Heavily Meditated: 10 Days of Vipassana
Sometime late last winter I declared 2021 the Year of Conscious Creation at Rootstock. After a whirlwind roller coaster year of manifesting and the maneuvering around people, projects and work in this pulsing paradigm that is Rootstock Retreat, I took a breath and set the intention to make 2021 a bit more spacious and grounded. With that, I crossed off two days of every week, one week of every month and one month in the year to ensure time to be with what is and then plugged all those closed windows into my Google calendar.
April was free and the plan was to enter into my quiet month in Shelburne Falls, MA at Dhamma Dharā with a ten day Vipassana meditation course. I would emerge, heavily meditated, on April 11th, my 45th birthday and have 2 full weeks of imagination farming before diving back into a full schedule of service and celebration.
I’ve now been out of Vipassana for a little longer than I was in it and the effects are still integrating and very present for me. It’s difficult to really express what ten days of silence, no eye contact, no reading, no writing and no communicating with anybody or thing but my own body and mind feels like. Words that touch it are intense, challenging, purifying, amazing, fucking hard, fucking powerful and transformative. There are 3 main take aways that bubbled up to he surface for me:
Doing nothing takes absolutely everything
This moment, Now, lasts a really long time
Vipassana is core curriculum in Human 101. Basic life skills that everybody can benefit from.
In a tiny nutshell, Vipassana is a technique of meditation that works to reprogram your mind to respond differently to craving and aversion, thereby increasing your equanimity outside of the meditation hall as well and supporting a calmer, more compassionate way of relating to everything around you. Every buddha statue that you see of this calm being with a still mind, well, he’s doing something! Ok, so you still your mind…..then what?!?! Well, Vipassana teaches you how to command it’s attention, focus and consciousness to connect with your physical body in a powerful way that bridges the physical and metaphysical and reveals the truth of the matter: human beings are masses of bubbles, vibrations, electrical impulses and sensations.
I couldn’t help but compare the arc of my Vipassana experience with the psilocybin work I share with folks. Preparation, set, setting, dosage and integration remain essential pillars that allow for the medicine to work but the time horizon is just a little longer.
Day 1-3 - there was still a lot of novelty and curiosity about where I was, what pillows or stools fit best, how the schedule felt…It was easy to unplug and be still since I was taking in a new environment and strategizing on how to navigate what I thought I was doing there.
Day 4 - This was “Vipassana Day’ and the first moment that I experienced the technique that I was there to learn. I had a powerful first meditation (filled with pleasure which then leads to craving) and felt excited about the prospect of having more time to sink into the subtle vibrations.
Day 5-8 - As could be expected, the subtle vibrations and good feelings are only half (sometimes much less) of the experience. There’s also the pain, wandering mind, irritating humans making noise, indigestion and straight up boredom that creep in and, though I was still experiencing a fair share of “good” meditations I was also going a little crazy. This window was the peak of the experience where I had the tool, the space, the time and the experience to practice it and it was on me to make the most of it. ‘Strong determination’ sittings asked us to not move our arms, legs or posture for the full hour and just stay equanimous with whatever sensation came or went. For the record, this is really hard to do. Every minute felt like an hour so an hour felt like an overtime workweek…a day felt like 3 months and 10 days felt like eternity. I would close my eyes and imagine the rise and fall of civilizations, generations coming and going and CERTAIN that I had just sat through an hour only to open my eyes and see that literally 3 minutes had passed. Three fucking minutes. Time had lost all orientation. It was a wave form and, depending on how equanimous or not I was, it either passed gracefully or slow, like molasses in winter. I never contemplated leaving or quitting but this was the window of time when I would have.
Day 9 - I saw the light at the end of the tunnel and allowed myself to imagine what it would feel like to leave this solitary confinement. Mixed with “good” meditations and a lot of dreaming of my life and home, I tricked myself into thinking that I was almost done…
Day 10 - Noble silence was still in place through about 2pm and the 4am-2pm window of really fucking meditating hard was easy to cherish since I knew I would finally be able to say thank you to the people serving me food. I sat in the pagoda for a lot of the day and was blessed to feel the whole range of sensations from body dissolution to an anxiety attack with total equanimity and curiosity. When it finally came time to speak, everybody was raw and excited and amazed and gentle. It was like waking up from a collective dream and, honestly, just the first 30min of chatter was over-stimulating and exhausting.
Day 11 - My 45th birthday, my first full day of being able to both talk and meditate, felt kind of like a rebirth day. I cleaned my room, said thank you to all the people, trees, rocks and spaces that held me through that wild experience and then walked right of that self-imposed cage into my beautiful life.
It’s taken some time and space to find clarity on what, exactly, I was suffering in the peak of my suffering. It wasn’t FOMO and it wasn’t physical discomfort…I experienced suffering in not being able to make eye contact with other humans. It was painful to be served and not say thank you. I longed to hear the bird songs on my hill instead of this foreign place… All sweet and beautiful things. My suffering was actually just my love of life looked at through another lens and I am still making sense of this.
Being silent for the first days of Spring awaking is one of the most precious things I could think to give myself and the world and, I hope and pray that even one of you that reads this, takes that opportunity.
I’m still meditating (though not for 10 hours a day) and the technique remains a powerful gift that has deepened that practice and my own relationship to my body. I don’t think I’ll be disappearing into #nunlife anytime soon but I am already imagining when I will step back into that crucible to continue the purification and understanding of myself and the world…I’m thinking for my 50th but who knows.
EVERY HUMAN BEING THAT HAS A BRAIN OR A BODY WILL BENEFIT FROM VIPASSANA.
There’s so much more to say. I have thoughts about this technique as it pertains to my Kundalini practice to my medicine work, but it feels like enough to hold that experience and mark it’s impact on my journey. Thanks for reading and blessings on your day.