Experiencing Vipassana — Part

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Notes from doing 10 days of Vipassana meditation for the first time in my life Tranquility | Photo by [Simon Migaj](https://unsplash.com/photos/Yui5vfKHuzs?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=credit

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CopyText) From 2nd to 13th January 2019, I attended a Vipassana course at Dhamma Hitkari in Rohtak. The below is an introduction to Vipassana and account of my experiences then.

What is Vipassana?

Vipassana means seeing things as they are , i.e. experiencing the true nature of reality. The Vipassana course is an introduction to the meditation technique taught by the Buddha and a first step along his eight-fold path.

In their own words

Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago . Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self-purification by self-observation. One begins by observing the natural breath to concentrate the mind . With a sharpened awareness one proceeds to observe the changing nature of body and mind, and experiences the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness.

Logistics of VipassanaSo how does one go about learning this technique and walking along Buddha’s path? Through 10 days of non-stop meditation.

As a part of the course, you have to observe maun (“noble silence”) for the entire duration i.e. you are asked to refrain from speaking to anyone. You have to return any thing that allows you to remain in touch with the outside world . This means you keep your books, phone, laptop, diary or other writing materials, with the centre management. The above practices are enforced from late evening on the first day of the course.

Here’s what the schedule of a typical Vipassana day looks like:

4:00 a.m. Morning wake-up bell 4:30–6:30 a.m. Meditate in the hall or in your room 6:30–8:00 a.m. Breakfast break 8:00–9:00 a.m. Group meditation in the hall 9:00–11:00 a.m. Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher’s instructions 11:00–12 noon Lunch break 12:00–1:00 p.m. Rest, and interviews with the teacher 1:00–2:30 p.m. Meditate in the hall or in your room 2:30–3:30 p.m. Group meditation in the hall 3:30–5:00 p.m. Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher’s instructions 5:00–6:00 p.m. Tea break 6:00–7:00 p.m. Group meditation in the hall 7:00–8:15 p.m. Teacher’s discourse in the hall 8:30–9:00 p.m. Group meditation in the hall 9:00–9:30 p.m. Question time in the hall 9:30 p.m. Retire to your room; lights out In case you didn’t notice that’s, 10.5 hours of meditation every day with 1–2 hour breaks in the middle. Most people don’t even work for more than 8 hours, and definitely not with the intense level of composure and focus that Vipassana meditation requires . Anyone who thinks this is an idle retreat where one can reflect on life and ponder philosophical questions should leave those beliefs behind. Vipassana is closer to a demanding day-job, a job where you are a janitor trying to clean up the mess that is your mind.

My experienc

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Why?

I had heard about Vipassana from two college friends who had completed the course. One of them had done Vipassana and radically transformed his life for the better — losing weight, giving up smoking and a slew of other vices; overall getting his affairs in order . So it was something that always intrigued me.

Unfortunately, taking 10 days out is hard when you’re working. Even when I was between jobs, it rarely seemed like the better choice over going for a holiday . However, this year at B-school I discovered I had a 12-day block of free time. Most people went home or on trips. I had recently gone home and didn’t feel too strongly about a trip either . So I decided to head to Vipassana, knowing that such large chunk of time (and such burden-free circumstances) would rarely appear in the future.

PhysicalMy centre of choice was Dhamma Hitkari in Rohtak. I tried booking about a month in advance and it was the only one in North India available at such short notice, the more sought after centres get booked 2–3 months in advance.

Dhamma Hitkari is a newer and relatively smaller centre. My course was running full and we had around 70 people who showed up for the course. Here I got twin-sharing rooms with basic facilities like a mattress, blankets, etc . The quality of facilities was neither luxurious nor shabby — just ok and eminently livable for someone trying to be a monk for 10 days.

On the evening before the first day, you are given a brief about the course and centre facilities. Additionally, you reminded about rules of the course in a sort of a warning, “ Are you absolutely sure you want to proceed?” . Everyone present said yes. The course commenced the next day.

