Insight Meditation at a 10-day Goenka retreat

Jodi Ettenberg (The Guardian); Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The author meditating in full lotus position: "A full 10 days of constant meditation created a barrier between the worrying and me" (photograph by Attit Patel for G Adventures).

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My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of vipassana, silence, and spiders

Prince Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha.

I went to New Zealand to break my brain and put it back together, without ever having meditated before. I had no idea what I was in for

I signed up for a FREE 10-day "insight meditation" (vipassana) course in a moment of quiet desperation. I was coming up on close to a year of insomnia. I found myself exhausted by the anxiety of not sleeping yet unable to find any meaningful rest.

For the first time in my life I was having panic attacks. Nightly, they were triggered by the dawning realization that sleep would elude me yet again. I was also dealing with chronic pain. A bad accident as a kid followed by a series of rib fractures and back injuries over the years generated a state of permanent hurt made worse with the lack of sleep and an excess of cortisol.

I chose this specific course, which took place in New Zealand, because despite the trendiness of meditation classes and apps, vipassana or insight meditation seemed to be about equanimity, discipline, and hard work -- right up my alley.

I am not the most woo woo of humans, and the idea of a giant drum circle of positive thinkers made me want to run away screaming. Vipassana is different from mindfulness meditation, which focuses on awareness, or to transcendental meditation (TM), which uses a personal mantra.

Instead, insight meditation practice dictates a blanket command of non-reaction. No matter the pain as you sit, or the fact that your hands and legs fall asleep and that your brain is crying for release, you keep sitting.

You are instructed to come back, bring back awareness to the present moment, and refocus attention on the objective sensations in the body, arising and falling, while doing a scan of the limbs in a specific order.

By doing so, over 10 days, practitioners train themselves to stop reacting to the Eight Vicissitudes of Life:

1. gain
2. loss
3. pleasure
4. pain
5. good repute
6. ill repute
7. praise
8. blame.

I told my friend I wanted to break my brain and put it back together again While this training descended from Theravada Buddhism, modern-day Goenka courses (Dhamma.org) are secular in nature.

The father of these retreats is the late S. N. Goenka, an Indian man raised in Burma with a Transylvanian accent who learned vipassana from Buddhist monks there [mainly from the enlightened lay teacher U Ba Khin].

When a friend asked me why I was willingly heading into solitary confinement, especially since I had never meditated before, I told her I wanted to break my brain and put it back together again.

“I need to defrag my hard drive,” I quipped. “It isn’t running efficiently.” I compared it to hiring a personal trainer to help me at a first-ever gym session. She disagreed. “No, it’s like running a marathon having never run before. Jodi what are you doing to yourself?”

The grounds of the meditation retreat near Auckland, New Zealand (Jodi Ettenberg)

 

The grueling schedule

On the first day, a bell rang outside my door at 4:00 am, reminding me that despite the darkness, it was time to wake up. I was not, nor will I ever be, a "morning person."

I felt a rush of anger rise up in me when I heard that sound, and I fantasized about taking the gong and flinging it into the forest. So much for equanimity.

I tumbled out of my cot and got ready for the first of the day 4:30 am meditation session. The first day’s focus was on awareness of breath (mindfulness of in-and-out breathing or ana-pana-sati). That’s it. When your mind moves from that awareness, you bring your mind back to the fact that you are breathing or that breathing is happening.

The simplicity of this instruction felt incredibly futile. I had a hard time focusing on my breath because of the persistent burning in my back. Regardless of how many pillows I piled under my knees, the pain bubbled up until it hit a crescendo.

The retreat is silent. But you're allowed to speak to the teacher during certain hours, and I went that first day, knotted in pain and panic. Eyeing me serenely, he asked how long I had been meditating. Sheepishly, I explained that I hadn’t actually meditated before. Plus my back was falling apart. Plus I didn’t know how to focus on my breath. I should leave, right?

With total calm, he told me to disassociate my panic from the pain. I was making it worse for myself by focusing on the hurt, which only magnified it for me. He told me to do my best, whatever that was.

I snorted before I could help myself.

“Oh, you’re one of those,” he said with a soft smile. “Perfectionism won’t help you here.”

I trudged back out of the meditation hall and into the bright New Zealand sunlight, reeling. The teacher offered a wooden L-shaped ergonomic contraption to help prop up my back during the meditation. As to whether I was meditating "correctly," he was silent.

The message was clear, I thought: I was competing against my best self, not anyone else’s. After the first three days of focusing on breathing, we were introduced to vipassana or insight practice. This involved sequences of long body scans in a specific order.

Throughout, we were instructed to be detached but aware of the sensations or pain we feel. By not allowing ourselves to habitually react to what our bodies feel, we are training our minds to build a barrier against blind reaction.

