given it a capital V to refer to just what they did, and not the whole array of insight meditations. But I knew it was about insight, ten days of silence, a very full meditation program and strict adherence to the rules. 

On arrival at Dhamma Medini (if you choose the Auckland centre, the only one in New Zealand) you are presented with a reasonably large complex consisting of a large, two storey central building (mostly the kitchen, dining areas and bathrooms), and several units of single room complexes strung out up and down the small valley in which the centre sits. It was nothing flash but definitely not ramshackle either. My first shock was how many people were milling about being checked in. During one particularly uninspiring meditation session I counted eighty-something people in the hall - it was a really big retreat. Something like 35 men and 50 women, numbers I had not witnessed before in a New Zealand setting. The popularity of the courses is undeniable. Also interesting to me, there were a lot of young faces, another thing that is not common in New Zealand meditation circles, at least where I have practiced. 

After unloading my bags to the deck I headed upstairs for registration. It was like you were arriving at a sports day registration, professional and well executed. I checked in and was told I was in room 20 on the male side (men and women are separated of course). Everyone gets their own room except for about six people who were camping. The rooms are small and simple and all you need when all you'll be doing for the next ten days is meditating. I unpacked and headed to the common area where no one on the men’s side was quite clear whether the silence had started yet. The guys at my table were all silent, some others were chatting quietly.

I arrived at about 5pm and dinner was at 6pm. This was followed by an introductory chat where the strict rules were again explained. The big one is ten days of “noble silence”. This means no communicating with other participants in any way. No talking, no gesturing, no handing notes, no eye to eye contact or any other forms of communication. It is made clear though that the course management team are there to talk to at any time 24/7 (Ahmed was the men’s manager), and the assistant teachers (ATs) are available during set times to talk about the meditation technique and adjoining theory, so it’s not a complete vow of silence for ten days. The other main rules are:

• To adhere to the five precepts you take on the first night:

  • No killing or causing suffering to any being.

  • No stealing or taking what isn’t given.

  • Abstain from sexual misconduct (usually taken as no sexual activity of any kind).

  • Abstain from lying and false speech 

  • Abstain from all intoxicants (including tobacco, alcohol, and recreational drugs).

• You agree to adhere to the strict schedule, which runs from 4:00am to 9:00pm daily, the first meditation being 4:30 to 6:30am. 

• Maintain separation of genders (except for in the meditation hall)

• Abstain from physical contact

• No reading, writing or electronics

• You commit to stay for the full duration of the course. 

After the introductory talk they march you up into the meditation hall where you get allocated your one square metre for the next ten days, along with a meditation mat, cushion and blanket. This is your lot for the first session on the night of Day 0, the next day you are allowed to bring in as many extra cushions and blankets as you like to help you be comfortable. 

It’s here in the meditation hall on the evening of Day 0 that you’re introduced to S. N. Goenka, the teacher. Goenka, a very unassuming looking Indian fellow, is the head teacher for the whole Vipassana tradition, and he passed away in 2013. Luckily, during his life there were recordings made of him delivering the course. These videos are played to students each night, they are the dhamma talks (teachings) that everyone looks forward to. On the retreat they are akin to a movie night each night, which breaks up the arduous meditation schedule. Goenka, it turns out, is quite charismatic and very charming. He’s not your typical Indian guru (and he jokes about that too) and his talks each night were clear, concise, enlightening and engaging. You couldn’t ask for much more in your dhamma talks and I really enjoyed listening to him each night. There was one thing that rubbed me the wrong way, but more on that soon. 

Supporting the charming Mr. Goenka were some real, live people, the assistant teachers, one for the men (I'm going to call him Trevor, or Trevs, interchangeably) and one for the women (name unknown by me). The ATs perched themselves up on the dias at the front of the hall and kept themselves separate from the students except when meditating and during question sessions. They even had their own entrance to the meditation hall. To be honest I thought from Day 0 the ATs had a bit of a “hollier than thou” thing going on. They had white cushions and blankets compared to the plebs grey or blue ones and they perched up there at the front, elevated from everyone else, in a place that I’ve usually seen reserved for a Buddha figure. They just didn’t seem that approachable. 

