Winter is the season of epiphanies, and I’m learning that so is the age of 19.
Behind the wheel of my step-mum's charming 2000s Honda shitbox I have one hour to exhaust my throat of as many jovial, melodic hums as I can before 10 days of complete silence and solitude. 'The Jeep Song' by The Dresden Dolls crawls out from somewhere deep in my memory and burrows into my conscious mind like a tick you can't dislodge, cementing my expedition's soundtrack without my permission.
As suburbia segues into desaturated freeways, that lead to all-in-one corner stores, and then impressionist farmland, I appreciate how specifically this song seems to mirror my current circumstances.
The inclination to 'skip town' is strong when you're young. That impatient faith, when you believe you are missing something, and your self is something to be sought without rather than within by “just getting away from it all”. That hopping in a car and trailing off to anywhere, alone but wide open, will do some good.
Amanda Palmer’s vocals bellow out of the car and over the fields I drive by, agonising over the way she flinches at the sight of every ‘96 Jeep Cherokee. My Cherokee is a red and yellow striped Crumpler crossbody, the epitome of fashion and function (ignoring the inklings of a generation increasingly tipping to one side) for every blonde Melbournian male of a certain age, height, haircut and build.
Every time Amanda Palmer sees a Cherokee her neck cranes to get a look at the driver. Every time I see a Crumpler my heart pops. It’s never him, though.
I sing along with Amanda as we both drive empty passenger seats, and ourselves crazy. But he is not the reason I make this trip, time just has a funny way of being aligned.
The clouds hang low in a bewitching mist across Woori Yallock and I make out the sign 'Wake up, drowsy drivers die'. I consider slapping myself across the face for dramatic effect.
When I arrive at the Vipassana meditation centre, I bid farewell to my car ('Sam', as humanised by my step-mum, the attribute colouring it a slightly more tender parting), hand in my valuables and take my bags to my cabin with a cheesy nostalgic grin that yearns for those school camps of yore. The grounds are enchantingly abundant with wild assortments of trees and flowers against a watercoloured mountainous backdrop, and I feel lucky to be here considering the registration list fills up months in advance.
The course begins with an introductory dinner followed by an mp3 me and the 40 other meditators solemnly sit and listen to. I stare at the ground in performative unison, suddenly a serious and seasoned practitioner. A man with a British accent who attempts not in the slightest to naturalise his reading off a script staggers and pauses whilst explaining the routine and rules we are to abide by for the next 10 days:
“You will be meditating for 11 hours a day with two meals and rest periods in between. You must not kill, you must not steal, you must not lie, take intoxicants or engage in sexual activity. This is a very serious undertaking which you are not allowed to leave, so if you don't think you can complete the full 10-day course, we urge you to reconsider and pull out now.”
My excitement is slightly shaken as I'm reminded of my friends' and family's sensationalist theories of cult recruitment and LSD in the free food and going stir stir stir crazy. But, my mind is stilled by an amusement with how uncomfortably close to the microphone this guy talks, so that I can hear every whistling exhale like a cyclone, every fallible quiver of an inhale, lick of a lip and shift in his seat, and I have to suppress a stupid smile at the vision of a phone sex operator telling me next how he wants me to touch myself for a dollar a minute on the other end of the line. Clearly, I need to work on my focus if this retreat is to have any impact.
Day 0 concludes with a short meditation in the hall utilising the rudimentary technique of Anapana, awareness of the natural breath as it enters and exits the nostrils. That's it. Sounds simple, proves extremely bloody difficult.
The hall is a liminal white cube with not much more inside than two grids of square baby blue cushions for meditators to sit/kneel on, some lights that adapt their warmth and brightness to the time of day, and an elevated altar of sorts from where the teachers can sit and look down upon us…bit weird. The sky when I walk out of the meditation hall looks like a simulation with its startling volume of piercing white stars, inconceivable to my set of polluted Melbourne eyes. I see the Milky Way and it makes me crave a chocolate bar.
