Month: January 2015

Here’s the last of three blogs about the retreat I went to. This part is about my impressions of it.

This was a silent Vipassana meditation retreat with no verbal, visual, or physical contact with other attendees until the middle of the tenth day.

I was surprised by the number of 25 to 35 year olds that were there, and for many it wasn’t their first retreat!

I’d assumed before going that most attendees would be middle-aged or older because ten days is a long time to live a monastic existence if you’re not a monastic. Maybe there’s a trend happening among the 25 to 35 demographic.

This is sort of random and insignificant, but at least half of the men were sporting facial hair of some sort.

I was  the only American (I think). So it was cool seeing 65 Latinos interested in Vipassana meditation. Several of the women attendees were dropped off and picked up by their parents, kinda like at a summer camp. That’s probably due to the tendency of Latinos staying with their family longer.

Goenka is the voice of Vipassana. He’s an interesting speaker, although some of his stories are quaint, and he seems a product of his Indian culture, there were a couple of references to reincarnation. But his English is clear and sophisticated, if a little accented.

One thing I had a hard time with was his singing in Pali, the language of ancient India. I guess he’s trying to keep the teaching as pure and true to the original as possible. The method has been passed down unchanged and effective for 25 centuries. Still, his singing was distracting and confusing to me. Each time, I felt like I’d wandered into a backstreet karaoke bar in Tokyo where a drunken Japanese company man was slurring through a song I didn’t know. Apparently I’m not the first to feel this way, people who’ve attended more than one retreat say that Goenka’s singing grows on you.

Something I need to dig into is the mind/body connection. I don’t understand completely how calmly observing (both pleasant and unpleasant) sensations (occurring in your reality) right now, and noting how they dissipate (arising and passing) leads to getting rid of internal feelings of “unsatisfactoriness.”

The description of “awakening” that’s often attributed to the Buddha is saying it was the release from “suffering,” but I’ve read that a more accurate translation is the release is from “unsatisfactoriness.” That makes more sense to me.

Was attending this ten-day meditation course worthwhile? Yes.

Will I go again? Not soon. But maybe it’s like asking a woman who’s just given birth if she’s ready to do it again. Probably not soon. But who knows how you’ll feel after some time passes.

This is the second of three blogs about the retreat I went to. This is about the internal part.

Unfortunately meditation suffers from bad branding, probably due to the mysteriousness surrounding what it’s about. Meditation is just a technique for calming your mind so you can live in reality as it is right now, not how it was in the past or how it might be in the future.

The retreat was a Vipassana meditation retreat. It’s non-sectarian, non-religious, and there’s no agenda being pushed. Atheists and religious folk both can take something away. You don’t have to believe in anything to try it.

This reminds me of a story. A journalist interviewing the Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist Niels Bohr noticed Bohr had a “good luck” horseshoe on his office wall. The journalist was surprised and asked Bohr why an esteemed scientist would have such a thing. Bohr said “The way I understand it, is that it works whether you believe in it or not.”

The retreat participants are silent. But the Vipassana technique is presented step by step via audio tapes by S.N. Goenka (he died in 2013). He was a wealthy businessman who got a lot from Vipassana and spread (shared) the technique in its most pure form which had been preserved in Burma.

Basically, 2,500 years ago the Buddha took three existing techniques and refined them, creating Vipassana meditation, which is what he used himself and taught.

The first part is to be moral. As a temporary monastic for ten days, attendees do this by default.

Next is concentration meditation. Over the first three and a half days you focus your attention on your breath as it’s happening. Each day, you focus on a progressively smaller area surrounding your nostrils.

Starting on the fourth day, using your now refined ability to concentrate your attention, you begin scanning your body head to toe, part by part, over and over, using a calm, objective awareness of any sensation you encounter in that moment.

You’re probably thinking that sounds boring at best, right? But it’s not as boring as it sounds because your attention level has been increased. As you detect sensations, whether they’re pleasant or not, you notice that each one arises and passes away, each sensation is impermanent.

The genius part is that our minds, conscious and unconscious, demonstrate craving and aversions by manifesting subtle and not so subtle sensations in the body. So by noting these physical sensations in a non-attached way, they pass away just like they arose. That’s how I understand it.

The directions during the retreat are clear, and the best thing to do is to try implementing them without any hacks you think might help you. It’s a very old technique that’s honed and has been effective for many.

The site’s been quiet lately due to holiday busyness, and because I was on a ten-day meditation retreat. I’m back, and here’s the first of three blogs about it, the external part.

How was it? It was like third grade on a Texan, long and hard.

First, there’re ten days of silence, including no visual or physical contact. The men and women were segregated to their own halves of the campus. Days started at 4 am and it was lights out by 10 pm. All of the food was vegetarian but tasty, eaten during a five-hour window, breakfast at 6:30 and lunch at 11. Walking was the only exercise and the longest route I found on the campus took about seven minutes.

What about cell phones, computers, books, or writing? Forget about it. You’re on your own. The days were taken up with ten hours of meditation, in hourlong blocks with breaks or meals in between. It’s all about creating a monastic environment for ten days, minus weird hairdos, outfits, or rites and rituals.

The whole thing was non-sectarian and was attended by people ranging from atheists to strong Catholics, all just there to try out a meditation technique called Vipassana. It’s the same technique the Buddha figured out 2,500 years ago. The technique was preserved in its most pristine form in Burma all these years.In modern times, S.N, Goenka, a wealthy businessman, who’d stumbled across it, began sharing it.

Because as the saying goes, “the mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master,” the aim of the Vipassana technique is taming the monkey mind that’s jumping from thought to thought, and back and forth between past and future.

All retreats are free and staffed by volunteers who liked the course and are returning the favor by serving at another retreat. When you complete the course you can make a donation, but it’s not expected or encouraged.

There’re now Vipassana centers all over the world. The one I went to was the first in Latin America. It’s in the mountains, about an hour and a half from Mexico City, so the nights were cold but the days were sunny and almost warm.

Because it’s centrally located in Mexico, the center gets lots of traffic, there were 65 women and 60 men. I was the only gringo, but there were people from other countries, though most were Mexicans. How do I know that? In the middle of the 10th day we started talking again. So you’re able to finally chat with the other attendees about whatever you want.

That’s the external part of the retreat in a nutshell. I’ll talk about the internal aspect and my general impressions in the next two blogs.