What It’s Like to Do a Ten-Day Vipassana Meditation Retreat

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

• Blaise Pascal

“All right, brain. You don’t like me and I don’t like you, but let’s just do this and I can get back to killing you with beer.”

• Homer Simpson

“It’s a DEAL!”

• Homer Simpson’s brain

I’d just arrived at the Dhammaddica Vipassana meditation centre in rural Chiba, Japan – about an hour-and-a-half south-east of Tokyo – and the first of my assumptions as to what a Vipassana meditation retreat entails were proven incorrect, as most assumptions usually are.

Instead of a beautiful, grand old Japanese Buddhist pagoda, I was going to be spending the next ten days in much plainer surroundings. In the middle stood the meditation hall: a large beige building, flanked by the dormitory buildings on either side: low, long and similarly beige. Adjacent to them in separate blocks were the out-housed shower and toilet blocks (one of the reasons torches were one of the few items we were allowed to bring to the retreat), though the bare moon would often help with night-time trips.

On an overcast day in March it all looked a bit flatter and grimmer than I’d anticipated. Rather than the stereotypical temple conjured up by my imagination, it all resembled a minimum security prison; less Legend of Zelda and more Department of Justice. It would turn out to be a perfect setting for the course.

Before the course officially began and all communication was banned, I got chatting to Peter, a guy who had grown up first in New York, before getting a Christian Brothers education in Tipperary, and had been living in Tokyo for 20 years with his Burmese wife. He was about to start his sixth ten-day Vipassana retreat.

I asked him what he had gotten out of the previous ones, what kept him coming back?

“A permanent change” was his response.

“Cool.”

He left me hanging at that and I was left wondering what, if any, permanent changes I could expect from my introduction to meditation.

My assumptions about meditation

Looking back over some notes I made of what I was expecting to get from doing the  retreat it seems I was anticipating it going one of two ways: One, I’d either be suddenly struck down with some sort of epiphany, or epiphanies, about my life; a life-changing experience, neatly wrapped up in a ten-day journey. Like getting a haircut or a makeover for the soul. Instant and ultimately easy answers to the big questions. They’d just come to me. You just have to pay the fee of an extended burst of mental effort: 10 days with no phone and no communication with others, a bit of meditation. Only those spiritually aware enough for a life-changing psychedelic experience need sign up, and I was hard enough for it.

Or, the other predicted outcome involved more effort from myself, took longer, was less exciting and was therefore ultimately less appealing: that the course would be an introduction to a practice that might bring out the best in me and inspire me to put in the subsequent weeks and months of change-making and habit-forming work that would ultimately lead me on a journey to being a better person. It would turn out that permanent changes aren’t easy.

On Day 1 we were introduced to the schedule of over ten hours of meditation a day. This took place in the large meditation hall, where the sixty or so students, strictly segregated between males and females, sat cross-legged on cushions overlooked by the course leader. Her role was often quite passive, as meditation sessions were narrated by a recording of the voice of S.N. Goenka, the man who founded and popularised this modern teaching practice of Vipassana.

He claims to have revived it intact from the part of his native Myanmar where the tradition remained unbroken since the teachings of Buddha himself, and the many voluntarily-run centres around the world which he began founding teach a secularised version of meditation which can be practiced by anyone. In order to preserve the teachings intact, the nightly video discourses are provided on a crackly VHS tape by the ghost of Goenka himself.

The first few days provided us with an introduction to meditation, consisting entirely of focusing on your breath.

“Focus… on your breath,” the disembodied voice instructed us.

Which was hard.

I’d been practicing with a meditation app for a couple of weeks before this, and thought I was progressing well enough to be almost ready for a full hour.

No. Just, no. Torture from the first minute. Those apps are a bloody scam anyway.

The no-talking was the easy part. The sitting was excruciating. So was trying to concentrate on your breath for what may as well have been infinity. It felt like being told to hold your breath underwater with no idea when you’re going to reach the surface again.

I try to sit cross-legged, but almost immediately it’s agony. My groins, my neck and my back ached. I realise how difficult it is just to sit, even aided by cushions. I have to change posture every 10 minutes, uncrossing and crossing my legs again in different directions, stretching my legs out to the side and trying to massage some blood flow into them before they lose feeling forever, before trying to sit on them as many Japanese people do so effortlessly at low dining tables, yet I’m also unable to maintain that for more than a minute.

Enjoy the silence

Day 1 is the longest day, and the hardest, and each day thereafter was mercifully easier than the last one. My body loosened up a bit more most days, though I wouldn’t be able to sit cross-legged for any length of time really for most of the course. The passing of time was endured more easily the more it was endured.

I constantly adjusted and readjusted my legs in order to alleviate the physical pain of doing nothing but sitting on a cushion. Or was it mental pain?

I wondered how I looked to everyone else, once I’d settled into a pattern of crossing and uncrossing and then stretching my legs every ten minutes or so. I couldn’t tell because there were no clocks. They weren’t supposed to have their eyes open anyway, but still it’d be going through my head.

Everything goes through your head when you can’t talk to anyone else.