The day starts with the ringing of an electric gong at 4 AM that can be heard throughout the centre. It was mostly enough to wake me up. Additionally, helpers at the centre go about with small bells trying to awaken people . As it gets closer to meditation time, the helpers knock on everyone’s doors to wake them up and get them to come to the meditation hall.

The meditation hall was a giant circular room where we all sat cross legged on the floor facing the “assistant teacher”. The hall is dimly lit and curtained off, providing a nice quiet environment for meditation . The course is conducted by playing audio recordings of S. N. Goenka, the founder of Dhamma. The recordings guide you through the meditation procedure for the day in a step-by-step fashion . After an hour or two of meditation, you get 5 minute breaks to just go out and stretch a bit. Leaving the hall is not permitted otherwise.

In the major breaks, food is served. The food provided was good and healthy, no oily or fried things. All vegetarian, of course. No restrictions on how much you can eat . Breakfast was things like porridge, idly, poha, etc. served along with a fruit or some sprouts and tea. Lunch and dinner were things like khichdi, rice and roti, subzis of peas and potato, and kurmura.

People use the rest of the break to take walks, sleep, lie in the grass, wash their clothes and stare at the sky.

Meditative/Mental

The course is quite well structured and you receive step-by-step guidance through the audio tapes being played.

The first 3 days of the course are used to practise aanapana — which is observation of breath . Aanapana is strictly about observation, you don’t try to modify or control your breath, you just observe how it is occurring . What do you observe? Which nostril is it coming from, Is it going in or out, Is slow or heavy. You try to observe the sensations you get near your nose and in your nostrils as the air moves in and out . While doing so, one is told not to react or try to control the breath, don’t try to speed it up or slow it down, see it occur as it is.

I was decently successful in this phase. I have practiced meditation through other means before and all meditation techniques have some form of breath observation or regulation . Sitting idly and focusing has a way of increasing your sensitivity and by the third day, I could indeed sense not only the inflow and outflow of air but also a slight sensation below the nose as the air moved out.

The first three days of Aanapana are just warm-up , they are just preparation for the next 7 days when you practise the actual technique.

The next step after aanapana is observing bodily sensations . The (rationalised) broader idea here is to be more closely connected with your sub-conscious mind . Our mind is (sensibly) used to allowing us to experience only the most gross sensations we feel — an intense thirst, sharp pain, etc. However, at every moment, on every part of your body, your nerves are firing and you are experiencing sensations, however mild they may be . It’s just that most of these are not alarming enough to enter your conscious mind, they are filtered out. Through focused attention you can start tuning yourself to observe even these small sensations.

From the 4th day onwards, having learnt how to focus your mind on observing breath, you are asked to focus your attention on the tiny sliver of your body that lies below your nostrils and above your lips.

This was awkward; because initially I felt nothing. And more awkwardly I didn’t know how I was supposed to go about feeling anything. Despite trying and keeping my focus . It took me a long time to adjust to the concept of the mind’s eye .

In normal life, we pay attention to things through our bodily senses. Got that report to finish? Keep your notes right in front of you where your eyes can see them , get a coffee, resist the temptations of Zuckerbergian contraptions and power through . For music you enjoy, you might close your eyes and twist your head so you can focus all your attention on the music so you can hear every little note . Paying attention to external objects through my bodily senses? That’s I was used to .

But how do I pay attention to my skin? That too with my eyes closed! And not my skin as a whole, a very specific area of my skin below the nostrils and above the lips. Where do I look? to find those sensations. And how do I look? . Everything I experience is so heavily anchored in the sense of vision . So I just sat there baffled. But in the spirit of persisting, I tried more. With my eyes still closed, I tried visualising the area I was supposed to focus on and used that to help myself pay attention to it . It wasn’t a miracle cure that immediately allowed me to start experiencing new sensations; but it was something the helped me overcome the “ How do I pay attention to my skin” problem.

