To my worried co-workers, friends, and family: I have completed my vipassana retreat.
To my curious co-workers, friends, and family: allow me to explain what one does at a vipassana retreat.
To my future self: allow me to help you remember what you have learned at your vipassana retreat.
The Context
Like a circular pool, there are any number of ways we may enter the waters of this subject. Jumping in, we see that vipassana is Buddhist. This practice is specific to Siddhartha Gotama, a Buddha. “A Buddha” because Buddha is a title given to one who is fully awakened, similar to an “arahant,” which is a Pali word for “liberated one.” Yet a Buddha discovers the path without a teacher and then teaches it to the world. An arahant reaches liberation by following a Buddha’s teachings.
Buddha is like Christ in that it describes a state of being. It is not the name of an individual. There is Jesus the Christ; there is Krishna the Christ. Any one of us may, and must, achieve that Christ consciousness along our path towards full liberation.
There have been many Buddhas before the time of Gotama the Buddha. There will be Buddhas again after Gotama the Buddha. We remember Gotama specifically because Gotama’s offering is unique to this world. He taught the world how to use bodily sensations to first connect mind and matter, and then to transcend them. He taught vipassana: “seeing things as they really are.”
The Buddha’s motivation was to relieve the world of misery and suffering. Though the world will always have its pains, it need not have misery. Pain is merely a sensation, while our reaction to pain is what creates misery.
The weather blows cold in winter. Chapping our lips. Numbing our face. Running our nose. This is pain, a mere sensation. Coming, going. It is only when we react with aversion to the pain that misery begins. We want the pain to end and are distraught for however long it lasts.
When the pain does end, as all things always do, pleasantness relieves us. The pleasantness is also a sensation. Coming, going. It is only when we react with craving that the pleasant becomes the miserable. We want the pleasant to stay, but are distraught when it inevitably leaves.
At the intellectual level, I have heard this lesson many times: do not crave or avoid life. Allow life to be because life will so rarely go exactly how you please. If you need life to be this way and that way, you will be disappointed.
We hear this. We logically grasp this. Yet we do not understand. The winter of our lives arrives, and we are depressed in varying degrees. We lose the sun: small depression. We lose our health: bigger depression. We lose our loved one: big depression.
We carry on, but acting from misery begets more misery. The Buddha shows us that we treat only the symptoms of our misery, pruning only the limbs of this poisonous tree that bears poisonous fruit. Never do we take the tree out by the roots. We trim the canopy of our sadness by distracting ourselves with this relationship, this life event, that drink, that new sensation. Then the relationship ends, the era passes, the bar closes, the sensation leaves, and the sadness returns. Whatever was trimmed regrows.
Cravings and aversions run our lives. The best of us see the symptoms, but so few treat the cause. The doctor who treats only the symptoms will never cure the disease. To cure the disease, cure the cause. Trimming the trees of misery will not do. We must take the trees out at the roots.
You have the habit of swearing when things go wrong because you have the habit of craving the perfect outcome. You have the habit of drinking too much because you have the craving to feel free. You crave freedom because you have imprisoned yourself in an ever-shrinking cell that blocks out all that you avoid. Keep this up, and soon every experience will be unnerving and unbearable. No life change, relationship change, exercise change, possession change, job change, financial change, cultural change, political change, religious change, or otherwise will give you unassailable happiness. What is outside of us cannot cure us. The cause and cure are within.
Vipassana is a meditation technique that cures misery. The secret: we are already peace and joy. There is nothing to gain. Instead, this technique teaches us how to uproot our mind’s subconscious habit of reacting and miring in our woes. It is this reaction that churns the waters of our mind so greatly that we lose sense of our own true nature.
The Retreat
I was at another retreat in a yoga ashram two years ago when I first heard about vipassana. On the porch of our duplex, lied my neighbor’s barefoot shoes, just like my own. “A friend,” I thought. Indeed. We met and were at once acquainted. He told me, “This retreat is so different than a vipassana retreat, which is what I normally do. I’m not used to such a leisurely meditation schedule.” He went on to explain the vipassana retreat, its strict “Noble silence” for nine days, its 10 hours of strict meditation per day, and hints about the technique that he described as “raw.”
