Secret Diary of a Vipassana Meditator

Contrary to my boy’s expectation, it wasn’t the 10 days of silence, or even handing in my iPhone, that was a problem for me.  As for the sitting still and meditating all day every day – I’d done two months in traction.  I’d be fine.  The difference I soon discovered was that this time I physically could get up, but it wasn’t allowed.  Recipe for claustrophobia.  But that didn’t come til Day 4 ...

They actually trick you and designate arrival day, Day Zero, and it’s disorganised, hot and noisy.  Checking in and allocating rooms to 45 Indian and 5 foreign women takes the best part of the afternoon, and the staccato chatter that shimmers like a heat cloud as it settles on the dormitory, builds to such an intensity that I wonder how on earth they will come to an abrupt stop.  True to all the vipassana accounts I’ve read, the urgent need for snacks sent me and an Irish girl outside the gates foraging before lockdown.

Day One and let the games begin.  In a weird version of boot camp meets POW camp we’re numbered and marched in, each to our cushion for the week.  That’s it.  No instructions.  No fans! From my background of yoga practice with guided meditation, this is boring and directionless.  At least there are the meal breaks to look forward to.  Yum.  Savoury rice bubbles, dry, for the dinner snack tonight ... and it would turn out, every night.  But, you know, I really kind of liked them.  The boy was going to love this addition to my culinary repertoire.

On Day Two I decided I liked the 4.30 to 6.30am meditation best.  In the cooler predawn darkness I could feel anonymous in the trickle of people who padded to their allotted spots.  We, the wicked foreign women, were grouped on the far edge of the room, near the windows.  A red hibiscus bush blossomed in my line of sight with seven, eight, thirteen flowers on any given day.  My body was already aching for some yoga, and my mind longed for the focus of some instruction.

How quickly we develop the habits of community and replicate our patterns in a new environment.  After breakfast, cleaning and washing in a silent procession, fulfilled our needs for certainty and meaning.  Very quickly my first reason for coming surfaced:  The challenge of the absolute external emotional intelligence unawareness of my indigenous fellow inmates was astounding.  Did silence mean no etiquette and no manners?  Our cleaning lady has more class than what I observed in these supposedly middle and upper caste women, and particularly from those over forty.

With a lot of days to go, I had to find a way, and of course that’s what meditation is about, finding the middle path.  For me this balance is found in the practice of Kundalini yoga, where prana, the life force, circulates through a network of subtle channels, the nadis.  The two energies of Ida and Pingala flow along the left and right sides of the spine of the subtle body, and the Sushumna nadi flows up and down, between them, coursing through the chakras and balancing prana.  Yeah great!  All well and good sitting on your mat in a beautiful beachside yoga studio.  Tough call trapped on one square metre of real estate in a Dhamma Hall in Bangalore.

I can’t change the world, but I don’t have to change who I am.  Acceptance not compromise.  I don’t have to change the world, just be.  That’s enough.  I love my life.  I feel safe.  I need to move – my body needs yoga.  Ω

Day Three began on a high.  Oh my gosh!  Tea without sugar, just for me.  But in a place with no rules, India has all of a sudden thrown up a zillion ... and I apparently break all of them.  The first and worst is daring to be a foreigner and come here.  The list of no’s is endless:  no fans, no outside, no skin, especially no white skin, no white hair, no blue eyes, no open eyes, no open windows, no open doors (at least that is purported to be because of thieving monkeys), no touching, no thank you, no manners!  I am cast as the villain who doesn’t follow the rules.  So does this mean I’ve cracked it?  I understand the code.  I’m ready to go now.

Peppermint, lime, cypress and frankincense.

Start again, it’s Day Four.  I think this was hump day.  I steeled myself and fronted to ask the guru a question.  Well, what a waste of time that was.  The so called guru turned out to be nothing more than a technique adviser.  This is the technique that we had had no proper instruction for, just outdated audio and video discourses by the now deceased guru who had kept the tradition of vipassana alive in Burma and then returned to India a conquering hero to bring enlightenment to all the fallen.  This manifested itself in his resolute grip on absolute power and inability to empower or give ownership and the title of teacher to anyone else.  The supervising assistants are destined to be gurus in waiting forever.  Of course this sparked huge cognitive dissonance for me in terms of learning and teaching theory and practice ... but that’s a whole other story and the boy would insist that it’s all about context anyway ... whatever that means.

