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I Only Freaked Out Once, or What I Liked About My Recent Vipassana Course
So it was only a three day course. I don’t know if that made things somehow better or not. I found the first few days extremely challenging. I thought, “I really did this for ten days?” I couldn’t really believe I’d lived under such a schedule.
It works like this: You have to complete a ten day course to be able to attend the shorter so-called “old student” courses. Believe me, I would have gone for the three day from the start had they let me.
Here’s how the day looks:
4:00 a.m. ————————- Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 a.m. —————- Meditate in Dharma Hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 a.m. —————- Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 a.m. —————- Group meditation in Dharma Hall
9:00-11:00 a.m. ————— Meditate in Dharma Hall or in your room according to teacher’s instruction
11:00 -12 noon —————- Lunch break
12 noon - 1:00 p.m. ——— Rest, private Q&A session with teacher
1:00-2:30 p.m. —————– Meditate in Dharma Hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 p.m. —————– Group meditation in Dharma Hall
3:30-5:00 p.m. —————– Meditate in Dharma Hall or in your room according to teacher’s instruction
5:00-6:00 p.m. —————– Tea break
6:00-7:00 p.m. —————– Group meditation in Dharma Hall
7:00-8:15 p.m. ——————Teacher’s Discourse in Dharma Hall
8:15-9:00 p.m. —————— Group meditation in Dharma Hall
9:00-9:30 p.m. —————– Open Q&A session in Dharma Hall
10:00 p.m. ———————— Light out
It’s a lot of meditation. There’s a lot of time to just be being with yourself and oh my gosh, that’s a challenge!
But I did say I was going to mention what I liked about my recent course.
I love the silence. It’s probably my favorite thing about the course. And y’all know, I’m a talker. I noticed that before we take the vow of silence and after it’s lifted, there are some folks who are just right ready to chat up a storm. That (maybe surprisingly) is not me. In fact, usually after the vow is lifted, I’m not really interested in talking for a while. It gives me a headache. I wondered, though, if some of us talkers flock to such courses to get a break from our mouths and the noises they generate in our heads and in the heads of others?
I love the land. The Southwest Vipassana Center is located out in the country about 40 miles from Dallas. Next door is a farm that’s home to a lovely bunch of cows. They are also one of my favorite parts of the course. When I was there in the spring, the young cows were so sweet to watch with their mommies. Now they’re bigger and still friendly as ever. Also, this time they were making up for our silence with lowing and their own chanting. The night they got into singing with the coyotes was amazing. I stood out in the crisp moonlight, aware of the women around me with their jaws dropping as well (though we we weren’t to be interacting with one another, so it was a strange moment), hearing the coyotes call from all sides of the women’s residence.
All of this is to say that the location couldn’t be more sweet, beautiful and conducive to such study as we’re doing there.
I love being fed. Though I found myself more cranky this trip, I was grateful for the meals. Perhaps especially the breakfast. The food is hot and generous, with lots of fresh vegetables and grains. Being an old student I no longer eat after noon and that was, as expected, challenging, but overall it was okay. Everyone was (or should I say wasn’t) doing it.
There was the one day when I was especially hungry in the evening - and cranky - and one woman who had a special dietary need had an apple. Her crunching into that apple was like listening to a jackhammer through an amplifier. I didn’t want to be anywhere near her, not so much in rejection of the crunching sound, but more because I wanted her apple.
” … no craving, no aversion … ” yeah right.
But I do deeply appreciate being cared for in the way of not having to think about making food or cleaning it up. It’s very generous.
I love the women’s residence. The rooms are clean, simple, ample and, actually, nice. The showers are hot and are warmly tiled. The floors are inviting for those times when you absolutely have to go into child’s pose to stretch out your back from the sitting of the day. Every woman has her own room at Southwest which is a huge gift for times when one needs to be alone for a freakout. This trip I had my freakouts in my cell in the Pagoda and in the Meditation Hall (okay, so I guess that counts as two. There may have been one or two more; who knows? Everything arises to pass away). Last time, however, I was grateful for the haven of my room to wig, cry, get frustrated, create possibilities. Whatever I needed to do. Keep breathing. You know.
