January 8, 2009
Doing a Vipassana meditation retreat
At last count, I've done over 20 Vipassana meditation retreats. I did my first in 1983. By that time I had been meditating for over a dozen years, but I never taken the opportunity to go away on a retreat and spend 10 days doing nothing but meditating for 14 hours a day or more.
In America, there are two primary lineages that most people will run into when exploring Vipassana meditation. The first was made popular by a teacher from Burma called Mahasi Sayadaw and is taught through the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. Most people know this practice as mindfulness practice, and the retreats include periods of sitting meditation, where you attend to whatever arises in your awareness and note or label it (things like "thinking," "sensation," "sound," etc.). There are also periods of walking meditation, where you pay attention to the lifting and moving and placing of each footstep.
My favorite joke from a retreat that I did at IMS is that the teacher, Ruth Denison, had been talking about doing only one thing at a time. And when she would say this, you could see everybody nodding their head with the idea that that was the best way to live, just doing one thing at a time, very slowly and methodically with full attention. One morning during breakfast, a student noticed that Ruth was eating oatmeal while she was reading the newspaper. Quite upset, the student walked over and confront the teacher. "You told us were only supposed to be doing one thing a time, and here you are eating your oatmeal while you're reading the newspaper."
Almost confused Ruth looked up at student and said, "Yes. I'm only doing one thing right now. I'm eating my oatmeal while I'm reading my newspaper."
The second Vipassana meditation lineage also comes from Burma — from a teacher named U Ba Khin — and has been made most well-known by one of Ba Khin's students, S. N. Goenka, and is taught at the Insight Meditation Center in Shelbourne Falls, Massachusetts and other IMC locations around the country and the world. Vipassana meditation retreats in the U Ba Khin lineage involved four days of developing concentration by observing the sensations of breathing. And then the remainder of the 10-day course involves observing sensations throughout the body. There's no walking meditation, merely hours of sitting either in a meditation cell or in a group in the meditation hall, with a discourse given by Goenka (or a videotape of him if the course is being run by an assistant teacher).
Before I did my first meditation retreat. I had done a lot of reading to anticipate what might or should happen. All I can tell you is that in the 20 courses I've done, what actually happened was never even remotely like what I imagined anticipated or hoped for.
The best suggestion I can give if you're considering doing at a Vipassana meditation retreat is give up any idea that you know what'll happen or, even better, since it's impossible to give up an idea, just know that whatever you think will happen, won't. Something else will happen, guaranteed.
Maybe the second best suggestion I can give is to realize that a meditation retreat is an unusual situation and is not real life. What I mean is that expecting to maintain whatever you experience during a meditation course after you return to your daily life — with work and family and bills and television — is not realistic… in the same way that the way you experience yourself on vacation is not the same as the way you experience yourself at home. And while a vacation adds to your overall enjoyment of life, you don't expect to run your entire life with that same sense of novelty and excitement and relaxation you experience on vacation. Let your meditation course experience be the same.
Related to this second suggestion is the following: if your first Vipassana meditation retreat is mind blowing and seems life-changing, don't go telling all your friends how your life is changed and how they need to do what you've just done. The odds are pretty good that in a couple of weeks some of those changes that you found will her have faded. Maybe not entirely, but enough so that rather than being a completely new direction for your life, it may be just a small detour or small adjustment. You don't want to be "the boy who cried 'life changing!'"
Not only will keeping quiet for a few weeks save you the embarrassment of your friends seeing that you are still subject to getting angry in traffic or frustrated by relationships after your "life-changing event" but, more importantly, if in fact your life does change dramatically, the unmistakable signs of that will be more attractive than anything you could possibly say.
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Comments on Doing a Vipassana meditation retreat »
After his joke about Ruth Denison, Mr. Sashen failed to mention that the three students given transmission by U Ba Khin to teach and who taught in America were not just Goenka, but also Robert Hover and Ruth Denison. Later, after U Ba Khin died, Ruth was "excommunicated," for teaching men (she was told she could only teach women), and also, I believe, for adding her well-known use of movement to vipassana practice at her retreats, integrated from her work in Sensory Awareness with Charlotte Selver.
John Coleman was also authorized to teach in America.
The reasons for the various teachers ending their relationships with each other is, I've found, more heresay and rumor than fact. Ruth had taught numerous co-ed courses during the time that all the different teachers were working together.