do a vipassana meditation retreat

For some reason there isn’t much information about the actual content of these 10-day courses. I’m going to give the content as I interpreted it… I didn’t always try to interpret the content literally, or even as they intended me to interpret it, because I’m lazy, and I’d probably get it wrong too. I just got back and have 10 days of thoughts to brain dump so hopefully this isn’t too nonsensical.

It took me a long time to wrap my head around a simple, easy-to-digest version of what was being taught. Goenka’s method of talking is full of comforting repetitions, careful warnings, protective disclaimers, strong metaphors, vibrant analogies, and abstract philosophies (even though he says repeatedly that there are none). It’s very difficult to figure out why you disagree with him sometimes… he’s anticipated most of the obvious objections with wiggly logic. Every five minutes or so my brain would react with “BUT!” and “WHAT?”… at times it bordered on being absolutely maddening. Sometimes he would provide clarification a couple days later that would satisfactorily unwind the complicated set of contradictions that had been created in a previous talk, and other times I just let them blow by without worrying about it. I tried to separate malicious and intentional contradictions (of which there were really none, in the end) from possible semantic or cultural differences… letting the latter through much more easily than the former. Here’s what I personally came away with, in my own heavily altered interpretations.

If you are unhappy, or, if you are unhappy sometimes, and think it’s a problem, Vipassana meditation has a very interesting approach to solving the problem that is based on pretty quick results and a unique approach that you probably haven’t tried before. It claims that people are unhappy for two superficial reasons: either they did not get what they want (missed cravings), or they got what they wanted and it either wasn’t enough or it eventually went away (aversions). This can apply to self-esteem, love, work, money, and general life.

The basic equation is: pain = suffering, and pleasure = suffering because it is never enough and will go away. I get hung up on this every time I contemplate the philosophies of Buddhism. Why can’t it be interpreted the other way around? Why can’t it be: pleasure = pleasure; suffering = relief and pleasure because it eventually passes away or is adapted to. I personally resolved this problem by deciding that suffering is only a problem if you think it is. If you feel like you suffer too much, then the suffering is a problem. If you don’t feel like you suffer too much, then it’s not as important to deal with it… but that doesn’t leave open the possibility that what you consider to be an acceptable amount of suffering could actually reduced a lot more if you wanted. Depends on what your threshold is. In any case, Vipassana is a treatment for suffering. If you don’t feel sick, you may not need the medicine.

Most religions state that in order to avoid getting attached to things, you need to either avoid those things, or learn not to like them. Two logical, but very difficult things to do. What Goenka (and Buddha) suggests is that there is a piece missing from this equation. Between yourself and any object in the real world is a physical sensation… a literal feeling that comes in through one of your senses. People like the taste and temperature of ice cream, not ice cream itself. People like the sound and vibrations of music, not the actual songs themselves. People like the way other people make them feel, not the people themselves. This last one is the one that I always get hung up on. Buddhism claims pretty confidently and without much debate that people who haven’t yet reached enlightenment can’t love other people. Most love requires a two-way relationship, right? That’s why it’s difficult to love people that don’t love you back… it ends up hurting you either directly, or indirectly. The suggestion is that people either love an idea of a person, or the idea of how the person feels about them, or the social implications of the relationship with the person, or the economic benefits, or something else that they will get back from the person, or the feelings of responsibility and self-image that you place in them, or the way they smell, or feel, or sound… people fall in love with the sensations a particular person creates in them more than the person themselves. It’s a tough one to untie. After thinking about it for literally days, I decided that while I may not fully believe in the entire truth of this statement, it is at least partially true. People that I like and love ALSO generally tend to make me feel good. If someone I love continually makes me feel bad and makes me suffer… it is possible to fall out of love. I probably don’t have any relationships of unconditional love… if a person completely changes, it’s possible to imagine not loving them in the same way anymore.

The other point stressed pretty much all the time is that everything is always changing. Can you love a thing that is constantly different than it was before? If everything is changing, including yourself, how can one thing constantly connect two things?

Both the intermediate step of sensation between you and the outside objects, and the fact that everything is going to change, are philosophical questions that are directly “experienced” with this meditation. By watching the body you come to know that sensations on the body will arise, and then pass away, arise, then pass away. Within the framework of your own body is a microcosm for the outside world. The difference is that you have a firsthand experience of your own body, and can feel things happening within it that you can’t feel outside of your body. So it is a good classroom for learning about the universe. By classifying and observing sensation in your own body, you can literally feel the “universal law of nature” in progress. You can feel how sensations on the body create and are magnified by desires in the mind, and how those sensations change meaninglessly from moment to moment, changing the mind meaninglessly from moment to moment. If you pay attention to pain and send anger at it, it becomes more painful, whereas if you pay attention to pain and simply observe it, it becomes more like a sound than a pain, and is not as powerful. Responding to a sensation magnifies is, which is why anger is often met with anger.

