The silent riot

Placing a fresh grape in my mouth, I close my eyes and feel the sensation of the cold, smooth skin that glides along the tongue and softly lodges itself into a comfortably warm position next to your inner cheek. As your jaw opens and your back teeth pierce through the outer layer, the juice instantly fills your mouth, sending pleasurable tingles throughout your body. The grape disintegrates fast and sensory adaptation overtakes as you forget about the recent burst of flavour and are left to chew on the slightly unpleasant residue of grape skin in your mouth. 

Goenka :)

In one of his talks, Goenka wisely says that 'pleasure always brings misery'... slightly depressing but true, what goes up must come down, right? It's funny reflecting on that simple process, something that was once a large, hard gape changed form and feeling within a few seconds... "Anitya" - the word for 'impermanence' in Sanskrit. Impermanence is ironically the only permanent thing in life and this is what I, along with many others have been spending the last 10 days trying to grasp. The story of chewing a grape will hopefully not seem quite so irrelevant by the end of this post... 

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.

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. 

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. 

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

A bumpy start

The little Laotian lady & J's injured arm

Our first meal by the riverside

The tables seem to have turned concerning a number of things. 1) I started off travelling with 1 girl and 1 boy.. crazy J. came a long and the female vibes just kept coming. Now, I'm one girl in a group of 10 lads. "It's like a fucking Forest down south, can I borrow your razor?", "RUGBY TIME!", "Beer, beer, beer!". I exaggerate slightly because they're all genuine and wouldn't hurt a fly but it's a funny turn of events. 2) We left Vietnam expecting calm and tranquil. I've picked up a tummy bug (sticking to a vegetarian diet for once) and on one of our slowest motorbike excursions so far, we skidded on a dirt road and managed to land ourselves in the hospital for the second time in an hour. The doctor looked happy as our money bags jingled in regret. I sat on the ledge watching J. on the bed nearest to me and a little boy on the one furthest away, both being stitched up. I sat there with a few cuts and bruises, tears streaming down my face as I swelled with the pain of J's arm, and the little boys foot on the other side of the room. The little boy had his eyes squeezed tight as they ruthlessly clamped down his legs to stop him from squirming. I attempted to distract J. from his pain by talking to him about home, mum and dad and his best mates back in Aus. choking on my own tears didn't seem to help the situation. I held my thumbs up and strained a smile to the little boy on the other side of the room to keep his spirits up, but mine weren't in full functioning order either so the attempt was in vain. The nurse came around and squirted some white alcoholic solution on my cuts and bruises and after a quick job (that turned out to be infected only days later), the doctor wished us good luck, put on his jacket and walked out. I turned to the window behind me to see the other boys waiting patiently, rolling around in wheelchairs, it made me grin. I just didn't understand where all this bad karma was coming from. Only hours before I'd been lying here having a blood test to check whether I had malaria or not (thankfully it's just food poisoning) and wanting to just be cradled and looked after..Lying in a hospital bed is never fun, i could just think of how only weeks earlier I'd been lying in one in KL, hospital environments are just so unnatural. The smell, the equipment, the people, the energy. Thankfully the blood test came back negative for malaria, and while the doctor attempted to convince me to have various stomach scans that would cost a ridiculous sum of money, I payed what I owed and left with a sigh of relief that it was only food poisoning and I wouldn't have to admit defeat and fly home in a few days time.  It was only until later that we saw it as a sign that R&R was in need. A few days of no drinking or doing, just settling for a little. It was ironic that on our day of recovery i watched the clip my mum had sent me a few weeks earlier, that was so appropriate for the situation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx-AtPKWf9k&feature=share&list=UU1KIUp4PNCyIwCPTq1hYzWQ). One of the best things I got from it, besides a lifted spirit, was reaching enlightenment is like learning how to surf in a sea of waves. The waves can be both good and bad, sometimes you catch a great one and ride it for a while, and other times you tumble under the surface. You can't convince yourself you're always in a happy place because it's cruel to deny the dark side of the yin-yang. It bought me to the thought of intuition.. Just before the crash happened I was holding onto the back of the bike, imagining a scene in which we'd skid around a dirt corner and topple over, brushing off the thought with a shake of my head. Only minutes later did it actually occur and I was suddenly lying ontop of J. our wheel spinning and a dust cloud settling over us. I rolled over with a bruised knee and the boys all pulled up, gaping at the scene. J. pulled his sleeve up to reveal a deep gash, more were to be found on his hip and grazes in various other parts. We groggily drove back to the hospital, the thought of biking through the rest of the country losing all appeal.

