What I Learned from Vipassana, a Ten Day Silent Meditation Retreat
Part One
What did I learn from Vipassana? : An Executive Summary
That it is possible to experience joy, elation, ecstasy, from within. From becoming fully present through breath. That when the mind chatter dies down, you can discover what’s left - in my case, it’s poetry, songs, rhymes. That the feeling of utter, electric excitement, like going to bed the night before a trip to the amusement park as a child, can be accessed from inside. That the feeling I had in the back of my mind that I should stop relying on external sources to produce certain feelings and instead learn how to access them myself was right. That even though I’ve been in a funk for months now, there is hope for me to reconnect to my inner joy.
In life, everything you do, there are patterns repeated, whether or not you are conscious of them. Through meditation, you can observe these patterns and have the opportunity to work on improving yourself, which is both physical and mental work. For example - as I write this, I am pausing after every sentence or so to stare off into space as my mind falls down a tangent. This also happens in meditation. Physically, sitting down for extended periods of time brings out pain that are opportunities to practice remaining “equanimous”, a key term from Vipassana meaning remaining neutral. We are taught that all sensations are just temporary, so it is pointless to attach to them. Then, mentally, we go back to the breath/body scan/mantra/visualization/etc (depending on the style of meditation) to anchor our concentration.
S. N. Goenka, the teacher whose recordings are played at the 380 Vipassana centers throughout 94 countries, guides us to smile when we realize we have wandered off. Lovingly, he tells us to be curious, aware, attentive, and come back to the breath, without feeling anger or frustration - remaining equanimous. The number of times I have heard “come back to the breath” during yoga classes, inspirational speeches, etc is countless, yet, after this experience, these words mean something entirely different to me now. I feel I have learned a tool that I KNOW has brought me back to peace. By continuing to practice, I feel will improve my ability to reach equanimity faster and for longer periods of time. Eventually, it may even become my natural state. A life without suffering, misery, agitation, frustration… Enlightenment: the ultimate phase of meditation. Sounds pretty sweet to me.
Do I recommend signing up for a Vipassana course near you? Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt, I feel every single person would immensely benefit. This is one reason I want to share my experience, because I know this has changed my life dramatically for the better. That being said, from the first time I heard of Vipassana to actually attending, three years of contemplation passed. It is important to understand what you are getting yourself into, as it is a serious undertaking. By reading my insights, I hope whoever reads this learns something that brings you more peace, happiness, and love.
Link to find a Vipassana course near you: https://www.dhamma.org/en/courses/search
Vipassana Meditation
“Bhavatu sabba-mangalam - May all beings be happy!” - S. N. Goenka (30 January 1924, Mandalay, Myanmar aka Burma - 29 September 2013, Mumbai, India)
How did I hear about Vipassana? What was the application process like?
I first heard about Vipassana through my sibling Jesse, who told me about it when I ended my relationship in 2021. Even though Jesse had not done a course, they reckoned it would be helpful for navigating that big transformational period. My first application was for a course in Idaho in March 2022. Apart from the standard personal information, the online form asks for detailed information about your physical and mental health, substance use, and previous meditation and therapy experiences. They really want you to get specific, including dates, types, frequency, etc. As it was covid times, they required I had my own private vehicle in case I got sick. However, I was not willing to pay for a rental during that time, so I canceled my spot. The idea was put on the back burner, as I began working full time and honestly forgot about it.
Fast forwarding to my move to Australia, I remembered the idea and decided to apply to a center in Tasmania in February 2023. Again, I was accepted, but canceled because I didn’t feel like investing in going to the island just for the course, and it would have been too cold at that time to stay on and travel there. I kept it on my radar and applied to another center near where my brother and sister and law live in Queensland for December 2023. This one rejected me, saying because I disclosed that I had used magic mushrooms, the course teacher advised I should wait six months and reapply. This confused me, as there were a number of other substances I listed that felt more damaging than shrooms, yet, I could do nothing but wait. I did try to apply to another center, thinking another center’s teacher may have different rules, but they informed me they saw the other teacher’s decision and felt the same way. Whoops.
Finally, at the end of April 2024, I applied to Dhamma Pasada, a smaller center near Sydney, New South Wales, that was running a women’s only course at the end of May. At that moment, I had been traveling full time since February, and I was craving stability and direction. Sitting for ten days in meditation sounded like the perfect way to achieve that, so I prayed it would finally work out. You see, many centers fill up months in advance, as this is a free, donation-based course with limited spots. After two weeks, I was told the course was full but could put my name on a waiting list. I confirmed, crossing my fingers.
