When I signed up for a meditation course at
the Illinois Vipassana Meditation Center, I was hardly expecting a
peaceful, relaxing vacation. It would be meditation all day, every
day, for 10 days; I was accustomed to half an hour a day, max. But
I assumed that if people who’d never meditated before were
welcome, I should have no problem.
I’d heard that the course was
life-changing, that vipassana meditation was capable of alleviating all
addictions and anxieties. It’s even reformed hardened
criminals, as documented in the film Doing
Time, Doing Vipassana,in which
inmates and guards in India’s prisons who take the course are
shown at the end hugging one another and sobbing with joy. After
procrastinating for three years, I finally decided to take the
course last winter, when I was in the grip of chronic insomnia and feeling desperate.
The center in Pecatonica, Ill., west of
Rockford, is one of only four outside California that presents vipassana courses as
taught by Satya N. Goenka. An Indian teacher raised in Burma (now
Myanmar), Goenka has been a main force in spreading vipassana around the
world. Vipassanais a form of Buddhist meditation practiced mostly
in Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, but Goenka’s
nonreligious courses may be taken by people of all beliefs. The
Illinois center opened in January 2004, offering the course to 20
students a month. Last fall a dormitory and dining hall were added
to accommodate 50 students, thanks to a generous donation from a
veteran student. The courses are free of charge, and donations are
entirely voluntary; in fact, they are not accepted until the course
is completed. I had nothing to lose but 10 days of my time.
A day or two before departing, I
studied the meditation schedule posted on the
center’s Web site. Somehow I had overlooked the fact that the
morning wakeup call was at 4 a.m. The first meditation session was
scheduled for 4:30 to 6:30. Two hours straight! Breakfast followed, and
then there were two more sessions before lunch at 11 — one for an
hour and the other for an hour and a half. My anticipation was changing
from wondering whether it would be a transformative experience to
whether I’d be able to survive the ordeal at all.
Still, my spirits were high as I drove north
from Springfield on a sunny, warm afternoon in January. A thin
layer of fog suddenly appeared in the late afternoon about 30 miles
from Rockford. By the time I reached the center, my car was
enveloped in darkness and mist and a light rain was falling. After
registering, I proceeded to unload my car about 50 yards from the
dorm in a downpour accompanied by rather alarming crescendos of lightning and thunder. I could’ve taken
the bizarre weather as a bad sign, but for some reason it seemed to
herald something powerful.
The next day was the longest of my
life. My back had had enough meditating by lunchtime, and, judging
from the sounds of rustling, pillow-plumping, and sighing that
punctured my concentration about 15 minutes into each session, many
of the other students felt the same way. There was a merciful
hour’s break after lunch but then two more meditation
sessions and two more after dinner. Fortunately, every other
session or so, we were allowed to meditate in our rooms if we
wished and to lie down on our beds for up to five minutes if our
backs needed a rest. This was a bit of indulgence for novice
meditators; although we were told not to fall asleep and to leave
our doors open to allow the house manager to check on us, I fell
asleep several times with no repercussions.
Despite my discomfort, I felt rejuvenated by
the first technique we were taught, which involved focusing on the
breath as it enters and exits the nostrils. I had meditated on my
breath in the past, but this teaching was more specifically focused
on sensing the breath as it passes through the nostrils and onto
the upper lip. This slight shift generated a wonderful feeling of
aliveness, as if restoring something I’d lost during years of
intense mental activity.
An assistant teacher sat at the front of the
room meditating with us, looking ethereal wrapped in a white
blanket. She answered questions during breaks and played
instructions from Goenka on audiotape. As he narrowed our attention
to a smaller and smaller area of skin, part of me continued to
luxuriate in it, but my mind was becoming bored. It was running out
of things to think about, which was the design of the course, the
reason for the long list of rules that might strike an American
mind as harsh, even puritanical.
We had all taken a vow of silence, which
meant no talking to other students, not even gestures or glances.
This would deprive the mind of the interactions with other people
that fuel our thoughts. Settling the mind to as little activity as
possible allows something else to come through. Anyone who’s
tried to stop his or her thoughts knows how difficult it is to
achieve for very long. The egotistical mind, like the computer HAL
in 2001: A Space Odyssey, hates to relinquish control, is always striving
to return — not realizing that the ship’s well-being is
better served by letting go.
Men and women were segregated in the dorm and
dining hall to prevent the musings about the opposite sex that
often arise without our realizing it. All sexual activity was
prohibited, of course, in addition to the consumption of alcohol
and other intoxicants. We were fed vegetarian meals prepared by
volunteers to help us conform to our vow to avoid killing anything
during the course. Any distraction from the work of meditation was
banned, including radios, TVs, computers, and other electronic
devices, even in our dorm rooms. That was easy for me, but not
being allowed reading material was a real hardship I’d never
experienced before.