Everything, your mind stuck on a spin cycle of conversations and worries and joys and positive ideas and negative dwelling on the past.

Counter to my naïve assumption that this would be the perfect cultural experience to enjoy on my travels around Japan – the course and the centre itself seemed deliberately designed to have as close to zero environmental stimulation as possible. The only evidence of our host country was the modest bowl of miso soup served with some meals. I’d also signed up to do the course under the impression that it was a ‘Silent Meditation Course’ – that by not speaking to anyone for 10 days and just going about your business, with a few daily meditations thrown in for good measure or just for something to pass the time, you would come out a transformed person, mentally lighter and with a new and enlightened perspective on life.

I thought such a thing might even suit my character, being fond of travelling alone, and especially doing it in a country where I speak little of the local language. I’d be able to go about the routine of the course without having to make painful small talk with the other participants and that I’d reach enlightenment a bit easier than everyone else, content enough in my own space and with my own thoughts for company.

I dare say that, in some small part, I might have thought the whole thing could even be easy.

But there wasn’t any avoiding the mental pain, as far as I could see. The silence is merely a tool. The silence combined with the intense schedule and the ironically exhausting nature of trying to remain equanimous about your thoughts serve to put you in a vulnerable state, from which all of your ghosts and demons and idle thoughts come to the fore. The little devils.

The thoughts the thoughts the thoughts.

For want of a better phrase, or maybe not, they wreck your head. They come and they go. Even the positive ones hurt, like wishing weeks of your childhood away waiting for Christmas to come, or as a supposed grown-up, not being able to sleep the night before a festival.

“Focus on your breath…”

Groundhog Days

But at least it gets easier as the days go on.

Apart from Day 4.

On Day 4 it’s announced that you’re only really starting the Vipassana training itself. The first three days were just a warm-up, training to focus on your breath, walking before you can run, breathing before you can begin to scan your body from head to toe. That day they also introduced the three mandatory meditation sessions which would take place each day for the rest of the course. Oh, and you can’t move during those sessions. At all.

A massive groan went up around the meditation room at the end of the first ‘proper’ meditation, exhaled in one collective gasp. Wrestling with your mind is exhausting, and you could hear it in the silence.

That was the one day that was worse than the ones before it.

For me, anyway, for I found out after that for others it got worse before it got better. For some there mightn’t be a resolution or a ‘better’ at all, at least not on their first retreat. So it goes with any therapy or healing process.

“Remain balanced… practice perfect equanimity…” we’re advised.

It’s harder than he makes it sound.

Looking back, my visual memory of the whole 10 days is that the first half of it happened in black and white, before shifting to full-colour, a cameraman’s trick to make us feel truly numbed to the stimuli of the world. But now I can’t distinguish them really.

On day 5 I felt a lift of positivity, like I was making some progress. Apparently many people feel the same shift at that point.

Aside from the lectures’ references to your progression with the technique, it’s impossible to tell days apart when you’re there, even in hindsight. In the absence of variety in your routine and activities and conversations and meals, even your sense of time becomes numbed. The only other thing left to differentiate days was by the weather. Maybe that’s why we like to talk about it so much, it makes us feel like we’re going somewhere with our lives.

Most days it was sunny. Mid-March is spring time in Japan too, but a more predictable one than any season in Ireland. It was cold, but even over ten days there was a steady progression in the weather which felt concurrent to the course’s progress.

One of the days it rained, maybe day 4. And on one of the days – maybe Day 7 – it was so windy the clothesline kept falling over. Myself and another student helped each other put it back up, despite not being able to communicate a plan to lift three poles between two of us.

Remember to skip

I’ve never been much of a skipper – it had gone out of fashion by the time I was young lad. Once my dad pointed to a spot on the quiet country road in front of our farm, telling us that’s where he used to skip when he was a boy; he’d had as much joy and enthusiasm on his face as I’d seen and that twinkle in his eyes that someone gets when they’re taking a meaningful step back in time.

My brother and I laughed at him, a pair of bollockses.

But on Day 6 I allowed myself to skip, just a few short hops, as I returned alone to the dorm in the dark at night. I skipped because I felt joy and that was when the colour reappeared in my memories.

There are two types of people in this world – those who love the sound of the cracking of knuckles, and those who abhor it. Such is the effect of the relentless sitting, sitting, sitting that there is an ever-present chorus of snapping, crackling and popping of synovial fluid in creaking joints as students try to stretch out the effects of the wear-and-tear of doing nothing.

I would hurry back to my room after each session to administer my favourite, a good oul’ spinal twist and snap in the comfort of my own bed, along with some downward and upward dogs, shoulder stretches and anything else I could extend or try and massage into place, and grew to crave this miniature periodical treat, completely in contradiction to the spirit of Vipassana.

Like everything else on the course, exercise was banned, and so walking and stretching routines were the sole form of physical respite afforded the students, and during break times we all took the opportunity to walk and stretch, and stretch while we walked.

Unable to pass around instructions to form a group to stretch in unison, everyone worked alone, all facing different directions and ever-so-slightly out of sync.