Those words, “vipassana,” rang in my ears. I did not know when, but I knew that. I knew that I was fated to go. I would come to know this friend, Yoga with Ethan ॐ, and would come to hire him to be my “yoga coach.” Wrong, I was. The year of our working together was not actually yoga coaching, but vipassana training.
This was training for good posture, training for eating rightly (eating light-ly), training to embrace the metaphysical, the spiritual, the hologram of the body, the glimpses of the deeper mind, and the ever-inspired pursuit to “Know Thyself.”
The retreat’s aim is to provide the perfect first dive into the ocean of what will be a very long swim to shore. This technique is three-fold:
* Sīla: morality and right living.
* Sammā Samādhi: right concentration.
* Paññā: intuitive wisdom.
Sīla is done for you per the environment of the camp. The five precepts are (1) no killing (and more broadly, no harming of life), which we achieve through kindness to our neighbors and vegetarian diets; (2) no stealing (and more broadly, owning nothing), which we achieve by our free attendance; (3) no sexual misconduct, which we achieve by our busied schedule and separation of men and women while at the camp; (4) no lying, which we achieve through silence; (5) no intoxicants that includes any and all drugs. The importance of these precepts cannot be overstressed. One feels them working for you during the strict 4 AM to 9 PM schedule focused on the singular aim to know Thyself.
When you are focused on doing good for others, you purify all your actions. When you are focused on not stealing, you are actually surrendering your ownership. The campus has no locks on the doors. You cannot pay for your attendance. The food you eat is charity. The beds you use are charity. The resources for you are charity. You own nothing. You are taken care of, but more importantly, you surrender your possession, craving, and preference. The adage, “beggers can’t be choosers.” When you forgive all sexual passion, your creative energy is brought to higher centers of love, art, focus, and ultimately, deep, deep awareness of Self. When one does not lie but speaks only truth, the reality one perceives comes ever closer to the truth. You practice vipassana by “seeing what is truly there.” Finally, when you forgive all drugs, alcohol, and intoxicants, your mind is clear to feel its true sensations.
Following these precepts in wordly life is actually quite difficult. In fact, I can’t say I ever have till now. Now having done so, I speak from my personal experience, not from scripture or Judeo-Christian judgement. From my newfound paññā, or wisdom, I attest that following morality such as this is in my own best interest. It is the bedrock of my escape from misery. Henceforth, it will be my inspired aim to keep helping others (per this previous lesson), to continue in sobriety, to continue in truth-telling, to continue in creative passions over sensual passions, and to continue sharing and giving everything I own with everyone, understanding that nothing is truly mine.
The benefit to all this is an equanimous mind that prepares us for step two: samādi, or concentration. Yoga had introduced me to the term samādi as part of Patanjali’s eight-fold path, where samādi is the final step. That samādi is total absorption of the mind and what I had relegated to an experience exclusive to high saints. “I can’t enter samādi yet,” I thought. This must be a different, more attainable variant.
It is. It also is not. In this sense, samādi is concentration. We can have TV samādi when absorbed in our show, hunting samādi when tracking our prey, competition samādi when swept up in a game, and sammā samādhi, where sammā means purified, when we are absorbed in meditation.
The truest and deepest states of samādi are quite elusive, quite subtle. They are reserved to the breathless state. You will know you are in the deepest states of samādi when your need to breathe stops, and so eliminating your heart’s need to eradicate carbon dioxide, so bringing your entire body to complete stillness. This state of stillness gives direct perception of the infinite and of your true Self. Arriving here brings us to paññā, or wisdom.
The first three and a half days of the retreat are dedicated to developing concentration. You do this by limiting the area of your focus, sharpening the caliber of your mind’s attention. To focus on the body at whole is too large and would only produce broad or gross insight. Focusing on the whole head, the whole shoulder, the whole navel is too large, too broad. The prescription begins at the nose. Focus on the triangle of the nose. Focus on the breath. Focus on the sensations of the breath entering the nose, passing through the nostrils, entering the nasal walls.
The breath is the link between mind and matter, and thus the link to God. The breath is the bridge between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. This is so because the breath can be either autonomic or voluntary. We can control our breathing when we are conscious, just as our breathing acts of its own accord when instructed by our subconscious.
