How I Spent My Summer Holidays

Okay, I really hope that there are more holidayish summer holidays than the last couple of weeks, for although I was in the picturesque mountains of the Interior in late June/early July, I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder in my life. With the certification process being the hardest thing I’ve ever TRIED to do, a 10-day Vipassana retreat officially assumes the status of the hardest thing I’ve ever ACTUALLY DONE. “Fun” was not a component of this experience, at least not until it was over [viz. the banging-head-against-the-wall phenomenon]

The site explains the circumstances of these retreats clearly enough, so I won’t belabour that; nothing in the bare-bones font and design of the site prepares the human nervous system for 12 daily hours of meditation and what basically amounts to a daily 19-hour fast, as no food other than fruit and tea can be taken after noon…for not being able to even expose your upper arms to the sun or nod and smile encouragingly at a fellow victim, I mean participant, when they are so visibly shaken and miserable that every cell in you is alive with compassion. What’s a soft, decadent little pup like myself doing in this rigorous situation, you ask? Haven’t I structured both my practice and my teaching to avoid the tedious drudgery of “life is suffering”? Well, yeah, sort of, except that this is a vast and rich continent of practice and knowledge and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em for a 10 day psychic evisceration.

I’ve ranted against my half-witted definition of pop-Buddhism here and there; John’s language is more graceful and more accurate when he says that “some forms of discipline will amplify spirit, and other forms will diminish spirit”. I’ve had my spirit diminished by language like “suffering”, “craving”, “aversion”, “ignorance”, “misery” and even “equanimity”, borderline stoicism that can so easily jump the shark to apathy and inner death. Then naturally, since balance is apparently a foreign concept to me, I went wide in the other direction, joyfully embracing Tantra’s affirmation of life’s intrinsic divine unity as an excuse to marginalize/avoid/oversimplify other paths. UR DOIN IT RONG. Tantra means “to weave”, meaning in this instance that no methodology or path is excluded from its purview, from euphoric bhakti-fun, to grim Spartan rectitude. I figured I’d be a pretty sad excuse for a teacher if I couldn’t suck it up for 10 days, and I had various philosophical and pedagogical theories that needed experiential testing for validity. So your intrepid field reporter handed her iPhone to the wardens, put on M’s old T-shirts [the dowdiest items I could find] and went into the trenches.

If you really want to know what the method and practice are all about you should probably just sit a course, since SN Goenka, the teacher and primary living exponent of this method is emphatic that its fruits will arise only from experience. Any description I could offer regarding the technique would be inaccurate and amateurish. I will say it is exquisite in its simplicity and admirably effective at addressing the nature of the mind. Nothing like it. Non-sectarian, resolutely intellectual, clean crisp lines that made me yearn for a splattery Sanskrit yarn, people with 500 heads, jewelled saris and blueskinned demi-immortals…alas, no such drama here…it’s all like a big food processor for your head.

And of course I’m not just here with my own special mess to clean up; I’m also here as a little baby teacher trying to see how the big dogs do it, and how to connect with students who might be more familiar with this type of technique…or how to bring it to those who really need to do it, and don’t wanna. So I’m running a couple of different subprogams throughout the process, usually resulting in me pacing around our little enclosure, chewing on the inside of my cheek and muttering to myself like a…really, really stable and well-balanced person, heh. So much of what was instructed was in the language described above, and as the vast chunks of the day spent in meditation chewed up the cognitive grist, you’re already pretty much as bummed as you can be, so it really seems like piling on. I missed what I perceive as the heart of practice. I felt very hollow when I wasn’t pissed off or bored. It seemed like we were in a time capsule, bodies hidden, eyes down, trapped in this energetic dead zone where animals and birds even steered clear while we did our work. I had promised that I would do my very best not to pollute this method with the more familiar, though, so unless I really needed to call my lifeline in moments of psychospiritual duress I avoided mantra or emotional narrative.

Due to the misunderstanding of the nature of Tantra mentioned above my stance was usually skeptical and combative, especially ironic as Goenka accurately describes the daily experience of the new meditators with chilling accuracy, particularly weird considering the instruction is given via video, recorded in 1991…how does he know about my special snowflake experience IN THE FUTURE? What a guy. I’d gird my mental loins every day at 4:20 am when I shuffled down the hall for the dawn session, ready to sneer at anything that seemed dated, irrelevant, body-negative, patriarchal, or inaccurate. I found plenty of material to inwardly bitch and mutter about, which naturally made my practice even more awkward and graceless. I spent a lot of energy trying to SEPARATE this grim experience from my familiar practice, forgetting over and over again that Tantra creates CONNECTION. So, what’s the hook? Should you, as an Anusara-curious student, live in the mountains for 10 days? Is there a relationship there, and if so, what the heck is it when the two techniques seem so radically dissimilar?

