| | Three-Day Retreat Summary [Wart n' all] [Note: All relations to persons living or dead is purely coincidental]
So, on 02/13 I went to the Illinois Vipassana Center in Pecatonica, IL [a Goenka center], meditated for roughly ten or eleven hours a day for three days, and then returned home on 02/17.
Here is what happened...
But first, I have to discuss what happened before I went on the retreat. At around 3am early Tuesday morning, I thought that maybe I'd gotten stream entry. I'd practiced for an hour on the zafu, and then switched to a chair. I'd been practicing for about thirty minutes when I had some strange experiences. My brain told me that it was stream entry. When I came out of it, I'd thought that I'd fallen asleep, and dreamt that I'd gotten stream. Then I wondered if I'd been meditating in my sleep and possible gotten stream in my sleep. Or perhaps it wasn't sleep, but a deep deep EQ? Regardless, I didn't put too much stock in it and went to bed. The next day in the afternoon, I decided to meditate again and, if I was able to induce a fruition, I'd know if it had been stream. About an hour in, I suddenly experienced a staccato of flashes, and a feeling of falling into a void. Was this a fruition? Wait, had I fallen asleep again?
At work, I eagerly anticipated leaving and getting home so I could try, once again, to induce a fruition. Did I feel different? Was my perspective different? I wasn't sure. Once I got home, however, I'd be able to figure out if it was for realsies. After getting home and practicing again, however, I found I was unable to induce a fruition. I hadn't gotten stream. I was all a false alarm.
I then had the retreat the very next day. I felt disappointed, and a little stupid, but decided that I had to rally quickly. It was important to make the most out of the retreat experience. I couldn't let this misunderstanding effect that.
So I drove to the center and registered and unpacked. Upon walking down the familiar paths of the center, I felt a deep sense of gratitude for the Goenka folks. What they did was a great service. I determined to make the most out of the opportunity. We took the vow of silence [Noble Silence], and, the next day at 3:55am, the retreat began.
Let me preface this by stating that my normal hours are such that I work until around 10pm. I usually eat dinner around midnight. I relax for a bit, and then meditate for an hour or so, and then crash typically around 5am...
And now I was waking UP at 3:55am.
And eating my last meal at 11am, which is usually when I am having my breakfast coffee.
Let's just say that, on retreat, my rhythms were thrown into disarray, and I didn't have much time to adjust. I was unable to fall asleep, and ended up getting only two hours of sleep. Then I got exhaustively tired in the morning, when I normally sleep. I got severe hunger pangs at night [when I normally eat my primary and biggest meal], which further made it difficult to sleep.
Nevertheless, I went to every session, more or less.
But these are some hardcore sessions! I can easily sit for one hour on my zafu, but when you sit two hours, or two and a half hours, it is a different matter. I started having pain in my knees. Sit for an hour, take a five minute break, sit for another hour, etc. No walking meditations. All sitting.
I started to notice something else: I became very judgmental of those around me. Here is an exact excerpt from some notes I took while having insomnia:
"The men here are a miserable representation of the species. My roomate is like an Indian version of Woody Allen from his early films but without the humor and charm, just spastic and awkward. I saw him drop an entire cube of cornbread on the floor. Then he tried to take a drink of water and poured it down his shirt. Then, when unable to locate the macaroni and cheese listed on the menu, I heard him emit a whimper/whine. He always seems to be taking a shit in the bathroom during my agreed upon shower time. And when I pass his door, sometimes he'll retreat back in, pulling the door shut slightly, like a crab scared back into its hole."
I started labeling the people around my. For instance, the "Cro-Magnon Man," who, to me, with his sloped forehead, exactly reminded me of those wax figures of cavemen I often saw at the Field Museum as a kid. During lunch, his eyes occasionally met mine, and it appeared to me that he wanted to pick and eat fleas off of me.
Again, from my notes: "During sits, the Cro-Magnon Man yawns constantly and incessantly. At one point, I was so distracted, I started counting the seconds in between his yawns. I shit you not, he yawned every 15 to 25 seconds. And not a polite, muffled yawn, but a loud full blooded yawn, followed by lip smacking, some saliva slurping, and occasionally a burp or two."
Another guy whose mere presence started irritating me was a bloke who "looked like he should have been on the Adam's family. He was tall, over six foot, gaunt, angular face, black floppy hair parted to the side, balding at the crown, really wide slumped shoulders tapering down into the smallest most non-existent ass I've ever seen [whose non-existence was accentuated by the silver jogging pants he wore every day]. With his black floppy hair, he also strikes me as looking like a long lost member of the Ramones, who became totally strung out on drugs, and now lives in a perceptually eternal succession of Goenka retreats." [Note: In this last regard I wasn't too far off. As it turns out, he claims to have attended roughly eighteen ten-day Goenka retreats, but possibly more. He'd lost count.]
