Ten Days of Silence and Twelve Hours of Meditation
Sweating out the delusions and seeing life as it is
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At the time of writing, I am fresh from a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. It took place at the Dhamma Sukhakari centre in Stowmarket, a market town in the Mid Suffolk district of Suffolk, England.
How to describe my mood upon returning? I can’t tell you that my problems are solved, that my broken heart is repaired, or that the grief I’ve been carrying for God knows how long has left me, but I do feel somewhat lighter. It’s a strange sensation, as if I’d had a deep clean of my “inner house”. Like any inhabited dwelling, it risks getting muddied as soon as cleaning duties are neglected. Yet the extreme confusion and doubt plaguing me this year have slowly begun to subside. In their place exists a gentle movement towards intentionality, as trust tentatively enters my heart. The constant shadow of fear has retreated somewhat, taking a backseat in the movie of my life (though it’s still there watching and eating popcorn, waiting to pounce back when I invite it in).
Meditation stints were twelve hours a day, every day. The day started at 4 am with a gong and a two-hour meditation in the Dhamma hall from 4.30 am. I had gone in with a false confidence, believing my daily meditation and dabblings in Sufi mysticism would carry me through easily. Within forty-eight hours I felt crushed and inadequate, the hard wind crystallising the tears on my cheeks as I stumbled around the bare winter garden. I wondered how I could bear to be with myself. I remembered a piece of advice I’d received from the I Ching: “The silt must be removed from the bottom of the well”.
That is what the Vipassana course is designed to do: bring up all the sorrows and maladies we’ve spent our lives running from, or repressing. What could I do to make myself feel better? I felt empty; bereft. Talking, interacting with others, reading, or writing is prohibited. Phones are removed from you upon arrival. There is no opportunity to distract yourself. Yet this opportunity gives us the gift of finally being able to see things exactly as they are. The Vipassana meditation teacher reminded me kindly of this when I approached her for advice.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. The recordings of the Vipassana retreat’s founder, S.N. Goenka, were a persistent spiritual pick-me-up, urging us to greet our arising sorrows with an “equanimous mind” throughout the day. In the Sufi tradition, they say that truth resides in the heart. I had been desperately trying to connect with my heart during meditations in the months leading up to the course. Yet it wasn’t until the Vipassana retreat I realised that without a disciplined meditation methodology, all I had been doing was falling into my sorrows, indulging my elations, and triggering constant emotional overwhelm.
My “I”, or ego was parasitically feeding into fantasies, delusions, and negative thought spirals. Initially, I was afraid that the “clinical" aspect of Vipassana meditation would be limiting, curtailing me from “feeling my feelings”. On the contrary, it allowed me to accept that my feelings existed (how could I not, they were there, I could feel them), but it also helped me not to become attached to them.
What is Vipassana meditation?
Vipassana is an ancient meditation practice said to have been developed by the Buddha on his way to achieving enlightenment. It was used in India over 2,500 years ago as a remedy for “universal ills”. S. N. Goenka, the Burmese meditation teacher who brought Vipassana to the West, considered himself incredibly lucky to have been born in Burma. In India, Vipassana meditation had fallen into obscurity. To remedy this, Goenka, authorised by his teacher Sayagyi U Ba Khin, moved to India, opening up Vipassana meditation centres throughout the country. Goenka’s teaching emphasised that the Buddha's path to liberation was non-sectarian, universal, and scientific in character.
At the time of writing, Vipassana courses in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin are held at three-hundred and eighty locations in ninety-four countries, of which about two hundred and thirty-five are permanent Vipassana meditation centres. There are centres throughout the world, in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and seventy-eight centres in India.
All courses are free and run on the donations and good-will of old students, who return as volunteers to prepare the food, ensuring that the course is run smoothly. The teachers in the centre are also volunteers, and our course was privileged enough to have teachers who had trained with Goenka himself.