Me and 'Mama'

The bus ride earlier wasn't fun either, sitting on bags of hard rice as we rocked side to side, the number of passengers increasing constantly and the number of goods (whether it be chickens, cabbages or potatoes, they just kept on coming). The pangs in my stomach would come and go in waves and I attempted to breathe into them and continue discussion with the boys or nod off to sleep against the hard glass window.. neither of them really working as good methods of distraction. We arrived and got into a tuk-tuk to get to the strip of guesthouses that we hopped between before settling on first one we'd seen. 4 in one room, 3 in another.. a few valium later I was passed out and in a happy place, the pain temporarily gone for the time being..
Laos had started with a bang and now we were at a crash. We'd began in a little border-town village that was tranquil and cheap, exactly what we needed. We stayed at a little guesthouse on the edge of the Mekong and after a swim with the locals, we checked out the town to take a few snaps and get a feel for where we now were. Passing an internet cafe with huddles of boys playing 'WOW' and 'Runescape' - it's funny how no matter what country you're in, the universal habits stay the same. At our guesthouse every night, there was a huge 'family dinner' for everyone staying there. Unlimited vegetarian food piled on plates that you helped yourself to, a long with unlimited shots of their local rice wine, that they continuously filled up during the meal. When the staff had gone to bed, they curiously placed 2 full bottles on our table, and left the fridge full of beer, unlocked (not smart when there's a group of drunk tourists stumbling around). We conversed with our new french friends, a drunk mix of languages spanning the room while we slurred words about a trek we were all set to do early the next morning (which of course never ended up happening, given that we were breathing rice wine till well into the afternoon). After a few days there and enough shots of rice wine we moved on to the next town, checking we hadn't left anything behind this time.

As we sat and ate our meals, Jack turned around to brush away a 'mosquito' that he heard in his ear. Only to realize it was another of the little old Laotian women wearing traditional dress and chewing beatle nut, making their funny 'shh shh shh' noises and trying to sell us 'bracelets'. After a few 'no no's' they opened their little bags to reveal huge bags of weed and little packets of opium. They'd go as far as to stuff it under your T-Shirt to get you to buy their (disappointing) products. I laughed as they tried to convince Jn. (a policeman in training) to buy their class A drugs.. but a few poppy fumes did help lighten the pain, only in Laos. We later bumped into our french friends from the first town, who'd made the trek the next morning, and spent the evening discussing picking clementines in Corsica  the next move on my agenda when I return to Europe. We all groggily got into bed, talking about aliens, the supernatural and how crazy the concept of wiki-leaks was, before drifting into a deep and beautiful slumber.

We didn't want to hold back our boys so for the day they went Kayaking while we rested and recovered.. before booking our tickets for the 'long boat' to Luang Prabang, our next stop. I'd been 2 years ago so was interested to see how different it'd be without the family, nice restaurants and no budget. We'd lost one of our boys N. who'd just finished his national service in the Israeli army and had a limited travel period so had to move faster than us, hence the group had shrunk again, (which did make it slightly easier to keep track of everyone.) We'd missed check-out time again, and were waved off by a hard-faced woman who was running the guesthouse (but I could understand as a single woman running a guesthouse you'd have to be on the ball the whole time, especially when people don't follow instructions, we couldn't exactly expect a friendly response).While on the bus, going up a fairly steep hill, we suddenly came to a halt as the engine stopped working and we narrowly escaped a crash with a local truck full of people. We began rolling backwards before the driver cleverly started the bus in reverse and we continued on, sighing in relief that this wasn't the end of our journey (for the second time). I'd stopped taking all the pills i'd been prescribed, my tummy ache was easing (ironically) and my mood was lighter. J. and I played word association games and laughed non-stop as the rest of the crew nodded off to their music.We had a quick toilet-break before the 7 hour boat ride, seeing the sign 'pay for toilet' annoying everyone. I hate it when they expect you to pay for something that's so basic and necessary. So everyone turned the corner and went in the bushes behind the facility.. almost expecting to see 'pay money' signs behind the bushes.