So that’s how it’s all set up. Now how it unfolded for me… 

Day 1: Even though you’re allowed to do it in your room if you like, I had agreed to myself that I’d be in the meditation hall for the whole of the first session on Day 1 from 4:30 to 6:30am. I quickly found out that there is very little instruction during these sessions and actually, you can take them as you please. You don’t have to sit continuously for two hours and you can get up and go out of the hall if you like to take a break etc, but essentially the time is there for you to practice. Later on I got into the habit of doing about 40 min stretches of meditation, interspersed with bathroom and stretching breaks. 

Now of course within the first hour of session one on Day 1 the other thing I took in with me to the course (aside from those allowed items) rears its ugly head: my aversion to sitting on the floor for long stretches of meditation. When I meditate at home I use back support, and I know that being uncomfortable generally leads to less pleasant and shallower meditations. Every teacher I’ve ever had would agree that if you’re extremely uncomfortable you probably aren’t meditating very well. Even Therevadan monks (think yellow robes and shaved heads) who I have practiced with have said that if the pain comes up three separate times, it’s time to adjust your position. So I really didn’t want to sit on the floor the whole time, I wanted to have good meditations. I had some ideas in my mind about how I wasn’t up for any self-inflicted pain, so by breakfast on Day 1 I was angry and thinking about walking out. 

By the end of the 9:00-11:00am session I was furious and I asked the course management for a chair. Now I thought it would simply be a practical question of where the chair was to come from, however, I was told I had to seek permission from Trevor, and that request would have to wait for the right time of day - wtf? When I finally got to Trevor he asked if I had an injury, I said no. He didn’t look very accommodating and we compromised on a back rest - a sort of chair on the floor with a base that the meditation cushion sits on, and a back panel positioned vertically to rest your back on. Trevor was worried I wouldn’t be able to go as deep if I was on a chair. There is an understanding in some meditation circles that being on the ground allows one to go deeper by having better grounding and alignment of the spine. Personally, I’m of the belief that not sitting on chairs is an artifact of chairs not being very common in ancient Asia. For us modern westerners it’s just really hard work. At least those were my beliefs at that point in my life. I gratefully accepted the backrest and went back to my frustration. 

Days 2 and 3: My back rest and I continued to meditate with some comfort and increasing discomfort. Yes OK, my back had more support, but my legs were still pretzelled up on the floor and going dead by about the 40 minute mark. Around me on the floor there was also noticeable discomfort. On a journey like this you slowly get to know the people that are sitting around you. It's quite strange in a way you have almost zero contact with these people, but over the course of ten days of sitting together you feel you really get to know one another. You start to feel what they’re going through as well and it’s like you become friends with them without even knowing them. The person sitting in front of me was an Argentinian guy called Gustavo (I knew this from his name tag on the table we sat at - yes, you have a dedicated spot for all meals as well). I nicknamed him Los Taurus, The Bull, for two reasons. During the first few days Los Taurus was having similar struggles to me in terms of his discomfort and at least a few each day he would inhale a huge breath and exhale it like a bull about to charge. It revealed the intensity of his experience. The second reason was that in our little bit of free time each day it was a popular pastime to walk up and down the driveway. While exercise is not allowed, keeping the body lightly moving is. Los Taurus would charge up and down the driveway much faster than anyone else, hence the name seemed to fit (and obviously the South American thing meant it had to be Los Taurus and not The Bull). But it seemed a lot of people were in the same painful boat, I guess I was just more resistant (stubborn) than most. 

It was actually at the end of Day 3 that I had an experience that probably set me down a wrong path. We had been building a lot of concentration over days one to three - that's the point of those days - and it got to the end of day three and I felt like I should try and consolidate that concentration, to lock it in for the next day. Moving from a highly concentrated state and to a more open state with broader focus is a good way of letting things settle, so to speak. So at the end of Day 3 in order to consolidate what I had done, I shifted my focus from my concentration on my breath and to a state of open awareness. I immediately experienced what I would later learn was known in this tradition, as Bhanga.