I have laid out the practicalities of the Vipassana experience, but recounting it is more complex. The journey was certainly not linear. Feelings came and went, undulating; much like daily life, except I could observe them better. We spent so much time in the body that it left me with a scatological series of impressions as varying as the late November weather. Days lashing with rain; or snow; or frost; mist; a clear night sky where the northern light was brighter than I'd ever seen it, and by day the sun cold, white, and piercing; a morning wispy crescent moon laid on a pink and orange streaked sunrise; crystallised dew drops on skeletal trees.
Silence
I arrived late, having missed the first day after mixing up the dates. On the first day, students are able to make introductions before being plunged into a “noble silence”. Therefore I was unable to introduce myself to my roommates, or even gesture to explain who I was and why I had appeared out of nowhere. I am a talkative person, but didn’t struggle at all with the vow of silence. I did not miss morning pleasantries or even the capacity to exchange a smile with another. I kept my gaze averted at all times. I knew who my friends were before I spoke to them. I knew it from the air surrounding them and the way they moved in the world. One of them, fortunately, was the woman I was sharing my bunk with. She spent a lot of the rest periods in bed, but when she moved, she moved purposefully, like a dancer. She was decisive in her actions, and always looked pissed off and bored. It was clear she had a kind heart. She looked for me in the dinner hall as if to check I was alright, and upon finding me, would avert her eyes.
The silence gives one space to reflect and perceive things more clearly. The sunrise is not clouded by morning chatter. I could see the sorrow and vulnerability behind the masks. For the first time, birds let me get up close to them. One even turned its head and looked me straight in the eye. I saw many little fat black birds with black beaks. I couldn’t identify them. I thought they must have been blackbirds, but they did not have its characteristic yellow beak. Nor did it have the rounded, greyish head of a jackdaw or the curved beak of a crow. Research after the course has revealed that blackbirds, in their first winter, tend to have dark beaks! My instinct had been right, but I had no phone to verify this at the time. Having said this, my Googling was in vain, it was only through borrowing my dad’s more comprehensive bird book (I’ve only got a slim volume) that I discovered this fact.
I watched fascinated as the first winter blackbirds greedily swallowed unripe yellow plums off a tree, one after the other, stone and all. Or snatched up the plump black berries of a shrub. I have never seen a bird eat with such gusto in front of me. I believe it was the silence, stillness, and unhurried energy of my body that allowed me to have this newfound intimacy with the wildlife.
Childlike wonder
As I entered the gardens to circulate the rows of young trees and shrubs, I would often see someone crouched on the floor, inspecting the fallen leaves, the stones, or the insects. Sometimes the younger participants could even be seen jumping and frolicking. Others would march up and down the garden, or dawdle absent-mindedly. Some would sit in a chair, closing their eyes against the surprisingly bright winter sun. Or they would stand, erect and proud, sunbathing as the frosty air cupped their cheeks.
On my first day, sitting on a chair by the window in my room, I caught a glimpse of an unsavoury-looking object on the windowsill. It looked like a tooth or a dried chickpea. I considered throwing it away but decided I did not want to touch it. Over the next few days, it was revealed to be a stone, as the collection beside it grew: different shapes and sizes of rocks and minerals lined up in a row. I later noticed that my bunkmate kept a small collection of miniature leaves beside her window.
As my senses became more heightened, I was captivated by the contrasts in colours of the leaves in the garden. I picked one from a tree that was deep gold amber. It had a messy red-brown stain in the centre that I imagined looked like my heart: bleeding but intact. I put it in my secret pocket, the one that held my illegal pen and the furtive notes written on paper towels in the shower room. I saw how some of the leaves that had fallen on the muddy ground were white as white. I had never noticed that leaves could be so white. When I turned them over, they appeared to be black as black, although more likely a very dark green. I collected three leaves of different shapes and hues, and they are now stuck to my notebook. On the benches beside the dhamma hall I observed a gallery of runes and sculptures created from leaves and stones. Perhaps we are not so evolved from our hunter gatherer past as we suppose.
