Back from Camp

So I promised to write-up something on this trip and here it is. First off, for those of you thinking a "meditation retreat" is an idyllic mental holiday where one can float in the bliss of a mind uncluttered with day to day concerns, I should disabuse you of the notion. Not the uncluttered part, rather the idyllic one. It was hard, hard work.

The schedule had us meditating about 11+ hours a day. The first three days dealt with harnessing the "flickering" mind through a practice which sharpened mental awareness to the here and now without being pulled away by past, future, thoughts or feelings. The main key to this was the same approach taken in taming any wild animal... persistence and patience. The mind runs away a thousand times, each time you eventually notice it has left the premises, you bring it back. Without getting frustrated or annoyed, the bringing it back is an essential piece, not a failure. Like doing reps with weights to build muscle. First it may have run away for 5-10 minutes before you even notice, very soon the length of time it is missing, and the number of times it runs away, reduces dramatically and you start to experience a very powerful "sharpening." This becomes restorative in its own right, but was only a foundation for the next part of the training: vipassana.

If you google "vipassana", this meditation retreat will come up first in the search results. It's taught by SN Goenka and his audio/video instructions along with onsite teachers and instructors are used in his centers throughout the world. It is non-religious, non-sectarian, but it does use the techniques taught by Gotama Buddha which, Goenka emphasizes and demonstrates, are not doctrines, but ways to experience basic truths about reality for yourself. To see things as "they really are." So after the first part, with the ability to at least hold onto a small beam of awareness without flitting into fantasy or thoughts reacting to thoughts rather than simply observing experience, the mind can start to investigate what is actually present in our bodies in terms of sensations.

And down the rabbit hole one goes, following Gotama's lead in exploring the very bedrock of human experience and the cause of all suffering and misery in the human mind. A tall order! But what one can learn here, experientially, is that our entire interaction with the 6 senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, thought/feelings) result in sensations which are constantly changing, constantly in flux and impermanent. The core of human misery then is wrapped up in either clinging or aversion to these sensations. What becomes powerful is the experiential part. It's one thing to realize, intellectually, perhaps through the loss of a loved one or some other life event, that things are impermanent. One could develop a philosophical stance from that perhaps, but to experience through observation this stream of arising, passing away, arising while simply observing starts to condition the awareness at a very deep level and, in Gotama's terms, starts to purify the mind and undo deep complexes of reactivity in our unconscious.

Usually we go straight from noticing to reacting. And while not specifically part of what was being taught, I tripped across something very cool. Meditating in the same position for an hour or longer, gives you a first hand opportunity to observe PAIN. This pain can be extremely intense, but it's not actually harmful. After slowly moving and stretching and getting circulation going again, things are as good as new (for the most part :-), but during the experience you may easily think you are suffering irreparable damage. This lead to an interesting epiphany for me. The difference between pain and suffering.

During one period of sitting, on Day 5, I started getting all sorts of pain arising from knees, hips, ankles, a little symphony of about 5 different sections each competing to see who could cause the most discomfort. Rather than changing posture, I decided to simply look more closely at these sensations, without wanting them to go away (aversion) and without trying to ignore them. Without any thought that things should or could be different from what they simply are, right now. Just simply focusing that "beam" of present awareness on what they actually were, their dimensions, their nature and qualities, ignoring any reactions to them that wasn't primary experience ---and a most amazing thing happened. As I observed each painful sensation, simply curious and with equanimity, it changed into something that I think the closest word is "radiance." Not pleasure or discomfort, but a subtle type of ecstasy. I rode out the rest of the session on this wave.

However, the next session, being all psyched to recreate this intriguing experience, I couldn't get back to that place, and realized something else about clinging or attachment to an expected result. Meh. I couldn't do it. So I went back to the normal progression. It did give me a hint at something possible though. I suppose one could practice this with hot chili peppers too :-)

While I was skeptical, off and on throughout, about this vipassana technique and the philosophy of simply observing sensation without interference as a way of unraveling deep habits of the mind to react in ways that propagate human misery, I couldn't argue with the actual experience and the "lightening" effects of this meditation. It was an interesting lesson in what Goenka refers to as the "field of wisdom" being composed of what you've heard or read, what you've reasoned out and the most important part of this triad: what you experience directly. The focus of this training was not on accepting any esoteric "truth" about the nature of reality, but upon a practical way of undoing our conditioning to see for ourselves what might really be happening discovered by a deep expedition 2,500 years ago. Not an easy task, by any means, but I do think the retreat delivered on providing a small, initial glimpse about what this type of exploration can reveal.

Here's a more comprehensive and entertaining description of the experience than my own.

And a good write-up on this retreat.