Bhanga, we are taught on Day 9 is an experience where the entire contents of the body dissolve from the awareness - it’s an insight into the reality of the impermanence of an apparently solid and unchanging body. In my case, the entire contents of my body faded from perception and was replaced by empty, cosmological-like space. The boundary to my body was still there, the space had an edge, but there was nothing but space and some associated psychedelic colour inside my body - it was completely empty. It was similar to some experiences I’d had before, but more contained to the body. It was certainly a pretty heightened state, so I took this as a pretty good sign that one, the environment I was in and teachings we were receiving were conducive to good meditation, and two, that I was doing something right, and that open awareness was a key to the experience. Of course the problem that I planted in my mind was that we were trying to achieve something at all. I immediately formed an attachment to this state and spent several days trying to recreate it. This took me away from the technique as we were being taught it, I thought I had already figured it out. How I was wrong… 

Day 4:  Day 4 was set to be one of the moving days of the retreat. We had been practicing anapana (mindfulness of breathing) for three and a half days and it was in the afternoon of Day 4 that we were to learn the rarified Vipassana technique. We were all quite excited for something different. Our timetables told us that we had to check the board in the kitchen for a different schedule for Day 4, so a lot of us thought something quite different and exciting was going to happen, like we all got extensive interviews with the ATs or something like this. Turns out the only thing that had changed was a slight adjustment to the meditations schedule - the four hour afternoon session now went: one hour, two hours, one hour, instead of 1.5 hours, one hour, 1.5 hours. Wow! Amazing! Disappointment number one for the day.

The second disappointment came to me when we finally taught Vipassana in the afternoon. As it turns out the Vipassana technique is centered around a body scan and sensing the sensations of the body. As one runs their awareness through the body one is instructed to feel all the sensations, both gross and subtle, as they go. Critically, one is also advised to be scanning the body with a view of annica - impermanence. That is to say that one must appreciate that all of the sensations running throughout the body, both pleasant and unpleasant, are impermanent and will invariably change. The theory basically goes that the body’s sensations are the storehouse of our habit energies - the place where our karmic thoughts get recorded - and by simply feeling the body’s sensations equanimously (that is without any attachment to pleasant sensations or aversion to unpleasant sensations), and letting them run their course, one can rid the mind of built up habit energies (that is, the energy that keeps us locked in our karmic cycles). This releases us from suffering.

This theory is backed up by modern approaches that see the body as a store of information about the deepest parts of our mind. Dooks like Dr David Hawkins Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender, which is all about letting deep emotions run their course by feeling their body sensation counterpart, and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which posits that deep trauma is stored in the body, both come to mind. So why my disappointment with the promised release of suffering? Well Fletcher went on a long journey during those 10 days and the Fletcher who is able to write about this now is not the same one that turned up on Day 4 to get taught how to do a body scan. That Fletcher had an apparent aversion to body scans, he thought they were entry level, so sitting through the big reveal, which turned out to be the most tedious explanation of a body scan I’ve even been through, got me to a whole new level of worked up. 

It took over one and a half hours for Goenka to run us through our “body scan”, something I usually do in 20 minutes. What really frustrated me was that at every point on the body Goenka would list all the possible sensations we might experience, the list took several minutes each time: “Maybe heat, maybe cold, maybe pressure, maybe itching, maybe tingling, maybe numbness, maybe stiffness, maybe heaviness, maybe lightness, maybe throbbing, maybe pulsing, maybe vibrations, maybe prickling, maybe twitching, maybe a feeling of expansion, contraction, contraction, expansion, and maybe no feeling whatsoever”. There must be more I can’t remember, and trust me, he didn’t say them anywhere near as fast as you read them. It was irritating in the extreme and all the while I was thinking, “Why the f**k do I, a meditation teacher, need to listen to this guy teach me how to do a body scan!? Is this what I’ve given up ten days of my life for!?”. Thinking back on it now it’s hard to believe I was so worked up. 

