Same Now, Different Day:
My First 10-Day Silent Meditation Retreat
Dawn, day three. I step out into the cold and smile. “Same now, different day”. The words arise in my mind like sparkles off the frost to greet me.
Before I dive into my experience, I will provide some background on what Vipassana is, & the structure of the retreat itself.
Vipassana meditation is not a religion. The course teachers claim it is simply the meditation technique and philosophical framework that the historical figure Siddhartha Gottama, aka Buddha, used to reach full enlightenment at the age of 35. He taught this technique to thousands during his lifetime 2,500 years ago in India, and it spread all over ancient Asia. Over the centuries, Buddhism as a religion emerged, as his original teachings became diluted by dogmatic and cultural influences. Vipassana largely disappeared. In northern Burma (formerly Myanmar), however, some preserved the technique and teaching of Vipassana in its pure form. In the 1970s, a Burmese businessman named S.N. Goenka discovered it, practiced for 14 years to become a teacher, and then one of his retreats was recorded on video in 1991. Audio guides for each sitting, and ten 1-hour seminar recordings played each evening, are the basis for the current Vipassana 10-day course teaching, used over 300 independent, volunteer and donation run centers around the world.
The course itself is as simple as it is challenging. Students take a vow of noble silence, abide by a moral code, and sit in meditation for 10.5 hours a day, beginning at 4:30AM each day, lasting until 9PM each night, nearly non-stop. There are two simple vegetarian meals each day, and a break at midday for optional five minute Q&A’s with the teacher. Beyond that, your entire world becomes a pattern of deep meditation and self-exploration punctuated only by short walks through the yard to silently shuffle the leaves. You don’t even make eye contact or simple gestures to the other students. You are to act as if you are alone.
Now, my story.
I had been traveling the world for over a year, half by bicycle, and waitlisted for Vipassana retreats twice. When my physical journey was over, and I returned to the US, I discovered there was a retreat center just nine miles from my childhood home. They had a 10-day course wedged right in between my fall wedding marathon and the start of the holidays…huh. Despite earlier frustrations on timing, I knew this experience was finding me right when it was meant to. I made the commitment to go, feeling totally unprepared, but knowing it was right.
Arriving by bike on the first day, I felt oddly calm. The center was in an old orphanage less than a mile from where I went to high school in Delaware, and I felt a sense of fun nostalgia and kismet in the whole arrangement. My bunk was simple but sufficient, and the diversity of the student population surprised me. There were all walks here. Young & old, granola and professional. I immediately started developing narratives for everyone, knowing I wouldn’t get to learn a thing about them for over a week.
The first three days, literally all you do is observe your natural respiration passing in and out of your nostrils. This sounds simple, and in theory, it is. In practice, it’s like getting a bull to sit on a barstool. The mind is in a constant state of chatter, and the longer you sit, the more wild it becomes. By the time you even notice you’ve totally forgotten your breath, it might have been 5 minutes, it might have been forty. The first day or two is just refining your ability to even notice if you’ve lost focus.
For me, the most important discovery in this process was a direct observation of the fact you are not your thoughts. They arise, but you observe. You begin to strengthen the practice of detaching from them. You simply observe them arise, bubbling up like a little mud geyser from somewhere below the surface of your conscious experience.
And there is a LOT of mud in there. A terrifying amount. A lifetime of memories, vivid in detail, of things you didn’t even remember forgetting. A crazy amount of ideas & solutions to things you’ve had on your mind. Unnameable varieties of emotions. Surprisingly accurate recall of pop culture & hip-hop lyrics. A grotesque amount of graphic sexual imagery. And so on.
This little geyser of thought becomes one of two main battlefields in the mind. The other is raw physical pain in the body, ebbing and flowing with varying intensity while you attempt to maintain a still, seated posture on a simple cushion for hours on end. The pain is real. It would vary from mild tingling to full on muscle spasms in white burning waves. A comparable sensation might be holding a wall sit for 10 minutes, legs bursting into brushfire and trembling while your spinal muscles stiffen into icy hot rods thick and hard as a broom handle.
Throughout this experience, one is told to remain totally equanimous; that is, to maintain a non-reactive and purely observational stance to any sensation, pleasant or unpleasant. Do not shift your posture for comfort, do not run away from your mind. This is the root of the entire technique: focus, observe, & experience whatever arises within you.
Welcome to your ‘retreat’.
How does sitting in tremendous pain watching your psyche vomit up its rotted contents lead to enlightenment? Valid question. According to Goenka, the key philosophical goal behind this masochistic exercise is simple: to directly experience the impermanence of being.
