Yesterday I just returned to civilization. I was out for 10 days at a facility that teaches a course on Vipassana Meditation. I had no access to my phone, internet and I was not allowed to communicate with anyone both verbally or non-verbally for all intents and purposes.
I was honestly expecting it to be a peaceful retreat. I started meditating for the better part of this past year and have enjoyed its benefits. I was hoping to have quite a bit of fun on this journey as I do in my daily practice.
I didn’t.
In fact, it was a brutal experience. From day 1, my mind was racing to entertain itself with books or journals, all of which were not allowed. The meditation started with focusing on one’s natural breath, but I felt bored to oblivion. I’ve certainly done this before but for 10 hours in the day, it can only get so interesting. And eventually the difficulty of the technique and sitting for so long became extremely uncomfortable.
But somehow it was worth it. There’s certainly a lot to be said about the trip. And most of it one has to experience for themselves. But I want to share just three primary things I learned from the meditation
Discomfort is Necessary
Each day of the course I was ready to pack it in. I actually couldn’t because I had no ride back home. But my mind wouldn’t stop. Everyday it asked itself “What is the purpose of this? Why do you want to suffer so much? Just end it now”.
I was extremely fortunate though because I did find some motivational to keep me going through the first few days. And then there were key moments of progress that made me feel like I was learning something.
In fact, the most uncomfortable times were where those moments came. There was so much that I gained from completing the course entirely. And yet during the course itself, the discomfort made we want to just leave the whole time.
It’s extremely easy when faced with uncomfortable situations to just abandon ship. If I wasn’t forced to, I would probably not maintain complete silence and meditate 10 days straight on my own. It would take 15 minutes for me to start doing something else. But the discomfort, as extreme as it was, was necessary for me to progress in the practice. I truly felt like I explored my own mind, free of distractions and people, more than I ever could before. We have to be able to push through discomfort, physical and mental, to make leaps even when it seems overwhelming.
Most Pain is Made-Up
One of the purposes of the course is to find a practical way to deconstruct the experiences of our mind. And to do this we observe the connection with sensations throughout the entire body. From that we realize the cravings and aversions that cause our unhappiness arise from sensations in our body. But by just observing that instead, we realize those sensations come and go. Because of their impermanence, we realize not to get attached or avoidant of certain experiences because they’ll come and go.
I wanted to see how this would work with one of my worst aversions: bugs. I decided to set up a chair outside where bugs were flying and crawling around. Of course, I was immediately nervous. I started imagining how the bugs would start going into my clothing and possibly bite me and I would suffer all this pain.
After 5 minutes of shaking voraciously so I didn’t seem like a plant, I finally was able to observe my own sensations. What I realized was that while my body was panicking, the actual sensations themselves weren’t painful. In fact, the whole time no bugs even got close to me. I might as well have been sitting indoors. And yet my mind was interpreting these sensations as pain and my experience became those interpretations. After bypassing it to reach my sensations, I naturally calmed down and felt more balanced about the situation.
Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, believed we “suffer more in imagination than in reality”. When there is no pain, our mind can make it up. And when there is pain, our mind magnifies it because it wants to get out. But learning how to balance your mind is essential so you don’t conjure a reality for yourself that is worse than what it actually is.
Understand the Reality of Your Stories
This crosses with the previous point, but it is important to make clear. The first task of our mind is to sort everything we observe into a story. You look at something outside and your mind labels it as a tree. You’re talking with a person and your mind judges the type of person they are. There is nearly never a moment where our understanding of reality has not already been interpreted for us.
This was something better articulated by Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, in describing his Vipassana meditation. Harari remembers how he couldn’t go 10 seconds into observing his breath until his mind started wandering or creating a story out of it. And if we can’t observe our own breath as it naturally is without conjuring it into something else, how can we observe the rest of reality as it naturally is. This was something I experienced as well in observing my sensations. Stories saying I’m not breathing well enough or that this other sensation is a sign of inflammation.
The goal of this technique is to resist this natural tendency of the mind. For example, focusing on your natural breath builds the ability to observe things as they naturally are. And once you can do that, you move throughout your body and possible the rest of the world as well. Harari himself believes he would not have been able to analyze the way stories influenced mankind if not for attempting to remove the process of stories in his observations.
Our interpretations of the world are very useful tools. But we have to observe reality as it actually is and remember those stories are just stories.
Should I do this too?
These are just a few of the more explainable principles I learned from the course. There is so much more to be derived from the experience of actually doing it and living with that discomfort.
The course is extremely uncomfortable, but I would still recommend it to anyone. Coming out of it you feel so much love, joy, and compassion for others. And you feel like you’ve taken small steps to understand the nature of your experience in its entirety. You don’t need any prior experience in meditation. But one thing for sure is you’ll need determination. Understand that you’ll want to quit and it will be difficult.
But know whatever you want to leave for is not as valuable as what you get by staying.
The course can be registered for on dhamma.org. It’s free, entirely donation-based, and completely volunteer-run. Even though I didn’t think I would in the moment, I plan to come back to continue the path of understanding my own experience. As painful as it is, the happiness and understanding that comes out of it is worth it.