We retire to our quarters - or, "cells", as they call them - at 9:30pm to rest for the following day, and after I've drawn my privacy curtain, zipped up my sleeping bag, and set my alarm clock for 4:30am the next morning, I feel provoked to carve tallies into the wall for each night I spend in cell #2 before remembering I put myself here. That first night, I get little to no sleep in my new environment. Outside, the hills are alive with the sound of hooning; I recall the Crumpler’s assertion that 'there's nothing to do this side of Belgrave but sink piss, smoke green and drive your car really fast 'round windy roads,' and then I find that I have woken up the next morning.
Our daily routine is as follows:
4:30 - 6:30 Meditation in hall or cell
6:30 - 8:00 Breakfast and rest
8:00 - 9:00 Group meditation in hall
9:00 - 11:00 Meditation in hall or cell
11:00 - 13:00 Lunch and rest
13:00 - 14:30 Meditation in hall or cell
14:30 - 15:30 Meditation in hall
15:30 - 17:00 Meditation in hall or cell
17:00 - 18:00 Tea break and rest
18:00 - 19:00 Group meditation in hall
19:00 - 20:15 Discourse from teacher
20:15 - 21:00 Group meditation in hall
21:00 - 21:30 Question time with teachers
21:30 Lights out
My meditation practice on Day 1 was composed of 95% failure. My thoughts were a dog I had to chase down again and again, running amok after slipping out of its collar, and if I didn't have a conscious thought in my head then I heard a song playing unceasingly from nowhere, which I never fully resolved throughout the entire retreat, only learnt to manage better. On Day 1 this song was the unfortunate and irritatingly catchy 'Tri Kila Banani' by Goce Petreski, dubbed by one YouTube commenter the 'national anthem for the entire former Yugoslavia':
Шики наки шики наки мани,
пари нема пари за цигари!
Shiki naki shiki naki mani,
money, he has no money for cigarettes!
Мене ми се јаде, мене ми се јаде,
мене ми се јаде печена кокошка!
I am hungry, I am hungry,
I am hungry for roast chicken!
Три кила банани
мене ми се јаде мале, мале.
Three kilos of bananas
I am craving them a little bit, a little bit.
It’s not the type of thing you want on repeat when trying to master stillness of the mind.
Despite these musical challenges, I felt my memory dramatically improve within the first day; I found myself successfully banking creative ideas and thoughts for later, a cause for celebration considering my reputation for never remembering anything, but thinking, of course, was not the goal.
For the first two and a half days I did more realising I was not meditating and in fact having very elaborate thoughts, daydreams, and visions, than meditating. My step-mum describes her own (unrelated) meditation practice as "ecstasy", but mine started more like a bad acid trip. The two visions I recall most strongly hovering across my eyelids were firstly of my friend Miranda with exaggeratedly stretched lips vomiting hundreds of human ears in a waterfall of pink goop, and then sperm cells the size of asteroids swimming towards Earth from outer space. I very quickly came to learn that I am not in control of my thoughts, rather, my thoughts are berserk and untameable…and very much in control of me.
