My 10 Days of Rest and Relaxation

Read more about Vipassana meditation and find upcoming retreats here and here.

And so, this, too, shall change.

Some 3 months ago now, I drove out into The Dandenongs in the middle of December to a small little property in Woori Yallock. At the time, I knew what I had signed up for, at least on paper. A 10-day meditation retreat. I was familiar with some of the rules and expectations, too. No leaving once the retreat has started. No talking to other students once the retreat has started. What I didn't know, couldn't have known, was the actual experience I was in for - both the highs and the lows - and the fact that in 10 days time I would leave feeling like an entirely different person: still occupying the same clothes, same possessions, yet at some intrinsic level fundamentally, and permanently, altered. And no, this is in no way hyperbole.

A quick disclaimer first.

Since returning from the retreat, I have had many long (and interesting) conversations with friends and family about the course itself, usually revolving around what meditation is, what a 'retreat' is and why in the hell I would freely elect to do this. The goal of this article is to answer the latter two of these three queries. The topic of meditation itself and why one should do it, though clearly of utmost relevance here, is not fully concurrent with participating in a retreat and so I will treat it in a separate essay at a later time. By the end of this, I will hope to have at the very least opened a fresh perspective on the theme of mindfulness, if not convinced one or two of you to sign up for a retreat yourselves. Because in the current day and age, despite engagement with meditation being on the up, proactively practicing mental health in this manner is at a position very much where the practice of running with respect to physical health was in the 1970s and '80s: people are aware of its existence but it's generally viewed as weird and the people who do it are often wackos that are part of a cult of some description or another. Yes, I can't verify the accuracy of this claim having not been around at this time, but from all reports this seemed to be the state of affairs.

Okay, with that out of the way, just a quick sketch of the roadmap ahead - first will be to cover off explicitly on what a retreat like the one I did involves. Next will come some discussion about what I experienced throughout, and then finally some more global discussion about the merits of such a course and how it relates to the practice of meditation itself. Let's get started.

What is a Retreat?

See No, Hear No, Speak No Evil

From the outset, it is important to note that there is no such thing as the meditation retreat. There are countless variations to be found, with the most important variables to be specified being: (a) the type of meditation being taught and (b) the duration of the retreat. Filling out this form, my answers are (a) Vipassana and (b) 10 days. Vipassana, often translated from the Pali¹ as seeing things the way they are, is most commonly associated with the Western concept of mindfulness. I'm painting with really broad strokes here, but the key idea of this practice is to achieve enlightenment via a sharpening of the faculties of awareness to the sensations we associate with consciousness. This is by no means the only type of practice, nor is it the superior one. The specific style one selects on their journey, be it Vipassana, or Zen, or Dzogchen or Transcendental, is very much user-dependent. What resonates with you cannot be known __a priori* and in the beginning it is worth experimenting with different forms to find the one that works best for you. With that said, at some point it is worthwhile settling deep into one form or another - little progress is to be made when styles are mixed and bastardised together.

On a side note, I started meditating seriously about three years ago now, essentially right after I finished my high-school exams. I don't have many deep regrets at this point in my life, but I wish to have been introduced to the practice much sooner because that teenage period of one's life is fraught with dangers to mental wellness. Since then, though I have experimented with a good half-dozen differing techniques, the one I come back to often at this point is Vipassana. For someone that has never done something like this before, it is perhaps the most palatable one as many forms can get extremely abstract which can be off-putting if not digested in the appropriate context. Vipassana is certainly the type of meditation that has helped immensely in bridging the gap in the last 40 years or so between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, a mending of the void that in my eyes can only be beneficial in the current social climate/rampant mental health crisis.

Now, what is common to most retreats is a core set of principles and values that one must uphold during the duration of the course. Again, there might be some slight variation, but generally there is:

1. NO TALKING to any other students upon commencement. I was able to speak to a few others (more on this later) before and after the course, and there is someone there for pastoral care/logistic issues who you can talk to about any problems you might have,
2. NO EYE CONTACT with any other students where reasonable,
3. NO DRUGS OF ANY KIND, namely alcohol. Many retreats would also prohibit caffeine but in this case it was available, and
4. SEPARATION OF SEXES, the camp being divided into two grounds with a fence down the middle. The opposite sex is only really to be seen then in the corner of the eye across the meditation hall before and after practice.