Four days later, I got another email saying a space had become available! The day I received this news was also the first day I began volunteering at the Krishna Village in Eungella, NSW. My commitment was to be there for four weeks, so it meant I would have to cut my volunteering short in order to attend. Thankfully, I asked the volunteer coordinator if I could go and then come back and was told yes. The location of the Vipassana center wasn’t the most convenient, as I was now a nine hours drive north of Sydney, so I decided to leave my car at the village for friends to use while I was away and book a train back down the coast.
Vipassana: Days Zero to Four
My ten days at the Dhamma Pasada Vipassana Meditation Center in Lower Portland, New South Wales (about an hour and a half’s drive out from Sydney in the mountains) was spent in almost total silence, avoiding eye contact and physical touch, with twenty five female students, one teacher, one site manager, and a few servers. Going in, I did not have any expectations, and had tried my best to know the least about what was in store. I did set the intentions to explore and become acquainted with my inner self, as well as reconnect with my inner joy. However, I have to say that nothing you can hear or expect can prepare you for the reality of the course. Yes, it was painful - bordering torturous at times. I can definitely see how some people give up and leave the course early - it was actually nice I didn’t have my car with me, because I couldn’t even entertain the idea of packing up and leaving (there’s a Vipassana center-specific rideshare website where I found another student who gave three of us rides there).
Above all, it was absolutely transformational. I will share some stories and lessons to provide a peek into the reality of surrendering myself to a highly structured, quite extreme environment in the name of self development. Oh, what it is to be a human.
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Day Zero is when students are arrive between three thirty and five thirty pm. We have time to get settled in our rooms, hand over our phones, journals, food, and any other items not allowed during the course, and eat dinner together. At eight pm, the vow of Noble Silence begins, as does the official start of the course. On the first full day, Day One, our teacher Suzanne shared with us that we are in boot camp for the mind. Oh my, was she spot on. My feeling was that she waited until we had all taken our vow of silence and agreed to stay to then reveal that we are in for something more intense than we may have imagined.
During the first three days, we learn Anapana meditation, a style where we only focus on feeling the sensations of our breath coming in and out of our nose. We focus all of our attention on the area above our upper lip and around our nostrils, paying attention to the change of temperature when the air comes in cool versus when it leaves warmer. I would get furious with myself at how challenging it was to stay focused on my breath.
To make matters worse, I was deep in the trenches of examining myself, feeling guilt and shame over my recent and past behavior. You see, every night at seven pm, we have the evening discourse, which I like to call “Movie Night”. Instead of just audio, we get to watch an hour and fifteen minutes or so video of Goenka lecturing to a hall of Vipassana students.
Tangent: A source of entertainment from the videos were their trademark eighties style of recording. For example - his wife Elaichi Devi Goenka sits beside him, who you can sometimes see when the camera person exercises their artistic license by randomly zooming in and out. It made me nostalgic, taking me back to the family home video era, where mastering the technique of smoothly pressing down on the camcorder’s grooved zoom adjuster was a skill in itself. Noticing any hint of disorder within our highly structured day provided me with a reminder of Life Before Vipassana, a reality which feels so distant when five minutes can feel like ages and you still have a WEEK to go. Jesus, was it hard.
To circle back, Goenka talks in these discourses about challenges that may be arising based off commonly asked questions/complaints/doubts from past students, teachings from Dhamma, the “cosmic law and order” moral codes and virtues taught by Buddha, along with stories from his personal experiences, teachers, and culture. In my opinion, if one were to just watch these discourses, it would be enough to change your life. Goenka is able to share ancient wisdom with such clear examples, gripping stories, and - best of all - HUMOR. Anyone of any culture can grasp the meaning. After a long day of sitting with all of my inner demons, I would always look forward to Movie Night, as it was a reliable, fresh spring of renewed inspiration and determination to keep fighting.
