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| Goenka :) |
We've just completed a Vipassana course at the Dhamma Dipa meditation centre in Herefordshire, England. A 10-day silent retreat that consists of 11.5 hours of sitting meditation a day. Up at 4am with the repetitive sound waves of the reverberating gong and bed at 9.30pm as we flowed with the movement of the sun and entered into the deep rabbit hole of our minds. A silent retreat in theory but probably the noisiest 10 days I've ever experienced with the constant mental chatter.
In one evenings discourse, a staggered scene is described in which a mad person interacts with a 'normal person'... the mad one goes from wanting to eat to asking for food to being handed food by the normal person and then thinking the food's a weapon that was about to kill them they grab the food, throw it away and end up hungry, agitated and still mad. Now one would usually not compare themselves to the mad person right? But have you ever sat with yourself, crossed legged, still, with your eyes closed in complete silence and tried 'Anapana' - just being present with your body and monitoring your natural breath without trying to control it. Watching it come in and out and just focusing on the breath, not the thoughts. I urge you to do this for 10 minutes, not even an hour and work out the percentage of that time that you were able to be present and just focus on the breath..
now how much can you suddenly relate to the mad person... the lack of grammar, the constant flow, the scattered thoughts that flit from this to that with such speed and intensity... and when you think about the fact that your brain is part of your central nervous system that controls your whole body/ your whole existence and your mind can't focus on one task, the breath, that is with you every second, day and night... it makes you question the amount of control (and sanity) you really have.
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| I missed the banana and chopped the top of one of my thumbs off!! |
Vipassana was the technique that Siddhārtha Gautama, Shakyamuni (also known as Buddha) used to reach enlightenment - when one hears that it's associated with Buddha/ Buddhism it's like a red flag to a bull... it suddenly becomes a sectarian practise, something religious that freaks people out as it only applies to a percentage of people. However, this is a technique that has no religious affiliation. It consists of only 3 universal laws hence they apply to everyone. 1) Sila: Morality 2): sama-Samadhi: Mastery over the mind and 3) Pana: Wisdom. During a 10 day course living as monks, we were able to follow these 3 precepts so scrupulously in a tightly controlled environment. 'Sila' was followed by observing the 5 rules: no stealing, lying, intoxication, killing or sexual misconduct. This allowed one to develop 'Samadhi' (mastery over the mind) by initially practising Anapana that I described earlier, focusing on the natural breath and the small space between your nostrils and your upper lip, allowing your mind to become sharper and sharper in its focus before actual Vipassana meditation starts. Vipassana involves scanning your body from top to bottom and bottom to top, observing all kinds of sensations that occur like itching, aching, tingling or vibrating. You soon learn that the habit patterns of the mind can all be assigned to either craving or aversion. If you feel something you like and you want more of it = craving. This happens every day in life with food, people, activities, drugs, sounds etc.. the list is endless. Or you feel something you don't like so you try to get rid of it = aversion, again a daily occurance.
So the practise of vipassana is to remain 'equanimous': just notice and observe, like a scientist would without craving or running from any of it... easy to write but ridiculously hard to practise. On top of trying to remain equanimous to just the sensations you've got your monkey mind jumping around all over the place taking you to different people and countries and universes and multiverses to the point where you're clutching your head, ready to check in to an asylum. Not having your voice or entertainment or another person to be able to ground you, leaves one helpless and forces you to develop Samahdi... with every moment of being completely equanimous, your sankara's begin to release themselves. Sankaras can be described as the conditioned response to objects in your life that are basically the roots of your misery, they're so ingrained into your being that they cause many other patterns in life. We recognise these many patterns every day as problems but aren't able to really get that far below the surface. With this technique you begin to make an incision into your mind by breaking it's habit and instead of allowing it to create more sankara's and build on to its roots, it has no choice but to release the store that it already contains. During brief moments of equanimity, the Sankara's slowly began to rise and disintegrate, manifesting into all kinds of sensations like the hard outer layer of the grape before slowly breaking down to become the residue of grape skin ... and the cycle continues.
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| How I felt after the first day.. |
So I thought, before this course, that like other yoga/ meditation retreats that I'd been to, this was going to be a relaxing break of no connection to the outside world (as we had to drop all forms of entertainment at the door), yummy vegetarian food and lovely people. Uhh. After day one, I realised this expectation was far from what we were going to be experiencing... and the sound of the snores in the silent hall coming from the girl next to me didn't serve to inspire..
It was 10 days of intense work, a surgical procedure into the mind that released a lot of the shit, resulting in a lot of unpleasant thoughts and feelings. There wasn't one day that I didn't have a moment of wanting to leave. Goenka, the amazing man that guides you through the whole process, admitted that he too packed his bags on the second day of his first course and was convinced to stay by one of the assistant teachers at the time... His story's pretty inspirational actually, definitely worth sharing:
To start, Vipassana has been around long before Buddha spread it. After it was spread like any other teaching, individuals started to adapt it to their liking and it became lost, everywhere except Burma where Buddha had known that it would be preserved in its original form - he'd predicted that this would then be re-discovered and spread again 2500 years after his death...
