“If the brochure doesn’t say that they won’t hit you with sticks, then how do you know that they won’t?” – my husband

At four A.M. I rise to the sound of a gong, dress and make my way towards the meditation center. I don’t feel tired, even with only six hours of sleep, instead I am elated by the excitement of what I am about to undertake. Under a full moon the frost covered landscape sparkles and I muse that the path under my feet looks like black diamonds. It is day one of my first Vipassana retreat at the Northwest Vipassana Center and I am giddy with naiveté. I have no idea what I am in for.

To be fair I could have done my homework a little better. Usually I am the sort of person that does exhaustive research before jumping into things, but the story of how I came to enroll is romantic and not the type of situation that should be subjected to prosaic hang-ups. I had just watched the The Secret, a video outlining the concepts of the law of attraction, and with my prior experience using similar techniques it made a deep impression on me. Having had a very tumultuous year I was feeling lost. My every attempt to better my situation seemed to be met with inexplicable obstruction. My philosophy of life impelled me to believe that there must be some purpose to these obstacles and difficulties. I surveyed my motivations and discovered that I was acting out my life on a course designed only to survive and not to meet some loftier goal. I was not living with a purpose. Yet, anyone with a stomach is forced to contend with the dilemma of needing to earn money. Surely my life did not need to be a simple two-option choice of starvation or stagnation. So, as the video suggested I very clearly asked the universe or whatever to point me in the best direction. My goal was to find the path that would allow me to make a living and at the same time live my life purposefully. The universe or whatever sent me a very clear message almost immediately. Just like I had asked, it happened in an extremely obvious way dropping right into my lap.

It was early December and I had taken a temporary position at a cosmetics company just to earn some extra cash while I figured things out. A man walked into our store, came right up to me requesting a certain kind of shampoo, and then declared that he was on his way to take part in a Buddhist retreat. Without any prompting he just began telling me about it. I recognized the significance instantly and asked him to write out the name of the place, which he did on his used bus ticket. He wasn’t even from our area. He had traveled from Chicago and stopped in Oregon on his way to pick up some shampoo and apparently carry out the will of some mysterious influence, the underlying intelligence of the universe known by many names which ties together each individual’s narrative into a neat web and manifests to the uninitiated as merely coincidence. I didn’t even consider not participating in the retreat. I had made a deal. I had interacted with this force of natural law before and knew the reality of its power. It wasn’t faith; it was the interpretation of my individual experience. It was an earned trust that I acted on. In January when my seasonal job ended I had decided on another possible path, the one that will make this article available to the general public, but I did not forget about my deal. I applied to the Northwest Vipassana Center and asked to attend.

The retreat available to a new student is a ten-day course. There are many rules, five basic precepts and a very strict schedule. Noble Silence seemed at first like it would be the most challenging; no speech, no gesturing, and no eye contact with the other meditators. One can of course speak with the manager or the assistant teachers, but no communication of any kind with the other students and no outside communication. I soon discovered that the no eye contact rule is nearly impossible unless everyone looks only at their own feet all day long, which would be impractical in a small space with some many people to avoid bumping into. Nearly everyone made mistakes at some point. On the whole it proved to be of practical importance as it provided simulated solitude, which was very much appreciated as our individual difficulties eventually bubbled to the surface.

