CHAPTER 1
Ten Days at Meditation Boot Camp 2005
Before
First, they laughed. Friends raised eyebrows and guffawed when I told them I'd signed up for a ten-day Vipassana Meditation course at a Buddhist retreat center.
"You?" they exclaimed. "Come on. I've sat next to you at meetings. You'll never sit still and be silent ten days."
Some offered to bet on how long I'd last.
Listening to the rules, even my buddies who had done retreats said, "You've signed up for a nunnery! Vipassana is the most austere method, Pat. No journal, pens, books, sketch pad. Just you and your thoughts."
My therapist commended my courage and reminded me I choose extreme things. "You're free to leave, but go committed," she said. "You'll make it if you get through the first three days."
The closet quiet person inside the active human doing that most of my acquaintances saw cherished tai chi. Multitasking, focusing on movement and breathing, worked for me. I loved the daylong silent retreats my teacher held every other month when we moved ever so slowly to lovely positions like ocean currents and sea waves and light in the hidden temple. Tai chi, after first sorting my to-do list and letting it go, had been the only way I could meditate successfully so far.
I trusted a friend who'd done this Vipassana course. Although she said parts were torture, parts ecstasy, the peace she radiated was visible. That e word was enough for me. Everything pointed toward my developing a daily spiritual practice. This could be the first step.
Worth the ride, I thought as I wrote on my application, "I want mental discipline to write better." I answered questions about my health and use of prescriptions and illicit substances and was accepted a month in advance.
Then I freaked out. I was a nervous wreck. Could I really do without talking for almost two weeks? Would I develop secret means of communicating with my friend who'd also signed up? What demons might arise that I'd ostensibly conquered? I thought of everything — unresolved issues over how my children had turned out, two divorces, disappointment with my current level of self- actualization on Maslow's hierarchy, abandonment issues, conflict over my second-born son now in the military. Almost simultaneous with this retreat, he would be going through the military 's finest hell week. My agitation continued until the day before I left, when my therapist told me I was doing the workshop before it started.
"Listen," she said, reading from the California Vipassana Center's brochure, "It's 'a technique to eradicate suffering ... to make positive contributions to society ... a means of mental purification ... to face life's tensions in a calm, balanced way.' The human-suffering part is a bit lofty," she said. "But it's what you're looking for, isn't it?" My husband of twelve years stayed calm through my panic. "
How would you feel if you were doing this?" I challenged him.
"This is about not doing, Pat. You'll make it. I wish I were doing it with you."
Hours before I left, I emailed twenty of my closest friends for support.
Dear friends,
Pat Hanson is about to embark on a new journey or a different way of experiencing the journey she is already on, and she needs / I need your support. Starting October 19 until October 30, I will be attending a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat in the Sequoias near Yosemite. Caffeine available, but silence 24-7 and four and a half hours of required sitting meditation (no more than an hour at a time), plus lectures in the evening on the technique, which is mainly to let the monkey mind go and focus on the breathing.
I can leave at any time, but I'm committed at this point to finishing. I'd like your positive thoughts behind me energetically. What I am asking you for is to send some silent strength sent to me via your thoughts, prayers, and written notes that I will receive sometime after November 1 when I've reentered.
I hope to get to the discipline and deep place from which my greatest work in the world can be accomplished from a much more centered place. As you know, my bumper sticker reads, "Good Happens." Well, "Shift Happens" too. The evolution that has been continuing since my sixtieth birthday feels like choices to slow down. Peace is what I want to discover inside underneath the rest. I'll let you know if this works. Think of me ... fondly, I hope.
Love, Pat
During
Accommodations were sparse, yet the narrow bed was comfortable, and my little cubicle had a window overlooking a grape arbor. There were about one hundred people from all over the world. At the last evening meal we'd have for ten days — only fruit and tea served at 5:00 p.m. thereafter — I met a woman from Vietnam, two girls who had hitchhiked from Quebec, and a bejeweled woman from India.
A short video was shown explaining the Code of Discipline we'd all signed, promising to abstain from intoxicants, all forms of killing any living creature (even the fruit flies?), stealing, and decoration (my ears thanked me), along with complete celibacy. Fine for me, I thought, but what about the men?
We agreed to suspend other forms of prayer, worship, and ceremony, such as fasting, mantras, and use of crystals. This was not to condemn any other practice but to experience Vipassana in its purity. We were to meditate exactly as asked and hold the rules with acceptance, discrimination, and understanding, not blind submission.
The din at the delicious vegetarian repast that I shared with forty-five people I would not even be making eye contact with for the next ten days was deafening! I asked one young woman who'd done this several times before why she kept returning.