A simplistic example of a vipassana technique

If your leg falls asleep as you are scanning your neck for objective bodily sensations, your mind may wander to the thought of whether you’ll ever stand up again. But you don’t move your leg to compensate.

Instead, refocus on the neck, and ignore the part of your brain that's begging you to give attention to the leg pain. Remind yourself that the pain is temporary, just like everything else. In addition to the body scans, Day 4 marked the beginning of “hours of strong determination.”

They occurred three times a day, during which we were not allowed to move. Leg hurts? Too bad. Nose itches like mad? Can’t scratch it. For the entire hour, sit and scan this body from the inside.

Along the way if there are points of pain, observe them impersonally and dispassionately as the scan reaches those points, knowing they are impermanent, impersonal, and uncomfortable. In response to these new practices, a wave of people left the course. It took all of my energy not to walk out myself.

I tried to remind myself it was only 10 days, after all. Surely I could handle 10 days of focus and repetition? I held on by a thread, until Day 5.

An arachnophobe walks into a vipassana meditation course

When I was 2-years-old, a family member took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. I had nightmares about spiders for years, waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

My arachnophobia (fear of spiders) has never waned, and I am ashamed to admit that it has dictated some of my travel plans. Before the meditation course began, I worried about the long days of silence. I did not worry about spiders. This was a mistake.

The course was on a bird sanctuary outside Auckland, and I arrived only to find that spiders carpeted the wooden buildings, inside and out. When you take a vipassana course, you agree to abide by Buddhism's Five Precepts:

1. no killing
2. no stealing
3. no sexual misconduct (no sexual conduct at all)
4. no lying
5. no intoxicants.

That's not all. There's no writing, no talking, no eye contact, no looking at or interacting with the opposite sex, no kind of communicating at all, in fact.

At the end of Day 1, I noticed a daddy longlegs spider struggling on the carpet but heading toward the door. I reached for a weapon, the course schedule, only to realize I was about to kill something with a document that says "Don’t kill anything."

Instead, I took a deep breath, skirted around the creature, and opened the door. I stood there silently cheering its departure from my room.

In the meditation hall, such spiders dropped from the ceiling, feeding my anxiety. Huge black spiders dotted the corner of the room where we picked up our pillows, watching over us as we shuffled into yet another meditation session.

In response, the retreat organizers provided us with a deluxe “spider catcher.” This was a Tupperware container with a piece of paper to slide under it for ease of transport. I did not find this helpful.

The do-it-yourself "spider catcher" provided during the retreat (Jodi Ettenberg).

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Then on Day 5 I hit peak spider. Just before bed, I caught a glimpse of a bulbous black spider in my peripheral vision, dropping out of a tiny hole near the ceiling. Unlike the many spiders on the veranda, this one was huge! I leapt out of bed in a panic.

Every time I tried to reach the spider, it would crawl away and disappear in the hole again. I left the light on, drifting off only to dream about spiders and wake up breathless and panicking.

Finally I shut the light decisively. At 2:00 am I awoke to a feeling of deep alarm and turned the light back on. The spider was dropping from the ceiling, right above my head. Gasping, I rolled sideways out of the bed. The spider, as startled as I, hastily pulled its way back toward the ceiling.

I watched in horror as it spent the rest of the night eating other spiders in the room. I did not sleep at all. I fantasized about flinging off my pillows and running through the hall, screaming like a banshee

Some studies have shown that people who are blind or deaf may have a heightened ability in their other bodily senses. Why? When the brain is deprived of one input source, it's capable of reorganizing itself to support and augment other senses, a phenomenon known as “cross-modal neuroplasticity.”

I felt a small, temporary version of this phenomenon during the course. I could not speak or write, but my mind was whirring away at an alarming speed. Trapped in a cognitive cycle of shame and blame, my phobia of spiders was magnified.

The next day I swallowed my pride and broke my vow of noble silence. I begged the female volunteer leader to let me switch rooms. At that point in the course several people had left, and I was able to move to a different cabin.

For the rest of the week, as everyone else sat on the grass enjoying the warm sun between sessions, I stayed in my room, too scared to leave. It’s funny what our brain can do to us.

A friend once said that in life, worrying ahead of time is futile, because what we fear never really manifests. Instead, what we least expect creeps up behind us to scare us out of our mind. Or in my case, it drops down from the ceiling in plain view.

I wish I could say that the spider incident was a turning point. But it was simply a bump along the way. I fulfilled my goal of making it to the end, but the course remains one of the most difficult things I’ve ever chosen to do.

Oh, the sex! Oh, the pleasure! Oh, the vanity and futility of trying to find happiness that way!

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By Day 6 I felt exhausted by the pain, the sleepless nights, and a mind slowly unspooling. Some people talk about intruding childhood memories or overly sexual thoughts during their insight meditation experience.

