background
far out in the countryside of southern Washington there are students of all ages, ethnicities and professions sitting on cushions in silence inside of a dark, quiet pagoda, engaging in a 2500 year old practice that dates back to the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha
the practice is called Vipassana. It’s a free, 10-day ‘meditation retreat’ that is hard to describe without cheapening it. A spiritual boot camp? A journey of self exploration? No, words don’t quite do it justice
i myself heard about it from a friend. I just so happened to be graduating and I had a 12 day period in between school and the start of a job that could very well be the rest of my life. What better way to have possibly an existential crisis than at a silent retreat in the middle of the woods? Multiple people were concerned I might be joining a cult
Vipassana is anything but a cult. You can look into it yourself. The point of this essay is to discuss some of the things I learned while meditating, and frankly I’d rather talk about my experience in that than try and convince you participate a highly intensive period of reflective self-imprisonment
it’s not just shutting your eyes and sitting
i like to brag that our schedule involved 13 hours of meditation from 4:30am to 9 for 10 days straight (in reality, it was probably more like 10 hours with all stretch breaks, and occasional sleep ins. I’ve never been a morning person.) But even 10 hours goes by faster than you’d think. In fact, I found that the longest day for me was the last day, the day with the least meditation. Even now, I am for the time being, perfectly content with meditating for an hour a day (they recommended two hours, but life is hectic for me right now. Baby steps). That is not a flex about my incredible willpower. My meditation practice now is just easier and far more interesting.
perhaps you, like me, are accustomed to the idea of setting a 15–30 minute timing in your iPhone and telling yourself “Ok. Just be calm. Breath. Try not to get distracted”. Maybe you actually enjoy meditating like that. Or, maybe, you found it to be a chore and felt a tad frustrated with the many repeated attempt at doing so.
however, that is not the technique of Vipassana, which leads you to the discovery that meditation is only painful and boring because you are unaware of your own experience
shaolin monks aren’t sadists… they are olympic meditators
when (and if) Christ was crucified, he probably didn’t make a sound. Not because being crucified didn’t hurt. If Jesus was truly enlightened, he would have had full awareness of every sensation in his body. He would have been able to look at all the people screaming at him and torturing him and he would have viewed all the pain, physical and emotional, with complete neutrality. That’s the kind of capability you see shaolin monks training for when the practice a technique like the “Iron body”, which involves being struck repeatedly with blunt objects in often sensitive parts of the body
meditating gives you super powers. It gives you psychic control over your perception of the sensations going on in your body. And, it let’s you tap into a subtle electric field that flows throughout your entire body that brings the practitioner pure bliss, without so much of flinching to the pain of getting kicked in the crotch
it’s not just about the effects. There is a more meaningful purpose
the effects are incredible. I can’t tell you how much more calm I feel. I feel satisfied with my work and relationships. I think more clearly and collected tense situations. My memory is more adaptive. You have no doubt heard the common benefits to meditation. But if those effects are the goal, you aren’t going to find them. The technique only works when you can honestly let go of your craving for temporary things, and that absolutely incudes your health. It is guaranteed you will not be “healthy” at your time of death, anyways
Vipassana meditation trains us to observe even the subtlest sensation in the body, and then reveals that at all times that there is a symphony of sensation going on. Through the meditation, we slowly increase the breadth and depth of this awareness of sensation, but we can’t get there if we have preference or displeasure for one sensation over the other (which would suck away your attention focused on all the other subtle sensations going on).
pain doesn’t hurt on it’s own. mental reaction to pain is what makes it hurt
Put your hand in the box
if you aren’t disciplined, 15 minutes of sitting may feel painful. If you decide to take up Vipassana, your first hour-long ”Sitting of Strong Discipline” will feel like the Gom Jabbar from Dune (Those last 15 minutes are brutal).
if you aren’t suppressing the pain you experience with some sort of intoxicant, the pain will hurt you so long as you do not observe it for what it is. Meditation can show you that there is another way to deal with pain doesn’t involve suffering with it or suppressing it, and that is an more valuable skill than you think. Death, breakups, terminations, and accidents happen to everybody. Even something as simple as a friend forgetting your birthday can cause hours of pain if you aren’t equipped to observe your own inner turmoil.
the Western world has a lot of toys, diversions and intoxicants, and when none of those work to suppress your pain, there are a plethora of ideological dogmas you can subscribe to that will stroke your wounded ego. Andrew Tate cures the woes of lonely male angst, Lizzo inspires body positivity, and The Communist Manifesto is a great read (especially if you just lost your job). But no toy or ideology will allow a person to sit with their pain. Only having the discipline to explore unpleasentries (and conversely, abstain from what we crave), enables us to truely be free.
the humanity chart
the ability to discipline ourselves is what sets us as distinct as human
screw the nihilists. Humans are special. At least relative to the animals around us, we are not an insignificant creature, but a very rare form of life. All animals fall on a spectrum from wild (unable to be disciplined) to domesticated (able to be disciplined by some other animal). Some animals like Monkeys and Crows, however, demonstrate a third trait: the ability to discipline themselves.
No animals demonstrate this trait to the degree humans do. Name another animal that engages dedicates years of it’s life to participating in an olympic sport, speed cubing competitions, or competitive eating contests.
However, even amongst humans, there is great variation in this. In violent prisons you can find people so undisciplined that they wouldn’t think twice about killing someone for disrespecting them, and in desk jobs and college campuses across the world, you will find people who have been told what and where to be for there entire lives (and have gotten quite good at it). You may be born human, but that doesn’t make you a person with free will. That is something no one but yourself can work for.