So, Goenka was a rich, successful Indian business man and as a result of his stressful life he began suffering from terrible migraines that no doctor from Burma to Switzerland could cure, besides giving him a dose of morphine when the pain got unbearable... Not being a sustainable alternative to a cure and only adding a destructive addiction to his life, Goenka remained open to alternatives and one day was advised by his friend to take a Vipassana course... being the skeptic that he was he refused for a while as he didn't understand how it would bode well with his current religious practise or cure his migraine. Long story short, he finally agreed to go after being told it wouldn't interfere with any current practise and would teach him the art of living, curing his migraine as a bonus in the process... With patience and persistence he advanced on the path of Vipassana and stepped onto the wheel of Dharma (behaving in accord with the laws of nature) as opposed to the previous wheel of misery that he was once on. Once you live purely by the law of Dharma, it begins to reward you too - so he advanced and began to experience less misery and more liberation by taking his practise seriously. He was then sent away from Burma by his teacher when the time had struck in 1969 (2500 years exactly after Buddha had died) to go and spread the technique. Again, being the skeptic he was, he didn't see how he was supposed to complete this task. But after teaching his first course in India, the word spread and before long hundreds of people from all walks of life were practising Vipassana and walking the path of Dharma. He began to open centres up all over the world and today they're accessible to everyone, on a donation basis and taught via audio and video recordings from Goenka in 1991.
Every evening we would all sit in the mediation hall for one of his discourses, it was like movie night! Listening to his funny jokes and stories that all had some underlying lesson here or there, he'd connect the dots for us by describing what we were going through and offering us guidance.
His voice became oh so familiar, I can hear it now... At the beginning of the day you'd close your eyes and hear his chanting over the speakers. Initially, I found much of it quite unpleasant and even funny. He had one long cow-sounding moooo sound that was completely off pitch, on the first day I sat with an aching back and excruciatingly painful legs with nothing but aversion, listening to this annoying noise in such irritation, wondering why on earth we had to be there. That was the beginning of the unpleasant process that I later grew to deeply understand and appreciate, he wasn't here to take us through a sweet sounding journey, he was teaching us to deal with unpleasant reality and reach for the sweet sound within... by the tenth day that sound brought the biggest smile to my face.
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| The classic wheel of dharma |
It was great being able to appreciate details that wouldn't normally phase you at all... every day as the 4am gong went, I'd freshen up and go for a walk in the forest at dawn. I'd listen to the layers of bird song while watching the little white tails of bunnies hopping through the trees and seeing the clumps of wild mushrooms hidden by the long grass, each blade held its own suspended drop of dew. One afternoon, I lay down in the grass and turned my head to the side, at eye level with the thousands of daisies that I zoomed in on individually, appreciating their beauty and watching the bees sucking out pollen from the wild flowers inbetween - reaping such satisfaction as the clouds parted and everyone lay down in silence to feel the sensation of the sun warming our skin. That evening I looked above the tree infront of the centre and watched tiny particles of dandelions dancing in the wind - this is what fairies were :) fantasy can all be witnessed...
On the tenth day - 'metta', you learn to become extrovert again and integrate back into interacting with others by talking to the people you've created such an extraordinary, silent relationship with. Men and women are separated from the beginning to avoid distraction, so a bunch of hysterically excited women suddenly began to speak all at once... it was overhwelming in every way, what do you even begin to talk about? We all connected, breaking our previous conceptions of what everyone was like in silence - when we sat down to meditate again I could feel my heart almost leaping out of my chest with excitement... The weather could sense the change as well and as we all closed our eyes it began storming outside the room. We could feel the dramatic pulsing of thunder and rain and then above it all the shrill voice of the tall bleach blonde haired woman that had earlier been talking to me about creating a tornado in the next storm. She was running around outside singing her heart out. With all of our eyes still closed we witnessed the sounds of the drama, the pattering of the assistant teachers feet as she ran outside to explain the inappropriateness of her actions - more pattering of feet as more teachers went out to the scene. The argument escalated and we heard 'IGNORANCE, IGNORANCE' as she screamed with the energy of the storm at our teacher. Running around whacking the little trees in the garden, the previous serenity of the last 10 days seemed so lost and we curiously left the meditation hall at the end of the session where she was no where to be seen... The last day was dramatic in every way and it was discovered that many precepts had been broken by a naughty few who were either sneaking off to the fields for a midnight shag or walking to the 'nearest' pub for a pint...
So at the beginning of the post I began with what my present moment was, eating a grape. Something that is no longer as I look over at my bowl that now only contains a naked stem that was once abundant with lush greenery... Anitya. V asked me on the journey home how much of the time I reckoned I spent actually meditating during the 11.5 hours a day... I thought about it and replied 'about 20%' ... 20% of true presence out of 100... What a sad realisation, that one spends most of their life out of body, thinking about the past and the future. But I guess once you're aware of it and have been given the technique to change it, things can only go up ... if you stick to it that is.. Still wearing my sober halo and having completed the challenge of a lifetime, I've had a taste of Dharma and began developing the third law that I hadn't discussed, Pana/ wisdom, that can only come from experience. I thank Goenka truly and hope that everyone gives this a trial as it's so beneficial and gives you a glimpse of the terrifyingly expansive truth within. Paatiently and aardently I await to see how this seed will grow into a tree that will one day serve many others.
Clip of the day: Goenka's speech at the UN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy9PugTy15M