Soon I was indeed able to focus my mind on that little area below the nostrils. I was experiencing occasional tiny itches that I (probably) wouldn’t have noticed otherwise . This along with the a mild sensations of air coming and going that I had started experiencing a few days earlier.

Here you are instructed to not react to any of the new sensations you experience. Feel an itch? Don’t get annoyed by it, don’t feel happy that Oh! I’m a monk, I can experience tiny sensations now . Experience it in a neutral fashion. The teaching here is that all sensations are fleeting. You are experiencing bio-chemical reactions occurring in your body which are constantly happening . None of these sensations are permanent. An extrapolation here is that life itself is impermanent.

From the fourth day onwards, the meditation moves on to focus on physical sensations and the area under focus keeps increasing. Having focused your attention on the area below your nose, you go on to do the same for your head . Next you’re asked to focus on your neck, followed by right shoulder followed by your left shoulder, so on and so forth you continue moving your attention from top to bottom over your body . Having paid attention to one body part at a time, you then begin sweeping your attention from top to bottom and back to top again. The next is change in style, top to bottom and reverse from bottom to top; all along here you’re focusing on just a single part of your body . Next you to pay attention to multiple parts together: both your arms, your entire chest, both feet, etc. This finally ends in your being able to experience all the sensations on your body from all parts, all at once . This escalation of focus area occurs over the course of the remaining seven days.

When you talk about Vipassana, people seem to worry about not being able to talk or having to wake up early or eat just thrice a day. For me, those were the easiest parts . The environment in the Vipassana centre automatically conditions you to go through those apparent struggles. No one else is talking to you either, so shutting up is quite easy . There are no limitations on the amount you can eat, so you can stuff yourself full if you like. However, given the low level of physical activity during course, you discover that your food requirements are actually lower than usual.

Instead, the biggest struggles are those with the self. For me, the biggest struggle was being able to stay put and keep my mind focused.

I’m not sure if this is a tall people thing, but sitting cross-legged on the floor for extended periods of time was something I found difficult. I was barely able to sit for 10–15 minutes when I would start experiencing pain or numbness . This made me want to adjust my posture and stretch my legs every 10 minutes or so. Not a great idea, if you’re trying to stay still and focus your mind . In fact, after the 3rd day the course requires you to pick a posture and not move for the entire mediation session. Quite hard, and something that remained elusive for me.

The other big struggle was focusing the mind. I believe I have a decent ability to focus; being able to stay put in a chair for hours on end when I have work to do . But this was different. Again, having no thing in front of me to focus on and using my mind to focus on my breath was a challenge. In usual circumstances, it is your mind watching your body . Staying in your chair is sign that you’re (hopefully) making progress towards your work or keeping your feet going step-by-step during a run is how your mind observes your progress . Here, the both the observer and the observed are the same — your mind ! So while you can feel legs your stiffen or eye-lids getting droopy, as observed by your mind; when you’re observing your mind with your mind there is no such second entity . So how do you know, your mind has been distracted? That’s the fun, you don’t! Instead you discover this only after the fact. You’ll be sitting there trying to focus your attention on your breath, when Oh I really miss KFC . The chicken wings I had last time were lovely, is that Amex discount still on? It ends on 15th January, when is the course till? 13th Jan I think, what’s today? I wonder if there’s any KFC nearby? and whoosh, you’re off into world of your fantasies . Hopefully somewhere in the middle of your distraction, you get a counter-distraction about being physically present in the meditation room during the Vipassana course and remember that you’ve forgotten to focus on your breathing . That brings you back to focusing on your breadth, you try to stay still and attain a state of focused attention for a few minutes as Didn’t Raymond from church like my photo the other day? He’s become a “photographer” now . Instagram is such a fake place. Glad I removed the app and only occasionally use the website …

This cycle of focus, distraction, counter-distraction, realisation, focus happened again and again and again, throughout my time trying to meditate. It was simultaneously fascinating, enlightening and exhausting.