It is our breath that first responds to our emotional state. Passionate thinking increases our breathing. Equanimous thinking decreases our breathing. Breath awareness is the first cue to our state of mind. Following the breath is the perfect anchor to take us deeper and deeper, subtler and subtler to the depths of our subconscious self.
Each day of meditation brought new instructions from our teacher, S.N. Goenka. Each instruction asked us to sharpen, narrow, and shrink the area of our focus. From the full nasal triangle we reduced our focus to just the nostrils. From the nostrils we reduced our focus to just the area above the upper lip. We watched the faintest sensation of air passing. We observed the breath like a scientist, methodically notating the characteristics: warm, cold, strong, soft, fast, slow. No judgement. Merely watching.
This intense focus develops our ability, serving pre-requisite for the actual technique of vipassana. We would begin on day four with new instructions. First, we were to sit with “strong determination,” called adhiṭṭhāna. No movement for at least one full hour at a time. No opening of the eyes. No opening of the hands. No shifting of the muscles. Absolutely still. Second, you are to scan the body, every inch of the body using the same attentive scalpel we had developed by focusing on the subtlest sensations of our breath, a technique called ānāpāna (ānā: inhalation, pāna: exhalation).
You make yourself as comfortable as possible. My friend, Ethan, had disclosed that adhiṭṭhāna was to come, so for the first three days I practiced my sitting still ahead of the actual “strong determination.” Here I was in a bolstered cross-legged pose, one among twenty men in the left side meditation hall, divided and adjacent to twenty women. The male teachers before us; the female teachers before them. No matter how comfortable you began, a critical threshold would pass, usually around thirty to forty minutes after beginning. Pain would splinter forth from the nerves. Aching. Heat. Misery, it would seem. This is when the practice starts.
The Buddha’s goal for us is to escape our misery, to destroy the latent seeds of our misery at the root level. Otherwise, those seeds will grow into the trees of our future suffering, sowing fruits ripe with more suffering, in perpetuity, in a vicious and compounding cycle till the misery usurps our lives, till we have pinioned ourselves in sensational hell. The means of escape is to train our subconscious mind not to react.
We see our emotions at the surface level. We see the actions of our rage, or see the purchases of our greed, or feel the sadness of our grief. We see circumstantially that our environment dictates our moods, well-being, actions, health, materials, and lives. We see our fatness and say, I must stop eating junk food. We replace sweet cookies with sweet apples. We work at the surface level. The Buddha wished for us to understand, “Where does my desire for this sugar originate?” When sitting in adhiṭṭhāna, after focusing the mind with ānāpāna, the vipassana begins when we are instructed to focus only on our sensations.
Focus only on your sensations, seeing them how they really are, keeping an equanimous mind, understanding that all sensations change, change, change, just as nature changes. “Anicca, anicca, anicca,” is what we heard time and time again. Change, change, change. Everything is change. When the unpleasant sensation arises, when my hips were on fire from my posture, we do not move. We sit with strong determination and we notice, “This is an unpleasant sensation, a gross sensation. Let’s see how long it lasts. Let’s watch it change. Anicca, anicca, anicca.” Then, after some time of watching, of remaining curious, of going deeper, subtler, subtler into the sensation, the exact quality of the sensation, the exact epicenter of the sensation, moving from the skin of the hip, to the flesh of the hip, to the inside bone of the hip, to the molecular cells of the hip, to the atoms of those cells, to the very source of the sensation, all visualizing, feeling, feeling, over the course of hours, days, and seemingly beyond time, the sensation dissolves from gross pain to subtler warmth, to subtler tingling, to subtler bubbling, to subtler vibrations, lightening, lightening, lightening.
These vipassana body scans would take our attention part-by-part, inch-by-inch across the entire bodily plane, from head-to-toe, from toe-to-head, from out-to-in, from in-to-out, from left-to-right, from right-to-left, again-and-again, this rounding, rounding of our attention on the body watching our sensations dissolve from gross pain to subtle vibration.
