The Discipline of Vipassana

Day 1 of my Vipassana retreat, and I am so mad that I have been asked to sit for 12 hours of meditation, starting at 4:30am, that I take four retaliatory naps throughout the day (and two during unsanctioned times).

I had done silent meditation retreats before, the last five-day just a few months prior, so I thought I was prepared. But the 4:00am wake up times with no walking nor yoga was another level of intensity. For me, the silence and turning inward was no problem. But I was not prepared for this. If the IMS retreat was like a military boot camp, then Vipasanna was like training for Navy Seals. The pressure valve of being with oneself is released a little when one can get up, can walk, can shift positions in one's seat; take that away, and you sit in a pressure cooker of yourself.

I had looked at the schedule before I came, so I should have known. But actually experiencing twelve hours of seated meditation in a single day, and knowing that the next eight days of my life would also contain that very experience, was a whole other world away from reading the schedule. Jon Kabat-Zinn famously talks about how you can't get nutrition from eating the menu, you have eat the food, as a way of describing the importance of actually practicing meditation. By that same law, I couldn't possibly begin to understand the pressure I would experience when asked to sit for that length of time, day in and day out. I just had to do it.

Vipassana is a rigid and specific sequence of meditation techniques designed to sharpen your mind and attune it to the entire internal landscape. You start the first day by only concentrating on the breath in the triangular shape starting above your upper lip and following your nose line up to between the eyes. The next day you narrow it down to focusing on the movement of the breath against the skin, and then the next just to the area between the upper lip and below the nose. Finally, you focus on sensations on that tiny space—tingling, heat, coolness, pain, pressure— for hours, and hours, and hours. At last, on day four, you are directed to start slow body scans, noting areas that are blind to sensation or painful "gross solidified sensation," and noting all with equanimity. No judgement. No reactivity. No nothing. Just noticing. The catch is that for three of the twelve hours a day, you are no longer permitted to move or shift in response to discomfort. You cannot open your eyes. You cannot uncross your hands. You cannot wiggle your toes. You just note.

After learning this strategy on Day 4, and sitting motionless for most of the 1 1/2 hour teaching (my knee screaming and searing pain in my back ultimately did cause me to squirm), I walked quickly back to my room and burst into hot, angry tears. How could I be asked to sit in the pain? What is the point of this? I had been practicing a meditation that allowed mindful deliberate movement when pain became too intense, and this permitted none. I was convinced I was injuring my knees and each hour tried a different position. I eventually found a way to sit that relieved that pain, but the back pain would not dissipate.

At first, it was just a generalized terrible pain. The same pain I made peace with my last gentler retreat, so I wanted so badly to be soothing and loving towards it with my narration. But there was no space for mental constructs in this particular meditation. Only looking and perceiving. There was to be no action, movement or thoughts, at all to change the experience. Just observation.

As I looked at it longer, I saw the pain was sharp and radiated down from my right shoulder blade. I saw that it occasionally faded from one spot only to heighten in the spot next to it. It was a gripping tense pain that eased for a moment or two with subtle back and side bends to the left and right, tilting of the pelvis forward and back, only to resume moments later with the equal or greater ferocity. Every formal sit, we were reminded to just observe, without needing to change or control, just observe experience. I practiced again and again bringing my attention to that spot, allowing myself to be completely absorbed in the sensation, and then backing away to explore sensation through the rest of the body.

I was promised that the sensation would resolve on its own if I did not fight or engage with it. I had a hard time keeping faith, and as I watched, it seem to multiply and shift.

On the fifth and sixth days, I started to see cracks in the intensity. I noticed that I could sit with the sensation for longer before I started getting frantic about it. I even had more transcendent experiences once the pain dissipated where I could feel subtle sensations all across the body. I got excited to see these shifts. I must be making progress! I must be becoming more enlightened!

"I have been having these cool experiences," I informed my teacher, "but I'm not sure what it all means."

"Nothing," she responded placidly, "Just keep watching."

Sigh.