We had come from all over the Midwest, some
from as far south as Tennessee and North Carolina, to a small patch
of land in the northernmost reaches of Illinois to voluntarily
circumscribe our lives to the bare minimum — as few material
possessions as possible, as little activity as possible. The cold,
snowy weather further constrained our movements during break times
to a walking path of about 100 yards from the dorm to the dining
hall and meditation hall. This place with its heavy snows, foggy
air, and capricious weather was pristinely beautiful, but it was
unlike the Illinois I was used to; it seemed more like Scandinavia.
I was in the middle of nowhere, on an alien
planet where people didn’t speak or interact. Barred even
from making eye contact, I furtively watched the other students at
mealtime, forming opinions and judgments about them on scant
evidence. Their faces were eerily expressionless as they went about
getting their food. I was seeing what they really look like, at
home alone without their social masks.
By the end of the first day, having replayed
recent events of my life ad nauseam, my mind was becoming desperate for more grist for
its mill. At some point I became amused by its attempts to come up
with something — anything — to think about. It all
seemed like folderol. In this larkish mood, I wanted to burst out
laughing at everything, from the odd noises people made during
meditation to the silly little pillow I brought to meditate on.
I was able to release my pent-up
laughter with the other students at night during the discourses
Goenka gave on videotape, in which he put the day’s work into
perspective and provided inspiration to continue to the end. He was
quite funny in characterizing the human ego and what goes through
people’s minds on each day of the course. Most want to quit
at some point, which is why students must agree to complete all 10
days before taking the course. Goenka himself, who was a successful
businessman when he took his first course in 1956, wanted to quit
on the first day.
Overcoming aversion to hardship and
deprivation — and negative experiences in general — is
one of the goals of the meditation. Goenka explained that the
effort to hold on to pleasurable experiences and avoid the
unpleasant are the source of human misery. The cravings and
aversions we develop through our life become rooted deep in our
unconscious. When we can’t have what we crave, we become
angry and obsessed with getting it. By the same token, when we are
confronted with something we don’t want, we react blindly to
stop it or get away from it.
I knew that the cause of my insomnia was
anxiety about things going wrong, about unpleasant experiences
coming my way. It had gotten to the point that the fear of insomnia
alone could bring it on. If the possibility of not sleeping
occurred to me the night before an important event, I’d worry
that I wouldn’t be able to function the next day without
sleep. Overnight travel had become a reliable trigger of the
dreaded ceiling stare, and my trip to Pecatonica was no exception.
As luck would have it, I was paired in the
dorm with a noisy roommate who had a strange disregard for the
rules, staying up past the lights-out time of 9:30 p.m., showering
or washing clothes until 10. Although we had separate sleeping
compartments with doors for privacy, we shared a bathroom. I would
fall asleep soon after 9:30, only to be wakened by loudly closing
doors when she finished in the bathroom. I lay for hours, unable to
get back to sleep, stewing over her inconsiderateness.
After two nights of disturbances, as well as
my roommate’s puttering about during meditation sessions in
our room, I told the house manager, Ginger, about it. She thanked
me for coming forward, noting that the rules are important for
fostering meditation. My roommate reformed her ways for a few days,
but, by the sixth night, she was pushing 10 again. Awakened after
about 15 minutes of sleep, I nonetheless remained calm, inspired by
Goenka’s message that night about the necessity of facing up
to our mental negativity if we are ever to cleanse ourselves of it.
Vipassanameditation,
he said, shines a light on the demons hiding in the dark recesses
of our unconscious as a result of cravings and aversions that have
become deeply rooted; once they are faced calmly, without fear or
distress, they lose their power and slink away. Goenka likened the
unconscious to a dangerous wild animal that must be tamed with
meditation. Even if a person studies holy writings and leads a
moral life, the untamed unconscious can erupt in a volcano of
suppressed emotion.
I lay in bed meditating using the technique
we had begun learning only the day before. The first technique,
called anapana, was for the purpose of settling the mind to equanimity
— “equanimous mind,” as Goenka put it. We were to
revert to anapana whenever we were perturbed or emotionally upset, but
after the third day, we focused on vipassana, the core technique of the course. It required a
painstaking inventory of the body, seeking the subtlest of
sensations.
It was so difficult at first that I wanted to
quit and run away, but by the next day I was sensing what I took to
be the subtle vibrations that Goenka described as occurring
constantly throughout the body. Vipassanameditation is simply a tool for sharpening
the mind to detect them, he told us. In a discourse that touched on
subatomic physics, he explained that the subtle vibrations are a
link between body and mind and therefore the key to reforming the
mind.
What I sensed was similar to tingling, but
more rarefied, perhaps electrical in nature. The vibrations were
inexplicably comforting; Goenka warned that even they could become
addictive. He stressed just observing everything calmly as it is,
without trying to force the subtle vibrations or to avoid the
unpleasant sensations.
