Vipassana improves human brain
I decided to make this article about Vipassana because I received huge benefit from practicing it and because friends and colleagues are asking for my impression after its completion and most importantly, they are interested in the result in the life of a regular human.
Vipassana is a name of a meditation technique that Buddha practiced according to legends. Further in the text I consciously avoid word meditation because it is talking about a certain technique and not about meditation in general.
My first introduction to Vipassana had happened in the year 2011 and a half year before I realised that I had been looking for exactly this when I received a call from my friend who just completed Vipassana and received own experience. He told me at that moment “You think I went there to increase my spirituality. No, I just want to earn more money”. Many people have this impression about increasing income from Vipassana and I wasn’t an exception. But when you get familiar more with this phenomenon then you realise that happiness isn’t in money. Then my friend shared his experience of healing his back disease.
I didn’t have a day of doubts that I have to go to Vipassana course.
In total I had passed 3 courses during the next 12 years and I practiced it myself in between courses. Ideally it is recommended to practice 2 hours daily but for me this is the desired goal and if I could practice it regularly then I feel happier.
Some theories about Vipassana as I understand it after 12 years and 3 courses.
During our lives we face situations that we like or don’t like. All situations have feelings in our body, these feelings are either pleasant or unpleasant. Regular human mind can’t distinguish this connection because we are living on autopilot and this body reaction happens in less than a second. At this moment our mind is busy with emotions either pleasant or unpleasant.
Unpleasant feelings cause psychological traumas and we consciously or unconsciously avoid repeating these feelings or actions that caused feelings. We create aversion to such actions. Pleasant feelings cause craving and we want to repeat them, or affection to have this experience again and again and because it is impossible to have pleasant feelings all the time, this causes unpleasant feelings.
Here the sankhara circle closes!
This causes behavioural pattern, unconscious psychological and body reaction in different life situations. This is what determines our freedom in our behaviour or activity, risks acceptance or rejection, view breadth in the business opportunities search.
All psychosomatic reactions remain in a human body, they can be eradicated during the practice of Vipassana, alternatively they can be eradicated with help of psychotherapy and hypnosis.
If you practice Vipassana, over time you will be able to catch a reaction like an event — feeling in your body, although for this you need a high level of self-awareness and a sense of your own body.
Vipassana trains the brain to be very sensitive to subconscious responses, as well as to body sensations. Such a brain is called sharp as a surgical knife. With this knife, with its own brain, the practitioner can get psychosomatic reactions from the past and allow them to leave the body and evaporate. And this evaporation is human nature that Buddha discovered.
I understand your disbelief in what I just said, until now you have not been told about it. It is exactly as you think, all, all, all psychological traumas can be evaporated with help of Vipassana and you can get freedom from them.
Practitioners also get rid of illnesses, but they call it a side effect. Tension accumulates in weak parts of the body, and when the tension is released, healing can occur. But traditional medicine should not be neglected. In addition, it takes a long time to practice in order to delve into one’s own brain.
In my case, psychosomatics came out through pain, sometimes unbearable pain. I had to stop practicing in order to stop the pain, and then the pain passed, but the trauma remained. You need to wait until the pain completely goes away. Unlike psychotherapy and hypnosis, strong emotional experiences do not occur during Vipassana, but sometimes the brain triggers memories of the time when the trauma was formed. During the days of very deep Vipassana practice, I also saw dreams with very rich emotions from events that had happened about 20 years ago.
After each course, my understanding of the goals of Vipassana changed, as did the state of my body and the freedom of my mind.
My first experience freed me from the habit of constantly being offended, and also greatly increased my ability to see things beyond the obvious. More precisely, they have always been obvious, we just do not pay attention to some small details. After Vipassana, in my mind the external life was perceived as in a slow motion movie, sometimes it was even boring because of how slow everything was.
Later, Vipassana became a source of energy and happiness for me during many years, with a workload of about 12 hours a day and 7 days a week, usually once a month on a Sunday, my body could not stand up from fatigue, on such days I had to call and change meeting times, then sit and practice Vipassana for 2 hours, and 2 hours later, I run the next working marathon for the next month like a newborn.
My next trip to Vipassana happened at the end of 2022. By that time, I had accumulated a lot of tension in my body, especially in my shoulders and back. Regardless of the constant support of my body, I did not feel the final release from this tension, although everything looked normal and better than could be imagined.
To understand what kind of support I’m talking about, I mean yoga and irregular running and swimming, regular massages and visits to the sauna. By default, average people understand the level of self-sensation and energy of my body. And anyway, there was no final release from tension in the absence of serious issues.
You ask where this tension came from. This is all from life, this is my payment for life.
During the second course of Vipassana the teacher invited me in and said that she noticed that I couldn’t sit for an hour without moving, then she asked if I had any leg injuries in the past, but I never had such an injury, I just did a lot of sport since childhood and just had tension in my legs from sports. And thanks to her advice and my knowledge of the technical side of Vipassana, I gained an insight into how psychosomatics are recorded in the body. The teacher suggested I sit on a chair next time, so I did, and then I watched my legs shaking as I went deep into Vipassana, the tension was coming out from my legs.
My theory of exactly how psychosomatics are recorded in the body is as follows. This finding also confirms why people who run after a hard day at work get a mental release after a stressful day.
After a hard working day full of scandals, difficult negotiations and tasks, the brain continues to think and chew on all work situations non-stop. And when you start running, the brain continues to analyse work situations for some time. During running and movement of the legs, these difficult thoughts are recorded in the moving elements of the body, so physical tension together with the mental tension passes from the brain to the legs.
I am not a scientist in this field, this is just my hypothesis based on the analysis of my body and the events that preceded Vipassana.
During that trip to Vipassana, on the 10th day, I got zero feeling of any tension, pain, discomfort in my body. At that time I was almost 45 years old, can you imagine what that feels like? It’s like being born again at the age of 45 in terms of body sensation. Then I experienced again how my eyes see what people cannot see with ordinary eyes, namely, I saw how the leaves on the branch of a tree move when they grow. This can be seen in the slow motion video. This had already happened to me before, for example, I saw how the fluff on the tennis ball flew during its flight when I played tennis.
Later, I realised how difficult life situations were written into my shoulders while I was swimming during a period of unhappy family life and how it eventually ended, namely the blocking and dysfunction of the left hand. That story was long before I met Vipassana.
The third course of Vipassana I took at the end of 2023, during this time I finally removed the tension from other parts of my body and got a feeling of vibration of the whole body, it was felt simultaneously in all corners of my body. There was no more pain, instead there was only a neutral vibration, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Funnily enough, it felt like a leather bag of vibrations, the vibrations ended where my skin ended.
I call it the ultimate liberation of myself from the past. Liberation from unconscious behavioural patterns.
Now imagine yourself free from the unconscious reactions of your behaviour. People annoy you, but it doesn’t bother you; before people seemed stupid to you, but now you do not notice their such qualities any more; when you get insulted, you only see that the person who does this is weak and needs love. Isn’t that a miracle?