My mind wanted so badly for it all to mean something. Surely I was cracking the space-time continuum with my laser-like focus. Surely I would be drifting into to cosmos soon for my efforts. Instead, it turned out I was just making up a story about a particularly pleasant constellation of sensations.

This stuff is hard. Nonreactive means nonreactive to everything. You don't react to pain by trying to make it go away; you don't react to pleasure by making up a story about it meaning something. But in order to NOT do those things, you watch yourself DO them again. And again. And again. It's so very human to want discomfort to stop and pleasure to stay, but the whole game is about letting it all go. The moments where I could, what freedom there was. What a delightful (yet fleeting) experience of noticing without clinging or aversion.

There was also something very freeing about having every moment of my day accounted for, even if I just spent that time sitting and watching. I didn't have to decide if I was going to get up at 4:00am and meditate. They rang a bell, so I did. I was told to come back at 9am, and to eat at 11:30am, and to listen at 7:00pm, so I did. These are not choices I would make for myself on a daily basis, which is part of why I go to retreat. If someone didn't tell me to stay motionless for the full hour, I would most certainly wiggly my way out. But then I wouldn't have had the experience of seeing what happens next. What happens the eleventh hour of meditation in a day. What happens the eighth day of meditation in a row.

On our last day, our teacher informed us it was important to keep up our practice, an hour in the morning and an hour at night, to maintain our sharpened awareness. I knew immediately I wouldn't be committing to that. Two hours of my precious waking time dedicated to silent observation? Enlightenment isn't yet worth it to me.

I walked away with a sense that I could stay longer in my discomfort, and react slightly less, than when I arrived. It is said that you're always practicing something, and to make up for all of those years of practicing avoidance, resistance, and grasping, I can't expect one week to bring me to a new plane of existence. But even the slightest shift has got to be worth something. And for that, I am grateful.

Finding My Way Back Into Balance

In having left the classroom after five years, I have finally found myself in a place where I can do so much that I've always wanted to do: "...sit by the window when it rains and read books...paint because I want to...listen to my body..." And more... repetitively strum the ukulele with no thought for song recall, cook a meal and eat it one bite at a time, write letters to friends around the country, wake up with the sun shining around the curtains.  It is so luxurious to have this wealth of time.

Back in Washington, D.C., it was normal to wake before sunrise and return home well into the evening. It was expected that people sat in coffee shops on weekends with spillover work, ate most meals out of the house, and scheduled friend dates one right after the next so never was there an afternoon to fritter away. Unscheduled time, the rare occasion when it came up, was met with confusion and unease.

I don't want to work in overdrive my whole life only to begin finding space in my old age. I wonder why it is that this is the advanced civilization that we've created. Is this really how we want our lives to go? The constant pushing to do, to perform, to better, to acquire is exhausting.

And yet.

Too little structure and I find my life becomes shapeless and vapid. I find myself whiling away my days with endless streaming Netflix and Facebook and handfuls of popcorn. Also, not inconsequentially, I find my savings rapidly depleting. I do not thrive when I am let loose in the universe with little to hold me in place. For myself, I like a box. Not a tight box, mind you, but one which prevents me from dissipating into nothingness. I like having something to work in and push against, as long as it isn't too small.

The quote above is not quite right for me, I guess. I don't, "just want to be, boundless and infinite." I want to balance that being with doing. There are many things that can be done to contribute to this world, and it feels important to me to do one of those things.  I want to earn my keep by providing service to others. I want to have days full of purpose and meaning.

One of Pantanjali's most quoted yoga sutra states, "Sthira Sukkham Asanam."  This means the posture should be steady AND easeful. We need both.

My life quest is to find that balance between Popcorn-munching Neftflix-watching Couch-potatoeing and Endless Email-responding Overscheduled Work-worship. I would guess that the sweet spot looks different for different people, but we all crave the balance.

Because that equilibrium point is always shifting, it is like approaching infinity, and we are likely never able to get it just right. I swung hard out of my years of teaching and efforting into the opposite extreme of underemployment and relaxation. Now I work to bring myself back towards the midline, so that I might both give something of value to the world and continue to cultivate inner wellbeing as I do it.