6. All discipline is built on your framework for morality
In my life I have encountered many individuals who I would label both “high performing” and “ambitious”. Some of these people are good people. But many people I see in this camp are unsurprisingly vain and lack regard for moral practices, instead adhering to the dogma of money, clout, and prestige.
Intuition tells us that there is a correlation here, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you observe people in your own life like that (perhaps even yourself). But I don’t think it’s because high-performers are bad people. Rather, their capacity for discipline was built on whatever framework of morality they had at the time their discipline was developed, so the discipline depends on the amorality to function. If a man on his way to his Wall Street hedge fund job began scrutinizing his morals one day, he might not put in the same intensity of effort into his job and instead spend more time questioning his own integrity. On paper, we’d see this as a drop in performance.
7. Experiencing the full benefits of meditation can only happen if you act morally
All major religions lay a foundation for enlightenment and coincidentally, all call upon us to act morally. This isn’t just for the benefit of getting into heaven or hell at some point in the future. If we are dishonest with others, how can we expect we will be honest with ourselves? Worded another way: if we do not have boundaries for the integrity of our truth, how can we expect to see things as they actually are? Suppose I see an oddly shaped mole on my skin one day, but rather than face the truth that I have a tumor growing on my skin, I convince myself that it is just a blemish. The hell that will follow that dishonesty is mine and mine alone to reap. Similarly, as meditators, you are choosing to remove the psychic tumors of our mind (Sankara). To do so, you must outwardly project the same morality and compassion as you would inwardly.
8. The primary benefit of meditation is your own happiness
The purpose of meditation is not to attain psychic superpowers, alleviate pain, get along better with others, improve your health, have more mental clarity, improve quality of sleep, increase productivity, develop spiritually, foster morality, strengthen one’s willpower, or even liberate oneself from Samsara.
The purpose of meditation is for our own happiness. People will literally go to school, get a degree in a field they hate, and spend their whole life being jealous of the success of others than be happy. This isn’t a rare thing either. You see it every day. But if I told you before you went to school to get a degree in Computer Science that you would be miserable every day and not adjust well to the workplace at all, would you still do it?
Some people would argue that fear keeps us from attaining happiness. Fear that we won’t have the resources to provide for ourselves or the people we love. Sometimes we choose to do things, not because they will bring us happiness, but because they will help us to avoid fear. Ok, so maybe your fear comes true, and you don’t make enough in your lifetime to afford a house in the Bay Area. But imagine now that you didn’t have to worry about that fear ever manifesting. Imagine how much happier you would be.
Now imagine not having having to feel that fear in the first place. Because that’s what meditation can do.
9. Buddhism is not a religion
This is as preachy as I’ll get with this one, and I am by no means an expert on buddhism. To be honest, when I undertook this 10-day course, I didn’t even realize how entangled it was in the philosophy. But the common association with meditation and buddhism stands because meditation is fundamental to the process of mental purification Siddhartha Gautama discovered to become the Buddha (the Awakened one).
At least in the Vipassana course I took, you can practice as a monastic “Buddhist” practice and still be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc. I myself once had a Catholic background. But the course really stresses that they don’t just want you to understand what is going on in your mind and body intellectually during the meditation; they want you to experience it for yourself. To be honest, in my limited experience exploring religion there is just a certain kind of substance Vipassana meditation brings that everything else seems to only be scratching the surface of whilst doing formalized rituals (prayer, services) and calling it a day.
I can say from my background at least, that I was taught if you belong to the right group and say the right things, that alone is enough to get your heaven-pass. But buddhism doesn’t sugar coat things. Liberation is a long path that few are ever likely to achieve in their lifetime. Sure, it’s message isn’t immune to getting lost in pointless rituals and politics. But in many ways, it seems to me to be the philosophy that is the hardest to swallow, but with the most depth to back it up.
practical reflections on Vipassana
meditation is easiest when you feel like you have no where else to be (or nothing else to think about). For that reason, it’s also hardest when it’s not part of a routine practice. As long as you feel like you are engaging something out of the ordinary, you are limited in how far you can go with your practice.
finding time
deep meditation has properties that can substitute for sleep
sitting
the instructors poorly teach sitting etiquette. They tell you to sit through the pain, advise you on a position, but what they fail to cover is how as westerners, alot of aren’t familiar with the feeling of sitting properly in the first place
when you barbell squat with a lot of weight, you might use a belt to do the work of engaging your core. Engaging your core is extremely important as you come back up in a slightly bent over position. Similarly, when meditating, you are trying to maintain an upright position, so you need to engage your core AND your back, otherwise you will find parts of your body become sore, even after the meditation (especially for hour long sittings). So:
- engage your core and back before getting comfortable.
- if you become uncomfortable during a meditation, try lightly engaging these areas
- as you meditate deeper, you may naturally adopt an engaged position that is simultaneously perfectly relaxed. In a non-meditative state this may feel like your entire body is impossibly frozen, but as you get deeper it feels perfectly natural
- use two additional cushions: one under each leg. These will probably hurt regardless depending on your flexibility, but they do get better over time
what it’s like to mediate deeply
most of our waking time is filled of mind clutter
meditation draws attention to gross sensation (pain, pleasure, itches, sweatiness, etc.)
through observing gross sensation, you can tap into the more pertinent subtle sensations that flow throughout the body
bringing meditation to your actions
when reading, pay as much attention to the pages as the content
when on the computer, pay as much attention to the screen itself as to what it shows In all activities, notice the details, sounds, and your own internal feelings when engaging with them