To my worried co-workers, friends, and family: I have completed my vipassana retreat. To my curious co-workers, friends, and family: allow me to explain what one does at a vipassana retreat. To my future self: allow me to help you remember what you have learned at your vipassana retreat. The Context Like a circular pool, there are any number of ways we may enter the waters of this subject. Jumping in, we see that vipassana is Buddhist. This practice is specific to Siddhartha Gotama, a Buddha. “A Buddha” because Buddha is a title given to one who is fully awakened, similar to an “arahant,” which is a Pali word for “liberated one.” Yet a Buddha discovers the path without a teacher and then teaches it to the world. An arahant reaches liberation by following a Buddha’s teachings. Buddha is like Christ in that it describes a state of being. It is not the name of an individual. There is Jesus the Christ; there is Krishna the Christ. Any one of us may, and must, achieve that Christ consciousness along our path towards full liberation. There have been many Buddhas before the time of Gotama the Buddha. There will be Buddhas again after Gotama the Buddha. We remember Gotama specifically because Gotama’s offering is unique to this world. He taught the world how to use bodily sensations to first connect mind and matter, and then to transcend them. He taught vipassana: “seeing things as they really are.” The Buddha’s motivation was to relieve the world of misery and suffering. Though the world will always have its pains, it need not have misery. Pain is merely a sensation, while our reaction to pain is what creates misery. The weather blows cold in winter. Chapping our lips. Numbing our face. Running our nose. This is pain, a mere sensation. Coming, going. It is only when we react with aversion to the pain that misery begins. We want the pain to end and are distraught for however long it lasts. When the pain does end, as all things always do, pleasantness relieves us. The pleasantness is also a sensation. Coming, going. It is only when we react with craving that the pleasant becomes the miserable. We want the pleasant to stay, but are distraught when it inevitably leaves. At the intellectual level, I have heard this lesson many times: do not crave or avoid life. Allow life to be because life will so rarely go exactly how you please. If you need life to be this way and that way, you will be disappointed. We hear this. We logically grasp this. Yet we do not understand. The winter of our lives arrives, and we are depressed in varying degrees. We lose the sun: small depression. We lose our health: bigger depression. We lose our loved one: big depression. We carry on, but acting from misery begets more misery. The Buddha shows us that we treat only the symptoms of our misery, pruning only the limbs of this poisonous tree that bears poisonous fruit. Never do we take the tree out by the roots. We trim the canopy of our sadness by distracting ourselves with this relationship, this life event, that drink, that new sensation. Then the relationship ends, the era passes, the bar closes, the sensation leaves, and the sadness returns. Whatever was trimmed regrows. Cravings and aversions run our lives. The best of us see the symptoms, but so few treat the cause. The doctor who treats only the symptoms will never cure the disease. To cure the disease, cure the cause. Trimming the trees of misery will not do. We must take the trees out at the roots. You have the habit of swearing when things go wrong because you have the habit of craving the perfect outcome. You have the habit of drinking too much because you have the craving to feel free. You crave freedom because you have imprisoned yourself in an ever-shrinking cell that blocks out all that you avoid. Keep this up, and soon every experience will be unnerving and unbearable. No life change, relationship change, exercise change, possession change, job change, financial change, cultural change, political change, religious change, or otherwise will give you unassailable happiness. What is outside of us cannot cure us. The cause and cure are within. Vipassana is a meditation technique that cures misery. The secret: we are already peace and joy. There is nothing to gain. Instead, this technique teaches us how to uproot our mind’s subconscious habit of reacting and miring in our woes. It is this reaction that churns the waters of our mind so greatly that we lose sense of our own true nature. The Retreat I was at another retreat in a yoga ashram two years ago when I first heard about vipassana. On the porch of our duplex, lied my neighbor’s barefoot shoes, just like my own. “A friend,” I thought. Indeed. We met and were at once acquainted. He told me, “This retreat is so different than a vipassana retreat, which is what I normally do. I’m not used to such a leisurely meditation schedule.” He went on to explain the vipassana