On that first day I discovered that Buddhist meditation is very different from the other type of meditation I had practiced before. My other meditation experience had been with a technique called the Silva Mind Control Method. Using the Silva Method I would relax so extremely that I would be right on the verge of falling asleep. Usually I would practice with a recording of a narrator talking continuously which made it easy to focus and not fall asleep, therefore it was acceptable to sit in a chair and rest my back. In Vipassana, the meditator is expected to remain alert and aware at all times and the body does not relax entirely. As I was unaccustomed to sitting up straight on a cushion on the floor for a whole day, this proved to be a very real physical challenge to me. Sitting down all day might not sound very physically challenging, but I dare anyone who doubts to try it for only an hour without resting. It hurts. Our task was to feel the breath entering and leaving our noses. It was very important not to interfere with the natural pattern of respiration, but only to observe. I found that the volume of pain I experienced was somewhat distracting at first but the continuity of the pain, the uniformity actually lent to my concentration. As one might imagine it is very difficult to focus on one’s breathing alone without thinking of anything else for hour after hour. Perhaps most frustrating for me was that I had a method that could allow me to both ignore pain almost entirely and to focus on something fully be it interesting or not, but because these were part of the Silva technique that I was not supposed to use them. One of the most important rules when submitting oneself to the Vipassana technique is that one must temporarily suspend other mediation practices and mental techniques. Mixing other techniques can hinder progress and can even be harmful.

At the start of the second day when we were still focusing on our breath I began to doubt. I wondered why I was subjecting myself to such discomfort when it seemed that I could have perhaps learned this technique from a book on tape. But I knew intellectually that I had not yet given the technique a full trial, especially since it had not really gotten started yet. The pain in my back was still there, but worse pain had started in my hips and knees. The volume of the pain was about the same at each location but the knees and hips pains were intermittent and I found them to be completely distracting and not helpful at all in my attempts to focus my attention, for a second day, on my breathing. I toyed with the idea of calling my husband to pick me up.

When I first told my family members about my plans to attend the Vipassana course I met with varying degrees of concern and skepticism. My mother being the most open minded told me to have a good time. Perhaps that is because she knows me very well and knows that I am not dissuaded from things that I am determined to do. One relative voiced the opinion that it sounded like a cult, and another said that nothing could make him “bow down and worship Buddha.” I assured them both that religious conversion had no place at the Northwest Vipassana Center, but in their minds this assurance meant very little. My husband who has a great fear of anything that smells anything like religion warned me that if I fell asleep while meditating they, as he put it, might hit me with sticks.

“Of course they’re not going to hit me with sticks,” I assured him as I laughed.
“How do you know?” he challenged.
“Because it doesn’t say anything about being hit with sticks in the brochure.”
“Well, if the brochure doesn’t say that they won’t hit you with sticks, then how do you know that they won’t?”

By fortunate coincidence I did meet a few people who had already attended. At a discussion group, which I just began to attend, I met a professional psychic who works at a local bookstore. She seemed very experienced in meditation and other related subjects. When she told me that she came very close to leaving the course before completing it, I wondered just what was going on there that was so difficult. What could be such a challenge that someone so seasoned could be pushed to the edge of giving up? Even with this hint of coming ordeal, I maintained a thoroughly cocky attitude.

On the third day I was still in a lot of pain. Thankfully we were now instructed to focus on the sensations on our upper lips. This change may not have been as exciting as a pizza party, which one of my fellow meditators eventually confessed to be hoping for, but when one has been trying to concentrate on just their breathing for two days it seems pretty appealing. Right away something interesting happened to me, but not something expected. I was experiencing two main sensations on my upper lip. One was expansion and contraction, the other a faint tickling like an electrical impulse traveling through my lip from one side to the other over and over again. I knew this to be a feeling of electricity because of a medical treatment I once experienced at a chiropractor’s office. Before having my neck adjusted, the nurse had run a faint electric current through the muscles of my shoulders. It had created a gentle tickling sensation and warped pressure like a gentle stream was flowing through my back. It was somewhat pleasant but weird. A subtler version of this feeling continued to make its route from one side of my lip to the other. Later that day when the female assistant teacher called me over to ask what sensations I was feeling, I told her, and she advised me to now focus only on the most subtle, which happened to be the electric feeling. When I did so I became so interested in what this sensation might actually be that I moved my awareness out into the rest of my head so that I could follow it and see where else it was going. To my amazement I found that it was a wheel spinning in my head. I signed up to meet with the assistant teacher over lunch and by her advice I went back to focusing on just the area above my lip. But this strange occurrence proved to me that there was something worthwhile in this technique.