As I lay meditating after being wakened, I
was amazed at how relaxed I felt. After an hour or so, however,
frustration seeped in, and I soon gave in to my anxiety. “Why
me?” I asked. “Why, out of 25 women, do I get stuck
with the loud, nutty one?”
I slept only two or three hours that night.
The next morning I told Ginger that the problem persisted, and
asked whether another room was available, in view of my insomnia.
She said that she would check into it and suggested consulting the
assistant teacher for help with the insomnia, which I did that day
after lunch. As I sat in the waiting room with the muted sounds of
another student talking to the teacher in the background, my
roommate walked in and sat down. I could not believe my bad luck.
Was she the personification of my demon insomnia out to torment me?
When it came my turn, I alluded vaguely to
“my roommate situation,” as having inflamed my
insomnia, which was the reason I’d taken the course in the
first place. “Isn’t it strange,” the teacher
responded, with a sympathetic smile, “how we’re given
what we need to deal with?” I nodded laughing: Something
similar had occurred to me earlier that morning. After I described
my insomnia, she gave me a meditation tip from her own experience
with sleeplessness. That night I thought I saw my roommate glare at
me as we passed in the meditation hall, but it was all worth it
when she went to bed at 9:30 and I was able to sleep soundly.
Over the next few days, while
practicing yoga after lunch in my room, I looked out on the snowy
gray landscape at women trudging back and forth on the path to the
dining hall, and I let the gloomy feelings that come with winter
rise to the surface. I’ve always found Illinois winters
particularly depressing, with their gray skies and bone-chilling
cold. Perhaps it’s the impulse to avoid wintertime bleakness
and death that fuels the holiday shopping and drinking binges.
The gray Midwest doeshave the highest
rate of alcoholism and drug addiction in the country, according to
the most recent U.S. government figures. Coming from a long line of
Irish drinkers, I know that escape from negative feelings is a
prime motivation for alcoholics. They drink to alleviate anxiety in
one form or another. The alcohol allows them to experience more
than they would sober; indeed, in light of Goenka’s
teachings, the unconscious may drive a person to drink if its
desire for experience is repressed. As the addiction progresses,
the anxiety looms larger in their sober lives, and they limit their
lives more and more to familiar experiences. After a while the only
place they feel happy and safe is under the influence. That might
explain at least in part the Midwestern predilection for security
and staying put.
Vipassanareconditions
the mind to embrace new experiences instead of resisting them. The
direct experience of fluctuating sensations leads to the
realization that life is suffused with change. Indeed, it is the
reason life is so wondrous. Change makes it possible to shed the
dark aspects of the personality that cause suffering, to transform
criminals into compassionate human beings. When the demons depart,
long-buried love and compassion rise in their place, Goenka told
us, and the desire to serve others becomes strong.
The success of the vipassana prison program in
India over the last 10 years has encouraged prisons in Taiwan,
Alabama, Seattle, and San Francisco to try it. A 2003 study of the
Seattle facility found that only 56 percent of prisoners who took
the vipassanacourse returned to jail, compared with 75 percent
for the rest of the prison population. The effectiveness of the
prison courses may be partly due to the fact that untreated
addictions are a major cause of recidivism.
On the 10th day, the silence was
broken at 10 a.m., the chattering began, faces lit up, and I was
surprised at how wrong my impressions of my fellow students had
been. Soon after I introduced myself, my roommate apologized for
disturbing me and explained that she is by nature a noisy person
who is discomfited by quiet. It all seemed terribly petty by this
point. She’d emigrated from Moscow in the 1980s and had only
taken the course to accompany her son, a veteran of numerous 10-day
courses. We ended up laughing together and exchanging e-mail
addresses.
The next morning we had one last 4:30 session
in the meditation hall before leaving. As I walked down the path in
the dark on freshly fallen snow glittering exquisitely beneath the
lights, I inhaled the pristine cold, the purity of winter, from
which all things rise again. I was reminded of Christmas —
not the commercial holiday of recent years but the Christmases of
my youth, when I felt the true spirit of the season.
I returned home with renewed energy and
excitement about life. As I continued practicing the meditation, I
became aware that my anxiety was stoked when I tried to cram too
much into each day, leaving my body knotted in tension. It has
taken an incredible amount of effort, with countless backslidings,
to slow down and experience life fully, but when I do, it’s
magic — like seeing the eternity in each moment. That, for
me, is the best Christmas present ever.
As for insomnia, the struggle continues off
and on, with decidedly less anxiety and hopelessness. The vipassana course is
only the beginning of the road to recovery and must be supplemented
at home with daily meditation for an hour in the morning and at
night — which is a breeze after 10 full days of it. Having
experienced the power of a calm mind, I can envision a time when my
demon insomnia will jump ship to seek out more turbulent seas.
For more information on the Illinois
Vipassana Meditation Center in Pecatonica, visit
www.pakasa.dhamma.org.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2005.