To top it all off we were given new instructions that during each of the one hour group sittings (of which there are three each day) we must now sit with “adhittana”, that is, strong determination. Strong determination meant no moving or opening our eyes for the entirety of the one hour sitting, or at least as long as we could with “strong determination”. By this stage I was getting to 30 minutes 40 minutes before I started dead legs and needed to move my body, so of course I was even more irate. I really felt like leaving. By the stage I was committed though, I was four days in, so I only had six full days to get through. Tomorrow was the halfway stage. So I made a determination to keep going, but some things had to change.  

Day 5: On Day 5 I finally got my chair. I thought f**k it, I'm not even going to ask the teacher. I had a chair and my room that I acquired from the extras in the dining room so that I could do my room meditations and comfort. (Perhaps somewhat ironically sometime on Day 2 or 3 I fell asleep meditating in the chair and woke up 50 minutes later with my neck stiffer than my mate with cerebral palsy, not being able to move - extreme discomfort.) I took this chair up into the meditation hall during the early morning session when Trevor and Ahmed weren’t present, and sat on it at the back of the room. I was in comfort, finally. I had a decent meditation. When it came to the 8:00-9:00am group sitting, Ahmed, as usual, went through the men's side of the hall to check everybody was present. I was watching as his eyes reached my mat and noticed that I wasn’t there. I got up out of my chair and walked over to him to quietly inform him that I'm now sitting in a chair at the back of the hall. A look of concern crystalised on his face. He told me once again I have to ask the teacher first and can I go and sit on the ground until the teacher grants permission. I was not impressed and I gave him what was perhaps the biggest eye roll that I've given anyone since I was an angry teenager and disgruntledly went to sit on the floor.

I was acting like a proper spoiled kid. Turns out Ahmed immediately went and spoke to Trevs and came back just as I had settled onto my cushions to tell me that he said I can sit on my chair now. Awesome, I thought, and went to take up my comfortable, upright position on my chair at the back of the hall. At the end of the session Ahmed found me and told me that Trevor would like to see me at the midday interviews. I was a little bit worried. I thought, oh no, I’m being the bad kid in the class and now the teacher wants to see me. What's he going to say?

Between the end of the 9:00-11:00am meditation sitting and the midday interviews there is an hour for lunch and resting. During this time I refined the argument that I would make to Trevs. This essentially came down to the fact that for the last four days we had been refining our awareness and concentration to subtler and subtler levels in order that we can perceive the most subtle bodily sensations. Then we had been given an instruction to sit without moving on the floor for an hour during which intense painful sensations dutifully arose. There seemed to me to be a huge contradiction between the instruction to feel more and more subtle layers of our own reality, and the intense gross sensations imposed on us by our teacher. These gross sensations will obviously overpower the subtle sensations. This made no sense to me, so I got a chair to assist with the directive I had been given by Trevs himself to feel the subtler sensations. My midday interview came with Trevs and I, no doubt eloquently, put forward my position. Trevs actually acknowledged that I had a good point. Then he gave me a very unsatisfactory answer that sensations come and go and that what I’m experiencing is the First Noble Truth, the existence of suffering. It will pass. That was all I got. He could tell I was unsatisfied. I embellished the fact that my knee was starting to become inflamed (which it was, slightly) and he allowed me to continue using my chair, and to swap between the ground and the chair as I pleased. I assured him I’d continue to persist with the hours of strong determination on the floor. 

What I didn't understand at the time is that we could actually use our pain as a tool in this meditation. The truth is that much of that pain is actually psychosomatic - we are creating it in our minds - and by controlling our minds we can actually control the pain. Vipassana is actually an exposition of how our mind and our body are one in the same thing. The mind-matter duality that we experience in our day to day lives is a fabrication. Mind and matter are one. The experience of this understanding, however, wouldn't come to me until much later on Day 8, and to be honest, I felt a pretty let down by Trev’s answer. I wish he had taken the time to explain this to me more thoroughly. It’s actually one of the central tenets of the whole course, and you would think a teacher would be able to explain it so that a student could understand it. For now though I could use a chair and I felt relieved. 