My favorite time of day was easily the discourse delivered via DVD by Goenka, our instructor. We never got to meet him in person, but I have never before in my life seen a video and felt so much that I was being spoken to by a real person and not a recording. Goenka is originally from Burma; the only country that kept the teaching of Vipassana pure from the time it was first introduced. He personally brought the teaching back to India where it had originated, and again began to spread it all over the world. Goenka seems much more down to Earth than one might expect from such a figure. “Who is this man? He looks like a straight!” Goenka joked in one of his discourses prompting uproars of laughter. The lessons of Vipassana come alive in his stories that illustrate the way of Dhamma, which to oversimplify means universal truth and universal love. It is a concept preached worldwide by pretty much any enlightened person throughout history, but rarely upheld by followers. My recollections would not be able to do it justice. There is a book available that contains the script of his discourses including the stories themselves, which I will one day obtain a copy of, but the book lacks his comedic delivery and hilarious improvisations.

In one of the first few discourses Goenka warned us that the process of Vipassana is like opening up a wound to let out the pus. He advised us that it would be unpleasant at times but it was necessary. He told us to think of it as surgery, and to be sure that we stayed for the entire course, because to leave in the middle could cause us great harm. This warning intrigued me and scared me a little. Again I wondered how a meditation technique could possibly be so powerful or dangerous.

The fourth day, referred to at the center as Vipassana Day, is the first day that we began to practice the actual technique known as Vipassana. Much to my relief there was indeed more to the practice than brute force concentration. As Goenka explained in his discourse, the idea behind focusing on one's breath and then later focusing on the sensations on one’s upper lip, is to sharpen the mind and enhance one’s ability to fully experience the sensations of the body. The subconscious, which is always conscious in its own way, is constantly aware of the body’s sensations. The subconscious has a great deal of power over an individual’s actions because of a pattern of what Goenka called Samsara (he pronounced Sankara) referring to both craving and aversion. The idea is that by consciously being aware of the body’s sensations and remaining equanimous (or not reacting to sensations) one takes power away from the subconscious.

The subconscious is a slippery fish. Even with all the technology of our time, it remains much a mystery as far as western science is concerned. The idea that Siddhartha Gautama may have discovered a way, not only to study the subconcious, but also to control it around 500 BC is pretty radical. And yet there is ample evidence to suggest using these techniques practitioners have discovered and documented first-hand observations that would later be echoed by the great western scientific minds. Such as the fact that cells in the human body are constantly being regenerated.

Addictions are characterized as not merely chemical dependency, though no less serious. Addiction to craving itself is said to be the main problem with trying to break the addictive pattern. The cycle of aversion and craving must be broken by living in the present moment. I noticed that this was true in that scenes of past abuse and pleasure replayed in my mind while I tried to concentrate on the tasks at hand. Anticipation of the future also weighed heavily. By the fourth day my mind had quieted enough that these interruptions were rare.

Our task on day five was to move awareness throughout the body piece by piece and not to react with craving or aversion to any of the sensations I experienced. At this point my pain seemed to dissolve into a feeling of vibration. Stupidly, I assumed this was part of my previous training and managed to supress it. I forced myself to experience my pain fully. At the fourth day’s discourse I was so relieved to learn that the vibrational sensation was part of the technique, that I wasn’t even tempted to kick myself. But the fifth day, even with the absence of physical pain, was to be the most challenging day of all.

I awoke in the morning of the fifth day feeling very depressed. I couldn’t put my finger on any cause of depression. It was more like a chemical reaction than anything else. It was so intense that several times during the day I had to suppress the urge to cry. I was very thankful that no one was allowed to talk to me at that point. It was also the day that we would begin praticing what is called “strong determination.” Three times a day for one hour each we were not supposed to move at all. No adjusting one’s position for comfort, no scratching of an itch, no opening one’s eyes, and no moving of ones hands. At the time and state of mind I was in this seemed completely crazy to me. If it hadn’t been for Goenka’s surgery comparison and grave warning I would have seriously considered leaving.