I love the feeling I have after. During the course there is a lot of struggle and extreme challenge. There are also highly peaceful moments and other just neutral. It’s hard to tell while the course is going on what you’re really getting from it, but coming out, even after just three days, I feel as though my psyche has been given a good bath and my dramatic world has been scrubbed away, at least for the moment.
I went into this course feeling as wide open as ever, having seen only a few days before the universe tremble into the mirage that it is. Still, attachments of all kinds become apparent when quiet all the time. I predicted I’d have freakouts in the areas of relationship and money, and I did.
My biggest freakout, though, had nothing like that attached to it.
I was in the meditation hall on Saturday night (the same evening of the apple eater). The weather had been cold and windy and so I was dressed in multiple layers and was unsure how comfortable I’d be in the hall. During the group sits, eventually, you sit without moving for an hour. The instruction is to sit without opening your eyes, legs or hands. Overall, I’m pretty good at this now - up until about 45/50 minutes. At home I usually sit for about 50 - 55, so about this time in the group sits, I start wondering when we’re going to be released. But most of the time, like I said, I’m pretty good at it. I actually like it.
Not this night. I was hot. There was a ticking clock. The people behind me had bodies making gurgling noises. I put in ear plugs (so much for not moving my hands). I got so frustrated I took off several layers of clothes (eyes came open then, too). With the ear plugs in my own breathing was bothering me. I was freaking out.
I opened my mouth as if to yell and made like I was yelling, only I couldn’t make any noise. Forget about trying to do Vipassana. I started crying.
But I couldn’t make any noise then either. Okay, let me be fair, I was making noise. I was sighing heavily, surely to the agitation of the gurglers behind me. That, combined with my fidgeting, increased my stress and guilt about the whole experience. I wanted to apologize, but, of course, there’s no talking, no eye contact, no nothing.
I did notice after the course was over that the two women who’d been seated behind me didin’t really give me the time of day. So I decided it went back to the freakout session and they were hating on me. Oh well.
So what did I like about the freak out?
What’s nice is there’s no one to talk to about it. There’s no one to confess to, no one to tell a story. There’s no one to forgive or attempt to soothe or distract. There’s no journaling or phone calling or going in the bathtub or running. Nothing. No Ryan Adams tour blog. I mean, NO-THING.
So it passes.
When you don’t fight it.
In that evening session I accepted that I was uncomfortable and distressed and stopped trying to practice the specific Vipassana technique and just sat there. Shortly after that time, the session ended. Wow. It was like I’d been through the ringer. One nice thing about it, like I said, is that there was no topic. This wasn’t about the man I love not doing what I want him to do. It wasn’t about my lack of regular income or my debt or my not being creative enough to generate a trip to the U.K. for the Cardinals’ fall tour.
In Vipassana we talk about sankaras, or reactions to craving or aversion that build up in your mind and have you repeatedly react to these triggers each time you are exposed to the influence that generated the sankara in the first place. We have also learned that through this practice of observing sensations on the body without reacting, we will drive up old sankaras, and, if we continue to observe without craving, without aversion, they will arise and pass away.
This is very attractive to me because, as I heard it, that means we can clear some oooold shit without having to review it, without having to go into further psychotherapy about how our mom left us at a young age or how as a child (and sometimes even still as an adult) I was afraid of my father. Stuff like that. It’s all drama and story anyway. This practice can neutralize our reaction even to that oooold stuff. Joy!
So that evening in the mediation hall when I had the freakout about nothing and eventually allowed it to be, I saw that perhaps this was just some old sankara arising and passing away. Simple as that. When we got up from sitting I went walking back to the residence for a quick break before the evening discourse and noticed that I felt clear. Throughout the discourse that evening, my energy was light, grounded, open to receiving information. Pretty amazing.
So this is what I like about Vipassana: everything arises to pass away. All form, all matter, including our emotions and body sensations and thoughts are annicha: impermanent. “Why get so attached to something that is so ephemeral?”
Ha! As I typed that, my mind said, “yeah right.”
:-)
Keep practicing.
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