As we traversed into the subtle vibrations, we so traversed into the subtleties of the subconscious mind. At this level, we work at the roots of our mind. We see that no matter how comfortably we sit, no matter what the pose or posture, this gross, painful sensation arises, then changes, then passes. It would seem that if I sit in an uncomfortable position, the pain would only worsen, worsen, worsen and never resolve, but this is not so. The pain does dissolve, leaving in its wake a beautiful and pleasant sensation of flowing energy coursing through the body. The noticing of this change proves to yourself, experientially, that life is ephemeral, ever changing, ever changing. Realizing this, you acquire the personal confidence that you can conquer anything because no difficulty is insurmountable. No difficulty is forever. No matter how painful the difficulty at present, you develop the faith to know that pain is only a sensation and will not last.
Just when you think you have scorched your nerves for good, scorched your muscles for good, truly injured yourself, you stand, you break your strong determination, and miraculously, to your surprise, the pain flies away. Immediately gone. “It was all in my mind,” I realized.
The eradication of misery begins when we see these sensations, some pleasant, some unpleasant, and we surrender our aversion or craving for the sensation. When a gross and painful sensation rises to the surface of our body, we notice it for what it is. “This too shall pass.” Changing, anicca, focusing, we watch the gross dissolve into the subtle. The painful dissolve into the pleasant. After sitting in pain for quite some time, the spontaneous relief of all pain is quite pleasing, quite euphoric, quite tempting to crave. “This too shall pass.” Changing, anicca, the pleasant experiences will also pass. Like this, we remain equanimous, neither avoiding nor craving the sensations in our body.
By maintaining our equanimity, we do not feed the mind, the ego. Just as the body must be fed with food and water, so the mind must be fed with cravings and aversions. This feeding of the mind is what the Buddha discovered as the fetters of our imprisonment in the jail of our misery. When we maintain an equanimous mind, the fetters of past aversions, past cravings rise to the surface of our experience. These chains of past karma, suppressed and repressed experiences, emotions of craving and aversion, manifest in the body as sensation. How we react to the sensations becomes the habit of our mind, our saṅkhāra. Every impression on our mind results in a saṅkhāra. Every moment of our life. Most saṅkhāras are described as “writing on water.” Their impressions dissolve as they are written. Other saṅkhāras are like writing on sand, dissolving in a day upon the next change of tides. Still other saṅkhāras are like writing on rocks. They are deep, deep, impressionable, and they remain with us for our entire lives.
The reactions we keep with us for life and beyond are the reactions we have cut into our minds with chisel and mallet, striking day-after-day, year-after-year, life-after-life, the same cravings and aversions, addictions and character traits. To practice vipassana is to practice the retraining of our mind at the subconscious level to not hold fast to the good and push away the bad, but to allow life to pass through us, flow through us harmoniously. Doing so allows our previous saṅkhāras to rise to the surface. In this deep meditation we experience the root sensation of our habits and moods. When we recognize that our every action begins as a sensation in the body, when we recognize that all sensations are passing, we recognize that we can be free of any addiction, any character trait, any mood. “This too shall pass.”
I fully expected this retreat to be hellfire. Just think, and in just this life, I have cut deeply into the rock of my mind the habit of anger, rage, self-loathing. How many tennis rackets have I destroyed? How many bones in my hands have I broken from the walls that I have punched? How many times have I stabbed my legs, cut my thighs, crashed my car? How much money have I wasted in pursuit of destitution, self-sabotage? How many drugs have I taken to feel free from these pains, and secretly to further feed this habit of self-defeat? Manifold. “And you’re telling me that all actions taken, unless experienced with equanimity, are stored in my body as units of trapped energy, knots in the spiritual body, saṅkhāras?” This is true.
The students next to me, some of them would disclose to our teachers in our momentary group interviews, “I’m writhing in pain and I am enraged. Where is this rage come from? I am furious.” The teachers would respond, “Good, good. You’re allowing your stored emotions to rise. Let them pass. This too shall pass.”
“Where is all my rage,” I would think. I’m sitting here equanimous, I’m waiting. I’m watching. I hated myself so much. Where is that suicidality? Where is that rage? I allow it to come. I allow it to pass.
