Written 1/24/22
I experienced my first Vipassana retreat two weeks ago. The most challenging then rewarding 10 days of my life so far. True to my promise for this blog, here’s my painfully honest review.
First, some background,
A traditional Vipassana retreat is a prolonged live-in course for silence and meditation as taught through the Vipassana technique. The teacher of this technique, SN Goenka, is an Indian guru or sage of sorts with award-winning wisdom that’s translated Buddha’s teachings into a format that can be learned in 10 days and has transformed hundreds of thousands of students around the world at donation-based Dhamma centers. From Goenka’s site where one can find and apply for a course:
“Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation. It was rediscovered by Gotama Buddha more than 2500 years ago and was taught by him as a universal remedy for universal ills, i.e., an Art Of Living. This non-sectarian technique aims for the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation.”
Coming up on the end of 2021, a year of so much growth and change, spending my New Years in quiet reflection felt more aligned than a forgotten late night and hungover morning. And for the first time ever, I didn’t feel called to psychedelics for this reflection. I’ve learned so much from plant medicine, each experience bringing a new lesson and recharge that comes from the egoless state. But this state, often called the ‘afterglow’, doesn’t stay long. What felt like the next stage in my journey, and what called me east to India, was learning to reach that state without the medicine, so that I may learn to live from there always. And being the extremist I am…the most authentic and intense place, time, and format was going to be the way.
Bodh Gaya. The town where Buddha received his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in 6th century BC, home to the Mahabodhi temple built in his remembrance and honor, a place all Buddhist pilgrimages pass through. Discovering the wisdom of Buddhism 5 years ago through my now most reread and gifted books, Awakening The Buddha Within, was what started me down the mindfulness path. That, combined with the origins of the Vipassana technique itself, called me to this setting for my first retreat.
I arrive and that’s affirmed with the unconditionally selfless hospitality, warm inviting smiles, and simple life of the locals devoted to the Middle Way and path of Dhamma. Here, I feel and see the drastic contrast of east to west. A lifestyle that to us is poverty, to them is everything they need. A deep acceptance and presence colors their simple days in the Bodh Gaya town and surrounding villages. It’s contagious, a gift to witness pre-retreat, and holds one of many more lessons to come in my time in India.
It’s the day after my birthday, days before the new year, and what will be Day 0 of the Vipassana. I’m taken to the temple 15 minutes from Bodh Gaya’s center, Dhamma Bodhi, on a tuktuk driven by a kind boy who’d become a friend and devoted host here. We park and Chunu walks me and my bags to the reception and leaves with a bow, hands in namaste as both a goodbye and good luck. Having experienced this retreat himself, like many Bodh Gaya locals, he knew what was to come.
I look around at the humble entrance and fellow students’ reveling stares at the sole American, feeling a weird combination of nervous and calm. The nerves came from my western-conditioned mind blasted out of its comfort zone. The calm, from a deeper voice within that brought me here to begin with. The voice that took me to a map of India and down a Google rabbit hole to pick this town and this temple and this 10 days. It had to be here. On the biggest party week of the year, and in the poorest yet most sacred state in India, it had to be here.
I get to my dorm, drop my bags onto my rain water-soaked floor, look at my board of a bed next to a cold water shower and read the meditation schedule with a big sigh that said I hope I figure out why soon.
A bell rings. A bell I grew to detest and hear in my sleep in angst until my breakthrough on the 6th day. I’m ashamed it took that long…I overestimated how far I was in my meditation practice. Psychedelics have taken me to deep places and transformational growth, but sitting with myself in the bare naked patience that meditation requires, is a different game. A game that was about to knock me sideways, and from the looks of the other women walking heavily to the Dhamma Hall, I took a guess I wasn’t alone. Here we go.
We walk silently, now under the Noble Silence vow, and have been separated from the men with a wall and a blue tarp as if seeing the other gender would halt our practice. I was triggered by the old-schoolness of it at first, then grew to understand and be grateful for that approach. The monkey mind gets hungry and restless amidst hours and hours of stillness and deprivations, any and all cravings will arise, sexuality not the least of it I soon learned.
The course begins in the meditation hall where we’d spend an inordinate amount of the next 10 days with our teacher at the front and 80 silent souls in lotus position on our designated mats.
The first couple of days are the period I now call my ego temper tantrum. I reached for any reason to justify running away. It was like drudging through near dry cement. I’ve never felt time move so slowly. My legs were numb, my back in knots, my body tired and hungry, my thoughts restless and defiant to all the strict rules and schedule and the repetitive teachings of a technique that wasn’t working for me.
The mind whirred with objections, why do we have to suffer so much to not suffer, this is bad for my body, I should be exercising or working not sitting all day, psychedelics can get me there in 10 minutes not 10 days, I’m going to get sick, la di da di da it went on. My ego was a kicking and screaming toddler stuck on timeout, in that state everything felt like prison. Two bland meals a day, served on metal trays, up at 4 am, lights out at 9 pm, meditating 7-10 hours in between. No books, journals, technology, or interaction with each other or the outside world. Mostly, I was stuck on the idea that this meditation technique simply didn’t work for me, so why stay.
I’m not sure if this was because our teacher didn’t speak English, or if all Vipassana retreats do this, but after every meditation sitting we’d listen to SN Goenka on recording in both Hindi and English—a combination of Pali chants, guided meditations, and teachings on the Anapana technique (the first step in the practice of vipassana meditation).
