Ten days of silence, meditating ten hours a day, sounds like hell. At least to most people...
Why would anyone do that to themselves?
...one of them told me it had changed his life.
When I first signed up for my ten-day Vipassana retreat and told people what it was, their response was a mix of concern, confusion, and trepidation-by-proxy. It's a natural response, I suppose; most of us can't sit with ourselves for five minutes without needing a distraction, let alone ten days. Why would anyone do that to themselves?
Members of my own family even thought I must have been desperate, and neglecting myself. It was a known pattern of mine to put my mind through extreme experiences, having attended three different ayahuasca retreats in the space of just over a year. What's more, my experience at those ayahuasca retreats sucked, or at least the ceremonies did. Though I made some lifelong connections, and had a pretty great time on San Pedro (a mescaline cactus), the ayahuasca ceremonies were absolute torture. Many of the people there had incredible ayahuasca ceremonies, but for me it just plain hurt.
Here we are a year and a half later from my last Aya retreat, and I've just landed in Bali. I'm on my way to my guest house in Ubud from the airport, looking for ways to fill my time. A couple of my mates, one of whom I'd actually met at an Ayahuasca retreat in Ecuador, had told me about these ten-day Vipassana retreats held all over the world; one of them told me it had changed his life, with the change staying with him years later. It turned out there was a Vipassana centre in Bali, pretty near Ubud in fact, so I signed up for a retreat that was a month out, giving me some time to explore the island beforehand. I won't bore you with the stuff I got up to leading up to it.
The first few days
The first few days of the retreat were a little tough, honestly, though that came as no surprise. The standard sentiment about these retreats is that it's raw-dogging to the max. I'd also heard that all that time with your own thoughts can lead you to see things about yourself you'd been glossing over.
But after maybe two or three days, the rest of my experience was... great.
Sorry if you were expecting another piece about how tough Vipassana retreats are, because I absolutely loved it. I love meditation, and after ten years of practice and a deep interest in spirituality, I've learnt to generate some pretty sublime feelings within myself. On top of that, you get your own private room, delicious vegan food, and it's all completely free, in the name of spreading the Dharma. Wow. On top of all that, being in a space full of fellow meditators, all striving and working on themselves, fills the room with a really beautiful energy.
Vipassana
The style of meditation at these Vipassana retreats is, of course, Vipassana, but what is that? Generally speaking, Vipassana is a form of open-awareness meditation aimed at generating insight into the nature of reality. I was at an S.N. Goenka retreat, the famous ten-day one you hear about, and those retreats have their own special, specific variant of this general meditation form. According to Goenka, whose teachings are played at the retreat as audio recordings, the Vipassana taught there is passed directly down from the Buddha himself, through a sect of Buddhism found in Myanmar, his country of origin.
Goenka's Vipassana is, ultimately, a long, in-depth body scan. Starting from the crown of your head, you observe the sensations that naturally occur in your body, no matter how gross or subtle. You pass from the crown of your head to your forehead, the front of your face, your ears, et cetera, through every single part of your body till you reach your toes. Then you do the whole process back in reverse, up to the crown.
Samadhi
The term has its own strong cultural meaning, almost mythical: a feeling of complete oneness with the divine.
Imagine sitting for ten hours a day just doing that... how on earth could that be pleasurable? Well, such a precise meditation form leaves little room for the mind to drift, and after just a few days you begin to generate considerable samadhi: a deep, unified, unshakeable steadiness of mind, sometimes translated as meditative concentration. That said, the term has its own strong cultural meaning, almost mythical: a feeling of complete oneness with the divine. In such a state, you aren't just contemplating oneness with god, or trying to attach passing pleasant feelings to something you read in a yoga book - you are the utterly magnificent, radiating source of light and energy of the entire universe.
This is not an experience most people have at these retreats, at least not to this extent. A lot of people do generate a good degree of samadhi, concentration, and feel a deep sense of peace, but struggle to break through to something beyond. But it turned out I was really a natural at this practice. At Goenka retreats, there's a specific state you can enter once you've meditated on and mentally soothed your body enough that the original gross sensations - the big, ugly, distracting aches and pains - give way to an incredibly subtle feeling of energetic vibration over the body. This state is called Bhanga. They say the earliest you can realistically experience it is day five or six, but I was getting it on day three. Big deal, right? Two days early? Well, it was about to get a lot better than that...
Following my intuition
I was in a state of complete and utter bliss, and at some point I let the inner intuition of my mind guide the meditations. I started to deviate a little from the standard early-days prescription - relentlessly scanning the body in a slow, methodical way - doing these en masse scans instead (something Goenka would later introduce himself, after day five), combined with some good old Zen Shikantaza: just sitting. Since I was so easily and frequently entering Bhanga, I was barely experiencing any difficult physical sensations or thoughts.