By Day 3 I felt acclimated to the routine. On a good day, my busy mind could not tolerate even 10 minutes of meditation a day. Mediation was a promise routinely upended by unchecked thoughts of whether I remembered to pack a lunch for uni, what I'm gonna say to so and so when I see them next, and the fact that I STILL haven't gotten my bike serviced despite its increasing number of attempts to kill me. Now, however, on this retreat, I was sitting through four-hour intervals of just breathing with complete resignation. After my 2 hour morning meditation which miraculously felt like 20 minutes, I'd saunter in the pre-dawn blackness to the dining hall smorgasbord and perform the same breakfast choreography: line up, grab cutlery, scoop porridge and dried fruit into bowl, toast bread, smother peanut butter, chop banana, 1 scoop decaf, 2nd scoop decaf, teaspoon sugar, boiling water, stir, sit in front of the black window opposite my own reflection as though waiting for an allotted visitation from someone who never shows up on the other side, eat, check the clock, wash up, and shuffle to my cell to have a nap and treat myself to some contraband thinking before the 8am meditation interval. I began noticing the effects of the lack of intellectual stimulation when all sorts of shapes and faces began appearing in the bark and leaves outside the dining room window in the daytime: lions, squirrels, Baba Yaga. If I astonishingly wasn't sleeping during rest periods, my hobbies for the week entailed: walking down gravel trails within the site's bounds occasionally passing the gated car park to check that Sam was okay, observing rocks' textures and colours very closely, lying against tree trunks, feeling the sun on my face, fantasising, and some light boy-watching - not for pleasure, simply for amusement. The sexes were completely segregated by fences partitioning the entire site, but one could sneak a glimpse here and there from the dining hall window or the top of the female side of the hill when entertainment was particularly dire. I privately chuckled watching the men also mosey around aimlessly up and down their predetermined gravel paths, like NPCs fixed to straight lines and awaiting commands in lieu of any pens, paper, reading material, technology, religious objects, or scented products. I began to develop an immense gratitude for all such simple pleasures I've taken for granted as essential, even missing my sister's company, and I realised that all my past sentiments about how "I could totally become a nun" were unfounded.
On this day the Anapana technique was expanded on; we now had to focus our attention not just on the breath moving through the nasal passage, but on the triangular area from the bottom of the top lip up to the top of the nostrils. Within this area, we were to begin sharpening our mind to notice any and all sensations that may crop up on this small area above the upper lip: itches, tingling, pain, perspiration, warmth, coolness, vibration, air, anything. A key rule to follow when practising Anapana and Vipassana is to avoid visualisation or verbalisation. Unlike other meditation styles such as transcendental meditation where one repeats a strong vibrational mantra such as the classic 'om', or mindfulness meditation for which one might imagine a warm glowing bubble in their mind's eye floating down the body à la Smiling Mind, Vipassana meditation requires one's full attention to be devoted to the physical sensations directly experienced in the body, no imagined words or visuals.
The theories underlying the practice are explained in the valuable evening discourses which take the form of perfectly fuzzy VCR recordings projected onto the meditation hall's main wall, of the late S.N. Goenka's wisdom delivered in California a number of decades ago - one particular set of 10 days that have now come to succeed him for all eternity. Goenka is impossible not to like. He delivers his lectures with a perfect balance of straight-faced theoretical severity and truly timeless lighthearted wit, consistently employing simple tales and metaphors to impart lessons. He is a natural and humble storyteller, endearing like a favourite grandpa you just want to give a hug to. Being able to indulge in a couple chuckles and/or giggles each evening was enough to meet my basic human needs amidst the silence and solitude and teachers who repeated my name in every single sentence when giving instructions, as if to remind me of my identity so it didn't slip away. Vaguely lingering in the back of my mind was the Netflix infographic urging caution towards immensely charismatic leaders, but suspicion never grew. These evening discourses consolidated my understanding of the technique and enhanced my progress, as per the Day 2 clarification that all thoughts one can possibly conjure are either past memories, or future imaginations. This simple binary distinction suddenly made it so easy for me to dissect and dismiss any thoughts that popped into my head, highly sharpening my focus on the present, and with this focus, my happiness also.
