what to say after 10 days of silent retreat with ten hours of body observation? The overall responce I have been giving friends, family and colleagues that ask is that is was frightfully boring. the technique is very straightforward...3days of breath awareness and six days of scanning the body's sensations trying not ot react with the usual instintive clinging to or hating the respective feelings and rather to have an impersonal disinterest in them understanding that they too will pass like everything else in our spacio-temporal world. Not to say that this is easy, its damn near impossible to focus on that alone, even for somebody with meditation experience, its more perhaps that i have become far more of a creature of comfort and hyper-stimulation like so many people in the world.
The combination of hightened focus on the body and the body's increasing discomort at the prolonged sitting...makes for an intense mental workout. Add to this the very repetitive and sometimes overtly dogmatic 'universalism' talks on the technique as well as off-key droning chanting by the main teacher: SN Goenka blaring from video and speakers for probably two hours out of the ten per day; and the whole thing can be quite traumatic. And traumatic it was, particularly for Thekla my partner and Kathy her step-mom, that accompanied me on the retreat and though they both have years of various meditation behind them, have never called themselves Buddhist as I have. I am also judging things from a different school of Buddhism, mostly Tibetan, which places far more emphasis on using compassion for all living beings and a desire to help them as its main focus. Vipassana which survives of from the pali-teachings of Buddha used in Burma, uses personal liberation as the primary focus and benefit to thers as far more ancilliery.
All three of us had some form of insight from the practice but all felt that we could have done it in long weekend and that 10 days of Goenka would be more likely to scare people away from meditation than get them going. On the sixth night when I was unable to sleep from being hyper alert and being quite stiff from 60 hours of meditation, I settled down into a beautiful visualisation of a figure 8 of love/compassion and light/wisdom passing up and down my body synchronsied with my breath and gradually untying and disolving the knots around my central energy channel. Though Goenka would probably not approve of such abstractions, it was a shifting point for me in terms of how the Buddhas teachings can become lived bodily experiences. And it must be said that the technique is benefitting people since many thousands around the world keep going back and there are over a 1000 and growing such retreat centres worrldwide all finansed by courese that are given for only a donation that the practitioner can afford.
Now with a couple of days of reflection and having kept up a daily meditative routine for about 2 weeks, I am a little less critcal. Although I am not using the Vipassana technique as Goenka suggests (i.e. no mantras, nor vizualisations) the scanning and not reacting to my bodys impulses has merged well into the fibre of my purification mantra visualisation practice. I have never been particularly good at maintaing a daily meditation routine and it feels as if the ball is finally rolling and as if there is more of a continuum in my awareness than with my sporadic meditative past. It occurs to me that I was in a completely different headspace when I did a 10 day Vipassana course four years ago. And if anything I have become a lot more scattered and considerably more over-burdened with ideas since then. This in fact was one of the resaons for wanting to return to the austerity of the Worchester mountain retreat centre an hour outside of Cape Town. This is in retrospect also the reason why it was that much more difficult this time.
Thekla also seems to have turned over a new leaf in our relationship, with a renewed joyous effort for our life together. Kathy, who gives us a weekly yoga class, also seems to have woven some of the equanimity to sensations practice into her teaching... So in closing, no regrets for having begrudgingly suffered through it; any perseverence in my life is an accomplishment and things have shifted. So I appologise the universe at large for my rampant bemoaning of Goenka and the Technique, I think that it is a very useful tool for thought addicts like myself to become liberated, if not neccesarily one that I am disciplined enough to maintain in its philosphically minimalist austerity.
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