Receptivity
You begin to feel the lightness and darkness surrounding people. To swerve out of the way and go towards it when necessary. To stand beside someone and keep yourself open, or walk away when it felt right. On the morning of the last day, the moment that the gong was struck I woke from a deep sleep. Somewhere in the recesses of my unconscious, I had sensed that it was about to be struck. I realised that I had been able to sense this almost every morning. I would visualise a shadowy figure advancing towards our quarters, carrying the gong: it would be struck, and I’d already be awake. When I shared this with my roommates, they said they had experienced the same sensation.
The trees and the pond in the centre opened into dialogue with you. If you looked at the Vipassana participants from afar, staring up at the trees, or down into the pond with such intensity, it might have seemed as if we were all on a psychedelic trip. But it’s only that we weren’t distracted by our phones, perhaps the most harmful, addictive drug of all. And despite its vicelike grip over my daily existence, I had no withdrawal symptoms without it.
One time, as I perambulated the garden, a woman walked passed me, openly sobbing. I was having a rare moment of equanimous happiness. As soon as I passed her my eyes filled with tears. I was sharing her sorrow. I felt it pass through me. I noted its impermanence. It was not my sorrow to carry, just as the sorrow I choose to carry on a daily basis is not either. As Goenka’s recordings repeated to us each day: “Anicca”; “Anicca”; “Anicca” (the Pali word for impermanence). All feelings are transitory. We do not need to hold on to them forever.
Acceptance and tolerance
How to love a room of farting, burping, coughing, sniffling people? How to keep the love flowing when someone continuously clicks their knuckles as we prepare to meditate? How to remember that I too almost certainly have habits that irritate my fellow neighbours? How not to judge the ones, who with a blindsighted hunger in their eyes, always get to the front of the dinner queue to grab the best bits? I noted the people that I warmed to, without knowing anything about them and the ones I felt aversion towards. I probed into why, trying not to attach myself to these judgements.
One of my favourite meditation techniques is the Metta Bhavana (the loving kindness meditation). It was the first meditation technique I ever learnt, after attending a meditation course in 2016 at The Buddhist Centre in Highbury and Islington, London. Goenka introduced it to the group on the penultimate day, warning us that if we felt the remainder of “gross sensations” in our body from the Vipassana meditation we could not do the Metta Bhavana successfully. During meditations, I had been seized by excessively painful sensations in a few areas of my body. At first, I believed myself to be physiologically challenged by the cross-legged posture. It didn’t make sense, though, as I practiced yoga regularly and meditated every day at home in the cross-legged position. When I stopped meditating, getting up to stretch, the pain would instantly leave my body.
It became clear that these pains were psychological. The teacher referred to them as my accumulated “saṅkhāras”. In Buddhism, saṅkhāra is a word fusing the subject and the object, connoting "impression, disposition, conditioning, forming, perfecting in one's mind, influencing one's sensory and conceptual faculty" as well as any "preparation, sacrament" that "impresses, disposes, influences or conditions" how one thinks, conceives or feels (Wikipedia).
I was astonished to understand that these pains were the built-up resentments, negative feelings, and traumas that had lain dormant in my body, resistant to all the “gratitude practices”, visualisations, and positive projections I had furnished myself with in order to suppress them. Therefore, for the first two sittings of Metta Bhavana, I could not participate. I realised, indeed, that I could not send out loving kindness to others with all these blockages inside me. First I had to be able to feel the love and kindness within myself. I am still learning, it seems.
Breaking the silence
I did not want to. It was too sudden. I wasn’t yet ready to receive the wisdom of “anicca”; “anicca”: everything changing. I strolled around the garden, loudly singing a song I had composed in my head, illegally, as a product of the meditation sittings. I bumped into three Chinese women walking through the gardens. One of them was the stone collector from my room. She was full of wonder and warmth. We spoke about Goenka, and the loving intention so apparent in his voice as he delivered the instructions, even if they were pre-recorded and played on an electronic device. My roommate spoke about learning Cantonese at university, how it was the language of her childhood, and how speaking it gave her a feeling of home. Another woman living in Hong Kong had decided to do the course whilst travelling through Europe.
