Vipassana Magic

I recently completed my second 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreat, whereby you sit on the floor and meditate for around 10 hours a day, starting at 4:30am and finishing at 9:30pm. During this time you’re not permitted to speak or have eye-contact or any other kind of interaction with any of the other students, although you can speak to the teachers and staff if you have any questions or issues that need dealing with.

When I did my first one, at least eight years ago now, it was by far the hardest thing I had ever attempted and I spent most of the time feeling angry and rebellious against the teaching and wishing I was anywhere than where I was, even plotting my escape at times. You can read my review of this first experience, and a description of the technique, in a previous blog post. However, the experience brought me so many benefits that I knew I would do it again when I was ready.

Last year a growing feeling to return to this intense practice was with me, and I invited my partner, Trev, to join me. He is relatively new to meditation but we had been meditating together in the mornings for most of last year and he felt drawn to attend too. These retreats are super popular, to the point that you have to apply as soon as the applications open for a particular retreat, otherwise you don’t stand a chance of a place. Ironically, having prepared ourselves for this, we somehow got the date wrong and, by the time we applied, we of course missed out on a place and were put on the waiting list instead. Soon afterwards Trev heard that he had a place but I remained on the waiting list – the universe has a sense of humour!

But, I trusted – if it was my time, I would be there, and I really did feel it was my time. I could feel myself there in the meditation hall. Sure enough, just the day before the retreat started I received news that I had a last-minute place. I had already pretty much packed, so sure I was I would be there! But, still, a feeling of elation bubbled up within me and I knew it was the right thing for me and, interestingly, for us as a couple.

We drove due east through torrential rain for nearly five hours into the mountains of north-west Spain, not being able to see our surroundings at all, and finally arrived at the centre, Dhamma Sacca, where we said goodbye to each other and checked in to our respective sides of the building. Men and women are completely separated during a vipassana retreat to avoid distraction. The only time we might catch a glimpse of each other would be in the dim light of the meditation hall where men are seated on one side of the room and women on the other. But, seeing as we’re not supposed to be looking around and making eye contact with anyone, any interaction at all would be discouraged.

For the first few days the site was encased in a low cloud. I was determined this time round to surrender to the teachings and the technique, unlike my first time, and I found myself to be very focused indeed and, mostly, pretty calm. I did sneak a cheeky peek across the hall for the first few sessions to check Trev was turning up and hadn’t done a runner and, proud of him, I saw him take his place on the floor reliably each time and sensed his steady, solid commitment to the process.

A few days in the clouds lifted and revealed the most spectacular range of mountains surrounding the site like a protective yet detached embrace. You could hear a collective intake of breath as those new to the site beheld these mountain guardians for the first time. You couldn’t imagine a more supportive environment for tackling the madness of the mind! The rarefied heights of the snow-tipped craggy peaks, the soaring flight of huge birds of prey and the glittering stars at night all spoke of the capacity within us all to take the higher perspective and broader view of wisdom beyond the endlessly chattering mind.

We had access to a small wooded area during our daily break-times and these woodland walks provided essential balance for the very masculine energy of the disciplined meditation sessions and tight structure of the schedule. Every day I would sit next to a gently bubbling stream with my bare feet on the grass and feel a peace that came from nature and from a resonant natural place within me, without the need for all these intense endeavours yet, somehow, more easy to access because of them. My mind grappled with themes regarding masculine versus feminine approaches to enlightenment/peace/self-knowledge, of discipline, structure and tradition versus conscious surrender to our innate knowing, and I knew I would never be able to work it all out. The stream kindly chuckled at me, showing me with its flow that all streams are heading to the same ocean. There are as many ways to the ocean as there are streams, just as there are as many ways to enlightenment as there are people. There is no ‘the path’, there is only ‘our path’, our own unique journey. And masculine and feminine energies are never separate – as the yin-yang symbol shows us, each one has an element of the other within it and our totality is a dynamically moving and shifting blend of both, in complementary balance.

So, despite the seemingly polarised masculine energy of a vipassana retreat, I trusted that the feminine was also present. I felt it when we ate the delicious food, so nourishing and obviously made and served with love by the cooks and servers, all here voluntarily to support others on the path to self-liberation that they are also on. I also felt it in the love and care that was poured into the centre and our environment – the planted trees, the tended woodland, the eco-buildings, and in how we were looked after with attentive care by the voluntary staff, even as they firmly upheld the necessarily strict rules of the schedule.

The stream also helped me to fully appreciate one of the central teachings of vipassana, which is presence and calm acceptance of what is. The endlessly flowing water showed me that the past is gone. Life keeps on moving and flowing and the future is created from how we respond to the present. I could see how I was creating my own suffering by continuing to react to new situations from my past wounds and conditioned beliefs and that this led me to continue to create the same kinds of painful experiences in my future. The past would keep repeating itself and I would remain stuck in a past, traumatised version of myself, who felt unsafe and mistrustful of others and the world. The continuous meditation with its very effective and simple technique of awareness of body-sensation allowed me to watch my mind from a calm, observer perspective and practise responding to the present-moment sensations, many of which my mind deemed deeply unpleasant, with equanimity, peace and acceptance even when my mind wanted to react in its usual ways of resistance, anger, fear, mistrust, judgement etc. And I knew this was essential practice for life off the meditation mat.

