After countless recommendations from friends who went through the experience, I decided to take the Vipassana retreat. Scheduling-wise it fit in the middle of my around the world trip, in Australia.
I was a bit concerned that this 10-day chunk would take away from my Australia experience, but the place was set in a distinctly Australian landscape with Kangaroos, parrots, and even occasional snakes all around the retreat center, so I didn’t miss out.
The basic setup
What is the 10-day Vipassana retreat? It is essentially a meditation bootcamp, where you meditate most of the waking hours. For best results, there is a rule of noble silence, where you're not allowed to communicate to anyone verbally, or even with eye contact or gestures. The retreat center also has a separation between genders: in the dining hall, in the meditation hall and even the walking areas. On both the female and male sides, there is a "manager" (available 24/7, the only person you can talk to for practical needs), and the "assistant teacher" (available during office hours, and the only person you can talk to for meditation-related questions). The main teaching is done by a man named S.N. Goenka, thru pre-recorded sessions, as he passed away in 2013.
We get 2 meals per day, breakfast and dinner and a "tea break" with some fruit for dinner. Wake up time is 4:30 am and bedtime is 9:30 pm. Hmm, that's damn early, but I guess there won't be anything "exciting" to keep us up until late. Long live the fear of missing out (FOMA), as there's nothing to miss out on. Since we don't have our phones, and many of us don't have watches, the only thing that tells us about the time is the bells that ring to signify the times for meditation and meals (there's really not much else happening around here, exciting!)
Digital Crack
As the first order of business, we turn in our phones and other electronic devices. Oh man, this is gonna be hard. I wrap up the latest messenger conversations and say my goodbyes, and already begin to anticipate the withdrawals from the crack that is digital communication. 10 days without external input! A few hours later I still feel the urge to go online, check on something, after the first 5 seconds of that craving, I notice that the urge is about nothing in particular, just a way to distract from what's going on inside. Am I ready to look at that? Naah, no rush, we got 10 days left.
First Meditation
We get into the meditation hall, where our seats are already assigned and settle in. After a few minutes, some kind of sound begins to emanate from the speakers. Hmm, what is this noise? Didn't they check their audio system before the whole thing started? Oh that must be the voice of Goenka singing. Alright ... a bit out of place, but it's over in 5 minutes and Goenka's verbal instructions start.
We are all to promise that we'll stay committed to the course and follow Goenka's teachings and ONLY those teachings for the duration of the course. We also have to say "I will not kill. I will not steal...". I thought this part went without saying, but now this got me thinking: do we have any murderers or thieves in the house? That night I dreamt about a computer game where i had to steal something and kill a dog to proceed. Twisted how the mind works.
BEGIN WITH A QUIET AND CLEAR MIND. BE VERY ATTENTIVE. BE VERY VIGILANT. JUST OBSERVE, JUST OBSERVE... etc.
In contrast to his singing, Goenka’s soothing speaking voice is a big relief. He is clear, commanding, his words are a bit poetic and repetitive. It feels a bit like the instructions of Big Brother from 1984. We are supposed to watch the breath coming in and out of our nostrils, as we sit still in a meditation posture. Sounds easy enough, but it's NOT! The first session is 1 hour, and the first 20 minutes are already hell. I switch position a gazillion times, and others seem restless too. What comes most to mind on the first day is the most recent encounters and conversations, and it's really easy to get lost in that. Oh, look! It's already 9:30pm and it's time to go to bed ... hmm, great. But without a phone or anything else to do, this task isn’t so daunting.
The First Days
We are woken up by a bell at 4:30am and it's time to go to the meditation hall. Aaaand the singing starts again. The musical phrases often start with some kind of burping or barfing sound that goes into some completely tone deaf singing and terminates in a sound of a stalling engine. Wow this really takes the cake as some of the most unpleasant singing in history, and he does it with passion too! Enlightened guru that he is, there is just no filter. It’s like that guy in karaoke that pours his heart out into the microphone, but has zero talent, while everyone else is either laughing or hoping for him to stop. Except you can’t leave this karaoke and I'm beginning to realize we're going to be hearing this ALL the time, because Goenka sings at the beginning and at the end of EACH meditation hour.