"For the feeling the last day. There's nothing like it. I can't describe it. Wait and see."
Days One to Three: Anapana
I didn't hear the gong at 4:00 a.m. for the 4:30–6:30 optional meditation. For me that read very optional. I'd heard mainly second- or third-time students went. Stretching to grow did not include me completely changing my sleep patterns. Breakfast included hot cereal, prunes every day, fresh fruit, bread, and rice cakes. I'd weaned myself from caffeine and gotten over the fuzziness and the headaches beforehand. Tea was fine.
The first morning in the dimly lit meditation hall we were assigned cushions and instructed to surround ourselves with as many pillows and blankets as we liked. This was to assure sitting tall for the required meditation times — 8:00–9:00 a.m., 2:30–3:30 p.m., and 6:00–7:00 p.m. — and for the videotaped lecture from our Burmese teacher, S. N. Goenka, from 7:15 to 9:15 p.m. That was followed by another short meditation applying the new instructions he'd give us for the next day. Lights-out and bedtime were at 9:30.
I can't remember that first eyes-closed hour of sitting except its utter interminability. My mind wandered to everything from whether my back could take this to my son in the military and a memo I'd forgotten to dictate. But I did as told and focused on respiration. Innnn-hale. Exxxx-hale. Narrower than that, we were to focus on the triangular area surrounding the nostrils and the upper lip. Having had lifelong sinus infections, though we were told not to use visualization, I imagined what looking inside my head like an anatomy textbook might feel like.
What I was unprepared for the first night was the sound of guru Goenka's voice. It was the lowest, most guttural scraping sound I'd ever heard!
I have to pay attention to this? I'm outta here! I said to myself.
His instructions and intonations in barely discernable English ended with the returning students chanting, "Saa dooo ... Saaa ... doooo. Saaaahh ... Doooo." We all bowed when our in-house teacher stopped the meticulously timed tape, and we could finally open our eyes. He told us to return after five minutes.
Outside, after the first meditation the sun was shining, warming the crisp fall air. I stood mesmerized, watching as one drop of water descended a chain from a copper gutter, dancing past a spiderweb. Mmmmmm, I thought. My consciousness does seem slightly altered. When's the last time I noticed something as miniscule as that?
When we returned, the lights were dimmed, another tape was inserted, and I heard Goenka's unwelcome groan. "Staaarrt, a-ga-inn. Start again, with a calm and quiet mind. Focus on res-pir-ation. Practice per-sist-ent-ly, dil-i-gent-ly. And you will be successful."
At that point, I wanted to run away. To my relief, new students were excused to practice in their rooms, while returning students received some special instructions. I'd been told that no one checked whether you were in your room, so I went to the pond to find a small rock, my rock of the day. Each night, I would put one on my windowsill.
The two-thirty and six o'clock meditations were much the same. I made it through each hour sitting fairly still and upright. But by the time of Goenka's evening lecture, my position was nearly prone. I was invited to sit with a wall at my back. I graciously accepted, glad for the opportunity to observe the younger, more straight-backed men and women with awe for the remaining nine days.
Day one's videotaped discourse addressed staying the full time period. To help us not think about leaving, we were to consider ourselves in prison. It sure felt like that. It brought up empathy for those brothers and sisters on the real inside doing jail time. How did Nelson Mandela do it? Twenty-seven years! Ten days was nothing. Gratitude for my freedom filled me.
Clad in all white, Goenka opened every evening's lecture as his did the first, by acknowledging our getting through the day: "You have completed day one. Good. You have nine more to work. Make the best of this opportunity."
The first time I heard this, I wanted to throw something at the screen. The second day, I raised my arms — "Yes!" — breaking the rule of noble silence, but few observed me.
Looking back, I don't remember how I did it, but I did. Somehow, if a feeling of headache or stiffness in my jaw occurred, as soon as I gave it three minutes of focused sensation, it would go away. My lifelong sinus problems were not bothering me. My postnasal drip cough still came up almost every meditation through day ten, as did occasional sniffles and sneezes from others of the hundred infected with a cold virus, but the room was amazingly still — each time I got through a meditation session I felt stiller. In spite of warnings to give up visualization, what often came up for me was an image of lines of a hundred huge noses expanding and contracting in this huge hall simultaneously! I wanted an animator to illustrate this.
The discourses, which took focused listening to comprehend at first, were fascinating. It was new to me, the writer / reporter / compulsive note taker, not to have to capture anything and merely let it soak in. I'd heard many of Goenka's stories before, like the one about the elephant that seven people tried to describe, each differently, and the other about the three brothers sent to get a jar of oil, each dropping theirs once and losing some, each perceiving the jar as half-full or empty. I saw that the essence of each talk was quite simple, the principles common to many other spiritual and philosophical paths: Everything changes.