There were a couple of days where I had periods of feeling rebellious and rejecting the technique and teachings, but I soon came back to surrender and focus and, this time, was able to just laugh at myself and the mind-madness and also remain totally accepting of what I had needed to do at that time. We all have our limits of what we can stay calm and present with, and to be equanimous about the times we spin out and fall back into old coping strategies of anger and aversion is just a continuation of the same practice.

There were no big spiritual third-eye experiences for me this time, just a steady trickle of understandings and revelations about the workings of my mind and my conditioned reactions that gradually accumulated into a huge release of a very old childhood trauma story that I’ve been digging down into for the last few years. I felt like I’d finally reached the bottom of the barrel and was able to speak some truths to myself that my body had been trying to show me for a long time. In the admission of the truths to myself, something that had been locked up and frozen within me, around my womb area, finally melted and I felt a huge body release. I knew that this release was why my soul had led me back to vipassana at this time; it was the essential final piece that I needed to get to the end of this particular piece of soul-work and healing.

On the last day, when we were able to speak again, I avoided the sudden noise of 150 people rediscovering their voices and kept to my own company, choosing to eat my lunch next to a cactus plant that had been a real ally to me throughout the week with its phallic, masculine presence and steady calmness. I could feel I was in danger of overwhelm, knowing this feeling was a ghost of the past but not feeling I could hold it right now without the support of nature. Then, once the separation of males and females ended after lunch, there was a simple, quiet joy as Trev and I found each other and reconnected. There were not many words to begin with; the mutual understanding of the profound depth of what had just occurred for us both and the resultant deepening of our commitment and connection to each other was more than enough.

In the food hall the team had erected lots of information signs about the centre and about vipassana for this last day, which is designed to be a ‘shock-absorber’ day, before you re-enter the noisy, fast, hectic world. I spent some time later on reading these and when I came to the sign that described how vipassana retreats are all entirely financed by donations of previous students something in my heart exploded. Here was the soft, generous feminine energy in abundance. I felt so grateful that such a pure energy of selfless service exists so successfully on Earth at this time. There is no business model, only heartfelt voluntary service to enable others to liberate themselves from suffering. On the first retreat I did I hadn’t been able to fully accept this as a possibility and had remained sceptical, working out how much money to give to cover my expenses. But this time round, perhaps in part a reflection of the beautiful energy of the centre and its staff, and also of course a reflection of the very different version of myself that I am now, I fully understood that there was no expectation for me to pay anything (although the virtue of generosity is certainly strongly encouraged as a way of helping you on your path). And, if I was to donate, the amount was irrelevant and to be appropriate to my means. What was important was the purity of energy behind the donation; that it is given from the heart, in order to go towards helping others in the same way that I have been gratefully helped by vipassana.

I had such deep gratitude to Goenke, for bringing this pure energy through to our planet at this turbulent time, and I also that day had the second experience in my life-time of feeling the devotional heart-opening power of connecting with a pure lineage back to universal truths uncorrupted by human distortions of power. In this case the lineage was traced back to Gotama Buddha himself, and I acknowledged his presence in my life as a teacher in a deeper way than before. I’ve been hefting a heavy wooden Buddha statue around with me for years, even during my nomadic years, and I could understand now why he always took pride of place in a special place in my home or, currently, on the altar in the Roundhouse where I teach my yoga classes.

At one point during the retreat’s teachings, Goenke referred to Buddha as a true yogi, because he was a self-realised being who had understood the totality of who he was, beyond mind and matter. I acknowledged that ‘my path’ or my particular stream leading to the ocean, includes within it the ancient and evolving tradition of yoga and the Buddha’s teachings, which are really just different languages for the same journey back to Self. The words ‘and’ and ‘both’ were with me a lot throughout the week. Despite all my tortuous mind-grappling of trying to reconcile apparent polarities, I ultimately realised that it doesn’t need to be either/or – we can honour and accept all streams/paths. They all lead back to the ocean of oneness that we ultimately realise we are part of, and therefore all possibilities are there for us to explore and incorporate into our unique path, should we choose to. Even when things seem polar and mutually exclusive, we just need to take the broader perspective and we can see that everything can co-exist, in fluid balance. Sometimes we need structure and discipline, sometimes we need to surrender to the flow of a wisdom beyond us, sometimes we feel more masculine, sometimes more feminine, sometimes we need a very ‘yang’ concerted effort and intense endeavours and sometimes we need to let go and relax into peace and stillness and receive.

But, always, the opposite is with us too. This is what the mountains, the eagles, and the endlessly flowing stream were showing me all week. Thank you Goenke and Buddha for bringing through these teachings of concerted effort of mind concentration in pure form. Thank you to all the previous students and voluntary staff for inspiring me with your heartfelt generosity. Thank you to nature for your gentle teachings, that only need me to become quiet and still and attentive to receive, in all their beauty. I worship at all these different altars and more, as the endless flow of my unique path back to the ocean guides me to where I need to go next.