Vipassana - 2

When you check in for a Vipassana Meditation ten day course, they take your stuff.

Your technology; your phone, computer, iPad, Ipod.. gone.  They lock up your keys, your purse, any pencils or pens.  You can't have books or magazines smuggled in in your suitcase; nothing to ‘do’.  And once things get going, you can't do any major exercise such as running or yoga.  You can’t practice your religion or even try out any sort of meditation other than Vipassana. 

Vipassana attempts to get to the far reaches of your mind, so in order to give the technique a fair go, you need to apply Vipassana and only Vipassana to that place where you store all of what makes you, you! 

And so on the very first day, you stop talking. 

While you can get help if you need an extra blanket or a clean tooth brush, and you are able to speak with the Guru teacher who is on site to guide you through the program, you may not communicate in any form; body language, eye contact.. with each other. 

Noble Silence they call it. 

And it is actually quite lovely.  It gives you time, lots and lots of time, to think about yourself, your situation and of course, Vipassana. 

And you have lots to think about.. the first day you have to focus on your nose.. the inside part of your nose.. the air flowing through your nose.  You need to breath naturally and normally.. you need to sit quietly and keep your mind on your nose.. just your nose and the air passing through which ever nostril, or nostrils, it is travelling through. 

This is harder than you think. Your mind darts off to all sorts of places.  

Plus, you have to get yourself comfortable.  Also harder than you think.  Some people set up camp in a chair, others rested their backs on a wall, while still others went straight to the lotus position on the floor. 

The first time you sit in a lotus position for a straight hour is amazingly painful.  My legs felt like they were swollen.. and the tingling in them soon turned to numbness, but that terrible painful sort of numbness..   I tried to put cushions under my knees, over my knees, behind my back.  I piled them under me, beside me, in front of me.  Each time we went in for an hour meditation, I gathered a few new sizes and shapes of cushions.. they had lots available.  And, I wasn’t the only one.  Cushions filled the room and people tried on different combinations.  It wasn’t until day four that I finally figured out something that worked for me.  And just in time too.. we were now expected to sit for an hour, without so much as twitching.  

By day four, I could feel the inside of my nose, the entrance to my nose was perfectly clear and I could feel my upper lip the second my mind 'touched' it.  I had meditated for over 20 hours and had graduated from focusing on my nose, to full body scans..  

I was even meditating during my ‘free time’ in my small room.  After all, there was nothing else to do.. I had absolutely no stuff in there, had read the labels on my clothes and the clean up instructions on the back of the door a hundred times.   Even my enthusiasm for sleep for gone.. 

I was beginning to get a little bored.  Ok.. very bored.  After being so busy, for so long- working, watching tv at night and sitting on the computer for hours everyday..  suddenly being thrust into doing nothing for hours at a time, not even making eye contact with the other meditators.. well.. it was getting challenging!  Some people had decided to go.. leaving behind just a blue square in the meditation hall and a question mark.  

Why had they left?  Or rather, what was I doing staying?!