Goenka lectured, "Real wisdom is recognizing and accepting that everything is impermanent. With this insight, you will not be overwhelmed with life's vicissitudes. And when you retain an inner balance, you will naturally choose to act in ways that create happiness for you and others. Living each moment with a mind of equanimity you will surely progress toward the goal of liberation from all suffering."
By the third day, I'd calmed down and merely visualized putting my third rock on the windowsill in two more hours. Ten days still seemed a very, very long time. On breaks, I scanned the sky for changes in the weather, once even wishing a natural disaster would rescue me to break the monotony.
At the end of day three, we were congratulated and told that these first days were preparation for the essence of Vipassana, which would come tomorrow.
Days Four through Nine: Vipassana
By morning four, I was bored, completely satiated with my upper lip, sick of my nose, and oh so looking forward to something different. At breakfast, in addition to the signs about honoring " sittings of full determination" — in other words, don't disturb others if you cannot sit for sixty minutes cross-legged — a new schedule appeared for Vipassana day.
From nine to eleven o'clock, we were to stay in the meditation hall and receive instructions on the central tool of this practice. Goenka, in his droll voice — which by now sounded less like sandpaper and more like a concerned teacher — instructed us for two hours straight. We were to move our attention systematically from head to feet and feet to head, observing in order each part of our body. We were to observe objectively and maintain equanimity with all sensations experienced, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, in order to appreciate their impermanent nature. Keep our attention moving. Never focus more than a few minutes on any one place.
After those two hours, which went by quickly, I felt hypnotized. I hadn't wondered when the time would end. Finally, something to do! What a trip. I found myself in the sun, leaning against the wall of the bathrooms, sobbing. Something had happened — something deep, almost out of my grasp. That's all it is? Impermanence? Nothing stays the same? How many different ways do I have to get this concept? I could hear blues singer Sister Monica singing "Everything Must Change" in my head.
As day four melted slowly into day five and then six and then seven, Goenka instructed us to scan our bodies, going down and up each side, first separately and then simultaneously. View the chest and back, both arms, simultaneously and symmetrically. If off balance, pull the energies together into one. Go interior to deeper levels, to focus on sensation cell by cell. At one point, I felt I was giving my body a massage from the inside — a slow, deep, fantastic massage. I wondered what medical research was being done on this. I thought of my sister-in-law with lung cancer and my brother-in-law with Parkinson's and wondered if military or sports pros used mind training of this sort.
While there wasn't a single session in which my mind didn't wonder when I'd hear Goenka's final chants, each day he sounded happier, like he was singing ditties to us. I chanted and bowed with the rest. ("Sadhu. Sadhu. Sadhu. Bhavatu Sabba Mangalam.") May all beings be happy!"
I understood. May all beings be happy!
If I experienced headache or stiffness in my neck, as soon as I gave it some focused attention, it went away. My lifelong postnasal drip sinus problems continued to be at bay. My allergy-related cough reared its scratchy head almost every meditation, but my mind was nevertheless amazingly still. Each time, it felt more still.
The content of the discourses midweek emphasized another principle, one far too close to me and certain family members in real life — that of addictions. While this experience was way cheaper than a drug rehab, interestingly, I hadn't craved my daily glass of wine or a joint in over a week. Vipassana followers believe that there are three roots to all mental defilements — raga/lobha or craving, dosa or aversion, and moha or ignorance.
While teaching us to focus on only sensation, Goenka instructed us not to stay with either a pleasant sensation or any unpleasant ones. If one doesn't stay with cravings, they go away. If one doesn't stay with pain, it also disappears. Though the intellectual part of me could argue, "Well, then, how does one ever enjoy meditation?" I'd thought the suffering part of past was over. I began to believe this. The meditations did not become any less than the difficult, arduous hard work they were, both mentally and physically, but the days seemed to drop by slightly more easily.
Compared to my pre-course panic, the thoughts that came during breaks contained no negativity, demons, or work (my main addiction). They centered on love for family and nice things I could 've said and still might. To my husband Larry, I would express gratefulness for the good and God he is to others and me. To Larry's mother, I'd note how difficult for her to have helped her husband live since his stroke at fifty-seven and now how horrible that he is feeble, frail, and fading at eighty-seven and that she has to help him die. About my own mother, I wished to forgive the negativity that life circumstances had engrained in her voice and manner. I almost found those words. For my children, granddaughter, and friends, there was sweetness. I accepted them completely and wished them happiness.