The Anapana technique is simple, focus on the breath at the nostrils focus on the breath at the nostrils focus on the breath at the nostrils. With equanimity, equanimity, no craving, no aversion, complete equanimity. He’d use the same words so repeatedly that they began as nails on the chalkboard until they finally clicked in and I realized the repetition and simplicity is its effectiveness…but that didn’t come until days of smugly choosing my own technique and then ending in frustration when I could only go deep for about 40 minutes and needing to change my legs 4 times vs. the 0 or 1 requirement.
By the 6th day the breakthrough came. At this point we’d been taught the full Vipassana technique, which is also simple but more expansive. You scan the body part by part, observing sensations with complete objectivity. Not wanting what is not there, not trying to change what is there, simply observing the sensation as it is in that moment. With the wisdom of “anicca, anicca, anicca” (changing, changing, changing)—all is impermanent. All comes into our experience only to pass on like waves in the ocean. Heat, cold, tension, tingling, itching, heaviness, tightness, flow, all is ok, all is impermanent. Then scanning to the next part of the body. Top of head to feet, feet to top of head, then back again. Over and over and over with the point to get to a state of feeling no blockages or tension, just a free flow of energy as awareness scans the body up and down.
Once getting to that free flow, the next stage is bhanga. A Pali term that means dissolution, bhanga is a felt sense of complete formlessness and dissolving of the body. Here, sensations are felt as waves of light energy that are one with all versus encased in a separate solid form. This is the goal of Vipassana, to reach that felt sense of oneness with the universe, and therefore felt sense of dissolving the ego — the mind-made illusion of self that encases all “sankharas” (aversions and cravings), and therefore ends suffering. This is the discovery and teaching of Buddha’s enlightenment.
They say it takes years to get to bhanga, here’s where I can credit my psychedelic work. The number of times I’d reached bhanga through the medicine I suppose has opened that portal enough to make it easier to reach through meditation alone. I got there the evening of the 6th day, after a couple of days of caving to the technique and training with Goenka’s guidance. From here, the power and awe in this technique washed over me and my reason for coming here became glaringly clear with a deep gratitude and awe. I came to experience, sans medicine, what I’d only known intellectually or in the psychedelic state.
The next four days came and went with much more ease, even enjoyment.
I learned many things, here are a few.
The first, humility. A humility at the mental fortitude and good old-fashioned discipline required for the path of Dhamma. I can talk or write all day about this stuff…anyone in my life will tell you I do…but I’m humbly learning that knowing it is different than feeling it. Our conditioning is so deep, our ego-mind so cunning, our reactive thinking so ingrained, the only way to overcome it is to do your own work. No teacher or guru or book or shortcut will take you there. A psychedelic might hold your hand and show you the path, but remembering it, and carving this new way of being into the unaltered mind and daily life takes consistent, diligent, patient work. It takes sitting with yourself and looking inward with deep presence, and being ok with whatever you find. In meditation and in life, over and over. Because it’s easy to do when you feel good, but the real test is when you don’t feel good—in an argument, in traffic, in loss. Whenever a painful emotion or trigger arises, instead of attributing it to someone else or the circumstance, if you can bring awareness inward, with equanimity and the wisdom of impermanence, that’s the work. And the more often you can do this, the more sankharas will be hacked at the root and released for good. And, in Alan Watts’ words, this is the birth of responsibility—realizing that our reality is driven by how we respond to it, not the other way around. This is liberation.
The second, surrender and presence. Because only surrender could come when the ego tantrum did nothing but make me feel worse. Having no distractions handy—a partner, a workout, a phone, a chocolate bar—meant having no choice but to sit in the restlessness until it passed. Which it always did, as soon as I brought a prolonged presence to it. I experienced directly that accepting the now exactly as it is, no matter how challenging, paradoxically is where bliss and peace live. This is something I thought I knew and lived by—Eckhart Tolle being my favorite spiritual teacher (The Power of Now, A New Earth, and Stillness Speaks are the other of my most gifted books). But the achievement-focused doer I am, I hadn’t let myself truly feel it for expanded lengths of time, and that, of course, is where the benefits lie.
The third, the mind-body connection. It’s amazing how stubborn uncomfortable sensations and emotions are. It’s almost like we *want* to sulk and brood in them. When my legs were screaming, or my stomach growling, or my mind chattering, finding equanimity was so challenging—but when I did, when I truly felt acceptance and watched the sensation as an energetic happening, it’d then transform. The legs would relax, the belly would quiet, the mind would rest. It’s so counterintuitive and difficult to put into practice until you’ve experienced it, but the actual acceptance is what heals, not time or action or change. My own technique before this course was as I’ve been most of my life—stuck in my head. I’d watch thoughts go by with equanimity, but I’d never learned to do the same with my body. The mind is sticky, our (or at least my) attention always pulls back there like a tight rubber band, even in meditation. The word ‘mindfulness’ connotes that tendency. But consciousness isn’t isolated to the mind, our body is vibrating with this alive intelligence, and when we tune into its wisdom, we learn that the mind and body are more one than they are separate, and soon, that expands to all things are more one than separate.
10 days of being got me up close and personal with how rarely I do this, and how I might change that moving forward. Called an Art Of Living, Vipassana is more than a meditation practice. It’s cutting aversions and cravings at the root—at the sensations in the body—where they begin and before they become an emotion like anger or sadness or a response like violence or selfishness. The experience pushed me both physically and mentally, during which I told myself I’d never do it again. But now (after realizing how small 10 days is) I’m grateful this new door has been opened to the path. And more grateful plant medicine is an accessible, perhaps more loving, ally in getting there.