START AGAIN. WITH A CLEAR AND ATTENTIVE MIND. WORK VERY ARDENTLY, VERY DILIGENTLY.
Why does he keep saying “work” like we're digging ditches or something? It doesn’t take me long to find out. Sitting in a half lotus position or any other position without a backrest becomes difficult very quickly. Before and after every "sitting", everyone does stretches, preparing for the Sitting Olympics (seriously, this should be a thing). Shoulders, knees, feet, back, are in constant pain.
Before this experience, I hadn't been sitting still for more than 15 minutes at a time my whole life. In the end of the day, it wasn't the digital crack or the silence that proved to be most difficult, it is sitting in one place. God, 9 more days of this?
After the tea and the evening meditation is the entertainment highlight of the day: a video of Goenka's pep talk. When it comes to meditation and technique, you really feel the presence of a master, and his massive experience shows. He also turns out to be an excellent story teller, and a pretty funny guy with a good heart. At the end of the hour he closes his eyes and smiles as if something beautiful is about to happen. What might that be?… Oh no starts singing again! I get up and leave the room.
The next few days are equally difficult, it begins to sink in that I'm not going anywhere for a while, and there’s no rush or stress. On the other hand, the place is beginning to feel oppressive, I can't go anywhere, or do anything fun. The awful singing at the start and end of every session is starting to get to me. Somebody cut his mic already! Why are we forced to listen to this? What does this have to do with meditation? [turns out these are chants about the nature of mind in Pali, the original language of Buddha, if only Goenka could do it justice]
In the breaks, I start noticing little stone sculptures popping up around the retreat center. I don't know who is making them, and I start wondering what would happen if I just knock one of them over. OBSERVE, JUST OBSERVE (Goenka's words reverberate inside my head). Later on in the day I stare at the bell that the staff use ... wouldn't it be funny if I just rang it really loud. That would totally disrupt the rigid order of the day, that'll show them! In the absence of other stimuli, this story plays out rather vividly in my head. OK, back to the breath, coming into the nostrils, coming out of the nostrils.
I see a punk chick passing by quickly, she's the female manager and the only woman allowed on "our territory". She has some tattoos at the back of her neck. I breathe in her beauty, it's a rare occurrence around here. I wonder if her nipples are pierced... and there goes that string of thought, unraveling to obvious places. I totally get why they keep the men and the women separate.
The Middle Days
On Day 4, we get instructions from Goenka for the actual Vipassana technique. According to Goenka, Vipassana is the original teaching of Buddha, preserved in its pure form for 2500 years. There’s no way to verify that claim, surely many other Buddhist schools claim a direct lineage to Buddha as well, but let’s look past that and focus on the technique.
Instead of focusing on the breath (apparently that was just a warmup focus exercise), we are to do a scan of the body parts until we get a sensation in each part, and keep doing that until we get good at feeling sensation everywhere in our body. OK that's a rather simple algorithm, can't this be automated somehow? I imagine we can hook some electrodes into a person's sensory cortex and then iterate over the various areas until there's enough sensation detected.
Another thing that occurred to me was “Just how poorly designed would our brains have to be, that we would need to repeat a super simple procedure for 10 days for only temporary and partial quietness of the monkey brain?” I start to imagine the year 2050, and a futuristic version of this retreat center, where “enlightenment robots” are running around the meditation center, supervising the humans who naturally have trouble following such simple and repetitive instructions.
“Silly humans, brains so suboptimal”
Maybe I’m getting carried away. Back here on earth, in the poorly automated world of 2016, where the robots aren’t yet running the show, the Vipassana technique accomplishes the following:
- It makes us more aware of bodily sensations
- It takes us out of the head and into the body. When attention is preoccupied with the bodily sensations, it tends to get away from useless thoughts (the “monkey brain”)
- In places where there’s pain, it teaches to either accept the pain without wanting it to go away, or to ignore it and focus on something else
- It teaches us to focus on one task uninterrupted for longer periods despite distractions and discomfort
Around Day 6 or so, I felt like I was beginning to get the hang of it, my mind was much less cluttered and it became easier to sit still. I progress from shifting position every 5 minutes, to every 30. I started to realize that in fact sitting in a meditation position, with the discomfort that comes from it, is what brings the mind back from day-dreaming. The pain can be a reminder of the present moment, and keeps me from floating away in lala land for too long. Good stuff, this seems to be going somewhere.