Days 6-8: On Days 6 to 8 I found myself in a bit of a rhythm, finally. The 4:00am gong would wake me up, and the 4:20am gong, signaling 10 minutes until meditation, would be my cue to go back to sleep. I would wake up again around 5:00am and would generally find myself in the meditation hall by around 5:15am. I had determined that after falling asleep on my chair earlier that week and after moving it up to the meditation hall, I would do almost all of the meditations in the hall itself. However, from 6:00am each morning for the last half hour of the session, our friend Mr Goenka really let loose on his chanting, which I hated. If there was one criticism I could make of Goenka it would be that his chanting was atrocious. I've heard quite a bit of Buddhist chanting in my time but nothing quite like that. He mumbled his words to the point of barely passable pronunciation. It was like a string of sputtered consonants followed by wisps of exhalation trying to pass off as incantation. He had this amazingly horrible way of tailing off the chants as well, kind of like when you squeeze the neck of a balloon and let the air out and right at the end the sound slows, deepens and tapers out into almost nothing. All the energy fades out and you’re left no air, no sound, no satisfaction. I started to form the image in my mind (which appeared as a cartoon) of a chanting bull. The bull had been shot in the stomach and was bleeding to death and leering over it were two men with guns who were demanding that the bull use its dying breaths to chant these ancient verses. This was my image of Goenka each time he chanted. I know that sounds terribly disrespectful, but it’s the truth. So at 5:55am each morning I would extricate myself from the meditation and do the remaining half hour of meditation lying on my bed, by now being awake enough not to fall back asleep. 

At 6:30am the delight of breakfast presented itself (porridge, stewed fruit and toast, yum) and from after that to 8:00am we had free time. I would often walk up and down the driveway until my inflamed knee (which was genuinely inflamed) would encourage me to go down and lie down until the next session. From 8:00am to 9:00am was the group sitting where I no doubt disappointed Trevs and sat comfortably in my chair. From 9:00am to 11:00am was a two-hour session where I would mix between sitting on my chair, sitting on the floor and lying down and my room.  From 11:00am to 1:00pm was lunch and rest period - more walking and more laying down. This is usually when I would spend 20-30 minutes laying on a shakti mat a friend had leant me. For those who don’t know what a shakti mat is, Google it. It looks like some sort of torture device that you lay on - think modern day bed of nails - and it has an amazing way of relaxing the muscles in your back, I think by stimulating blood flow. 20 mins on the shakti mat and I was ready to go for another couple hours. Of course even sitting on a chair gets uncomfortable when you’re doing it for ten hours a day.  

From 1:00pm to 2:30pm was meditation as your own instruction and I would spend at least the first hour in the meditation hall. This after lunch session was actually when I had most of my more pleasant meditations because it was outside of the group sittings and there was no pressure to have a “good” meditation. Without that pressure, presence and awareness flowed and I could easily do a full hour in my chair and find some very deep concentration. From 2:30pm to 3:30pm was a group sitting - never in any good for me. 3:30pm to 5:00pm some additional instruction from Goenka then meditation at your own direction. I would usually sit in the hall until 4:30 or so and then kill some time until dinner time at 5:00pm.  

When I say dinner time I actually mean fruit and tea. There is no dinner as such like you usually have, just fruit and tea. For students who were on their second or more retreat (“old students”), it was tea only, no milk, no fruit. It was Day 6 or 7 when I reflected that this place really did feel like prison (another simile I had been toying with in my mind). Sometime in the middle of the day I caught myself thinking, “Gee, I'm really looking forward to my 5:00pm pear”. The reflection was that if all you’re looking forward to in your day is a pear at 5:00pm, then that really must be like prison. (To be fair to pears though it is pear season right now and those ones were particularly delicious.) 