Day 4 introduced us to the main technique of Vipassana in the evening, a momentous occasion. Anapana had been equipping our minds with the ability to notice acutely subtle sensations across one small area of the face, and now it was time to extend that practice across the entire body. We began the process of the body scan, focusing the entire attention at the crown of the head only and then progressively moving down the full scalp, face, ears, arms, front of trunk, back of trunk, legs, feet, then back again. At first, it is difficult to tune into every single part of the body, with many blindspots of zero sensation becoming known. The key is to not get frustrated, but keep on moving until a few scans later, you do notice sensation there. This brings me to two of the principal “evils” addressed by Vipassana meditation: craving and aversion. This technique teaches that every mental thought, feeling or behaviour is a response to an initial somatic sensation, and we react to these sensations with either craving or aversion. A sensation of warmth derived from romance or of energy from substance use causes cravings to pursue that feeling again, while a chest heaviness from anxiety or a leg strain from running elicit aversion and an unlikeliness to engage in that same certain behaviour in the future. As such, the final goal of Vipassana is to recondition the mind's habit patterns from reacting to somatic stimuli, to merely observing without any sort of appraisal, giving you a choice over how you react to anything in your life. By becoming proficient in the technique's defining pillars of awareness and equanimity, one becomes more adept at realising balance, truth and self-control in oneself. This may sound like common sense, but is incredibly challenging to achieve in actuality. Merely telling yourself to accept non-reactivity at the surface intellectual level does not penetrate the subconscious' conditioning; that has to be done at the experiential, physical level, with deep meditative concentration on one's own body.
On Day 5 I felt a distinct hormonal shift in my body and I could not stop thinking about sex. Suddenly the gender segregation made sense because for three delusional days I would've humped anything with a dick and two legs. Deciding to give my sore body a break from sitting upright for so long in the hall, I retired to my cell where I could meditate lying down in bed if I so wished. Eyes closed, on my back, all efforts at meditation were violently interjected with memories of my last sexual encounter. Rather than fighting them and increasing frustration with my brain, I had to let the imagery play out from start to finish. The clock revealed the passing of one hour when I opened my eyes and, at last, I had the capacity to meditate again with my libido wrung.
By Day 6 I had totally mastered my morning porridge to toast ratio so that I could leave my stomach adequately 1/4 empty for meditation whilst still enjoying both genres of breakfast food. This was the day Adhiṭṭhāna ('The Sitting of Strong Determination') was introduced to the regime. During our one hour group sits three times daily, we were no longer allowed to change our posture if anything began to hurt or feel uncomfortable. For one full hour one had to abstain from uncrossing the legs or hands, and maintain a straight back and neck. This is to further reprogram the mind towards a state of non-reactivity. The first sitting of strong determination was hellish. At a certain point my body began to heat up rapidly from the novel stress of not tending to my discomfort like I always do, and I became severely moist at the armpits with an excruciating pain at my crossed ankles, a pounding in the chest, breathing shallowly and feeling on the verge of panic-induced tears. When the gong sounded I released my posture like a limp plush toy; everything returned to equilibrium, but I had to hobble down the stairs from the hall to my cell.
By the third or fourth sitting of strong determination, I deduced a more comfortable posture without crossed ankles and my body weaned off its stress response, like magic; when a discomfort arose, I noticed it and continued my body scan. Feeling proud of myself for the change I could feel happening inside me, but equally distracted by the tide of estrogen steadily replenishing itself in my glands, I had to rub one out in my cell (twice). I felt guilty for indulging myself and in hindsight, I think appeasing genital craving antithesises all of the work we’d been doing, but “self-sex” is a somewhat grey area I encountered on a few online Buddhist forums, and at least I can vouch that I touched myself Mindfully, acutely aware of somatic sensation like never before.
By Day 7 bodily aches and pains became a unit of measurement: thigh pain means 15 minutes have passed, knee pain 30 minutes, and by the time the shoulders were sore and strained it meant the hour was almost up - I looked forward to this shoulder pain. Sitting in the dining hall amidst my usual breakfast menu, something happened that I hadn't experienced in the six days prior. Clouds of hot, static-like anxiety undulated in my chest where I previously could enjoy my breakfast in tranquility and satisfaction. I signed up for an interview with the teacher during my rest break at 12pm to inquire about this.
'I'm wondering, do you think this anxiety is my old saṅkhāras rising to the surface and passing away, or do you think I am only deepening my saṅkhāras by paying attention to and feeling distressed by them?'
