For those of you who read my posts on Facebook last summer about my Vipassana experience, you'll find that this entry is somewhat familiar. In fact, the first three entries (July, August and September) will be that way. However, I do insert a bit or two that is new - for instance, this one features a nickname (my favorite one) that I forgot to include in my original Facebook posts.
However, beyond September, I will begin to explore some of the philosophy and nuts/bolts of the Vipassana meditation process. I will explain, as best I can, how it's meant to work. How did it work for some newbie like me who had never meditated before? How did I spend four months after my first retreat on Cloud Nine, after nearly spending a year on the border of Cloud Eight (Nervous Breakdown)? I'll get into all that in the October, November and December issues of this column, as published in The Noise.
Plus, I will be writing about my experience taking a second journey to Hell. I took a second ten-day Vipassana Retreat in March of 2011. Also, I'm taking a three-day retreat this September, and planning yet another ten-day trip to Hell in December. For that one, I'll be going into retreat on December 21, and not emerging from my cave of silence until January 1. So, there will be a lot of ground to cover in coming issues.
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Here's the August column as printed in The Noise:
Despite the fact that I had never meditated in my life, I went on a 10-day Vipassana Meditation Retreat. For 10 days, I accepted a vow of complete silence: No talking with others, nor any silent communication by gesture or eye contact. Further, no cell phones, computers, TV, radios, music, no alcohol, no drugs. NOTHING. No input, no output. Except 100 hours of meditation.
Here follows the story of my experience: Part 2. Previous entries are posted online.
There is no comfort here. It is the morning of Day Four of my 10-day Vipassana Meditation Retreat. It is too hot. My quarters are in a doublewide trailer with 17 other men who snore and slam doors. I can’t sleep. And the meditation practice is absurd and pointless. I had such high hopes when I came here, but now, I just want to go home.
My first three days at the Retreat Center in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains have been hell. I arrived with an open mind, hoping for instruction and guidance. Instead, I feel disoriented and lost. The opening “orientation” session featured an older man whose voice cracked with uncertainty as he read from a sheet of paper. He gave us the same information I had already read on the website. Just what had I gotten myself into?
During the first meditation session, I sat in the hall with 125 other participants without any initial instruction. After what seemed like an eternity, the teacher, whose voice beckoned to us via audiotape, instructed us to focus our attention on the sensation of our breath touching the edges of our nostrils. That’s it, nothing else. We did this for hours and hours on end, interrupted only by short breaks. There is no visualization, no thinking about Chakras, no chanting “OM”, and no imagining the Buddha, some goddess, or light around my body.
This practice – Anapana meditation – is unnervingly difficult. After just a few breaths, my mind wanders to all kinds of fleeting thoughts. After two long days, I begin to question my sanity. I drift into waking dreams, where I am visited by strange creatures. On Day Three, I meet one that’s half-man, half-rat. The creature’s face is covered in dirty fur, and he talks like Pendleton from Charlotte’s Web. But I don’t remember what he says to me, because the teacher has instructed me that anytime I become aware of my mind wandering, to simply re-direct my attention back onto the touch of breath on my nostrils. No matter how weird the vision, just come back to my breath. I am bewildered by the places my mind is going, but I am trying to follow the instructions.
I keep myself from going crazy in between sessions by thinking up names and stories for the other people at the Retreat. I can’t talk to anyone, so I know nothing about them. There’s a guy who looks like Shaggy – he must have come here after solving another mystery with Scooby Doo. And there’s a guy with an obnoxiously thick beard that grows way too far down his neck. He carries around a giant soft meditation chair that outsizes any other meditation pillow in the room by a factor of four. I name him Neckbeard the Great, captain of the famous pirate ship, Neckhair.
Despite these distractions of oddity and humor, I am miserable. I’ve decided to leave without completing the course. Realizing the failure this represents, I curl up in my bed and begin to sob uncontrollably. My emotional reaction is large and unwieldy – a much stronger reaction than I typically have when I face failure. Clearly, three and a half days of no input and no output has removed all distraction from my mind, which makes me feel things much more deeply. I am failing this course, and the shame and fear associated with that pours out of me like a waterfall.
Two things, however, are keeping me from leaving: I am more fearful of admitting defeat than I am eager to get out of there. And, Day Four is “Vipassana Day”. We have been told that we will learn Vipassana meditation this afternoon.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the change in meditation would change everything for me. It would be the kind of break-through that not only gave me the strength to stay through ten full days of this hell, but also would change my life.
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Follow up notes to this column:
1. I was far more miserable and angry than I could really fully express in my word limit (the column is 750 words or less for publication). In my original free-flowing posts on Facebook about all this, I wrote about a fantasy sequence in which I jumped the Course Manager and repeatedly punched him in the face. I had many similar fantasy sequences in my mind, in which I hurt or attacked others. Yet, I am not a violent person; in fact, I've never been in a fight in my life. I'm a pacifist, mostly. So, to have this level of intense anger coursing through me was unusual and uncharacteristic. That's part of what the "Hell" is all about: when you shut down all input for ten full days, and cannot express yourself (no output), all the crud and emotions stored in your body start to come loose and find their way out. It's not pretty, but it is liberating... at least once you come out on the other side of it.
2. Neckbeard the Great, who I met on the final day of the course, turned out to be named Sean. Oddly, Sean took a bunch of us to a hidden look-out spot just outside the Course Boundary to show us a place he would go to sit during breaks. There, he found several clumps of human hair. It looked like someone chopped their hair off during a retreat a few moons back. I find it more than appropriate that Neckbeard is the person who showed us this great offering of human hair.
3. More nicknames:
-Steven Seagal (the ass-kicking movie star - spitting image)
-Mr. I'm Too Sexy (by the end of the Course, I would be singing this horrible song in my head each time he walked in the hall. Sometimes it was hard to keep from laughing out loud.)
-Frog Man (thus named for the frog-hop-way he would adjust his position in the meditation hall)
-Doc (wore smocks throughout the course)
-RunDMC
-Bubble Butt
-Bad Guy (looks like a random bad guy in a Jackie Chan movie. Hope he doesn't run into Steven)
-Mohawk (who I also called "NIN" because he wore a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, very peaceful)
-Thunder Girl
