Chap 57: Me, Myself and I - Ten Days in a Silent Meditation Retreat

So you may now all address me as The Enlightened One. On the morning of Christmas Eve I emerged from 10 days in a silent Vipassana meditation retreat in the Blue Mountains, about 2 hours outside of Sydney. How was it? Brutal, just f-ing brutal, you have no idea. I am so glad I did it, but so very much gladder it's now over!

It wasn't the practice of Noble Silence, which basically meant absolutely no talking, no eye contact, no gestures with the other students that I found hard. In fact, this was actually quite pleasant. God knows I hate making small talk with riff-raff!

Nor did I find the other monastic aspects of the experience - the waking at 4am, the 2 vegan meals a day, etc - to be brutally hard. (Technically the food was vegetarian, but in name only since there were no eggs and dairy was present in only the faintest trace (milk for one's tea or butter for one's toast, if you must, a yoghurt raita for the vegetable curry, a slight sprinkling of cheese atop the lentil bake.) No, I survived the 2 meal-a-day diet quite well thanks to my foresight in smuggling protein powder into the retreat, gobbling my shakes down in guilty secrecy in the toilets at 4:30 in the morning. (Though I have to say it did cause me some philosophical anxiety. Isn't it entirely inconsistent to be seeking both enlightenment and more muscle mass? I don't think the Buddha cared about the size of his biceps.)

No, what nearly drove me bonkers was the meditation itself. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say it wasn't the meditation so much as the actual quantity of it: over 10 hours a day, for 10 days straight, from 4:30 in the morning until 9 at night, with only a few breaks. Initially, it was the physical pain of the sitting, and then later the boredom and the desperation, which was exacerbated by the fact that in the little time we were not supposed to be meditating, we were not allowed any mental diversions (no talking, no reading, no music, no writing materials, and certainly no mobile phones allowed in the retreat.) And of course, no gym (though I did squeeze in a few secret sit-ups and private push-ups when my roommate was showering.)

So basically, for 10 days, it was just me and my mind. And I found my mind to be rather annoying company after a while. I think, though, that may be the whole point of the exercise. The first three days we spent meditating on the faint sensation of our breath on the edges of our nostrils as it flows in and out. This is paradoxically both excruciatingly boring and unbelievably difficult. Try it! Close your mind, just feel the sensation, focus the mind, observe it, and see if you can keep your mind there for longer than 4 breaths without having your mind winging away somewhere. Now imagine doing that for 10 hours a day. Borrrrrrinnnnggggggg!

Day 4 we were "given Vipassana" - a special sitting where we were learned the Vipassana technique, basically focusing the mind to scan the sensations of the body with the twin tools of awareness and equanimity. The five days one is mainly aware only of the "gross solidified sensations", ie pain. But around day 5 or 6, one typically starts getting "flow sensations", which feels like waves of ecstatic energy sweeping the body. The Vipassana people says it's when you awaken to the reality of the dissolution of the mind-matter construct and feel that your body is nothing more than the vibrations of energy. Really of course it's just the awakening of the nervous system and awareness to feel all the body at once. The closest way I think to describe it is a nonsexual full body orgasm. It's quite seductive, as you can imagine but according to the Vipassana tradition you are supposed to remain equanimous and detached from it.

After day 5 I started having a number very strange bodily sensations and reactions while meditating. Often I experienced the full body orgasm or "flow sensation". But there were other even more bizarre reactions too. For example, I'd be focusing my attention on my left ankle, and all of a sudden I'd feel an intense - and I mean really INTENSE! - prickling on my right eyelid. Or a sudden sharp pain in my left ear, as though someone had driven a chopstick through it, followed by a bizarre and uncontrollable gelatinous shivering of my body, that took a minute to subside. And many times my body would torque suddenly to the left or right. And once the fourth fingers on each of my hands spasmed inwards as my hands rested on my lap. And once my eyes started to flicker madly back and forth under my closed lids and I thought "How weird, I'm not controlling this. I'm like one of those nutters in a religious trance at an american religious revival festival." I observed my eyes flickering for at least 2 minutes and they didn't stop, so I intervened and stopped them with an exercise of will. These were the good sittings, because they were interesting.

Most of the time, however, though I had poor sittings, where I couldn't concentrate. By days 8 and 9 I was desperate. If they hadn't had my wallet I would have jumped the wall in the middle of the night and run away. I was craving, just craving my cell phone. Every hour seemed an eternity, when left alone with the company of my own mind. A number of sittings, I didn't manage a single scan of my body because my mind kept flying away. I recall spending one 2 hour meditation session obsessing over plot inconsistencies in seasons 1-3 of the new Battlestar Galactica. (For example, if Dr Baltar had invented a blood test that he used to discover that Boomer was a cylon in season 1, why was he having such existential anxiety about whether he himself was a cylon in season 3? Why didn't he just run the blood test on himself? Oh, during 2-3 days I uncovered many such inconsistencies. For sci-fi junkies, more info on request.)

I thought I was alone in having shitty sittings like this, but on the final day of the retreat when Noble Silence is lifted you realize that the other students suffered much the same as you. One chap told me that he spent several meditation sittings thinking nonstop about how Oceans 11 was such a better movie than Oceans 12 or 13. And that was perhaps one of the most interesting things about the retreat - realizing at the end that all these other students, who appeared to be serene, content, meditative, and totally enlightened during the 10 days, were in fact experiencing the same difficulties, doubts, boredom, and frustration as you.

So, en fin, I'm glad I went. I got a lot out of it, and not just a tick mark for the experience. It was way more difficult than I could have imagined. But at the end of the retreat I realized how ill disciplined my mind was, and I learned how to observe it's vagaries with a degree of detachment and compassion. I haven't meditated once since I emerged, but I can feel that I'm going to start again soon.

Now, to end this blog, I want to count my small blessings of the stay, the tiny things that kept me sane:

• Napping after lunch (a double boon: both pleasant and helped to pass the time).
• A small dainty black and white spider, whose web I disturbed. She ran to the edges of her web, clipped the strands of silk, gathered them up in a tiny ball, which then disappeared from between her mandibles. (Did she eat it? She must have! I didn't know spiders could do that.)
• The beautiful amazing birds. The parikeets and rosellas of the Blue Mountains were breathtaking as they chattered and swooped through the trees. One day, when I was the height of my bored desperation, one flew down out of the trees to a very nearby branch (I could have reached out and touched him) and examined me carefully and curiously for about 10 minutes. When another black and white raven-like bird called a currawong did the same thing the next day, I fancied they were able to detect my enlightened nature.

• Mosquitoes with black and white bands on their legs. (Kept me mentally occupied for ages wondering why evolution would have favoured them with their zebra colouring.)
• The musical crunch of the gravel path under my feet in the misty dark cold mornings as I made my way to the meditation hall after the 4am wakeup.
• Feeding bread to the fish after breakfast. I started taking a few crusts of toast to the koi pond. One fish was bigger than the others, and rather excitable. As I dribbled crumbs into the water, he'd frantically barrel through the other fish, sucking madly at the surface of the water in a desperate and eager attempt to seize the bread crust. He was quite dog-like in his personality, shaking his head to wrench the crust away from the attentions of the other fish. My 15 minutes with Rover after breakfast each morning were a mental lifesaver for me until the other students saw what I was doing and suddenly the fish pond was thronged. Still, it was fun while it lasted.