Anicca

The impermanent ten day Vipassana silent meditation retreat

Doing a ten day silent meditation retreat and then sharing a post about the personal experience publicly on Facebook doesn’t seem like quite the “enlightened” thing to do. Yet I don’t think any other experience has been as beneficial for my self-development as this one. It was the hardest and most intense thing I’ve ever done, but also the most liberating one. Having been to a psychologist myself, having studied psychology in the university, having had personal experiences with psychedelics – all these things with great value to me – a ten day meditation retreat is what I would now first recommend to almost anyone who is just looking to learn more about themselves or even would like to improve their mental well-being. In other words to take a step closer to freedom, happiness and love.

Impermanent wisdom of impermanence

Through Vipassana meditation we try to learn to see things as they really are. To see things as they really are, we have to develop awareness and equanimity. They are described like the two wings of the bird of Vipassana – both are required for it to able to fly. The first one implies being able to notice things or pay attention to things; the other one means that we don’t react to these things we notice, but observe them just as they are.

Let’s take chocolate as an example. I’ve really enjoyed chocolate throughout my life. The way a delicious chocolate sweetly, softly and creamily can melt when I eat it, giving rise to the sensations on my tastebuds is just amazing. Obviously, that has made me crave for chocolate like crazy and sometimes eat a (shit-)ton of chocolate at once. This isn’t very healthy neither in the short-term (feeling sick physically, feeling weak mentally) nor in the long-term (obesity, diabetes etc.). Not to mention that it’s damn addictive so I’ll probably do it again in the future and probably feel miserable again after doing it.

Now, with awareness, when the craving for chocolate arises, I can be aware of the craving; with equanimity I’ve learned not to react to it in any way. I’m not going to buy chocolate, nor am I going to tell myself that I’m a hopeless sweet tooth who can’t handle their chocolate craving. I will just observe the craving, just as it is, and most likely, the craving will pass after a while.

Just imagine this silky substance covering your tastebuds one by one with divine pleasure

This brings us to anicca. This is a word you will hear a lot during the teachings at the retreat. In English it means “impermanence”. A fundamental claim of the practice is that everything is impermanent, everything changes all the time. New things appear, old things fade away. Everything that exists and has ever existed will at some point stop existing.

During the evening discourses, the teacher, mr. S. N. Goenka, even referred to how scientists in the Western world went deeper and deeper into looking at what matter is made of and discovered that the atom is just a pulsating particle made of wavelengths, doing nothing else than appearing and dissappearing. The teacher said that the scientist(s) who discovered this won a Nobel prize for their work, so I imagine he meant Louis de Broglie who “proposed that just as light has both wave-like and particle-like properties, electrons also have wave-like properties”, and George Paget Thomson as well as the pair of Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer who in separate experiments confirmed de Broglie’s hypothesis. Well, if I know my craving for chocolate will probably dissappear after some time because of its impermanence, then it isn’t very wise to react to it, now is it?

Louis de Broglie

Seems reasonable, but just integrating this information intellectually into your personal wisdom is not enough. According to the teachings at the retreat, true wisdom comprises of three parts. 

First, there is intellectual wisdom. This is wisdom you can get from reading whatever type of source of knowledge, or listening to someone share their knowledge.

Second, there is the wisdom of critical thinking. Here you have to put in your own effort to figure out whether what you understood at the level of intellectual wisdom makes sense or not. For example, when you’ve read that by doing a 10-day Vipassana retreat you will become more aware of your sensations without reacting to them, and that this will help you become more happy/liberated/loving, you should also check whether this has been true for other people so far (it has, for thousands, but please be aware that this doesn’t mean everyone), or whether science in some other way confirms the benefits of meditation (it does, but you should check the specifics out yourself). 

Finally, we get to the third part of wisdom. While this is the most important part, it should be emphasized here that all three parts of wisdom are required for wisdom to be a whole; if one is missing than the others lose their power too. 

The last type of wisdom is experiential wisdom. As the name says, if you really want to be wise about something, you have to experience it yourself. While they were able to confirm that matter works as a wavelength in their labs, De Broglie, Thompson, Davisson and Germer still probably had to deal with their cravings for chocolate (or money, alcohol, sex, cigarettes, power etc.) within themselves. Wisdom does not become whole until you experience it yourself, and the same goes for whatever one can learn from a ten day Vipassana silent meditation retreat.