All experience, pain and pleasure, physical and mental, share an essential characteristic; impermanence. They arise, they pass away. They are in constant, incessant, rapid change. In Pali, the ancient language of Buddha’s India, the word is Anicca, which Goenka repeats in his guttural voice three times at the end of each formal sitting in the meditation hall. “Ani-chuuuuh, Ani-chuuuuuuh, Ani-chuuuuuuuuh.”
Your work is simple, really. You have just two jobs for 10 days. Develop the acuity of your observation, and strengthen your equanimity to whatever you observe.
There is a moment somewhere after the 4th day when Goenka asks you to shift your focus of observation from the nostrils and breath to a one-inch section at the top of your head. In shifting my focus from my nose to the top of my head, instantly my focus of attention rose up, like watching a bubble rise in a fish tank.
Bloop! Huh. That was new.
From this point, practice in the technique of Vipassana starts. For the remainder of the week, you scan the body, watching the subtlest sensations occur throughout your physical structure. Buddha described subatomic particles (he called them “kalapas”) thousands of years before their discovery, and he apparently gained knowledge of these tiny units of vibrating matter by observing their activity in his own body.
I surely wasn’t able to reach this level of detail, but by day 8 or so, I could scan my body at will; an apple-sized area of bright focus moving throughout my frame. Everywhere, I sensed a soft, subtle, uniform hum. I was directly sensing the energy of my body’s electrochemical processes at work. I could feel my cells metabolizing & functioning. I perceived the softest of tingles; my form full of fizzing minutiae like a very quiet glass of Alka-Seltzer. It took me a while to become sure it was really there, and not something I was just imaging.
But it was. Arising, passing away. Changing every second.
Your body is one unimaginably complex electrochemical reaction, and you can actually train your mind to observe it. And it feels beautiful. This is not the final goal of Vipassana, but it is a pleasant side effect.
The repetition of rigorous daily patterns creates a deep sensitivity to detail, and for this alone, the experience is valuable. By the time you leave, your ability to sense and describe phenomena in and around your body feels markedly sharper.
Though the structure is the same each day, my internal landscape shifted like the weather. Sometimes my mind cut like a diamond, my body softly vibrating like the reflection of stars on a windless lake. Sometimes I’d be stranded for hours on a sharp reef of pain in a blizzard of pop lyrics and smut, questioning everything, especially what the actual fuck I was still doing here.
As the tides turn, you begin to learn to meet yourself where you’re at, without judgement or resistance, and simply move from moment to moment. This is profoundly stabilizing. A core part of you, the real ‘observer’ you, is always just there, experiencing every sensation & emotion that approaches it.
We often mistake this approaching stuff for ourselves, but it’s just our experience. Our experience is not us. Our experience happens to us.
If there is one aspect of meditation that has universal benefit, it may be strengthening equanimity towards one’s experience, and learning to choose your response from an abiding seat of awareness.
On the final day, I felt less excitement to leave than I expected. I was pleased I had completed the challenge, but had adjusted well to my monk-like regime. Same now, different day, after all.
The afternoon before departure, students are permitted to break the noble silence. We could finally share our experiences and open the window to each other’s lives we’d all been peeping in for the last 10 days. Nothing I heard from the others surprised me too much. The folks around me simply re-enforced my feeling that this experience was truly where I was meant to be.
One guy had lived in the same community in Guatemala I lived at in July, a month before I got there, working as a life coach. Another worked guiding psychedelic sessions with San Pedro and taught Tai-Chi. Another had a partner who ran a fermentation company in Baltimore. Still another had been living on his bike for years, traveling from retreat to retreat working as a server in the kitchens. There were lawyers and journalists and social workers too; reminding me that this practice has value to all, not just the seekers and weirdos.
As for lasting impacts on my life, they are still unfolding. Goenka admonishes students that they have only taken the first step on their path of Dhamma, which is living in accordance with the law of Nature. It is a life’s work to maintain the practice, and he recommends continuing to meditate one hour in the morning and one at night to maintain progress.
I’ve partially upheld my end of the bargain, and five months on, still meditate for at least 45 minutes daily, each morning. The 10-day retreat was challenging, but left me deeply confident in my own center. My ability to focus has certainly increased, as has my ability to notice any pattern arising with myself at the emotional and physical level.
The ability to remain equanimous in our experience is a desperately needed remedy for much of our suffering. If nothing else, I will continue to cultivate my power of presence within, pursuing self-mastery in service to others with a sharper set of tools than before.