What rang cherries for me was on the morning of day 5, we heard a long and exuberant chant that Goenka has recorded, in Pali [e.g. not Sanskrit] that nevertheless mentioned terms and structures that those of you who have studied Anusara Yoga seriously will find familiar: the bottom 25 tattvas, from the elements of the material world, through the senses and their objects, through the mind and cognitive processes, all the way up to the mutually exclusive categories of Spirit and Matter [their exclusivity is why these philosophies are described as "dual"]. Tantra arrived subsequent to these tattvas or “principles of existence” and, *without modifying or removing any of them*, ADDED another 11 on top to create a non-dual system, that is, no more exclusivity: the substance of all experience, in their view, was the same single, vast, indivisible consciousness. Sounds pretty good, right? We

little pups often conflate this indivisibility with an abandonment of the exclusivity that preceded it, but in a very real way the world is of course quite dualistic: fraught with paradox, irreconcilable difference, wild diversity, and of course the animating spirit does appear to leave the physical body at death, a hard process to reconcile no matter how enthusiastic your non-dual practice might be.

I realized I was living in a little lab, a test-tube where the subject is your own head, and the raw materials of the experiment are described so elegantly through these tattvas of the mind and senses, particularly the part that uses the senses and APPROPRIATES them as being “mine”: my aching leg, my osteopath-hungry sacrum, my twitchy left eyeball. There was no need to argue* with Goenka’s videotaped image [as if!]; in spite of the surface differences in the practice I was simply focussing on this one little “chunk” of the principles of existence, and about time, too. We don’t spend very much time on them, for the simple reason that it’s really uncomfortable and difficult. It’s also dangerous, which is why you are necessarily cloistered for 10 days, so you don’t wander down the mountain road towards the gravel pit with your medulla oblongata hanging out [of course, each course can have its own attrition, because, well, it sucks a lot of the time]. Vipassana is a safe and well-supervised way to develop rudimentary psychonautical skills: you learn how to swim in this deep sea in a very clear and rigorous way. And then those discoveries and skills can naturally be recontextualized in light of your core values, whether they reflect life’s duality or non-duality; you can choose.

Oh, my body. Holy moses. Lest we come to think that we are the doers, the sole agent of change in this embodiment [anava mala], watch what happens to your body when you have to sit still for hours at a time. What a trip, man, I have a whole new spine in addition to my brain’s new firmware download. [Upload?] You could also think of this level of sensitivity and awareness as a new depth of understanding Anusara Yoga’s first principle, including “softening and feeling”: nothing in my experience of those two words prepared me for the lessons of Vipassana. You can’t use all your 90-minute mixed-level class tricks and hope to hold Sukhasana [crossed legs] for an hour straight. You have to get more efficient or you’ll blow up. I practiced for the first time this morning [you're not allowed to do yoga while you're there, I know right?] and was as wobbly as a colt, panting and baffled.

The transformation was effective and global; there was not a single co-meditator of mine whose body did not visibly shift in its energy and posture over the course. This of course came about due to the gruelling rigor with which they all did their work, so lest you think I’m implying a quick or easy fix here, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m just saying. The only other transformation I’ve seen like that was 2009′s Immersion with Chavez and where that took a year, this was 10 days. I would think that without maintenance the previous patterns would likely return, also, so we’ll have to see how it plays out.

So what’s the punchline? Nothing makes you appreciate a smile like not seeing one; nothing makes the radiance of the summer sky shine like having your eyes closed for hours at a time while you scour out your cranium. Goenka relates the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment as “pulsating”, “true, deep happiness and peace”…sound familiar? Om namah Shivaya. On the last day you can start talking to each other with your new voice and your new head, and what you want to say may surprise you in its affection and grace after almost two weeks of sturm und drang. So while this method has different texts, different language and languaging, and a fierce determination, it’s all one love…at least if that’s your bag, and if you’re reading this blog then it probably is.

*One beef that I still have that I think we could collectively attempt to describe more consciously is insisting that the mind is some sort of incontinent infant or wild animal. Sure, it can seem like that as you Roy-Rogers your way through lassoing the sucker, but the mind is gorgeous and potent, and I’m getting a bit honked off at the paradigm of treating it as though it has soiled itself. I feel so strongly after this experience that the mind is not a dog or bull in the soul’s china shop: the mind is a wizard. The body is a warrior. The Heart is Lord.

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