A reasonable question at this point is: well, but exactly how does just observing sensations make me happier or more free or filled with more love? This requires an understanding of the universal law of life (bullshit detector triggered!) as Goenka referred to it. 

Imagine a piece of string (or rope). You grab the string between your fingers so that your left hand is holding it from the left end and the right hand is holding it from the right end. Now let’s move from our pleasant example of craving for chocolate to a more unpleasant example of having aversion (i.e. having a strong disliking) towards getting up from bed early in the morning. 

First, you give in to this aversion by staying in bed longer, which equals to twisting the string by one turn with your left hand. Then you get to work later, which is another twist of the string in the opposite direction with your right hand. You have increased stress, because your boss is angry, and you’re also not sure you’re able to finish all your tasks of the day on time, which means more twists to your string. The more unpleasant things happen, the more you twist your string until it’s so tight that you can’t twist it anymore. Nothing too bad happens with one day of being late to work, but if this happens over and over again – with stress for work growing and growing – you may become so tense that you end up having a burnout, or depression, or anxiety. 

All of these tensions, which may be both from cravings and aversions, are called sankharas. However, they’re only made when you keep twisting the string. What happens when you let the twisted rope go and just observe it? It releases all of its tension, unravels, and returns to its original form. When we learn observe our tensions just as they are, then we become able to let go of these sankharas.

Twisting and twisting and twisting...

Finally, and maybe most importantly, we get to what happens when we are able to let go of our own tensions. It’s quite simple – we love. According to the teachings, when we are able to let go of our cravings and aversions, the things that make us so focused on our own selves, we become more able to direct our attention towards what makes us really happy: love and compassion towards the other beings in this world. As the story was told at the retreat, since the moment Buddha became enlightened at the age of 35, he dedicated every day of the rest of his life to lessening the suffering of others. He kept on spreading love and compassion until his last breath at the age of 80. You won't become a Buddha with ten days, but you will take the first steps on the path of becoming liberated.

Sounds like bullshit? Well, I can only ask you to find more information about it, think critically about it, and then go experience it yourself.

Path to meditation

The fist time I started meditating was when I was 17. I had gotten to a point in life where it only consisted of school, football practice, and studying and sleeping at home. This was six days a week. I did not socialize a lot and within that routine I lost my interest for the things I had to do. I got stuck, displeased and occasionally quite sad. I did go to a psychologist to talk about it, but the real turning point for me was reading the book “Mindset: a mental guide for sport” by Jackie Reardon. The author used to a be a talented tennis player who struggled a lot with her emotions on the court and started looking for ways to deal with them. A Vipassana retreat was the turning point in her life that helped her take charge of her own mind.

Based on what she learned through Vipassana, but also from science done with athletes regarding their performance, and from the personal experiences of athletes, “Mindset” gives a framework of values for an athlete, and practical tips about how to train that mindset. One of the many practical exercises in the book is to meditate by observing your breath for ten minutes a day. I began doing that every day for one and a half years until the practice started fading away when I started studying in the university.

I stopped meditating, because I felt like I can keep a meditative mindset without keeping up the practice. Studying in a foreign country, my new studies, and a lot of international people kept up my curiosity for life. Of course, there were periods where I was absolutely non-curious towards things in life, and sadness (e.g from being homesick) would creep in, but overall I lived a decently happy and satisfying life without meditating until about one and a half years ago. It was the spring of 2017 when some restlessness started creeping in and by the December of 2017 I was at a point in my life again, where I just felt miserable. 

Thanks to a beautiful week of celebrating the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 with a group of (meditative) friends from my studies, I decided to start meditating again from the third of January, 2018. I increased the time of meditation to an average of 20 minutes a day. I listened to some podcasts about it and got new ideas about how to approach the practice. I felt more clear, focused and peaceful. Thus, with some small exceptions, I’ve kept on meditating daily since. As many of my friends have done a meditation retreat, I decided it’s finally time for me to do one too. 

“If 20 minutes of meditation a day is so helpful for me,” I thought, “then what would happen with 10 full days of meditation?”

To be continued...