6:00pm back in the meditation hall for one hour of strong determination. Again, never any good for me. 7:00pm and we all geared up for the discourse from Goenka, projected on the front wall of the meditation hall. As I mentioned, this discourse was another time of the day that everyone would look forward to. It was one to one and a quarter hours long and Goenka has a very beautiful way of delivering his dhamma (teaching). His talks are filled with stories and jokes and are easy to listen to. I also couldn't help but realise that the dhamma he was delivering was straight down the middle buddhist dhamma, nobody could argue with it, and it was delivered with great clarity and insight. To me, this clarity of message is the hallmark of good teaching. If somebody's bumbling around the edges with something that’s good evidence they haven't experienced what they’re talking about. With a couple of caveats around some of the quantum physics (yes, he goes there) Goenka is as clear as I’ve ever heard anyone teach before. Some of the dhamma in the middle few days was quite dense and even for myself, who has a pretty solid interest and grounding in this stuff, was hard to follow at times. But for the most part Goenka delivered really good, down the middle stuff that was easy to follow, or at least easy to get the important stuff from. His talks are all available freely online. Following the discourse was another 40 minute or so meditation (usually quite good for me) followed by bedtime at 9:00pm. 

On days six to eight I also started getting more of an appreciation of the people sitting around me. I was amazed by Alec, sitting directly to my right who I started to call The Moonwalker. Alec probably put more effort into his meditation and any of the other 80 something people present for those ten days. He was one of the people staying in a tent, and his was errected on the deck directly outside the dining room hall. I guess this meant he never really had much privacy and I think this contributed to him spending most of the meditation time - if not all of it - in the meditation hall. Whenever I arrived at the hall he was already there meditating, and whenever I left he was still there, going strong. If I ever decided to leave the hall early and noticed that Alec wasn’t right there on his mat next to mine, I would without doubt find him walking back up the path from the bathrooms. Further to this determined attitude towards his sitting meditation, Alec had taken it upon himself to walk meditatively anywhere he went on the retreat campus. While the rest of us would walk to our rooms, the dining hall, the bathrooms and up and down the driveway however we liked (some slow, some fast), Alec would be taking about one step every five to ten seconds anywhere he went, usually holding a cup of tea with eyes cast towards the ground. In the time that Los Taurus would do 20 laps of the drive, Alec would do one. I figured that he must be so concentrated, so high from meditation, that he was almost on the moon. This, with his walk speed granted him the name “The Moonwalker”. I was so impressed by his fortitude, but it also made me think, “Gee, he must be having some really deep experiences and I'm not, why is it that one person has such a different experience to another!?”. 

Another person who I came to nickname was Mr Smiley. Mr Smiley, I later confirmed was from Punjab in India. I had figured this earlier because his last name was Singh (I knew from his name tag on our table) and he had one of those brilliant Punjabi mustaches that curls up at the sides almost into a complete circle at the corners of the mouth. Mr Smiley had a very smiley disposition and even though we weren't allowed to communicate or look at other people, he was the one person who sometimes just shot you a little glance as he walked by. Every time I looked at him he was smiling, and every time he looked at me he was smiling. The smiles often came with a suspicion of an Indian head wobble as well. He was breaking the rules, but he was bringing joy. He was smiling so much there at one stage I held my hand up to shield my eyes from his as we walked past each other. We both let out a small chuckle and carried on. This was another one of those incredible situations where you become friends with someone before ever talking to them. On Day 10 when we could finally talk I was amazing to find out that his English was limited and we could barely converse. We had formed a closer relationship in the absence of language than was possible with it. 

