10 Day Silent Meditation Retreat - WA

I’m not sure there is anything I’ve tried that took as much willpower and strength as to endure 10 days of being with just myself, my thoughts and a vast landscape of wheat. 

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.

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:

4:00 am		Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 am		Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 am		Breakfast break (vegetarian buffet)
8:00-9:00 am		Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 am		Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00 noon		Lunch break (vegetarian buffet)
12noon-1:00 pm		Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 pm		Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 pm		Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 pm		Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 pm		Tea break (Fruit and tea)
6:00-7:00 pm		Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 pm		Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 pm		Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 pm		Question time in the hall
9:30 pm		Retire to your own room--Lights out

 THE MEDITATION

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 6^th 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.

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 2^nd 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:

·        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/