For me, the challenge was suppressing the urge to run around like a toddler. Instead of doing a body scan, I fantasized about tossing all my pillows and running through the empty space in the center of the hall, screaming like a nut. I daydreamed of doing snow angels on the worn carpet, making a mockery of the meditation.

Day 8 was the first time I sat through a “strong hour” without moving. When the gong rang, I was covered in sweat from the effort of thinking beyond the pain. By the end of the course, students often report feeling a full body flow of energy during meditation. I did not.

I felt shelves of pain along the way, no fluidity between them. But by the last day, Day 10, I could scan fluidly through arms or my right leg. More importantly, I could refocus my mind away from pain. It was progress.

Lessons learned

I emerged from the insight meditation course a calmer, temporarily less anxious version of myself. I started to sleep again. The relief of rest was palpable. I wrote down the following takeaways once I was reunited with my pen and paper:

1. Our collective obsession with finding happiness is not a reason to meditate.

Logic and neuroscience might ground the modern rationale for meditation, but to meditate in order to be happy is counterintuitive [and will likely be counterproductive]. The practice is a counterweight to the jagged peaks and valleys of our human experience. To remain stable when life goes awry is a happier result than grasping for whatever society tells us will make us happy.

2. So much of what complicates our lives comes from assumptions we make and our habitual reactions to them.

In the quiet of those 10 days, I saw how much our minds distort the reality we perceive. We don’t know the background of the people taking the course with us, but we nevertheless create lives for them in our minds. We project our fears onto their perception of us. For me, this meant creating inaccurate stories about many of the other participants, as well as their reactions to me. I kept falling asleep during morning session, keeling over into the person next to me. I heard the snickers of the group as I righted myself again and vowed to vigorously apologize to that woman as soon as the course was over. When I did say "sorry," the woman looked at me askance, “What? Don’t apologize. It was the only thing that made me smile during the last 10 days!” In the strangled silence, my brain had lost perspective. Often, anger or fears are reactions to a reality we have created in our own minds, a reflection of the stories we tell ourselves. We take sensory input as objective, but what we see, hear, and feel is NOT objective. It is subjective, colored by what we have known and the grudges and resentments we hold without even realizing we're clinging to such harmful things.

3. We have to do the work [or consider it play].

Shortcuts exist in life, but to train our brain we need to put in a significant amount of persistent effort [not strong effort or over "efforting"]. The first few days are devastating because the work is both mindless and extremely taxing. But one can see a dramatic change in a mere 10 days, with disciplined and persistent practice.

4. Perfectionism can be dangerous.

Believing that doing our best isn’t good enough is dangerous. There is no perfect, and there is no objective measure of what “right” can be. The course reminded me that if we have a value system that thrives on making decisions with integrity, for the right reasons, doing our best is good enough.

5. Training ourselves to stop reacting can help in tolerating pain.

As someone with chronic pain, this lesson was important. And I would not have come to this conclusion without the course, because I’m far too stubborn. I can see with hindsight that by obsessing over the pain and making it mine, I exacerbated it tremendously. We are holding on to what we fear and hate without realizing it; it's as strong as grasping and clinging with greed and/or delusion. While I still ache, that ache has less power over me. The distinction sounds slight, but it has been liberating. One year later the brief practice of vipassana or insight meditation did not permanently cure me of anxiety or insomnia. Instead, it provided me with a valuable tool: It showed me that I could manage my mind more than I realized. By doing so, I felt more in control of worrying and "catastrophizing," despite the fact that they were always there. A full 10 days of constant meditation created a barrier between the worrying and me. It allowed me to observe the anxiety more objectively. The whole process calmed me at a deep and inexplicable level. I am still the same neurotic person I always was, but meditation imbued me with a sense of perspective I now maintain and am deeply grateful for.

Would I do the course again? Definitely! A yearly 10-day silent course is recommended for those who want to meditate, but given the way this one tested my body and mind, I suspect I’ll wait a little longer. Maybe another year is a good year to schedule my next brain defrag.

• See longer, unedited version of this at legalnomads.com.

COMMENTS

It utterly changed my existence. That is, I stopped being a highly reactive crazy person. Lots of tremendous experiences and all, but it's the much less colorful not-being-crazy part that matters. And I stopped about 5 years ago for some reason - I was very busy and distracted. Looking at my comments in the Guardian over the past year I'm suddenly thinking, what AM I doing?? I need to start at Square One again. Blink.

Michael Cunningham: BIB, you say that "I am not sure I can handle it." Of course, you can't be sure until you try it. It is difficult. I had never in my life worked as hard as I did in my first course, aged 30. But the atmosphere, arrangements, and volunteer staff [and you can sign up to be one] are very supportive. Those who have sat, those who teach and serve on courses, know the difficulties and will help you get through them. Well worth the effort.