D i e n u

When I added this item to my 101 in 1001 list, I imagined something like a weekend trip to a spa. Something relaxing. Maybe a little indulgent.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that. But it was a trip by myself. That’s for sure.

I went to Kaufman, Texas for a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat. It’s hard to put into words exactly what the experience is like, so I’ll start by sharing the daily schedule:

4:00 am Morning wake-up bell

4:30-6:30 am Meditate in the hall or in your room

6:30-8:00 am Breakfast break

8:00-9:00 am Group meditation in the hall

9:00-11:00 am Meditate in the hall or in your room

11:00-12:00 noon Lunch break

12noon-1:00 pm Rest and interviews with the teacher

1:00-2:30 pm Meditate in the hall or in your room

2:30-3:30 pm Group meditation in the hall

3:30-5:00 pm Meditate in the hall or in your room

5:00-6:00 pm Tea break

6:00-7:00 pm Group meditation in the hall

7:00-8:15 pm Teacher’s Discourse in the hall

8:15-9:00 pm Group meditation in the hall

9:00-9:30 pm Question time in the hall

9:30 pm Lights out

Yep, you are reading that correctly. We woke up at 4am and meditated for a smidge over ten hours every day.

Waking up at 4 in the morning is hard, but that fact that you wake up to the sound of a gong vibrating in the predawn darkness, well, that helps a little.

Did I mention that we did the entire retreat in silence?

For the entire time, all students are asked to observe “noble silence.” This means that, not only do you do not speak to your fellow students, but you do not look at them, do not gesture, do not smile, do not communicate in any way.

The point of the retreat is to get inside your own head and stay there. So they take away anything that could distract you from that goal. Like speaking. Or reading materials. Or iPods. Or cameras (which is why you won’t find any photos in this entry). Or any communication with the outside world. No calls home. No e-mails. No letters. Nothing. They even segregate men and women at all time, so you won’t be distracted by a good-looking meditator across the dining hall.

It’s just you and your thoughts. For ten days. And it is hard and boring and miserable at times. But at times it’s also liberating and joyful and calming and incredibly exhilarating.

Which is the whole point.

What I learned at this retreat — the whole point of learning this form of meditation, in fact — is that there are things that feel good in life and things that feel bad in life. But none of these things, the good or the bad, none of them last forever.

So instead of wasting your time running toward things that feel good and away from things that feel bad, Vipassana teaches you to just watch, to observe the moment, without judging, without trying to run toward it or away from it. And by watching, you learn that everything passes. And you learn that it’s not worth it to get worked up about much of anything, once you understand how ephemeral it all is in the first place.

I learned on this retreat that I can stay quiet for ten days. I’ve learned that, surprisingly, I enjoy periods of silence. On the very last day, noble silence is broken and you’re allowed to talk to your fellow students, to share your experience and hear what it was like for them. And while I was glad to hear what the other women had to say, after a while I had to escape to my room for some quiet. Which was a new, but not unwelcome, experience for me.

But it wasn’t about the silence. That was just the means to the end.

What I really learned is a lot bigger than that.

I’ve spent most of my life looking for something to make me happy and running from the people and places I’ve blamed for my own unhappiness.

I think that’s probably true for a lot of us. We grow up believing that people and things outside us will make us happy or unhappy.

The right job, the right house, the right spouse — if we can only get everything just right, we’ll be happy.

And if we’re not happy? Well, there must be something outside of us that is causing us pain. We must be in the wrong job, in the wrong house, in the wrong marriage.

Vipassana teaches you to stop looking outward and to instead look inside, to see that happiness is a choice we have to power to make. That’s why the technique requires you to sit quietly for a long time — because the process of sitting is a metaphor for this bigger idea.

There is pain in life — the technique doesn’t pretend that it will spare you from pain. That’s why you sit. You sit until your back hurts. Until it is burning and throbbing and you think you could maybe cry if you let yourself.

So you shift and try to run away from the pain.

Which works for a moment.

But it always comes back.

And you moan and cry and whine inside your head. You think to yourself “what the hell am i doing here? Oh this hurts so bad. Oh i can’t handle it. Oh will the hour ever be finished? Oh my
god it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts.”

And, of course, you are miserable.

But then, sometime around day three, you sit down to another hour of pain and you close your eyes and you decide, “Fine. My back hurts. My back hurts and it would be nice if it didn’t hurt but it does and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So instead of whining and crying and trying to move into a better position, I’m just going to suck it up and see what happens.”

So you do. You sit still. When the pain comes, you don’t try to shift your position. You just sit quietly and watch it. And you are shocked to realize that, if you just watch and wait, the pain eventually fades away. It will come back, yes, but then it will go away again.

And you realize, for yourself, directly, what the teacher has been saying for three days when he says that everything in this world, good things and bad, everything arises and passes away. Arises and passes away. And you realize that the pain in your back was nothing compared to the pain you created in your head. You realize that you took the pain and you held onto it and you magnified it and you made it a hundred times worse than it had to be.

You start wondering what could happen if you tried the same thing in your life. If you refused to hold on to the negative stuff. If instead of magnifying your unhappiness and feeding the flames, you just let it go. Just sent it back from wherever it came.

Well, I tried it. And it works. It takes a lot of practice, but it works. On the way home from my retreat, I had a three-hour layover. Not a big deal. I used the time to write in my journal and catch up with the people I hadn’t spoken with in ten days.

Then the plane got delayed another hour. In the past, I would have thrown a fit. I would have heaved a bunch of loud sighs. I would have called home and bitched. I would have slid down in my airport chair and felt all kinds of sorry for myself.

This time, I just shrugged and kept on reading my book. Because I’d learned that me being upset about the delay wouldn’t make the plane come any faster. So why waste my energy on getting upset?

The retreat was amazing, one the hardest and most intense and most important things I’ve ever done.

But the hard part is just starting. Because it’s easy to be even-minding and calm when you don’t have to talk to anyone and your only job is to sit quietly for ten hours a day. When the entire program is structured around meditation, it’s easy to make time for it.

I’ve found that the technique only works if I practice. That I have to meditate every day if I want to really remember, deep down where it counts, the things I learned at the retreat.

But I’ve also found that I want to practice, that I want to stay in the peaceful place I discovered. Even when it feels like the rest of the world is on a mission to get me fired up.

If you even think you have an inkling of trying something like this, I say do it. It’s amazing. And it’s free to attend. Every student’s retreat is paid for by a student who has taken the retreat in the past. You are not even allowed to pay until the course is over. And there’s no dollar amount expected — you are asked to pay whatever you think you can afford and whatever you think it is worth.

And I can tell you that it’s worth a lot more than I could afford to pay.