There are a few other matters I have not included here, but the manner of one's actions can be summarised by the five precepts or Sila that you swear to abide by during the retreat:

1. To abstain from killing any being. This of course applies first to humans, but extends to all forms of life (where it is practical to do so). The food served is entirely vegetarian. Rooms are also equipped with bug catching cups and cleaning is done with a balsamic vinegar solution (rather than a stronger disinfectant) so that no harm comes to the many insects and spiders littering the grounds.
2. To abstain from any stealing,
3. To abstain from sexual misconduct and sexual thoughts,
4. To abstain from wrong speech, and
5. To abstain from all intoxicants.

It is worthwhile emphasising the strong underlining by teachers to not just accept these precepts at a surface level, but to truly understand their ramifications at the level of experience. As we will discuss later, the proposition implicit in these commitments is a purification of the spirit, moving beyond the basic temptations of the human life.

A Brief Overview of Vipassana

The particular practice in question for this retreat, Vipassana, was one that was seemingly lost for many centuries before being rediscovered in Burma (now Myanmar) in a more modern era. Some time in the last 75 years or so, there has been a few central Burmese figures that played a central role in spreading the teachings of Buddha in this way first to surrounding South-East Asian countries and then further abroad to the West. The name of central importance to my story is S.N. Goenka who had a strong hand in disseminating Vipassana to America some 50 years ago now. Working in the manner of his own teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, he ran the first 10-day retreats on the West Coast. He has sadly passed, but the recordings of these original retreats survive and they are the primary material used by the Dhamma group (see the links at the top of the article) of meditation centres around the world. Though there are more modern teachers up-to-date with the times of the 21st century, it is a common consensus amongst practitioners of Vipassana that the works of Goenka are of great clarity, giving perhaps the most translucent and digestible guide along the path of enlightenment especially for a Western audience.

I want to stress that this essay won't, nor should it, serve as teaching material for the technique of Vipassana. As I've become aware of, and as is stressed by those running the retreat, a student of meditation, particularly a new one, requires a teacher far more deeply entrenched in the practice than I am, and perhaps ever will be. What I can do however is provide a sketch of some of the basic tenets of Vipassana, the skeleton of the inquiry into experience so that some more superficial comparisons to other approaches to mindfulness can be drawn.

This will all be unpacked in greater detail below, but for now, the general structure of learning Vipassana proceeds as follows: first, one commences with Anapana. At its core, this is a technique in which one focuses on the breath and its associated sensations in order to strengthen the faculties of awareness. This is done to prepare the mind for Vipassana, since jumping to this immediately with a dulled mind will not produce anything positive. Once sufficiently sharpened, moving to Vipassana sees the student casting their attention to the full gamut of sensations experienced across the body. It is these sensations that are the objects by which one becomes enlightened to the true nature of experience. That all might sound a little woo-woo at the moment, but don't worry, we will explore what this actually entails.

Retreating

The Beginning

The particular centre I visited in Victoria is located somewhere in the Dandenong Ranges and is a beautiful place. One of the guiding principles in determining the location of a new centre is that it should be (a) far enough from the throes of city life so that deep solitude may be observed but (b) close enough to metropolitan areas so as to be accessible to as many people as possible. About 60 minutes drive from the Melbourne CBD, Woori Yallock ticks both these boxes comfortably. Upon arrival, you sign some forms promising to remain for the duration of the course and to abide by all the rules provided to you by the teachers. Though you can arrive part-way through a retreat, leaving early without prior reason is frowned upon as it simultaneously denies both that student and a prospective applicant from receiving the full rewards of dhamma². Here, one also surrenders all prohibited belongings including, but not limited to, cell phones, keys, books and writing implements. A small meal was served prior to commencement of the evening session, and I quickly fell to talking (which you can do prior to the first gong) to two other guys, both who happened to be my age and still studying at university, one in Melbourne and the other up in Canberra. It turned out that we had come to meditation from very similar paths, and what we didn't know to appreciate at the time, only once the retreat was over, was that having two other similar souls present to provide motivation to endure what was to come in the next 10 days saved all three of us from bowing out early.

