CONFESSIONS OF A RETREAT VIRGIN

It took a whole year to get up the courage to do a meditation retreat. I’d dabbled in Zen sitting – I’d taken classes with Tibetan nuns – and I couldn’t sit still for more than ten minutes. I knew if I were going to be serious about meditating, I’d have to learn how to sit for longer. I thought a retreat would mean intensive study of a solid technique and a guarantee that I’d do it regularly. I was worried I’d be blowing my vacation time on something that resembled a bad acid trip. But I’d been through too much to deny the reality that I could go anywhere in the world and I’d never escape the trappings of my mind.

The summer of 2001 began with my last grandparent dying. Three of my best friends were going to get married. I was put on month-to-month contracts at NPR, and didn’t know what my next permanent position would be. I also found out federal taxes were never taken out of my NPR paychecks, and I owed the IRS thousands of dollars. It was no longer good enough to hope that my boyfriend would love me someday; we broke up the night of the first wedding, and I’d moved out by the end of the summer. Fall had barely arrived by the 11th of September. I was a walking, barely waking, open wound.

I devoted myself mostly to work and Buddhism. And by January some of the numbness had given way to determination. So I set out for northern Massachusetts in the shelter of winter to do a ten-day retreat at the Vipassana Meditation Center.

According to the Center’s website, “Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word vipassana means seeing things as they really are.” Ambitious; time tested. I liked that.

I clicked on the section called “Code of Discipline”. No killing, no stealing, no drugs, no dinner (no dinner?), no exercise, no writing, no reading, no eye contact, no mixing of men and women, no music, no television, no outside contact, NO TALKING. It was becoming clear that they probably called it a retreat because most mortals would run away from this, screaming.


I felt pretty brave just showing up at the Center. I chuckled with cockiness as the staff locked up my cell phone, my pens, my journal. I can stand anything for ten days, I concluded. That first night, sixty of us piled our shoes at the doors of the main hall, grabbed as many pillows and blankets as we could, and sat down. Cross-legged, in neat, silent rows – we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in this place where we would spend 17 hours of each day wrestling our minds to the ground.

~ * ~

At 4:00 the next morning, we heard the hollow gong of the bell – the same bell that would signal breakfast time, rest time, another meditation session or lights out at 9:30. I was surprised that it didn’t take more than a couple days to get used to the silence I thought would be so ominous. At first, you’d feel uncomfortable sitting directly across from someone in the dining hall, hearing only the steady clink of spoon against bowl, the hiss of hot water melting a tea bag. Where do you look? And if someone looks at you, can they tell you’re actually certifiably insane when you’re not hiding behind social graces?

Eventually you realize you have nothing to say to the person across from you anyway, and you feel more relieved than stifled. And who needs conversation anyway when you can finally hear all that nonstop noise going on in your head… the Elton John song you tried to forget two weeks ago, the mini-series you’d pitch about a shady character from the Witness Protection Program hiding out at the Vipassana Meditation Center, the ex-boyfriend you were sure you’d forgiven, the way your mom got angry at you for taking your braids out at school when you were eight, the fact that you’d better clean your plate well because this morning you got one with a carrot sliver stuck to the side. There is no thin line between crazy and normal, I’d think to myself. It’s the distractions that fool us into buying that distinction. And we cling to those with the strength of life itself.

With so much inaudible thinking, it was nice to hear someone else’s voice every once in a while. The teacher, S. N. Goenka, lives in India - so the Center plays his teachings on tape. Meanwhile, two supremely mellow assistant teachers sat in front of the group on soft white cubes. You were allowed to ask them questions, but only about the techniques we were learning. For the first three days, we learned how to focus our attention on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling air through our nostrils. This helped us to distinguish between subtle and gross sensations (the tickle of a strand of hair vs. the ache of a stubbed toe). The real vipassana training began on the fourth day. That was the day they asked us not to squirm or fidget or wiggle during the sessions – we were supposed to try not to move at all. That way we could turn our awareness on the entire body – scanning each part from head to toe for the subtlest of sensations.

The point of that was to learn how to make all sensations “equanimous”: to train ourselves to refrain from feeling aversion to pain or craving pleasure. We were to just let all the sensations arise and then fade away. I didn’t have such a hard time letting go of the pleasurable feelings – but after an hour and a half of sitting completely motionless on my bony ass (the five pillows underneath it might as well have been sheets of toilet paper) on a concrete floor, it was pretty much impossible to not be averse to the pain. The pain in the lower half of my body was so unbearable that I would spontaneously burst into tears. In my mind, I was absolutely certain that I’d reached my limit, and that if I continued to sit there with this pain, I would die. There was no way something that hurts this much can be good for me, I’d tell myself over and over again.

And then that magical moment came when I decided to try sitting still for just one moment longer, just to see what would happen, to see whether I’d die or pass out or go crazier. And I didn’t. In one negligible fraction of a second, EVERYthing changed.

~ * ~

The images of previous “impossible” moments rolled through my mind in a furious wave. Was I wrong? About ALL of them? The next time I sat and reached that threshold of pain, I had an entirely new anticipation: that my mind would attempt to convince me I couldn’t take it. And I needed to follow the experiment through: if it were just my mind convincing my body, couldn’t my body be convinced of something new? My reactions to the pain started to became less powerful. I went from shaking and crying to thinking it was really uncomfortable to thinking it was just another sensation. And what our teacher was saying started to make real sense: we only give pain and pleasure so much importance because we’ve developed the habit of doing it. We’re used to labeling those sensations “good”, or “bad”, and we either want more or less of them to make us happy, or at least maintain the status quo. The retreat was an extreme example of what it feels like to shift into neutral – where you give yourself the time and space to just notice the feelings without becoming attached to them.

Was it, therefore, the best or the worst kind of example?

Seven years later – I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ve learned enough about Buddhism that I see the fool’s errand I’d normally take on, of trying to recreate that retreat experience, trying to return to some place that was moving and changing even when I was there. It was, more than all my beach vacations combined, the most relaxed I’ve ever felt. And my struggle to sit for 20 minutes every day seems both epic and juvenile in comparison. Most of the time it feels like faith to sit down in the first place. So I guess I haven’t learned so much about Buddhism that I’m free from the desire to want more. More relaxation, more time, more deaths of the impossible. More of the courage I had for a split second to see what happens.