A saṅkhāra is one's conditioned reaction to a sensation, learnt over time. Every time a sensation is craved or avoided, that saṅkhāra is deepened and perpetuates one's undesirable patterns of behaviour and thought, in my case, anxiety.
'This is very common. You've been working so hard the last few days to become aware of your subconscious, it is normal as the course progresses for old saṅkhāras to rise to the surface and bubble away as you develop indifference against them. This doesn't mean they'll be completely eradicated in 10 days, but over time they will be chipped away until there's nothing left.'
This anxiety continued in random intervals for the next few days, but didn't bother me quite as much as time progressed. It became clear to me just how much I suppressed anxiety in my day-to-day life, and that allowing myself to experience it presently without passing judgement was the only path towards healing.
Against the predictions of my menstruation-tracking app, I got my period on Day 8. I waved goodbye to exuberant arousal and hello to discipline-thwarting lethargy - I’m not sure which was worse. From Days 8-10 I retired to my cell for "meditation" more and more often, spending one or two of my eleven hours laying in bed thinking, or drifting in and out of sleep instead. I decided to refresh myself on the proper method of tampon insertion and while reading the little concertina pamphlet of instructions, realised I was peculiarly deriving great enjoyment from it. It then dawned on me that I hadn't properly read anything in over a week, and a mere illustrated feminine hygiene guide was bringing me dopamine. From here on out I began to crave the outside world. My thoughts were consumed by what food I was gonna eat first once I was home, what text messages might be awaiting me on my phone, planning potential art shows in my head and gifts I wanted to make my friends upon returning home. Admittedly, this was not very Vipassana of me.
On Day 9, just as I was losing confidence in myself and my practice of the technique, I achieved the coveted sensation. That of complete relaxation of the body so that as one scans from head to toe en masse, a free flow of subtle vibrations can be felt, “like a bucket of water being tipped over your head and flowing down”. The way I experienced it was like having a bar of softly-scented soap rubbed up and down your body. I felt baby-smooth.
But, I failed in the technique.
Because I enjoyed the sensation so much I began to crave it every time I scanned my body, and when it wasn't there I would become frustrated that I couldn't will it into existence, resulting in blankness of sensations and the deepening of unhelpful saṅkhāras. In order to reap any benefit from the technique of Vipassana, every single sensation must be accepted, positive or negative, as Annica - impermanent. When one accepts that every sensation – from restless anxiety to pleasant full body vibration – only lasts a short moment, one can let go of attachment and stop the cycle of reaction.
The noble silence was finally lifted on the morning of Day 10, and with it, the illusion of one's own projections. The stern, seemingly judgemental faces of the last 10 days lit up with the real humans and stories behind them, and you couldn't help but feel a deep compassion for people. You learn that everybody comes to Vipassana for a reason, and being a good listener is a beautiful, valuable skill.
Dipa was the first person I awkwardly broke the ice with after no verbalisation for close to 2 weeks, an artist whom I bonded with over our tomboyish ways. Not two words in, she began to cry, confiding that meditative practice saved her marriage, and supplied her with tools to breeze through childbirth, in acknowledgement that all pain is just Annica. She believes everybody should take a Vipassana course at least once in their lives.
Sarah and I spoke in the dining hall over lunch about her exhausting lifestyle caring for a multigenerational household, where her only "me" time in a day – shower time – is also interrupted by knocks to use the toilet. She said she needed to implement something in her life for an hour or two a day that would ground her and allow her space to breathe.
Taylor told me how Vipassana turned her son's unhealthy lifestyle completely around and Mike has attended a course every year for over two decades, meditation having taught him how to cope with mental illness and interpersonal relationships.
Most people just want somebody who will listen. After having these conversations, you realise that you were in fact meditating alongside real people for the last 10 days, that the teachers are “normal” people when snapped out of their seemingly programmed dulcet mono-tones of instruction. The lack of speech, eye contact and gestures made you truly feel like you were alone in your practice, but I believe this is completely necessary for learning to occur – distraction and self-comparison would've corrupted individual progress and the purity of the technique.
