What day-to-day really feels like at a silent meditation retreat when it gets real
What a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat taught me — Part Three: Nowhere to run, only sitting.
This is part three of a series of articles about my experience at a Goenka Vipassana 10-day meditation silent retreat. To read parts one and two, please click below:
We all had allotted seats in the meditation hall.
Older, more experienced students were in front, closer to the assistant teacher; and novices and first-timers like me sat in the back of the hall.
As the days went by, I noticed that suddenly, some of those seats were no longer occupied. I remember wondering what happened and whether those people had left the retreat.
I would soon find out.
About overcoming pain and discomfort
Usually, people feel pain and discomfort quite soon, by the end of the first day or at the most by the second day.
It gets unbearable at times — but at some point, normally in between the fourth and the sixth day, most people learn to dissociate themselves from the discomfort and pain; or, in other words, to not identify with them.
It’s, as Richard Davison puts it in “Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body”:
“Suddenly, what had been pain disappeared into a collection of sensations — tingling, burning, pressure — but his knee no longer hurt. The “pain” dissolved into waves of vibrations without a trace of emotional reactivity.
Focusing on just the sensations meant completely reappraising the nature of hurting: instead of fixating on the pain, the very notion of pain deconstructed into raw sensations. What went missing was just as critical: the psychological resistance to, and negative feelings about, those sensations.
The pain had not vanished, but Richie had changed his relationship to it. There was just raw sensation — not my pain, along with the usual stream of angst-ridden thoughts.”
I knew that it was going to be taxing. The fact that one cannot exercise during the retreat — except for those short walks during the allotted times — only made it even harder.
But I had prepared myself: those one-hour sittings at home in which I tried to be as immobile as I could, and a dedicated meditation bench that I had been using for months were bound to help, right?
They did help. But not enough.
As the days went by, pain and discomfort were continually increasing. I tried using all sorts of cushions and readapting my position, from kneeling (Zen-style) to sitting in a lotus position, back to kneeling, back and forth, to no avail. I, like many around me, built and rebuilt castles of cushions, hoping to find a position which would finally allow me to endure those long hours.
When the going gets tought, the tough gets… strong determination sittings?
The first three days of a Vipassana retreat as taught by Goenka focus on Anapana, during which one focuses his full attention on his breath. That is supposed to prepare the student for Vipassana meditation, which gets introduced only on the fourth day.
From day five on, a new challenge presents: during three meditation sessions per day, the practitioner is supposed to do a strong determination sitting. During each of these one-hour sittings, one is not supposed to move at all!
I expected the experience to be physically hard. I also expected it to, at some point, progressively get better and better, as my muscles got used to inactivity and my mind got around dissociating my self from the discomfort and unpleasurable sensations. This should also help with how I experienced pain in general and, what I was very interested in from the very beginning, how to handle my migraines.
As days progressed and those more challenging meditation sessions were introduced, however, I noticed that the time that I was genuinely meditating was progressively going down. I explain: if during the first strong determination sitting, I was meditating for 45 minutes and just struggling from pain and discomfort for the last 15 minutes, a couple of days later that proportion was the other way around: I was actually meditating for only 15 minutes, and struggling with deep discomfort for 45 minutes!
I tried to take every break that was possible during meditation sessions, in which I ran to my room and stretched out in my bed, in pain and agony, only to run back to the meditation hall three to five minutes later, when the gong rang, indicating we needed to get back.
And things were not improving.
Compassion & kindness in the face of pain & discomfort
I wasn’t the only one struggling — not that it served as consolation.
I increasingly noticed this during the evening discourses, after a long day of meditation practice. While experienced practitioners amazingly kept their poise and dignified, noble posture throughout hours and hours of sitting and during the discourse itself, that was not the case with basically all novice meditators.
They all rushed from their allotted meditation spaces to the back of the meditation hall in order to support their backs just as soon as the last meditation finished and even before the break.
That behaviour started gently and quite spontaneously, but soon enough it was like a human stampede, a serious competition to try to get a place where you could sit by the meditation hall back wall. I’m pretty sure that in some cases even some elbows and self-defence techniques were put to use by some meditators. So much for compassion towards others!
Nirvana is a back support.