It was somewhere around Day 7 where things really started to move for me. I had, for the whole week leading up to then, not been enjoying the retreat at all. The frustration was there around the pain in my body, the frustration was there around the intense schedule, and the frustration was there about Goenka’s horrible chanting. I knew, however, that these were small things. It was obvious to me now that the meditation had some power to it. Goenka parried it as the meditation that the Buddha used to become enlightened on that night 2,500 years ago under the Bhodi Tree, and I had been having some good experiences. I had had two meditations where I could really feel the upwelling of some pretty heavy stuff, all brought about by observing the physical sensations we’d been learning about. During one I even experienced (at least in part) the death of my parents. I found myself in my chair with my head cradled back, heart towards the sky, tears streaming down my cheeks, watching the dissolution of the emotional pain and associated physical sensations as I cried. I guessed I was holding on something to do with attachment to relationships, something I’ve certainly struggled with in the past. So it was clear to me that the meditation itself had some legs. It was also clear to me that the dhamma we were being taught was excellent - it was clear and concise and there was no arguing with it. It was further clear to me that thousands of people had been through this course and had positive and enlightening experiences. So the question then became, what else is going wrong here? Why am I still not liking this after a week of being in this routine, meditating for ten hours a day, listening to good dhamma talks AND in an environment that is perfectly conducive to good meditation? In the end I had to take a pretty hard look at myself and realise that I was the problem. It was my aversion to what was going on, my dislike for what I was experiencing that was actually getting in the way of my meditation. It wasn't to do with anything external, it was all internal. There was a pretty sobering realisation then and there that I was creating my own misery. I was creating my own suffering and creating barriers to enjoying, or even just taking some good learnings from this thing I had been looking forward to for so long. That evening I left the meditation hall feeling pretty depressed, the worst I had felt the whole time. This, it turns out, was a good thing, the penny was about to drop. My state of mind - beaten and succumbing - led me into a slightly different and slightly more open day 8. 

Days 8-10: The dhamma talk on Day 8 really changed things for me. There was something Goenka said that evening that struck me in a way it hadn’t before. That evening, the talk, combined with my state of mind from the night before, changed the whole retreat for me. This is when I realised I could control my own suffering, and it was all to do with the pain. Yes, there was some pain in my body from sitting in one position for so long, that is undeniable, no one could argue with that. But that wasn’t the whole story. Throughout the ten days you are encouraged to just sit and witness body sensations for what they are: sensations that come and go, always arising and always passing away, nothing even permanent. If you attach yourself to the sensation (be that attachment to pleasant sensation or aversion to unpleasant sensation) you will create suffering - unpleasant sensations will intensify and pleasant sensations, when they subside, will cause a feeling of loss. I realised I had actually brought to the retreat my expectation that I would feel pain if I was made to sit on a floor for long periods. When I was made to do exactly that, my aversion to it exacerbated the pain and even created new pain. It’s kind of like when you get a burn. If you focus on that burn it will intensify, you will feel it more. If you don’t focus on it, it will ease. So from Day 0, if I had any aversion to any unpleasant sensation from sitting on the floor I only ever managed to amplify the unpleasant sensation - my mind amplified it by not liking it. When this realisation struck I finally figured out that I could control my pain. 

In the session following that talk I sat back on the floor and waited for the pain to come forward. By taking an equanimous position (not attaching to the nice stuff or pushing away the uncomfortable stuff), by just observing the sensations for what they were, I was able to drastically reduce my physical pain. Not only that, but by just sitting and observing the pain without attachment, I was able to start undoing all those habit energies that kept me locked in the cycle of aversion to pain. All of the thought processes I have pertaining to the idea that I don’t like pain, or even more, all of the thought processes I have that I am only OK in comfortable situations - and I mean comfortable physically and mentally - slowly started to evaporate. This is the idea of Vipassana - feel the physical in the body and by that process you can rewrite the mental. I have no doubt that I am more OK with being uncomfortable (physically and mentally) now, than I was when I entered the retreat.  

So I was back on the floor, and back with the boys, feeling the camaraderie that comes with all sitting there in pain together for so many days. From there on I did almost all the meditations on the floor and embraced the pain when it came. The pain was a teacher and it was a healer. And as if I hadn’t yet gotten the picture, the last meditation on Day 10 really hit it home. I was sitting there on the mat in the last hour of strong determination and my whole left leg was in searing pain. It was both dead and feeling like it wanted to explode, but I was determined, it was the last sitting after all. Of course during the hour you sometimes wonder how much time has passed. I almost always had my watch on the floor in front of me but I learnt that as soon as I reached for it to check the time, the meditation was over for me. The movement just to reach down and check it would trigger all the pain to intensify. There’s the lesson again: Aversion to the pain I’m feeling leads to checking the time - I want out - then the movement intensifies the pain. The aversion has intensified the pain. I had been having a really good session and even though I was in intense pain, I had managed to be very equanimous about it, I hadn’t let it get the better of me, I had risen above. I had even managed at one point to turn the pain into a pleasant sensation, all by being equanimous to it. It got to the point though where I caved, I checked my watch. I had determined that if it was just five or ten minutes to go I would push through and keep going, but it was only 6:40pm, 20 minutes to go. I went to unfold my legs and fully expected, as usual, that I would have to help them out with my hands - they were completely dead and numb of course. Following that the usual is that it takes at least a five minutes of pins and needles for any feeling and voluntary movement to return. So I was shocked that within 20 seconds all the pain had completely evaporated. It was like I hadn’t been sitting with my legs folded for 40 minutes at all. And it struck me, I was creating all that pain in my head! What the actual f**k? How is it that we can create, through the mind, such intense and revolting physical pain? Boom, lesson learnt, twice.      