My whole body was vibrating on this subtle level, and I could so easily pass my attention up and down the whole thing, repeatedly, in some deeply pleasurable way. I don't mean to sound crude, but it felt like my body was a lingam, the respectful Sanskrit word for the penis. This energetic focus up and down my body seemed to generate an incredible amount of tantric energy. I was sitting in a state of pure bliss, but hadn't yet broken through to anything that felt categorically different to anything I'd felt before, even if the magnitude was much higher than past meditation experiences.
Attachment
All of my meditations were going great, and I looked forward to each session. Then, on the eighth day, I decided to sit and meditate with the intention of manifesting a future as a successful musician. I'd taken a large leaf from the garden and pulled alternating strips out of it from each side along the lines of its veins, making it look like a little tree. I put it on the ground in front of me and meditated with the intention of sending my energy into it, as if it represented the seedling of my musical aspiration.
For some reason, that meditation wasn't so enjoyable. I couldn't escape the thought that I was meditating with a big leaf in front of my spot, and something about steering my focus away from the pure transcendental energy of the meditation, onto a very worldly ego-pursuit, threw me off massively. I spent that two-hour sit in discomfort, like I was sitting in a hot sauna longer than I wanted to. I symbolically threw the leaf over the wall onto the girls' side once I'd finished.
Letting go
I decided to continue with the sole aim of just enjoying my meditations for what they were. I don't remember what time of day it was, but at some point on day nine I fully broke through; let me explain...
I started the day fully accepting to myself all the hang-ups that had come with wanting to succeed in original music, acknowledging the toxic patterns, and how the all-or-nothing desire for it as a means of self-validation was interfering with my ability to enjoy my life. I knew that I loved feeling one with god, and that I'd always have that - music or not. Admittedly, I wasn't really doing much active work towards that aspiration; it merely represented an escape from a system I disliked, and a path of freedom taken by TV role models. Now I could just enjoy my day of meditating without the distraction of misplaced desires.
I started the session doing the en masse sweeps of the energy of my body. After I'd successfully grounded myself and felt sufficiently embodied, I moved on to the Zen practice of Shikantaza, in which you sit without trying to direct your mind to anything at all, while still maintaining a deep state of meditative concentration. It's hard to explain how it works; it's more an intuition about how your transcendent mind functions, one you attain after meditating for a few years.
The nature of the mind
I realised that "the mind" was made up of two fundamental tendencies, coexisting, acting in opposite directions. There was the mother earth grounding energy that kept us with our bodies, and the father sky energy typically associated with the imagery of "god" above. I don't just mean the world can be divided into manifested earthly things and cerebral spiritual concepts - I mean the energies of the mind, as we experience them, can generally be seen as down, or negative, and up: "positive" thoughts.
In the equanimity of my meditation, I could see that the underlying purpose of the "negative" thoughts was merely to keep me healthfully grounded, and that they were only painful outside of meditation because I resisted them. Similarly, the "positive" thoughts served the purpose of reminding me of my own divine nature. We exist in a continuous flux in which we're simultaneously a thing of nature, in human bodies, but at the same time one with god.
Breaking through
It was the best feeling I've ever had in my life.
I'd spent so much time focusing deeply on my body - the very thing that grounds my soul to the world, my connection to mother nature - that it was as if my totality was like: "okay, we've got the body checked off now. Time for blast off." Having fully neutralised all the blocked energy in my body through the intense meditation on it, the downward energy of mother nature was now working by itself, and my spirit felt safe to eject into the cosmos under the direction of the father. All that remained of the tangible experience of my "mind" was upward, and I rode that train up through my spine and shot through the crown of my head.
It was completely orgasmic. There really isn't a better word to use. In fact, it was better than a physical orgasm. It was the best feeling I've ever had in my life - the kind you could die happy after. I was totally one with god, bathed in pure light. I spent the rest of that session with my head straight up to the sky, arms extended out in grateful receiving, tears in my eyes.
The rest of the retreat was a breeze. I savoured the unity fully and felt totally fulfilled. After years of meditation, chasing the elusive feeling of oneness with god, craving spiritual enlightenment, I'd just experienced something that totally ticked the box for me. This was the experience of the great yogis, the Zen masters. No wonder people dedicated their entire lives to monkhood. I'd sometimes open my eyes on the last couple of days to gaze at my fellow meditators in the hall, in their noble silence, practising with dedication, and feel deeply moved. To this day, it's one of the most beautiful sights I can recall.
Fulfilment
Until that point, I'd been convinced that, despite my long-time interest in esoteric philosophy, there was something fundamentally wrong with my spiritual health. My experience with Ayahuasca had been pure torture, and I'd for sure done a lot of things that weren't such great karma: upset people I loved, fucked up, missed opportunities for myself. And yet here I was, having the same experience the great saints were having.
I think the experience has stayed with me. Long after the retreat, I felt an even greater sense of inner peace than I had previously. It also seemed to mark the end of a transitional time in my life, where I'd conceptually and partially felt my divine connection, but hadn't yet had an experience where I was fully immersed in it. Don't forget either, these retreats are totally free: you only donate if you want to. Surely that's an act of pure love, to give that experience away to people.
Thank you, S.N. Goenka, for your gift to the world. May we all strive to be like you!