It never came. I realized, then, that seven years ago this month, I was voluntarily admitting myself into a psychiatric treatment center. This month, seven years later, I had admitted myself into a voluntary prison of my deep subconscious mind, a true mental hospital, metaphysical mental surgery, a vipassana retreat. That surgery should have, would have, resulted in many complications for me had the last seven years of my recovery not been so effectual, so painful and in its own way, relieving. Through dialectical behavior therapy, the countless psychiatric drugs, therapies, and trials, the transcendental meditation, then raja yoga meditation, then karma yoga through the service of working in a grocery during the pandemic, then more karma yoga through the service of working in a uniquely challenging job, then vipassana training with Ethan (not mentioning the thousands upon thousands of subtler remedies occurring in the moments of all interactions), I realized through all these things that my vipassana, my allowing these saṅkhāras to pass with an equanimous mind has been a journey of seven years and will continue to be a journey till the end.
The retreat closes with a day of reintegration. After nine days of silence, the final day is given to help us wake up from our mental surgery. The day is called metta day, metta meaning goodwill or unconditional care in Pali. The day begins with continued noble silence, but instead of our traditional adhiṭṭhāna at the morning meditation hour, we learn and practice a group metta (loving, kindness) meditation. Now imagine: a room of sixty meditators who have worked in the trenches of their minds, training with the discipline of warriors, sharpening their conscious attention to a razor’s edge, redirecting all this energy to their heart, to their goodwill for themselves, for each other, and for the world. Imagine the love felt in that room. It was experiential truth that I felt what modern physicists are proving in labs that the heart sends an electromagnetic signal not unlike a radio transmitter, and that these heart waves are measurable and measurably impact the hearts of all living creatures and beings. We felt in that room the synchronicity of sixty hearts matching the frequency of love, resonating like the strings of a perfectly tuned orchestra. Perfect coherence. Powerful, peaceful, loving.
Soaking in that space we one-by-one stood up and went out into the courtyard grounds under the full sun and clear blue sky. This would end our noble silence. Quite naturally, circles of chattering formed. When I exited the meditation hall, cushion cradled to my chest, relieved to have made this journey, to be done, I was swept up by one of the groups. We shared our names, our congratulations to have completed the course, and we laughed and talked as good friends, hearts full of love, not a drop of social fear or otherwise. Pure peace. Equanimity. How easy. You feel you can conquer the world because you know nothing can conquer you. All is changing, changing, changing.
The Lessons
* Ānāpāna (observing inhalation, exhalation) is the way to God, the key to the bridge connecting and transcending mind and matter.
* “Equanimity is the operating system of the mind,” which is a quote taken from a speaker hosted by my last company before I had attended a vipassana retreat. Anything other than equanimity creates a “virus” and “bloatware” for the mind’s operating system. To operate in life with peace and purity requires equanimity.
* Mastery of self, of habits, moods, traits, and total success in liberation begins at the sensational level of the atoms and wavelets of energy within the body. In order of importance: what we feel, what we think, what we say, what we do. Observing the subtle and letting it pass is how all difficulty and misery is overcome. Vipassana is the conscious technique to habituate our subconscious mind so that day and night, while awake and asleep, we will have attained mastery of equanimity, non-reaction and smooth passing of all experience.
* Morality. Despite my having no enemies, despite my desire to improve myself, despite my love for all humans, I have not been living a moral life. A true moral life, though the precepts are simple, is subtly difficult, requiring one’s full attention, courage, and determination. Consider just the instance of eating meat. The raising of the animal, the slaughtering of the animal, the pain the animal feels, the feelings of those animals impacting the cattlemen of the farms, the butchers of those butcher houses, creating for them the deeply suppressed avoidances that they are doing harm and taking the life of the living, harming themselves and harboring that misery which leaks into their daily lives, polluting, in the most subtle ways, the people-of-people who they interact with, and ultimately our entire population and society. “Morality surely isn’t so subtle,” I think to myself. No. It is. It is very subtle, even more subtle than this. However, consider the good that would actually manifest on our planet if we recognized that even a few perfect precepts can change the world in all ways.
* Dhamma. It is the law of nature. It is one with all. It is truth. To be with Dhamma, and to have Dhamma work for you, to practice Dhamma is to live in harmony with what is tru e. Dhamma does not belong to any sect, any god, any religion, any person. It is the universal law of liberation. The “religion,” so to speak, of India is called Sanātana Dharma, or eternal truth, eternal way. We all walk the same path back to God, though every path will be different.
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