What ends up happening is that you watch your body for sensations and train yourself to act towards these sensations with equanimity: neither feeling positive towards them nor negative towards them. Pleasurable tingling sensations and painful cramps will both come and go. By meditating in this way, your brain trains itself on a subconscious level to inject a new fork into the regular habitual path of feeling and immediately reacting. The new path moves the feeling from going immediately into reaction to instead go immediately into observation. The phrases “think before you act,” “watch your temper,” and “look before you cross” come to mind but are not quite right. Like hypnosis, it seems like you’re making changes on a level below your normal awareness, because you’re getting these sensations only through extreme attention. If you train yourself to respond on that subconscious level, after a long while you may begin to start responding to all sensations with the same realization that it too will change, and that it’s better to watch them before you react.

This, I thought, was a lot different from ceasing all desire (the typical Buddhist summary). After all, desire and strong determination are pretty much the same thing. One is intentional, I suppose, and this is why we should observe our sensations so that we know what we find pleasurable and what we find painful, and don’t let them make us react immediately with wanting more, or wanting less, but with enjoying the sensation, appreciating it for what it is at the present moment, and handling it more calmly. Or something like that. The phrases “appreciate it for what it is”, and “enjoy it while it lasts” come to mind. It is possible to enjoy a sunrise without craving more and more sunrises. You wouldn’t want the entire day to be a constant state of sunrise. Part of the enjoyment of it is that it is temporary, it brings you to the present moment, arises, and then the moment passes and you go on your way. I think appreciating people is much the same. I enjoyed the company of the fellow meditators on the 10th day, but didn’t ask any of them for contact information. Short, personal relationships with people that you enjoy the company of are fine. I’m not sad to have left, and I don’t know if I want to go on another meditation retreat any time soon, but this one was interesting and I learned a lot. What if a sour personal interaction with someone was treated the same way… appreciated, observed, and let go.

That’s the general idea. Pay close attention to sensations on your body, try to treat them equanimously, and use that training to hopefully help break the habit automatic reactions slowly in the real world. An ambitious but pretty simple idea at its core, I think. So simple that I think I sort of want to dress it up and make it more fancy, but the reality of it is that the experience is fancier and wackier than 900 channels of cable. I’m never going to be bored again because all I have to do is close my eyes and wander through my own madness. Wee!

There was a lot of other stuff, but much of it is soaked in religious semantics, Indian politics, and clever logic puzzles.

I went to this retreat with pretty much no background information. I was recommended it by a friend I trust, and that along with the rather extreme conditions of the course, and the hope for a 10-day adventure into madness, was enough for me to sign up. I did a cursory glance of the dhamma.org website and other informational sites but found very little about the actual contents of the course. In case you’re curious about what I experienced at this particular center (in Onalaska, Washington), here are the details:

The setting: Small plot of land between Portland and Seattle with dorms to fit about 80 people, a small dining area, a walking area for boys, a walking area for girls, and a meditation hall. Men and women were kept segregated at all times, though in the meditation hall everyone sat in one room, boys on the left, girls on the right (with separated entrances and exits). In our course, there were about 20 boys and 40 girls at the start… about about 5 or 6 left at some point. And old students would come and go for a few days here and there throughout the course. Lodging, food, and other simple needs are provided for free based on the donations of students who have taken the course. Breakfast was always oatmeal, boiled figs/apricots/raisins, and toast. Lunch was a simple vegetarian meal like pasta, rice and tofu, rice and soup, with fruit. Tea was tea.

The rules: Noble silence from 8pm two Wednesdays ago until around 10am yesterday (Sunday) morning. About 10.5 days in total. Noble silence means complete lack of communication, either through voice, eye contact, gestures, or any other kind of signaling. I didn’t notice anyone deliberately breaking the noble silence (though there were a few accidental words exchanged, like for example when I reached for the hand soap in the bathroom at the same time that someone else did). I hear that the level of silence varies by course. In addition to silence, you have to stay within the course boundaries (signs everywhere), you have to follow the Time Table (posted almost everywhere), obey the five precepts (no killing, lying, stealing, sexual misconduct (or, in this case, sex of any kind), or intoxicants), and all other posted rules. You also can’t practice any religious rites or rituals, including yoga, prayer, chanting, anything with beads, etc. Also, you give them all of your personal items: cellphone, wallet, keys, books, writing materials, medication, electronical items. You’ve got nothing for 10 days except for yourself, your own crazy head, and Goenka’s hypnotic voice; no other distractions.

The schedule: Two gongs were rung by the servers to announce important times during the day. The daily schedule was pretty much always the same:

4am: Wake up gong
4:30 – 6:30: Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30 – 8: Breakfast and rest
8 – 9: Group meditation in the hall
9 – 11: Morning instructions (which will tell you to meditate in the hall, or have the option to go back to your rooms to meditate if you like)
11 – 12: Lunch
12 – 1: Rest
1 – 2:30: Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30 – 3:30: Group meditation in the hall
3:30 – 5: Meditate in the hall or in your room
5 – 6: Tea
6 – 7: Group meditation in the hall
7 – 8:30: Video discourse in the meditation hall
8:30 – 9: Group meditation
9 – 10: Rest
10pm: Lights out

The meditation:Hm… lots of meditation you may notice. Yes, it adds up to 10 hours of meditation a day. The surprise for me is that this is a very unique form of meditation. Omms, visualization, and any other forms of mental distraction are discouraged. They spend the first 3 days teaching you a meditation that involves becoming aware of your breath, and the next 7 days delving into the particular kind of meditation that the course is named for. It’s not just sitting there and trying not to think of anything, which was sort of my expectation. Being peaceful and reflective, etc… totally not the case. It also has to be done sitting down (I was hoping to be able to walk around while meditating. “Nothing doing,” as Goenka would say.)