And then, after the evening oaths mentioned earlier, it began. At 4 AM the next morning. One thing that becomes very apparent is that when you are practicing meditation for some 12 hours a day as we began doing, a lot less sleep is required. As a handwavy approximation, 1 hour of meditation (done properly) is equivalent to 30 minutes of sleep. These first few days I still recall to this day as being extremely unpleasant. Between only eating twice a day³ and the various shocks imposed on the body - sitting cross-legged for hours on end, very early wakeups and no social interactions - I found myself in substantial discomfort. Part of the purpose of this piece is to convince you, the reader, to take the leap and do a 10-day meditation yourself, so please do not see the word discomfort along with a description of the daily schedule and shut off. The body is capable of a lot more than we give it credit for, and after the first few days the adaptation was rapid. It is actually precisely for this reason that I will not recommend doing a 3-day meditation retreat as your first (even though they are offered readily) as it does not give a novice student enough time to break through the initial difficulties and experience progress along the path.

The opening days focused solely on the technique of anapana. Day one began with a focus on the awareness of the breath in whatever way that materialised. The subsequent days incrementally narrowed the scope of concentration first to the triangle formed by the upper lip and nose, right the way to the small rings at the bottom of the nostrils. It became immediately apparent to me here that despite having done daily meditation of 10-20 minutes for some 3 years now, I had basically spent that entire time sitting there lost in thought - the antithesis of good practice. The mind, when observed, is the most chaotic thing you will ever interact with in the universe. Constantly shifting, running down tangents, it also made it clear that my mind is quite literally insane; thoughts and voices effervesced out of previously unrecognisable corners of the brain before quickly falling away again, and there was no coherency or thread between one thought and the next. To see this yourself, just stop reading for a second. Now close your eyes. Try and predict the very next thought that comes to you. I almost guarantee that you won't be able to, so unstable is this seat of cognition.

The Middle

By about the 4th day, doing nothing but paying attention to sensations of the breath brough with it a noticeable sharper attention. Having honed it sufficiently, one could now begin practicing Vipassana in its true form. In the simplest form I can put it, the technique is to shift awareness incrementally over each and every part of the body, from head to feet and from feet to head. And I quite literally mean every part of the body. The purpose of doing so will become clear momentarily, but the first few days of Vipassana were taxing in an entirely different way to the opening days. Meditation is, in many ways, the only way we know to perform a sort of surgery on the mind, cutting out the scar tissue of our negative emotions to leave behind greater clarity of experience. However, such introspection flies counter to just about everything your mind wants to do, and hence the process takes its toll on you quite rapidly.

On our retreat, there were accordingly a few students that dropped out around this time. One was a boy in my room a few years my junior whose parents, avid practitioners of meditation themselves, had more or less forced him to go on the course before starting at university. I recall feeling very sad for the boy, that he hadn't stayed through to the end to bear the fruits of his initial labours.

It was in these middle few days where I personally also had some of my most moving moments. There were several occasions where the thought of particular individuals in my life - close friends and family mostly - moved me to tears of gratitude. Other times, where my head felt like it was floating some distance away from the physical semblance of my body as experience resolved itself into this light cloud of sensations and thoughts. None of these nor the many other experiences I had are the "right" thing to be feeling, nor is there a checklist of such experiences that I could begin ticking off as a result of these insights. What they do represent however, are touchstones of progress on the path, which are ever so vital particularly as a new student like myself sets out on this journey.

The End

Despite each day appearing to drag on for an eternity, the end of the retreat arrived swiftly. No matter the discomfort or boredom, 10 days takes 10 days to pass, a simple fact whose importance I feel now is overlooked. And was I ever hurting and bored. My mind had wandered routinely to this point, in the many hours I had to think to myself, a lot of the time spending time planning what I would do upon returning back to normal life, the myriad changes I would make to complete the metamorphosis I felt I had undergone in the preceding days. There was of course a great deal of pent-up excitement, too, a chance to divulge with the others all that we had collectively gone through. The final days saw more modest alterations in technique, only continuing to deepen the level of focus on sensations occurring in consciousness. There was also on the final day an (extremely brief) introduction to the practice of mettā, a term often translated from the Pali as loving kindness. Whereas in most meditation, the objective is to clear the mind of thought, this technique involves consciously bringing forth phrases of good-will and love towards all living beings, starting usually with those for whom such affection is easiest like friends and family. Akin almost to a prayer, you would be surprised at the warming effects even 15 minutes of mettā can have on you and, subsequently, those with whom you interact.