My bunkmate and I broke the silence in the Dhamma hall with a warm hug, although physical contact was forbidden. In the dinner hall, the partition between the male and female dining hall was broken. The wall came down. I was nervous, for some reason, to break through. But I sauntered in to look at the books. A man asked me how I was and we immediately fell into a deeply personal conversation lasting an hour and a half. We didn’t speak again. After that, it was easier and I was delighted to find out that many of the men on the course were from Glasgow.
The morning we left, I made friends with one of the old students who had been working in the kitchen as a server. He was a nomadic type who didn’t know where he was going. He drove me to the station. We had time to go for a coffee and we bumped into some other students planning their next moves. They were planning an impromptu trip down the coast, looking at caravan hires on their phones. They invited me. If only I lived a life that permitted improvised caravan trips with people I’d just met. I had to get back to reality.
Since we had spent the vast majority of the time in silence, I was convinced that I would not make friends on the retreat, but I did. Perhaps we would never be in contact again, but I wholeheartedly felt the sincerity of the desire to reconnect as we swapped numbers. I reflected that bonds and friendships don’t always happen as a matter of circumstance, convenience, or the amount of time you know a person, but the quality of the intention with which you meet each other, whether you are able or not to match and reflect each other at the particular time you cross paths.
On the train, I spoke to two non-binary people: one who had been staying in the “female” section of the course, and the other in the “male” section. They told me about the unnecessary layer of discomfort that this dated aspect of the Vipassana tradition added to their experience. Although I never felt unsafe at any point, the Vipassana course can indeed make you feel alone, and at times you get this overwhelming sense that you have no idea who you are. That is precisely the point, but it can be disconcerting, even terrifying. Therefore, what is already challenging is potentially worsened for non-binary people and the non-inclusion of their identity. The person who had been on the male side said they had expressed this to the meditation teacher, who had been sympathetic and reassuring.
We discussed the Buddhist concept of the five aggregates of which a human being is composed: “rūpa” = the physical body composed of subatomic particles; “viññāṇa”= consciousness; “sañña”= perception; “vedanā”= sensation; and the aforementioned “saṅkhāra”. These ideas pertain to the nebulousness and non-fixed nature of what a person is, and how they are constructed and composed by exterior forces, conditionings, and judgements. It, therefore, made perfect sense that the binary division of gender on the course (the intention being to avoid “sexual misconduct” amongst the students) was 1) pointless for queers and 2) based on societal mores that Buddhism supposedly doesn’t ascribe to. Of course, in such a short space of time, one cannot escape the conditioning of society, and there is a logic to the division between the genders, but it doesn’t cater to or recognise the diversity of experience, and could certainly do with some reform and changes. It was exciting to hear about the ideas, proposals, and various groups that these radical, young Buddhists were part of, and they promised to keep me abreast of updates.
I may never speak to, or hear from most of these people again. Many were from different parts of the world – Germany, Italy, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Hong Kong – though something tells me that, at some point, I will cross paths with at least one or two of them. As Goenka says, trust in Dhamma; trust in the law of nature.
Anicca. Anicca.
Conclusion:
I am not “fixed”. I remain with the anxiety that I am not going to keep up the momentum of this unique experience; that I will “fuck it up”, or not turn over the new leaf I am always trying to turn over. Since getting home, I have kept up the practice, but maintaining it in the madness of daily life will depend on hard work, discipline, a commitment to myself, and a commitment to life. This is the true nature of meditation: diligence, and a wholehearted intent to see things exactly as they are. It is not only to chase the highs, nor the dancing lights on the peripheries of the consciousness; or that swell of oneness you might feel looking at stars, or a sunrise. These may arise with it; moments of serenity, and the joy found in presentness; not only seeking excessiveness, or quick thrills. But first, we have to recognise that too often in life we see only what we want to see, and that this is a natural outcome of spending a life repressing pain, difficulty, doubt, or fear. The silt must be removed from the bottom of the well.
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P.s. it’s baltic oer here, gie us a bob fer a hof and a hoof
[Translation from Scots: it’s cold over here, please tip me so I can buy a half of Guinness and a malt whiskey in the pub]