Vipassana meditation is all about conducting a progressively “piercing and penetrating” search of your own body, “part by part, piece by piece,” for sensation, pleasant and unpleasant. Starting first just below the nose, waiting for sensations of any kind (tingling, heat, itching sensations, pulsing, you’d be surprised how many different things you can feel), you sharpen the mind until you could feel sensation all along the skin all over your body, and finally inside the body as well. All these years I’ve been in this body and I never considered that simply putting your attention onto your skin for a long enough period of time will hyper sensitize it and bring to your conscious mind all of the feelings that are occuring there. Just as if you close your eyes and listen closely you’ll begin to hear all kinds of new sounds, each of our senses seems to have this ability to be strengthened and focused if exercised. It’s accompanied by chanting by S.N.Goenka (the course’s creator, and the person who has “returned” this meditation practice to India in the last 40 years with a bit of prophetic posing to make it seem more meaningful), and periodic instructions in his caaaaaalm and sooooothing voice. The teachers of the course actually did very little other than press play on the CD or DVD player, and answer questions twice a day if anyone had them. All of the instruction comes from audio and video tape… weird at first, but you learn that it is because this Goenka guy has a very charismatic and powerful presence (even though his singing got old real quick).

You get to experience first hand a personality that cult leaders are made of. Though I went back and forth on the verdict of whether or not Goenka was a cult leader himself, I couldn’t really find any ill will in his grand vision. A cult leader’s got to have some kind of evil scheme right? Make money, slaves, or political change occur? His vices may be a very clever form of ego that manages to wiggle its way through all of the anti-ego talk of Buddhism, and a desire to affect history… to be a part of the history of Buddha and his teachings.

Cult or not, this is definitely not idle meditation. It’s not relaxing at all. It’s not a method to erase yourself of thoughts. In their words, it’s a “deep surgical operation on the deepest levels of the mind”. It feels a lot like being hypnotized and getting beaten up at the same time. It feels like you could convince yourself that you were a dog if you really wanted to. At least it did for me. You walk out of there like a zombie, covered in tingling and soreness, and just want to lay in the sunny grass until the next gong rings. If they handed me an AK-47 and a picture of the Dalai Lama, who knows what might have happened. Instead, I watched ants on an ant hill pretty much non-stop during rest breaks.

After the 4th day, for three hours a day, during the group meditations, there is something called “Aditthana”, or Sittings of Strong Determination. During these three one hour sittings, you’re asked not to open your eyes, move your hands, or change your sitting position. This is what they say Buddha did for seven days under the Bo tree before attaining enlightenment. The numbness of sitting and having soreness first overwhelm you and then diminish away just adds to the intense nature of the meditation. By the end, sitting on my ass for an hour and a half without moving wasn’t difficult at all.

It was an incredibly surreal 10 days. Both in the sense of learning about myself and my mind, as well as adapting to the culture of silent community living and the weird meditation practice itself. My mood went soaringly high during certain days (days 2, 5, and 9 to be precise), and abysmally low during others (days 3, 7, and 8). Goenka warns early on that people are often tempted to leave on days 2 and 6… and later congratulates you on not having a weak will on days 3 and 7 (if you’re there). The inability to share or compare notes with anyone else during this time was an interesting constraint… it forced me to resolve these issues on my own without consulting the consensus. I think that this helped me both to avoid becoming too negative or too positive. It allowed my mood to swing up and down even higher as I didn’t have to remain consistent to anyone. I went from being determined to leave (putting on my running shoes and trying to avoid gun fire as I ran to the freeway), to deciding to stay, at least twice.

That’s an admittedly poor summary of the actual details of the course. Day 10 is different in that Noble Silence is broken and you can talk to others. People you’ve been in very close quarters with, and yet know nothing about (including their names), are suddenly close confidants whispering cons and talking loudly about pros. Nobody at my course had a completely positive review, nor a completely negative review. Each person seemed to be able to take something out of the course, and toss out the parts that didn’t work for them (which Goenka encourages one to do on the final discourse). I was expecting a sell on donating to the center, but other than a donation table almost nothing was mentioned about it.

I’ll review the actual contents of the meditation philosophy and practice in another post. If anyone has any questions about what this course is about, feel free to ask.

I chose the June 28th-July 9th trip in Onalaska, WA, sort of on a whim just now. I need to squeeze a hot air balloon trip in before this, if possible, and also get on the balloon for the Landmark Forum and whatever other wackiness that this year of experimentation brings forth. I’m excited about this one in particular, as it’s something I’ve wanted to do for years.