This post assumes you already know about Vipassana, and my previous experience with it. If you don’t, or need a refresher, read about my first experience.
Volunteering for Vipassana in Tiruvannamalai
In September 2013, while backpacking through Southeast Asia, I completed a 10-day Vipassana course in Thailand. The entire course is free, as it has been paid forward by students who took the course before you. I remember that at the end of the 10-days, donations were suggested, but moreso it was encouraged to volunteer for a future course.
Here I am, 3 1/2 years later, backpacking again. One of my goals on this trip was to give back to Vipassana community, so I applied and got accepted to be a volunteer in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. I wanted to volunteer in the beginning of my trip, since I felt like I had gone through an endless to-do list of big and small things as I left San Francisco and prepared to travel India. In Tiruvannamalai, I hoped to find a reprieve from the continuous planning that is required by the backpacking lifestyle of moving from place to place. Eleven days of no planning where to go next. I also hoped that by starting the trip with a mindful activity would set the tone for the rest of my trip.
After an 18-hour journey from Alleppey, Kerala, involving an overnight bus and two local buses, I arrived at Dhamma Arunachala. In the distance was Mt. Arunachala, one of the holiest places in India. There’s a Shiva temple at the base. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of devotees frequently come here and circumvent the mountain barefoot — 14km total.
April is part of the dry season, which means it was hot. Hotter than Kerala had been. The center was not as developed as I had thought — I recognized this immediately as I got off the bus and walked to the front gate. The center is relatively new, the first course having taken in mid-2015. The trees and other greenery that had been planted were still young, and didn’t provide much in shade or cooling areas around the center. There is still a lot of ongoing construction being done here.
I felt like most days, the temperature wavered between 100°–110° (F). It didn’t cool much at night, staying around 80°. During the day I gulped down water between meditation sessions. I would splash water on myself during breaks as well to cool down — but the water itself was warm from the tap. The reason is that there was no local water source — instead the center had to buy these large tanks of water that looked like they held a thousand gallons of water. So these tanks of water, being exposed to the sun, would heat up. Everything was hot. I ended up getting a headache the first two nights from the heat.
Eventually I got better at managing the heat, or my body had acclimated. I learned little tricks like filling a bucket with water hours before bathing, so that the water would cool down. Or dunking a thin towel into a bucket of water, and putting it over my body when going to bed, to help me fall asleep. I would wake up two more times in the night when I felt too hot to repeat this process.
Enough about the heat — How was the volunteering experience?
“Learn as you go”. When I first arrived at the center, hours before the students, I was given no orientation about simple things like where the male dorms were, where the female dorms were, etc. When check-in started, the administrator gave me the task of checking in foreigners, having them fill out a special form, and then gluing their passport photo onto the form (tip: always carry extra passport photos when traveling in India!). Students asked me a lot of basic questions I couldn’t answer. They just had to wait to talk to the administrator.
At some point I was hand-drawing Excel sheets, ordering students by age, trying to figure out their dorm and bed number — but it felt more difficult since the administrator was frenetic, and maybe even slightly annoyed that I didn’t already know all of this. I feel like a lot of the check-in process could have been made a lot more efficient.
Over the 11 days, my main responsibilities became:
1. ringing the bell (to wake up students, or indicate that they should come to the Dhamma Hall)
2. Going into the kitchen, setting up, and then serving food.
3. Playing the video discourse everyday at 7pm, and making sure no one falls asleep.
I shared these responsibilities with one other volunteer. Together, we managed about 40 men, almost all local Indians. There was one female volunteer who managed 20 women, half of them foreigners.
As a volunteer, students could also ask me questions. I didn’t get many though over the course , but here’s a few:
- One asked me for carrots or biscuits at night because he was hungry (during the course, new students only get breakfast, lunch, and a snack at tea time). I told him that wasn’t allowed.
- Another asked for his phone, or any phone, to send out an important text message he had forgot about. The teacher allowed him 5 minutes with his phone to do so.
- Another student just wanted to ask questions about who I was, how many courses I had did, where I was from. I told him to wait until the last day to ask me.
- On Day 6, one student asked me if he should quit, since his mind wasn’t getting any quieter. I encouraged him to continue and not expect so much in 10 days. He ended up staying until the end.
Even with my tasks, I still meditated about 6–8 hours a day. How was the quality of my meditation? Meditating felt very different vs. how I had felt as a student, since I was not obeying noble silence as a volunteer, being allowed to talk with the staff. This slight modification changes the experience tremendously, and I didn’t get the deep reflective solitude I did as a student.
Talking comes with baggage. I felt irritation at times towards others. Sometimes I would be given tasks that I didn’t quite understand, felt could be more efficient, or felt were unnecessary. But I respected the Indian way of doing things, perhaps being more open to challenge my American ego in this environment.
At the end of each day, we had a short meeting with the volunteers and the teachers; I would feel annoyed that the conversation was in Tamil, despite them knowing that me and the female volunteer didn’t understand. I think it would have been courteous/efficient to just dismiss us at that point. The head teacher barely engaged with me, so there was no development of any intimate relationship. Goenka (the central figure of Vipassana) must have foreseen all this, and every night before bed we did a meditation to forgive, and ask for forgiveness, for any suffering caused during the process of volunteering.
My meditation was also challenged by the heat itself. My mind would go into thoughts about whether I should have done more research, and looked for a center that had A/C, or how I would re-design the buildings to be more insulated from the heat (and why didn’t the architects think of this?!, etc.), or otherwise I would just have creative, entertaining thoughts, which I struggled to quiet down. Ultimately the heat led to a more active mind for me. I also saw students struggling with the heat, particularly the foreigners — but there was no escaping it. The best we had were ceiling fans that would just whirl the hot air around.
Final Reflection
I felt sadness on the last day, as everyone prepared to head back home after spending 11 days here together. How quickly things changed, from a serene, quiet, and disciplined environment, to students excitedly chatting away, and eager to return home. I’m grateful to have volunteered to see things from a different perspective — in some ways, I got to see how it must have been when I was a student, unfamiliar with this whole 11-day process, counting down to the last day to be free again. Having gone through the volunteering experience, I now appreciate the special environment the staff creates, allowing the students to receive the gift of noble silence, among other things.
I also felt gratitude that I had now completed my volunteering experience, and with it continuing to turn the wheel of knowledge about Vipassana meditation.