In one evening discourse, Goenka explained how equanimity in life – allowing things to fall into your path without force – brings everything you truly need; that is the law of nature. I booted up my phone for the first time in 10 days to uncannily coincidental messages from a number of people I'd been missing, desiring or thinking about recently, as did Dipa. This truth of detachment, in her words, “surrendering to the ‘vibes’ we can't see,” is the type of thing they “can't teach you in school”.
The car ride home was true euphoria. Enwrapped in greenery from all sides and that same bewitching mist, I felt like my soul had dropped into my body and I was actually attuned to the world around me for the first time in a long time, a world I had been maladaptively meandering about for so long. In my first few days back in Melbourne, family members remarked on a noticeable change in me, describing me as 'more grounded, balanced.'
One of the biggest lessons from the experience, for me, was to stop blaming the external, and take complete responsibility for my own biases, complexes, and emotional labours I enacted myself. Realising that you can be a lot happier if you choose to detach your self from the temporary states that occupy it, is liberating. Think about it like you’re a hotel inside of which different moods check in and out constantly, like tourists. Why cling to something that is so likely to change again? I began to forgive myself more and accept that embarrassment, regret, heartbreak and happiness, too, are only annica. Finite. Being okay with any feeling that is inside you gives you the choice to change its narrative.
The body remembers more than the mind. Possibly the most important skill I acquired from the technique was how to cope with discomfort; when unexplained turmoils would descend upon me, I could now acknowledge the sensation of nervousness, tension, perspiration in my body and keep it as that, not letting my mind entertain illusory panicked thoughts that only nurtured my momentary stress into becoming a belief, or at the very least something that just worked me up a bunch. I'd learnt that there was a whole wealth of super revealing information within my own body that I never even realised was there. My first day back when I found myself about to snap with frustration and a scrunched-up face at something a family member had said, I stopped and focused for the first time on the searing orb in my chest before I reacted. I sat with it for a moment, let it exist, and deduced that, actually, I didn’t have to identify with it. Crisis averted, lunch with family saved. Vipassana isn’t just about making your own life easier: it’s about becoming a better you, for other people, too.
One of the most beautiful things about this retreat is that everyone will come out of it with an unimaginably different experience – their own thoughts, visions, stamina, physical and emotional reactions, and lessons, all unique to their own life’s journey. Vipassana, while it might not be recommended or suitable for everyone, forces you to become acquainted with your deepest fears and self-judgements, and purify your mind of them in a way that contemporary western psychology may or may not prescribe. It is common for people to cry incessantly or have emotional outbursts during the 10 days, and while it can feel ethereal and culty in environment, these can be separated from the technique itself or, at least for me, comfortably overlooked for the disciplinary experience. The theory deeply resonates with me because it is logically accessible and non-sectarian - it can be practised by anyone with the will for discipline. However, being truly immersed in the lifestyle of a monk or nun is crucial in fully grasping the technique; attempting to learn it at home lacks the correct enrichment. Progressing through the pillars with enough physical and mental space, time, correct instruction, appropriate diet and access to professional advice, is crucial.
A few hours after leaving the Vipassana meditation centre, I witnessed one of those "inspirational" homegoods woodblock signs in a $2 shop window, something about how 'Life's not about stopping the rain, it's about learning to dance in it' and I actually got it on a new level, man. When I finally listened to 'The Jeep Song' again on my drive home, the continuous references to how 'my broken heart still skips a beat', 'every major street's a minor heart attack', 'it could be him, my heart is pounding', demonstrated just perfectly how widely acknowledged and experienced love is as a physical and biochemical phenomenon, not just mental and emotional. Perhaps this awareness extended more broadly outside of catchy breakup songs, that the physical feelings in your body carry with them vital memories and information worth deciphering, is the antidote to self-perpetuated suffering.
All information sourced from Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin.
https://www.dhamma.org/en/index
*Names and stories have been altered for privacy