THE STAY
The 10 day Vippassana Silent Meditation retreat led by
leading teacher S.N. Geonka, was situated 2 hours out of Perth in the Wheatbelt
region of WA in Brookton. Driving in to the area I was a little disappointed
that I was heading down south but wouldn’t be surrounded by lush trees for my
stay. Instead we were surrounded by masses of yellowy-white wheat, rolling
hills, rocks and dryness.
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| Dhamma Padipa, Silent Meditation Retreat - Brookton, WA |
The accommodation was a shared dormitory for about 20
people, with each of us getting a single bed. I arrived early and chose a
corner bed so I could at least feel some kind of space to myself. I later
regretted it when I started to hear a mouse running along my wall and knew if
it touched me I wouldn’t be able to scream.
RULES OF THE RETREAT
#1 NOBLE SILENCE – No kind of communication WHATSOEVER. No
speaking with anyone during the entire stay – even on lunch breaks, even at
night, even in the bathrooms away from other people. Nothing. No eye contact.
No mobile phones. No reading. No writing. No saying “oops”. No smiling at others.
No polite gestures to others. Every person there was there to be with
themselves and only themselves for 10 straight. (If you had a question for the
teacher or manager you were welcome to speak, but within restrictions).
#2 No contact with the opposite sex. The retreat was
separated into male and female areas. The females did not come across males
during the stay, even couples who had come to the retreat together were
completely separated the whole stay. The only time we saw the guys was in the
meditation hall, females to the right of the hall and males to the left.
#3 No leaving or going outside the course boundaries.
Apparently feeling the need to run away is a common occurrence with the
meditators. It was an interesting experiment as there were a couple of rebels
who had to be tracked down by the servers, these people later revealed they couldn’t
handle the confinement and just HAD to get out, even if it was just outside the
fence.
Other rules included obvious things, like no smoking, no
alcohol (though, someone did manage to bring a bottle of vino. There was a mini
party on the rocks on the last night of the day that we broke the silence), no
killing, no lying, no wearing of revealing or attention grabbing clothes (I was
wearing baggy t-shirts, I hadn’t worn a baggy t-shirt since high school), no
sexual conduct, no stealing.
DAILY SCHEDULE
In addition to the rules was a very strict course schedule
that went like this:
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4:00 am
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Morning wake-up bell
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4:30-6:30 am
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Meditate in the hall or in your
room
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6:30-8:00 am
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Breakfast break (vegetarian
buffet)
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8:00-9:00 am
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Group meditation in the hall
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9:00-11:00 am
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Meditate in the hall or in your
room according to the teacher's instructions
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11:00-12:00 noon
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Lunch break (vegetarian buffet)
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12noon-1:00 pm
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Rest and interviews with the
teacher
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1:00-2:30 pm
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Meditate in the hall or in your
room
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2:30-3:30 pm
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Group meditation in the hall
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3:30-5:00 pm
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Meditate in the hall or in your
own room according to the teacher's instructions
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5:00-6:00 pm
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Tea break (Fruit and tea)
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6:00-7:00 pm
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Group meditation in the hall
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7:00-8:15 pm
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Teacher's Discourse in the hall
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8:15-9:00 pm
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Group meditation in the hall
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9:00-9:30 pm
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Question time in the hall
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9:30 pm
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Retire to your own room--Lights
out
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So as you can see, there was about 10-12 hours of meditation
each day. The style of meditation – Vipassana, is an ancient meditation as developed
and taught by the original Gautama Buddha. It involves scanning from head to
toe the sensations in your body, whilst maintaining a pure, equanamous and
balanced mind (no thought).
The first time you do the scan, you don’t feel very much.
The only time I felt anything was when I got to my butt, back and knees because
after 30 minutes of sitting in the same position on a cushion without moving,
my own body was SCREAMING at me. You really can feel agonizing pain, and you
are encouraged to not move, and just observe the pain. These are called angry
sensations that signify the anger we feel in real life. The reason for not
moving while you’re in a tonne of pain, is that it teaches your body on a
cellular level to not react to anything, no matter how bad the situation may
be. The aim, is to become so concentrated and in tune with your body, that you
start to feel sensations wherever you hold your awareness. The sensations can
be tingling, pulsing, crawling etc, and eventually, you will start to feel a
pleasant tingling sensation. These sensations show us that all we are is a
bubbling, ever changing, ever moving, ever evolving piece of matter – and ourselves
just like the rest of physical things in this life, follows the LAW OF
IMPERMANENCE. We age, we grow, we change, we die. Nothing is permanent - SO THERE’S
NO POINT IN ATTACHING OUR IDENTITY TO
ANYTHING. That is the only truth.
Eventually, the pains disappear. Finally I would place my
awareness on a sore area, only to have the angry sensation dissolve into a
feeling of just a lot of hot bubbling sensation. The opposite of the angry
feelings was the pleasant tingly feelings, but here too we needed to be
careful, as CRAVING the pleasant feelings when they weren’t there yet was just
as detrimental. We had to let the feelings be and do what they wanted to do.
Our job was simply to remain calm, focused, pure and equal minded, and scan our
body. If our thoughts were in a rushing turmoil, we had to calm it by coming
back to the breath. If we were clinging onto the hope we would start to get the
pleasant feelings, we had to calm down. We were taught there are 2 things in
life which lead to absolute misery – and they are ding ding ding – ANGER AND
CRAVING. The meditation was a daily surgery to remove the roots of anger and
craving in our minds. Anytime we felt anger, gave into pain, or gave into
craving, we were just rooting our own problems even deeper.