There were three hippes on the retreat. All of whom: 1) wore flannel, 2) goofy yarn hats, and 3) had beards. I also wrote this in my notes: "Beware hippies chatting you up before a retreat. Especially if they are smiling like lunatics and appear to be trying to charm you. Be especially wary if you ask them where they live, and they say something like 'I'm in transition,' or 'I live on the road,' or something to that effect. They are probably trying to land a mark to get a ride somewhere after the retreat. Thus all the schmoozing."
There was also a guy who constantly tried sitting in different postures: a zafu, a bench, a chair, etc. Constantly, constantly moving around. Of course I felt enormously superior to him, with my simple and elegant zafu [except that my knees felt like they were about to snap].
What I realized was that, as important as Noble Silence is to a retreat, it has its shadow side, which is that when people cannot communicate with each other -- either verbally or non-verbally -- then tend to become distilled down into their most annoying attributes. At least this seems to be the case with me. All these descriptions, you may notice, are of men. This is simply because, at the Goenka centers you are segregated by sex. I have heard that the flip-side of distilling people into their negative attributes is the "vipassana romance," in which someone becomes enormously idealized in one's brain, and all kinds of sexual and attractive attributes projected onto them. I could easily see how this could happen.
On night two I found myself racked with disturbing thoughts about the human body, and my body in particular. I obsessed about illness and sickness. I couldn't get these things out of my mind. It suddenly occurred to me -- after a long long while, mind you, I think the next morning in the pre-dawn hours -- that I was in the Dark Night. Particularly Disgust and Desire for Deliverance. But how was this possible!? In my daily at home practice, I rarely if ever get Dark Night stuff, and regularly get Equanimity, and even High Equanimity! I thought that while on retreat, I'd be getting EQ every sit, and possibly have a breakthrough. But what happened was that I slid back. Why?
I think I slid back because, well, if you are at home and you are sitting and you have to take a shit, you simply get up, shit, and then return to the cushion. But on retreat, particularly on Goenka, you aren't supposed to move. If I find that I have to go to the bathroom, my mind start racing: "God this is painful. How long has it been? Can I make it until the end of the sit? My stomach is making crazy sounds. Can everyone hear? If I get up, everyone will think I suck. I'll be embarrassed before the entire group. Maybe even the Student Manager will chase me down and ask why I'm leaving. He may even tell me to come back. Ahhhh! I am in hell!" Your sit is now ruined.
Or, at home if your legs start hurting, you can simply change position, sit on a chair, lie down, etc., do whatever you need to do to become comfortable to maintain the integrity of the practice. But on a Goenka retreat, you aren't supposed to move. So you tend to experience a lot of pain which can pull you down in the DK stuff.
Also, as you can tell, the other people can distract and annoy you as well, with their burping and yawning and farting and shifting and just about everything they do-ness.
At home, you can create optimal conditions for a sit. If you are uncomfortable, you move. You can have silence, darkness, adjust the temperature, etc., whereas on retreat, you have to adjust to conditions as they are, and abide by the rules and dictates of the retreat, which means that, as in my case, I fell back in my practice to lower nanas than I get while at home.
I became annoyed that I saw the Student Manages slumping in his meditation chair, sleeping. I became annoyed at the female Student Manager who constantly and loudly cleared her throat in a loud staccato, like a machine gun. I became distracted by the phlegmy snot suckers and the flabby gaseous bowels and the high pitched tight-assed farts.
In the morning after my Digust trip, I decided the only thing to do was go to the hall at 4:30am and meditate my ass off. If there is anything I've learned from MCToB and the DhO, etc., it is that you need to work your way through Dark Night stuff. And that means getting that ass on the cushion, and noting noting noting the despair, misery, disgust, mind-states, etc. And that is what I did.
I went to the hall. The early morning sits are my favorite anyway. Almost no-one is there. It is still dark out. There is a rich, deep quality to the meditation hall at this time. So I meditated, meditated, meditated. First I did anapana. Goenka had stated that anapana is the knife which cuts through the knots of the mind. I did this a while and then started noting my ass off. I noted the anxiety and disgust. A few hours later, I came out of it. I went outside. Dawn was emerging. It was beautiful and cold. I felt like I'd been on a struggle to the death, but survived. I'd gotten out of it. If I got nothing else out of the retreat, I felt that just winning this battle would be enough. A real victory. The Dark Night stuff reminded me of years ago, having a "bad trip." It has felt very similar. As Hunter Thompson had put it, an "introspective nightmare." Whereby stuff we normally shrug off becomes fraught with existential implication, and the locus of a deep crisis. I suddenly wondered if those ol' bad trips had been Dark Night related. It felt plausible.
My conclusion is that retreats probably produce a lot of Dark Night nanas in people, even folks who don't normally get it in their civilian life and practice.
So I felt revitalized. After breakfast I walked down to the ponds. The center had become occupied by literally hundreds of geese. The ponds on the property were heated, and the geese were obviously attracted to this. The geese tolerated their human interlopers, if only slightly. Geese are ungainly and bulky people, always getting into raucous shenanigans, and going berserk with their trumpet-like honkings. I enjoyed their presence to no end.