By Day Five I admit I’m fully into the sensation identification as a manifestation of an emotion.  Even though that still sounds way too hippy trippy for me, I got it.  I’m one of those learners who will learn in spite the of quality of the teaching.  Nerdish but true.

Prickly is seeking validation.  Pain is for defence and strength in aloneness.  Heat and heart palpitations equal the old favourite, addiction to perfection.  And without getting attached and craving, shimmering is the Samadhi centre of nurturing, love and mothering.  Well, at least that’s how it is for me.  Your experience will be unique to you.

Being a morning person, as we’ve established, and having worked all that through and out by lunch time, I needed a way to fill the long, tedious and insufferable afternoon sessions.  I’ve written about this before so I’ll include the same passage.

“I remembered reading the autobiography of Dr. Tenzin Choedrak, personal physician to the Dalai Lama, and the accounts of other people who found themselves in confined spaces.  They still managed their yoga practice in stillness.  They mentally pictured their bodies doing the asanas, breathing and taking their minds through the sequence of postures they were unable to do.  I had time and I needed focus.”

I booked an hour of yoga for 3pm each day.  I pictured myself on my yoga mat, fluid and graceful, physically moving and living my yoga practice.  About this time the music also began to play and the first track of my vipassana soundtrack was cut, The Secret City, Changing Channels in My Head, followed by Simon and Garfunkel, I am a Rock.  The creativity of an uncluttered mind doesn’t stop there.  I’d already gone through the presentation I was giving the next week, and the whole subject outline for a course we were pitching.  Above and beyond that, when I really had to get out of my head, I shapeshifted into a white and gold budgerigar and flew myself to the beach to walk on the sand and dip my wings in the water.

Things got a bit freaky on Day Six when all this meditation really did spit up stuff I had dealt with and neatly packed away, but not really owned the reasons for.  So here I was looking for a philosophical discussion and some guidance on psychological and practice issues, and there was nothing.  As a meditator, you are allowed to talk to the assistant teacher, but as I’d already discovered this was a dead end.  Now, I consider myself an intelligent aware woman and I felt like this.  What on earth do they do with the crazies who come along to be healed and just get told to breathe and concentrate on their nose for four days?

Except for my flights to the beach and yoga sessions, the only thing that kept me sane and on the cushion when I was sinking, was the cool breeze that would defy the stillness and brush its finger tips over my skin, reminding me and reinforcing my air sign and connection with the life energy of prana.

From Day Seven my mantra was, I’m done.  I want to go home now, but there was no way this was going to beat me.  I was committed.  My soundtrack had moved on to Hunters and Collectors, Throw your arms around me.

I can’t meditate on the clock and I don’t want to meditate around the clock.

On Day Eight I solved the mystery of female familial relationships.  Truly.  Oh, and I realised the Reiki energy is within me.  Filling my head, the music changed to Kate Cerebrano's Courage and then Cry Baby, you get no sympathy from me.

I have a calm balanced mind.  I have dissolved.  I have saved my inner child.  I am still, in the midst of the swirling air.

Racing towards the end, Day Nine was my epiphany day.  I’d like to say it was some amazing revelation, but in hindsight it seems deceptively small.  My final song was Ruthie Foster's, Phenomenal Woman and that really is it ... and my gratitude for the gift of yoga.  Ω

And then it was Day Ten, which really couldn’t count for most of the meditators, as they stampeded to collect their mobile phones before breakfast, after they’d fidgeted through the final dawn meditation.  Noble Silence had actually finished at lunch time on Day Nine and there was no gentle easing back in, or rationing of words that rushed to fill those hard earned pauses in the mind chatter.  Voices gathered in the air like a thunderstorm gaining intensity in the warm night, until finally the cloudburst scattered the owners back to their erstwhile lives.  Last to collect my phone, I was suddenly alone to enjoy the calm after the storm.

Nowhere to go.  Nothing to do.  No one to please.