Some people get down on hands and knees to examine bugs that have caught their eye, or drops of water on a blade of grass. When you’ve all the time in the world you start to follow where your attention takes you.

Sometimes I laugh to myself at the absurdity of it all, and again, an onlooker would find that strange. No-one can ask you about what you’re doing. They’d only love to, they’d be genuinely interested. But they can’t.

The yard resembled the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as people wiggled, thrusted and threw their hands in the air, looking like they were about to yell at the clouds, all alone. It was like a Radiohead video; an artistic representation of loneliness in an ever-deeper sea of people.

It gets easier

Only once did I dose off during meditation, around Day 8, and only for a split-second. Within that split-second I dreamt myself to be in exactly the same place, the same situation and with the same people, but something was slightly different. We’d decided as a group to make the most of the hour off in the evening. We’d gathered around the bonfire in the middle of the yard, some of us enjoyed a can of beer, and contemplated a second. But no more than two, we’d be up again early in the morning and wouldn’t want a head on us. The course was nearly done and we were unwinding but we weren’t reckless. We joked and chatted with the women.

A moment later I was back in the meditation hall. Not much had changed, but of course there’d be no cans. There never was a bonfire. And we certainly hadn’t made a plan with each other, or joked, or laughed. And we were still segregated from all contact with the women on the course.

The split-second drift and snap back to reality was tragic and hilarious. My wandering, dreaming mind hadn’t even allowed me to escape to a local pub or a club in Tokyo or my own bed at home. I was still stuck here, but allowed just the smallest of almost-realistic concessions. A can and a conversation, but no more. In my micro-dream it had still been cold out.

The sitting gets easier. Your body adapts. Eventually you realise a lot of it’s in your head anyway. So it goes. As the days progressed, many students built their own little personalised forts out of the spare cushions at the back of the room. Each one built to its owners’ specifications to provide more leg support, or to relieve the hips, a link across time between childhood exercises in building castles and the inevitable requirement for mobility support in old age.

The forts got larger and more elaborate as the course went on, slowly, day by day.

It got easier. The weather improved. I enjoyed sitting on the crude benches in the sun. I’ve enjoyed it more for its own sake ever since.

On day 10 the silence was lifted. We could finally talk to each other. It’s physically difficult at first.

This moment had the immediate effect of starkly highlighting what loneliness does to you, what it had been doing to my mental state for the last week and a half.

Bar some awkward interruptions and bumps here and there, the silence is easy while you’re doing it, in that there isn’t a huge compulsion to break it – but it’s only at the end when it’s lifted that you realise how much of your anxiety, your mental torment, was caused by not being able to talk. A lot of mine melted away and evaporated as soon as we were able to speak.

Appreciating small talk

I made small talk at first with the other men who had been studying alongside me, a mix of Japanese of varying ages and expats from various corners of the world, most of whom were living in and around Tokyo. There were teachers, students, computer workers, full-time meditators and restaurant managers.

The mood was lightened by everyone cracking the jokes they’d been dying to make for the last 10 days.

The small talk quickly got into the nitty-gritty of the course, the whole shared experiences of the retreat and the silence and the teachings and the duress of it all.

The small talk did its job.

This was a lesson in the true damage of loneliness, with the removal of the barriers of communication serving to highlight just how painful its absence is.

The suffering wasn’t caused by the sitting, or the meditating, or the strict diet or the restricted sleeping hours. It was the silence after all. How naïve I’d been.

It turned out that the cure to a lot of the torment comes from just talking to others, on any level, small or grand, friend or stranger.

Instead of my usual sitting posture with my feet flat on the floor to the side, I tried to sit cross-legged without moving for an hour. Bar one instance of lifting up my knee to drain some much needed blood back into my foot, I managed it fine.

Had my stiff-legged inability to sit still for an hour all been in my head?

And it turned out nobody had noticed all the reshuffling and rearranging I’d been doing with my legs. Nobody cared.

A permanent change

On the 10^th day I sat down to meditate with friends. The ghosts who haunted my periphery vision for the last ten days apparated into being, brought to life and animated with different voices and languages, with stories and histories.

Talking to others before we retired to our dorms for the final night confirmed that I wasn’t the only one who’d felt like I’d worked through ideas and issues and engaged in self-reflection that would normally have taken months, if not years, in the real world.

I read before somewhere that a person dropped in a place with no external stimuli, or a jungle so dense they can’t see the sun, will end up walking in a circle no more than 100 yards in diameter, being removed of the natural ability to navigate the land.

Leaving the centre I felt like I could have been on the course for two days, or twenty, or two hundred.

It was disorienting.

I felt like I’d travelled through time.

And what about the permanent changes? Have I experienced any?

Am I a different person for having done what was basically an introductory crash-course in meditation, albeit a fairly intense one?

Did I have any epiphanies or flashes of divine inspiration?

I’d asked Peter on the first day if he still found the retreats ‘hard’ having completed five of them already, that surely the sixth one would be no bother to him.

He looked at me slightly puzzled, as if wondering if it’d be rude to state the obvious:

“Well, it wouldn’t be worth doing if it wasn’t hard, eh?”

 

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