So I walked amongst the geese and was observing them when I noticed something which shocked me: A goose, swimming in the pond, WITH AN ARROW THROUGH ITS BUTT. The neon green arrow was stuck completely through the goose's hindquarters. I broke Noble Silence and told the Student Manager about it. He told me that this goose had been there for two months and Wildlife Services could not catch it. He could fly, and appeared to be unperturbed by the arrow. The wound appeared to be a flesh-wound, which had healed around the arrow, and didn't seriously affect the goose's mobility. He also said the kitchen staff fed it regularly.
All this disturbed the hell out of me. I wondered how the shooter would like to be pierced by an arrow and forced to live with it for the rest of his days. Negative thoughts about hunters, and people who take pleasure in hurting other less defenseless beings filled my mind. Sick fucks! I felt enormous gratitude to the Goenka people for caring for the creature. I then went back to the hall and meditated on dukkha. After a while, the goose came to represent something different in my mind: "A buddha. Happy and contented despite the seemingly terrible affliction." I then began to wonder if the other geese thought that the arrow was a beautiful tail, and worshiped him. Or if the goose treated the arrow like a really punk rock piercing. After meditating, I went out and looked for the goose again. It was gone. He'd flown away and I didn't see it him for the rest of the retreat.
I jerked off a total of two times. The first time was not for pleasure, but for the hope it would help me fall asleep the night I had insomnia. It didn't by the way. The second time was due to sheer boredom. I'm a terrible Buddhist.
The food at a Goenka center is delicious. Wonderful! But is also makes me very gassy. The Beano I brought was only of marginal help.
After breaking Noble Silence, I made the unnerving discovery that nine out of ten of the people who I'd thought were the dregs of humanity were in fact intelligent, kind and sweet, and much more interesting than I'd previously given them credit for. Sometimes I found myself deliberately trying to avoid talking to people, because there is a part of me which wanted them to remain caricatures. Nevertheless, Indian Woody Allen? Smart and thoughtful. He was struggling with a bad back. Cro-Magnon man? Sweet and works at a university. Sleeping Student Manager Guy? Charismatic and an old student of Shinzen Young. Hippies? Told me about their DMT experiences with shamans, which was fascinating.
One out of ten times, however, people ARE just as bad as you thought. Worse, even. The ex-Ramone was one of these. He was as tiresome as he looked.
After breaking Noble Silence, I had my best sit of the retreat, my "fuck yeah" sit, and it was one of the last sits of the retreat. I finally got into High EQ territory. Wouldn't it be ironic if I got stream now, I thought? I noted the thought. I didn't get stream.
Was it a coincidence that my best sit came after breaking Noble Silence, and the atmosphere lightened a bit? I don't know, but I don't think so. If my good final sit was indicative of a new trend of equanimous sits, it would have meant that, had I been on a ten-day retreat, I'd now have seven more days to explore the territory. As it stood, however, it was now time to go home...
My conclusion is that, well, the first three days of a retreat is usually the roughest: adjusting to the schedule, the environment. the people, the etc. Once you finally get used to all this, on a three-day, it is now time to go home. On the ten-day, it was around day four or so that I started to notice some real changes and progress. I don't think I'll be doing a three-day again in a retreat-like setting. A three-day solo retreat might be very productive, but when doing it at a center, with the inevitable fallback, you are just getting into interesting territory when it is time to leave. I'm probably going to still take a ten-day in June, but I'm considering doing a solo retreat. But, to be frank, it is cheaper to do the Goenka than get a motel room for ten days. Just the plain and simple truth of my current situation.
If I got anything else out of the retreat, it was this: Super intensive noting works great. Don't scan vs note, just note intensely, in a directed way, bit by bit. Then broaden the focus out. It doesn't always have to be undirected noting. Also, note or describe in great detail that which the focus gets directed towards. Regardless of what the object is doing, describe it. Describe exactly what is, in as much detail as possible. Also, it is okay to think, just note the thoughts. Also also, intensely note whatever the mind is doing or not doing. Investigate. Don't just note objects which appear into the forefront of awareness. Note unremarkable things as well.
When I got home on Sunday I dedicated the entire day to my girlfriend. We talked and laughed and made love and ate at Flat Top Grill. We celebrated my birthday, which was the next day. It was great. Full of love. I was also extremely tired and fatigued. I came down with a cold. On Monday and Tuesday, my cold got worse. My sleeping and eating schedule was out of wack. I went to a doctor's appointment, did my taxes, did laundry and unpacked and did chores around the house. I called my ma and dad. I watched Dances with Wolves and then Street Trash. I worked. I wrote this report. I took a couple days off from meditating. I needed the break. But now I'm ready to jump back into the fray. It's all we can do, us vipassana junkies. Just make sure you note it... |