Coffee and Cigs

The long-boat was great fun. We motored along slowly, watching locals wash rice by the sides of the Mekong  pink water buffalo lapping water on the rocks and little boys frolicking by the sand as the older men stood behind them patiently with fishing lines. We read books, snoozed, jammed with guitars and harmonica's, sketched and talked. The time flew by and we were soon at the next town, that bordered Thailand 'Houeiai', where we stayed at 'BAP' guesthouse that was recommended in lonely planet. The woman running the guesthouse told us to call her 'mama', and was adamant that if we left we weren't allowed to come back. 'That's not fair mama' I said, 'no no you no say that's not fair, you go you no come back!' She made us laugh and obviously knew how to run a business. We played a new Spanish card game that night 'Escola', had some Lao tea and fresh mango while watching the sun set behind the red hills in Thailand (that was only 100m away across the Mekong). We then moved on to 'Pakbeng', the next town, before we caught the second-half of our long-boat journey to LP. A man stood where we arrived, with a sign saying 'BuonMey guesthouse' and shouting 'Bone me! Bone me!' that made us all giggle childishly. On the back of the sign was crossed out 'happy shakes, opium shakes, happy pancakes, opium pancakes' and that made us laugh even harder. We followed him up to his guesthouses, he'd sold it well, an odd character, completely ADD and switching between mocking English accents, to telling everyone to 'shut-up!' to giggling hysterically. I couldn't keep up. A group of others followed him as well  they'd pre-booked and weren't impressed with the steep walk up the hill, not what they'd read in the description when they were promised a 'free-ride to the guesthouse'. His excuse being 'oh the bus was late'. He claimed his name was 'Marco Polo' and we soon realized, like his name, his pitch was a scam as well  The rooms were dingy, the hot water didn't work, the extra bed never came, the happy shakes weren't happy enough and half the items on the menu were 'unavailable'. We still fell asleep happy that night, discussing childhood memories of 'Clifford the big red dog, spot, smurfs, Baba the elephant, Postman Pat' and so many more that bought fond smiles to our faces. Jn. smiling more than he had been 20 minutes ago when he'd discovered the giant spider in the corner of our bathroom (his one weakness besides heights).

Our make-shift meals on the boatride

We were awoken for the second half of the long-boat journey earlier than we'd have liked, with a bang on the door from 'Marco Polo', "GET UP! BOAT LEAVING!" We quickly ordered our fried rice, fruits and snacks to take on the boat, trying to avoid the extortionate rates that they tried to charge us. The first day we'd made make-shift meals of sticky rice, cans of tuna, soup from pot noodles.. borrowing bowls and cutlery off of our new Lao friends sitting in front of us, that were more than happy to practice their English as we tried to slip in a few words of Laotian. On the boat I thought back on all the people we'd met so far and how many had left their mark.. one in particular eliciting a furrowed brow .. the man we'd met in Nha Trang, Vietnam. He was 57 and had been in the British army, working as a sniper for the last 22 years. I remember talking to him over buckets of alcohol, crying as I watched the pain in his face as he told us about his best friend dying in his arms, the children he'd seen shot by their parents, the missions he'd had to be on and the amount of people he'd had to kill. The shadow loomed over him but rays of light still shined. The one most harrowing story he told me was of the brothel he'd had to break into. The men running it would sexually abuse girls from the ages of 7 - 20 before killing them and roasting their heads on spits, he'd killed each man involved and told us this with shaking hands and salty tears. J. and I couldn't imagine the pain he'd been through, and felt lucky to live so free of so much trauma and death, inspired by his strength we felt like that was the most we'd gained from any conversation at 'Why Not Bar' so far..

The boat ride passed faster than the previous one, I closed my eyes and 'a minute' later, we were already in in L.P, the French colonial buildings greeting us on arrival - I love this town, a world heritage site with no loud traffic, noisy rude people or big buses. We Followed our friends advice and trekked with other groups of backpackers to 'Spicy Lao', the hostel everyone was staying at. The adventures of which will be saved for the next post..

Recipe of the day: Laotian prawn curry

http://anhsfoodblog.com/2007/01/coconut-love-laotian-prawn-curry.html/