When learning the Anapana meditation technique, there were times I doubted whether I was feeling any kind of sensation outside my nose at all. Thoughts of all the chemicals I’ve snorted made me wonder if that decreased the sensitivity inside my nasal cavity. I decided to request a meeting with Suzanne, who is available to meet with students every day for an hour after lunch. Sitting on a raised platform facing us at the front of the meditation hall, she is responsible for beginning the recordings, keeping us on time, and our overall wellbeing. About every other day, she calls up students row by row to ask us questions and check in with our progress. This means we not only get to talk about how we are, but also hear how our fellow meditators are doing. Additionally, she is available for questions after the last meditation of the day ends at nine pm. So, despite what I expected, you definitely do speak during the ten days.
At our afternoon meeting, she reminded me to be gentle, kind, and compassionate with myself. Aye yi yi, oh how my patterns continue to arise - every friend/coach/therapist I’ve spoken to in the past couple years always says the same thing. It’s tiring how hard I am on myself, and I’m so ready to give that up, but it’s quite an engrained pattern that takes time to erode.
By bringing a smile to my lips, even when happiness was far from what I was feeling, slowly I made progress on becoming less negatively reactive when I got distracted. Here is an example of the unexpected benefits of meditation - I can use this same attitude when something goes wrong outside of the practice. Goenka teaches that all misery stems from attaching yourself to either feelings of craving or of aversion, which is by far one of my biggest takeaways from the course. When broken up into these two categories (craving and aversion), it becomes so obvious to identify the root of any discomfort.
So often, if I make a mistake, waves of resentment, regret, disgust overtake me, and I make no effort to shake them off. I feel I must punish myself… God, that is some ugly conditioning to un-do. This deals with craving a different outcome, or wishing it had not occurred - aversion. On Day Two or Three, when this concept was explained during Movie Night, the truth bomb exploded inside of me. It left no doubts surviving in regards to why or who was the cause of the heaviness I have been carrying: me. The clearest example of this is in my poetry found on my blog. ESPECIALLY the last post, which might as well be used as a Before Vipassana advertisement.
A life changing realization I had was that I recognized I had been in a CONSTANT state of craving: craving money, craving clothes, craving a van, even craving other people’s lives - from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. Instinctively, I knew I had everything I needed and more. I would remind myself: I am in Australia, free to travel and pursue whatever I feel like doing, with family and friends who love me, a lifetime of achievements under my belt, a healthy body, etc etc… yet, still be left with feelings of unhappiness/unfulfillment/emptiness. UGH. This is that funk I referred to previously. Now, I could identify what thoughts were causing the funk, and begin to work on decreasing them.
On the other side of the coin, there was my addiction to pleasure. To fill this emptiness caused by my craving, I’d turn to: weed, food, sugar, orgasms, social media - any external source to feed my hunger for positive sensations. Craving pleasure to avoid pain. These habits I was more aware of, and had already started seeking out ways to healthily satisfy this urge, knowing deep down I should be able to generate this feeling myself. Lo and behold, on Day Two during the pre-dinner meditation, I felt a surge of joy, peace, love - a feeling of being high, and this was simply through focusing on my rhythmic breathing. This accounts to what Goenka explains, about how it brings you to the present. Body and mind can reconnect to the omnipresent miracle that is to be alive, by escaping the confines of my pleasure-pain cycle addicted mind.
Feeling ecstatically high, as pleasant as it is, also comes with its danger- we are not meant to make this a goal to chase. All sensations are temporary, we are taught, so holding on to the desire to maintain a sensation will make us miserable. It’s one thing to hear and understand a concept, but in order to truly learn it, we have to experience it for ourselves. This ties into one of the teachings from the Buddha that Goenka speaks about: “panna”, the Sanskrit word for wisdom. Panna has three levels: “sutra-maya panna” = received wisdom, “cinta-maya panna” = intellectual wisdom, and “bhavana-maya panna” = experiential wisdom. When we listen to Goenka’s words (received wisdom) we can try to understand it (intellectual wisdom), and then try out the techniques through meditation (experiental wisdom). Luckily for us, we are there for ten days, so we have ample time to integrate the panna until reaching the final phase.
The very next day, feeling bright and fresh after the breakthrough moment, a delicious meal of daal was served for lunch. As eating was one of the few external pleasures to look forward to, I indulged with two helpings. Reveling in the spicy warmth brought to my taste buds thanks to the chili flakes I generously sprinkled on felt like a form of enlightenment, especially after a cold foggy morning spent bundled up for hours in the meditation hall.