Finally, on midday of the 10th day, the veil of silence was lifted. Unless you have been in a similar position, it is difficult to describe how it felt to begin conversing again with others. I found myself in a really precarious position of wanting to continue withholding from speech and blurting out the long line of banked-up thoughts to anyone in earshot. I think the former mostly won out over the latter; it did truly seem to me even after only 10 days that many of the things I would normally vocalise without hesitation were just pointless. Whilst in the months since I have recalibrated to my pre-retreat equilibrium, every utterance in that next week felt like a really powerful experience.

Hearing from the others was also a profound thing. Many came from walks of life far more interesting than mine, lives that once touched by the soothing balm of meditation underwent a paradigm shift of the greatest proportions. As an example, one gentleman had grown up in an orthodox Muslim family in the Middle East and upon escaping to the West found himself depressed deeply under the weight of repressed trauma. Another, a father, had come to Australia as a boat child from Vietnam as a young teenager and subsequently found himself plunged into the harsh environment of high school not speaking a word of English. It was one of the most moving days of my young life to this point to emerge from the struggles of the previous 9 days into the warmth of surrounding company.

Leaving the campsite the following morning once the retreat had officially concluded and cleaning had taken place, I left under the most infectious euphoria, as if there was no problem in the world that couldn't be solved by the love I had for my fellow man, but...

...when this glow had, upon my return to Melbourne, subsided underneath the grey clouds of normalcy, what kernel of insight, what knowledge, was left from this whole thing?

Everything is...

Well, quite a lot.

Firstly, it is important to make clear what I mean by knowledge here. There are three levels of understanding/wisdom I think that can be had in life. The first and shallowest is of a social kind, knowledge that has been shared to you by others. The second is knowledge that you have absorbed at an intellectual level. But the greatest form of knowledge, and what constitutes true wisdom in my books, is knowledge at the level of your own experience. For instance, one can intuit that nothing in life is impermanent, yet this truth embeds itself so much more deeply into one's view of the world when this ephemerality is actually experienced first hand (for many, sometimes only in the death of a loved one).

In fact, it is this particular learning that I think embedded itself mostly deeply in my mind during the retreat. At any scale you look at, the world is just a matter of things rising and then passing away. It is the nature of the breath. It is the nature of thoughts. It is the nature of pain and any other sensation, no matter how intense it is at the time. It is the nature of your own life, of humanity and our planet. It is even the nature of the atoms and the universe as a whole.

The other strong insight made was regarding the reality of my mind. In brief, every thought I have ever had is either looking backwards into the past, or forwards into the future. Additionally, each thought is either coloured by an aversion or a craving. So looking into the past with craving is what one may call nostalgia, looking forward into the future with aversion as anxiety. Given these two facts, any thought by definition moves you further away from happiness. Implicitly, one is either conjuring a state of mind that they wish to move closer to (craving) or further away from (aversion). In both scenarios, the constant is that the now is insufficient. All of this is to say that if you can undo the usual habit patterns of the mind, to respond to every sensation in a positive or negative way, then this is the path to liberation and true joy. There is a reason why meditators sit cross-legged, when sitting on a chair might offer greater comfort. It is so that one can observe the unpleasant sensations in the legs and back, yet generate no aversion to them.

Hopefully, this can serve as a very light sketch of what ground I have made on my own path so far; there is certainly a lot more that can be said here and I hope to do so in further writing.

If you have made it this far, perhaps, you are willing to go a step further. Consider doing your own 10-day retreat. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the most important thing I have done in my life to this point. If you wish to read more, go to the Dhamma.org website and search for courses near you.

Thank you, and may you be happy, and free from suffering 🙂.

Footnotes