retreat, its strict “Noble silence” for nine days, its 10 hours of strict meditation per day, and hints about the technique that he described as “raw.” Those words, “vipassana,” rang in my ears. I did not know when, but I knew that. I knew that I was fated to go. I would come to know this friend, Yoga with Ethan ॐ, and would come to hire him to be my “yoga coach.” Wrong, I was. The year of our working together was not actually yoga coaching, but vipassana training. This was training for good posture, training for eating rightly (eating light-ly), training to embrace the metaphysical, the spiritual, the hologram of the body, the glimpses of the deeper mind, and the ever-inspired pursuit to “Know Thyself.” The retreat’s aim is to provide the perfect first dive into the ocean of what will be a very long swim to shore. This technique is three-fold: * Sīla: morality and right living. * Sammā Samādhi: right concentration. * Paññā: intuitive wisdom. Sīla is done for you per the environment of the camp. The five precepts are (1) no killing (and more broadly, no harming of life), which we achieve through kindness to our neighbors and vegetarian diets; (2) no stealing (and more broadly, owning nothing), which we achieve by our free attendance; (3) no sexual misconduct, which we achieve by our busied schedule and separation of men and women while at the camp; (4) no lying, which we achieve through silence; (5) no intoxicants that includes any and all drugs. The importance of these precepts cannot be overstressed. One feels them working for you during the strict 4 AM to 9 PM schedule focused on the singular aim to know Thyself. When you are focused on doing good for others, you purify all your actions. When you are focused on not stealing, you are actually surrendering your ownership. The campus has no locks on the doors. You cannot pay for your attendance. The food you eat is charity. The beds you use are charity. The resources for you are charity. You own nothing. You are taken care of, but more importantly, you surrender your possession, craving, and preference. The adage, “beggers can’t be choosers.” When you forgive all sexual passion, your creative energy is brought to higher centers of love, art, focus, and ultimately, deep, deep awareness of Self. When one does not lie but speaks only truth, the reality one perceives comes ever closer to the truth. You practice vipassana by “seeing what is truly there.” Finally, when you forgive all drugs, alcohol, and intoxicants, your mind is clear to feel its true sensations. Following these precepts in wordly life is actually quite difficult. In fact, I can’t say I ever have till now. Now having done so, I speak from my personal experience, not from scripture or Judeo-Christian judgement. From my newfound paññā, or wisdom, I attest that following morality such as this is in my own best interest. It is the bedrock of my escape from misery. Henceforth, it will be my inspired aim to keep helping others (per this previous lesson), to continue in sobriety, to continue in truth-telling, to continue in creative passions over sensual passions, and to continue sharing and giving everything I own with everyone, understanding that nothing is truly mine. The benefit to all this is an equanimous mind that prepares us for step two: samādi, or concentration. Yoga had introduced me to the term samādi as part of Patanjali’s eight-fold path, where samādi is the final step. That samādi is total absorption of the mind and what I had relegated to an experience exclusive to high saints. “I can’t enter samādi yet,” I thought. This must be a different, more attainable variant. It is. It also is not. In this sense, samādi is concentration. We can have TV samādi when absorbed in our show, hunting samādi when tracking our prey, competition samādi when swept up in a game, and sammā samādhi, where sammā means purified, when we are absorbed in meditation. The truest and deepest states of samādi are quite elusive, quite subtle. They are reserved to the breathless state. You will know you are in the deepest states of samādi when your need to breathe stops, and so eliminating your heart’s need to eradicate carbon dioxide, so bringing your entire body to complete stillness. This state of stillness gives direct perception of the infinite and of your true Self. Arriving here brings us to paññā, or wisdom. The first three and a half days of the retreat are dedicated to developing concentration. You do this by limiting the area of your focus, sharpening the caliber of your mind’s attention. To focus on the body at whole is too large and would only produce broad or gross insight. Focusing on the whole head, the whole shoulder, the whole navel is too large, too broad. The prescription begins at the nose. Focus on the triangle of the nose. Focus on the breath. Focus on the sensations of the breath entering the nose, passing through the nostrils, ent