THE TEACHER - S.N. GOENKA
The meditation sessions themselves were led by S.N. Goenka -
all via video and audio tapes as he resides in India and these courses are held
all over the world. His voice is so deep and dragging on the tapes, & he
even sings. I thought who is this scary sounding person, but when we attended
the discourses every night (1-2 hours videos of Goenka speaking), he was
actually a lovely, compassionate and cute old man who sat next to his wife and
gave incredible analogies on life. And he had the uncanny KNOWING of exactly what
we were all going through, and precisely when we would experience it. Like the
hardest day being the 6th day, that we would be craving, when we
would want to run, that we were struggling with controlling our thoughts. He
taught us to forgive & be kind to ourselves and others & to have
compassion instead of contempt for others when we were angry. I really
appreciated Goenka and his teachings, though there was a girl who was an
obvious philosophical rebel and on the day we broke the silence tried to turn
the whole camp against him by saying he was corrupt.
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| S.N. Goenka - Video Discourse |
EXPERIENCES
Oh yes, the camp brings out the crazies. Imagine you are left
to yourself for 10 days, the meditation is designed to uproot your negative
subconscious thoughts and heal them. I myself, struggled with feelings of
anxiety and fears that I had when I was young. I would have visions of past
events and started to really see them for what they were, then felt them being
released. Without trying, I saw myself as a little girl, once at 4 and another
time at 14, and the older me as I am today, saw them for the beautiful beings
they were and gave them loving hugs, filling them with certainty where they had
been uncertain in themselves before. It was such a cleansing experience. Now I
have been a pretty sane person for most of my life and had a pretty normal
upbringing, so if there was anyone there who had been through hell in their
lives, I couldn’t imagine what they were going through!
Throughout my life, I have only experienced feelings of that
real, uplifting and pure joy at times few and far between. On the retreat
however, I experienced the feeling twice in 10 days. The first time was when we
broke the silence, the 2nd was when we finally finished our final
session in the meditation hall. The relief was incredible. & we were all
excited to see how our lives would be different from here on. We developed the
peace to respond rather than react. The meditation activates the law of nature
to work with us, to heal us, to bring good into our lives. To ensure our minds
stay pure, they encouraged us to stay away from intoxicants and meat in our
daily lives, which is something I have now adopted. A few people don’t understand
the decision to no longer drink, but when I think back to the experience of
purity I had at the retreat, and that I may pay the consequences of going
backwards rather than forward toward the final goal if I do have a drink, I
just don’t think it’s worth it.
LESSONS LEARNED
The retreat taught me so much, and I will continue to go
back and do a course every year. The main things I got out of the retreat:
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How to
choose compassion over contempt. I got angry while I was at the retreat –
it happened when a few of the other girls started to chatter. I was thinking
how dare they ruin the experience for everyone else, we’re all sticking to the
rules and they are distracting everyone with their chatter. I thought back to
Goenka’s words – about finding compassion for those who make us angry, &
that any anger we felt was just rooting it further in our minds and it would
continue to spawn. So I started to change my thinking. I thought to myself that
they were only short changing themselves, that they were missing all the
benefits by breaking the silence and the contract they had agreed to and losing
their integrity within themselves. There must have been a battle inside of them
which they could no longer stand, that I just didn’t understand. & through
my frustration I started to really feel a compassion for them, it was nothing
like trying to be above them and “pity them” either. I also tried to make light
of the situation by making jokes about it in my mind – giggling that they must
feel that Goenka wasn’t their friend at ALL. Silly joke in my mind but it
worked.
·
That we’re
all bat shit crazy, judgmental bastards. One of the funny observations from
one of the ladies was that before breaking the silence, she had made
assumptions about every single person at the retreat. We hadn’t even spoken to
each other but we were internally passing judgements and guessing what people’s
lives were like. Madness! Imagine the feelings we felt when we started to all
share our experiences, hear unexpected accents, all got along and fell in love
with each other – what a paradigm shift! It is clear that we do this in our
daily lives too. We pass judgements all the time, without understanding other
people or where they’ve been. It was a great lesson that you really don’t know
someone and can’t assume anything about anybody until you’ve made the effort
with them to get to know those parts of them
·
How to
have a wonderful future The experience of the retreat is an entirely
cleansing one, with the intention that you will continue to meditate daily and
attend courses yearly until you have reached full enlightenment. Enlightenment
comes about when we have found true inner peace, cleared all of our debris and
live our lives in complete accordance with the natural laws of the universe
(including kindness, no intoxicants, no lying etc etc). It becomes clear that
we are constantly playing out the patterns that our mind holds, so the more
crap we have in there, the more we see situations repeating themselves
continuously, whether we like them or not. It’s great when we have outward
things that we would like to achieve - we really can create great dreams in our
minds and then have them come into fruition, but the main goal first and
foremost in life should be to attain inner peace. If everyone in the world was
at peace within themselves, our world would be fully transformed, as it goes
with the laws of cause and effect. You are the cause, reality reflects the
effect. Peace comes about from learning to counter every negative experience
with the powers of love and forgiveness. Feel your feelings, understand them
and release them to the universe as only the universe knows the best thing to
do with them. Remind yourself that no angry thought is worth condemning
YOURSELF (you are the one holding the thought and having it replayed in your
reality) so it is wise to learn true forgiveness of others.
The retreat was a transformative one, and I really encourage
anyone who has the opportunity to go. It is truly tough, but completely worth
it. I haven’t even listed a tonne of other benefits and experiences that I had (including
that boring landscape turn into a vision of peaceful beauty) but then this blog
article would carry on too long.
The courses are held all over the world, and you can find
more information at: http://www.dhamma.org.au/