Then I noticed an interesting thing happen. As before memories began to replay in my mind, but this time instead of getting worked up over them, they just passed. I would recall some past incident of mistreatment and not feel anything at all except peace. That particular incident was over with. I was no longer being mistreated. It didn’t bother me. My biggest samsara was an aversion related to anger. Growing up I was taught that I should be nice, and that nice little girls don’t react angrily in speech or action. This caused me to suppress my anger growing up. Although I am thankful that I don’t react with explosive rage the way I’ve witnessed others do at times, it has caused other problems for me. When I don’t have any outlet at all for my anger it tends to eventually build to an unhealthy climax resulting in my not being able to think about much else until I find a way to disperse it. Compounding the problem is that often when I try to talk about my anger in order to diffuse it somewhat I am met with an attitude that no matter what the cause of anger is, it’s unacceptable for me to be angry and that I must somehow be defective, which has a tendency to make me even angrier.

Buddhist philosophy links emotions to elements. Anger as I later would learn is related to fire, which can manifest itself as heat or cold. On the sixth day I began to feel very hot most of the time, but still very cold other times. Wrapped in a meditation blanket during the sittings of “strong determination, I found that I would be so cold that I shivered and in the next moment I would be hot and sweating profusely. Later I would learn that unusual physical reactions are the norm while one practices Vipassana. Some of my fellow mediators manifested their personal issues auditorily by sleep talking or in the case of one young man, by involuntarily making a strange honking noise during meditation.

The seventh through the ninth day blur together for me. We learned new techniques and progressed in our meditations gradually. My mind continued to purge itself of aversions and the symptoms I had started to experience got worse. On the ninth evening I requested some fever medication. I didn’t feel like I even needed to take my temperature. I felt very certain that I had caught something. That is when the connection between emotion and physical reaction was explained to me. I was offered a heating pad and an ice pack for comfort, but they were reluctant to medicate me because it might interfere with the chemical reaction. I got permission to go to bed early and to get up late the next day.

On the morning of the tenth day I felt much better. We learned a new technique that I very much enjoyed and after the morning’s meditation we were allowed to talk again. Even without eye contact or gesturing, we found that we had bonded as a group. We finally got to compare thoughts about the class, our individual difficulties, and shared funny stories with each other. We exchanged email addresses and locations. It seemed as though I was talking way too much, but it was just so much fun to finally be able to communicate again with other people, and the people available were so extraordinarily fascinating.

It turned out that a pretty vegan girl with the shaved head and cat-like gaze was a former circus performer turned artist who designed her own clothing. The nineteen year old from Vasshon Island wrote and performed her own songs, was well read in the subject of quantum physics and more articulate than just about anyone I had ever met before. The blonde woman who seemed to have a different colored silk outfit for every day had spent time in India. The woman I accidentally stepped all over while going through a doorway happened to live only a few blocks from me.

I had worried at first that when I returned home that my old issues might bombard me again when confronted with the reality of everyday life. At first I was pleased to note that my tolerance and patience increased significantly. When I finally did become really angry again, it was for a very good reason, and I came to accept that not feeling anger ever again would not be a positive thing if it caused me to completely ignore obstacles and challenges in my life. Sometimes emotions serve a purpose and that is to act as a guide. As if to say, “Alert! You are being treated unfairly.” Just like someone who’s issue might have been fear would not have been better off being completely ambivalent to danger. I am still learning to balance. I am improved significantly, but enlightenment is still a work in progress. I heartily recommend the course to anyone who asks. I truly believe that anyone, no matter how well or ill adjusted, can benefit from it. But I do caution that it has a lot more in common with boot camp than with a vacation.♦