The Final Days
The fundamentals of the Vipassana technique remain essentially the same until the end, and Goenka’s evening TV channel, as well as his narration during the day, starts going into fables and mystery land. He begins to talk about how eventually, if you stay with this technique, “your body will dissolve” spending a lot of time on this phenomenon, even though most of the students did not actually experience it. I asked the assistant teacher what I was supposed to do with all the talk of the dissolving of the body, he said this was more for the advanced students who have done this 10-day course several times. Wow, I respect their commitment, am I willing to take 10 more days of my life to find out about this, but with no actual guarantee? Probably not.
Goenka also talks about the sensitivity of the brain becomes so fine, that we should begin to feel subatomic particles or “tiny little kalapas”, as he calls them. What are those subatomic particles exactly? Well of course it’s the elements of “fire”, “earth”, “air” and “water”. Einstein turns in his grave.
I wonder why meditation masters feel the need to try and justify their teachings with Quantum physics?
As Goenka’s message gets further and further from the reality on the ground, my attention startd dissipate again. The body scan in all its variations get boring after a while, and my mind starts to go off on tangents. Except the tangents are a bit more interesting this time. After having “worked thru” my whole life several times, long-forgotten childhood memories start bubbling up, and a few unresolved conflicts came to the surface and get played out with great intensity, shouting and crying and all sorts of emotions coming up in the high definition internal movie. Coming back to the meditation hall feels like waking up from an intense dream: phew, I see, it didn’t really happen, in the real world it's dead quiet, you can hear a pin drop. Back to the breath, back to the body scan. This happens several times, both during meditation and actual sleep. Even in times I may feel mentally checked out, there are some important processes going on.
As the time gets closer to the end, I start thinking about the exit, planning what to do when I get out, who I’m going to message, etc.
Getting out of silence
The 10th day is an exception, where we are finally allowed to talk to each other in between the meditation sessions, just to give us a buffer before going out into the real world. It was interesting to observe cliques beginning to form very quickly and seeing who belongs where. It was also interesting to compare the impressions you had of the people while they were silent with what you saw when they started talking again. I expected that talking again in a place like this, I would see a lot of calm and collected individuals, and the inner peace I felt would translate into chill conversations, but for some reason, there was a lot of nervous energy in the talking, and I also felt myself getting out of balance from it.
After a few hours of chit-chat, I needed to take one of those quiet walks on the forest paths again. Soon it was time to get back the phone and laptop. Looking at the phone and all the messages streaming in, felt a bit alien: I noticed the sensation of the phone in my hand, saw pixels instead of messages and didn't get the usual agitation from needing to do something about it right away.
The day after, everyone went home to deal with real world situations like work and family. I got a slightly different challenge instead: to meditate for 1 hour on a top bunk in noisy hostel in the middle of Sydney.
The Takeaways
What did I learn from this?
- How to stay focused for extended periods
- How to be less reactive to distractions (Increased the distance between noticing a distraction and reacting to it)
- I developed a higher tolerance to physical pain, by observing and not immediately reacting.
- I realized the extent FOMA has impact on my day to day decisions and don't react as easily to social distractions
- The value of commitment to a goal and sticking with it despite difficulties
What I thought about the setup
- The retreat facilities are great and the staff are really helpful
- Goenka’s main teaching is basically solid, the technique does not require any magic, and if you stick with it, you do get results
- I strongly believe that Goenka’s singing is out of place and take away from the experience
- Some of Goenka’s talks are clearly dated and low quality (recordings from the 80s)
- The Quantum physics references have to go
- There is a lot of experience of the dissolving body and yet no clear path to it
- The assistant teacher has too much of a background role, never really adding anything or deviating from the main teaching.
In the end, despite the annoying singing, I feel like it was a very valuable experience, and I would recommend Vipassana to anyone at least once in their lives.