I was amazed how the (arguably) razor-sharp mind of my focused self was such a cauldron of random disconnected thoughts. An ocean of thoughts just swirling about in the head all the time . You might imagine that your mind is like a quiet forest, tranquil and soothing, and through meditation you will walk through the forest towards enlightenment . Instead you discover that is closer to an active little volcano spewing random thoughts in the atmosphere of your conscious mind all the time . The volcano never tires, day or night, morning or evening, it is ready to throw up some lava of brain vomit at you . All you want for it is to stop. I even felt a little shame, this weird random thought-spewing thing is me .

Here’s what I found interesting. During Vipassana, you enter a period of lowest possible stimuli. No phones, no talking to people, no traffic, no pesky bosses, etc . So there’s very little of those things that one typically reacts to. So one would expect, that as you sit down to meditate, you will come home to a quiet mind . Instead you experience The Brain Show , full of distractions and entertainment. I was distracted by food, women, fantasies of success and revenge, anger at recent annoyances, childhood memories of all sorts, you name it . A fun outcome of this was this discovery of my urges . As I went through the focused-distracted-focused cycle, I unknowingly kept a rough score of what were the kinds of thoughts that mind was spewing out the most . Finding out the top 2–3 kinds of things that my mind craves for the most, was great moment of self-discovery.

Being able to focus and experience the little unfelt sensations on the body is a powerful experience that reminds of your weird gullible biological nature. While there are tales of people experiencing electric currents moving through their body during the Vipassana course, my time there was rather uneventful.

Except for an incident on the fourth day, all I experienced was a mildly heightened sensitivity to the sensations on my body when I sat down to meditate. The last meditation session of the day is a short one lasting only 30 minutes . The others are for multiple hours (you do get breaks in between though). This makes the last session, the easiest to get through. If your legs start hurting or you get distracted, you have to get through just 15 minutes more which is a great motivational boost . Additionally, it being the end of the day, you are tired without too many distractions and mostly alert (unlike in the morning). So, the last session of the day was almost always the peak for me, bringing in greater resolve and heightened focus . On the fourth day, as I sat to meditate I was able to attain a state of focus quite quickly. I had begun feeling the sensations on my face and my focus was growing when I felt like my feet had caught fire . I felt a moderate sensation of heat travel from slowly from my feet over my legs and across my torso to my back, as if a little flame had travelled over me . Afraid that the room had indeed caught fire, I opened my eyes to find that the room had gotten a bit hotter and I had burst out into a sweat. In my ultra-sensitive state, I had perceived the outbreak of perspiration on my body as a fire.

All said and done, I was able to focus well only on every alternate day. Every other day would be wasted just struggling to get my mind focused; I would just give up and mentally write jokes for stand-up comedy or script funny situations in my head . In anticipation of blissful release and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with successfully finishing Vipassana, I had started taking mental victory laps from the eight day day itself.

Social

The period of Vipassana is not a very social time, one does not communicate with others, merely observes them; until the last day when you are allowed to speak.

It was fun to see people for very different walks of life, teenagers — one of which was a professional dancer who couldn’t stop doing somersaults. There were two IAS aspirants both of whom had unfortunately not cleared the exam, coming here to soothe their souls . Quite a few old men and women too.

The last day descended into a discussion of all the gurus and sects in India from Art of Living to Sadhguru to Dera Sacha Sauda. Some of the folks had attended the course of multiple gurus, they said there was a huge overlap between the teachings here and those by other gurus (down to the exact details of stories and examples cited) . They did note that Vipassana was distinct for its non-commercial nature.

A personal observation of mine was that Buddhism was now being sold in the west too, under the guise of being present and experiencing the “power of now” / being in the moment This was the first of two posts. To read the second post, click here: http://bit.ly/2U6kI2b