After the two hour lunch break concluded, the sun had come out and things started heating up. Perhaps it was the added spice, or the fact that the daal was cooked in ghee and aroused my lactose intolerance, or that it was day three and I was sitting with the reality of “oh my god there is still an entire week left of this, what have I gotten myself into, how can I survive, this is too much for me, nuh uh” that broke me. The post lunch sits seemed like the longest and hardest part of the day, as there are three meditations in a row with only a short break of ten to fifteen minutes in between. At this stage, I was playing my usual game of How Far Can I Push Myself by setting the goal to attend every meditation in the hall (as some you have the option to stay in your room), as well as to not get up from my sitting position.
With a full, spicy belly, I was finding it torturous to stay awake, which also meant I could not concentrate on my breath at all. The number of times I got distracted peaked and it felt like I had regressed on the progress I had made, only adding more fuel to my fire. Pluuus, I hadn’t gotten the hang of positioning my body, but I was determined to not move as that was the goal I had set for myself. For the first time in my life, I felt desperate enough to start pleading to any and all unknown forces to help me make it through, to ease the pain, in return for promises to change my behavior from then on out. The physical and mental pain were actually so bad I was fighting back tears. As SOON as I heard Goenka’s chanting which signified the end of meditation, I stretched my legs out, sending what felt like excruciating, unbearable jolts of pain from my knees through to the top of my spine. It took everything in me to not burst out in tears then and there, as I wanted to wait until I was alone to wallow in my despair.
I still had enough wits about me to decide to grab the two measly pieces of fruit given to us for “tea”, Vipassana code for the evening meal. This is what the New Students, aka those who have not ever done a Vipassana course before, were allowed, and the Old Students who have sat a ten day course before had just lemon water and honey for their ‘dinner’.
Immediately after, I rage stormed back to outside my cabin with an apple, orange, and chamomile tea in hand. Setting them aside, the floodgates opened and I began sobbing, the kind that you feel your whole stomach lurching and your shoulders rocking up and down. RELEASE. I felt SUCH a release. Later in my room, I checked and my knees actually had bruises from over extending them or who knows what. You see, another pattern of mine is not complaining/moving even when things are bad. So, for me to have gotten to that extreme meant I pushed way past what would be considered a normal limit, and kept going until finally I reached my at times self deprecating level of pain endurance.
Of course, Goenka had advised us to leave a quarter of the stomach empty for meditation, and of course, I had to learn to heed that advice the hard way. Alert, alert, alert - another pattern of mine! More often than I’d like to admit, I see myself above the advice given by authority figures/laws/you name it. The rules apply to other people, but not to me, if I find them in conflict with my preferred way of operating.
It was confronting to go from feeling such satisfaction to such dejection. This is where I learned the bhavana-maya panna, the experiential wisdom, of what can come of attaching myself to pleasant experiences.
On Day Four, we switch from Anapana, concentrating on the breath, to Vipassana, a body scan. Just that morning, my Anapana meditations had gone great. I was feeling giddy from the simple sensation of sensing the outgoing breath on my upper lip and loving life. In the afternoon, we had the first sit to learn the Vipassana method. From three to five pm, all students are encouraged to stay inside the meditation hall during the entire time. Until then, we had been allowed to leave to take breaks if necessary, such as go on a walk, go to the bathroom, blow your nose, etc.
These two hours, we listen to Goenka guiding us “part by part, piece by piece”, to observe the sensations in our entire body. I could feel myself floating away. The more present I became by focusing on my body, the less attached I became to my physical form. I became so relaxed, light, and alert that I could intuit how practicing this could lead into being able to separate myself from mind and matter. It also reminded me that I had felt this before in guided meditations I had done, mainly under the influence of weed and/or rapé. This was a breakthrough moment for me, filling me with motivation that I was experiencing something I thought I needed weed to do. Boop - new neural pathway achieved! I can do this without external influences!
However, this excited feeling did not last long. After this initial guided body scan, we were then set loose to practice this method ourselves. It had taken me three days to become comfortable with Anapana. Now, I’d have to switch from focusing on one part of my body - again, which had taken me three days to get the hang of - to scanning my WHOLE body?!
The amount of time Goenka suggests the average body scan should take is ten minutes. I kid you not, I would get SO distracted, that in the period of one hour, I managed to do two body scans. Ohhh how the WAVE of FRUSTRATION and agitation and self-bullying overtook me again! And HARD! The mind chatter was back, buzzing with realizations inspired by the nightly discourses that were bringing to light the reality of my shadows, and I was digging deep to find the source of these patterns.