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Vipassana, at the level of practice, is all about not reacting to physical sensations, pleasant or unpleasant. It’s about letting sensations flow and understanding at the deepest level that all things are impermanent - good things come and go, bad things come and go. At a deeper, spiritual level it’s about a direct path to enlightenment. One of the things that Goenka drives home through his discourses is that the thing that the Buddha realised - the one insight that was different to all those aesetics who had gone before him - was that it is deep awareness of what is happening within the confines of the body that is truly liberating. The body is the record keeper and gate keeper. When you understand experientially that you can let go of attachment and aversion to the most subtle of bodily sensation, you have the opportunity to tear out the roots of the associated habitual thoughts (or beliefs, values, emotions etc - any mental formation, actually) that keep you in the cycles of suffering. The shedding of these thoughts is the path to enlightenment. 

Day 10 finally rolls around and at 10am you’re allowed to talk again. You could see all us guys were very excited to be able to share our experiences with one another. It’s an experience like no other, going through ten days of silence with this group of people you don’t know from a bar of soap and coming out the other side as friends. We shared stories and I made sure to tell them about the nicknames I’d made up. There was a real sense of deep camaraderie. I guess that’s inevitable when you’ve been sitting within a metre of each other as you’re going through some of your deepest stuff, you just pick up on that energy. And by this time, of course, I was a Vipassana convert. I had finally cracked it in those last few days and I even found out that many of the guys had not had such enlightening experiences as me. And here’s me thinking I was behind the eightball the whole time. It’s amazing how your mind can play tricks on you, and I haven’t even mentioned the “no-self” stuff yet.  

Would I recommend a 10-day Vipassana retreat? Absolutely. But know that you’re going to go through one of the most testing experiences of your life. I found it amazing that one of the guys had basically never meditated before arriving, what an introduction. I do wish I had a bit more preparation (especially in terms of practicing concentration practices in the months leading up to the retreat) and that I knew a bit more about what I was in for (providing this knowledge has been some of the motivation for writing this piece). I guess in some sense there is no way of describing a general Vipassana journey though, everyone has their own experience. The one person I’ve talked to in depth about my time since leaving had an entirely different experience to me, they loved it the whole time and continued meditating for five to six hours a day post-release. So in some ways it’s good to have no expectations, but in some ways it’s good to expect that it’s f**king difficult, and horrible, and torturous and like a self-imposed mental prison. That said, no one I have talked to on my course or outside in the free world has told me they regretted it. So put your big boy or girl pants on and get into it. You’ll 100% be a better person for it in the end. 

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Some tips on what to take:

• I would recommend a clock that you only have to open your eyes to check. Every time I wanted to check the time I had to reach down to my watch to pick it up, thereby disturbing the position I was in. Next time I would take a clock that faces upwards and is readable from a sitting position without moving. I would recommend taking a clock though. 

• A shakti mat! Mine was a real life saver and gave my back a new lease on life everytime I used it. 

• If you have your own favourite meditation equipment at home definitely take it. 

• I would break the rules next time and take a writing book. As long as it’s introspective journaling about the practice and your experience I can’t see how that would hurt. 

• I would probably also break the rules next time and take stacks of chocolate and treats for those darker moments (ie, every night)