I spent the last 12 days (10 full days) at a silent meditation retreat in the southern California desert where I learned the art of vipassana meditation from S.N. Goenka and his assisting teachers. If 10 days sounds long, the practice used to be to teach the technique in 7 week retreats, gradually to adapt to the modern world this length was reduced and 10 days was found to be the minimum to effectively introduce the vipassana technique of meditation.
How I chose to take the course
More than 2 years prior I had never meditated in my life. I returned from a work trip to Hawaii for Open Whisper Systems to my home at the time of Zurich, Switzerland and my boyfriend at the time broke up with me the next day. He had been insistent on making long term plans and I had acquiesced, we were going to spend some time traveling the world together after I finished my Ph.D. His insistence on the long term vs. my reluctance made the break up quite a shock from my perspective, but intellectually I could see why we were indeed incompatible which was reinforced by my initial reluctance to commit to anything longer term than a few months and the fact that I very quickly moved on mentally; we went for a nice walk, and the next day I was fine without so much as a cry.
Physically was a different story, which came as the real shock to me. I lost my appetite and my ability to sleep (the jet lag certainly didn’t help, but I had done the trip, and many like it, countless times before without such issues). I manage to fall asleep, but it went 2, 3 and soon 4 days with me being nauseous at even the thought of food. I went to the pharmacy, and they prescribed me some pills. After 5 days I could eat food, but it seemed to be only white food I found appealing. It was an interesting looking shopping cart, especially as a strict vegetarian.
Somewhere in there I thought back to previous minor stomach issues: before my first trip to work in the Israel/Palestine territory I was simultaneously quite nervous about safety and thought I had developed an ulcer. My stomach pain went away after my first day on the ground. My migraines moreover, were associated with periods of buildup of stress (usually after the period was over). Moreover, I thought about how I was one of the best skaters technically on my roller derby team, but was held back in the sport itself by psychology: distraction or doubt on the track. It was clear the mind/body connection wasn’t straightforward in my personal experience; in some cases my body responded as my mind, in others they disagreed, and still others there was a time delay. In googling about ways to start to make the coupling more controlled, I stumbled upon meditation as one way to “mind hack” and started my journey, helped by the wonderful Headspace which I literally cannot recommend enough for an introduction to meditation on your own schedule.
Soon, I felt it easier to sleep and eat, and as I progressed I found it useful in managing stress and preparing for important and daunting tasks I faced at the time, such as roller derby matches and public speaking. While I rarely melt down emotionally as an adult, the SOS meditation in the app was invaluable in maintaining my composure at a critical juncture. Moreover, the routine of taking some time to myself everyday, was likely highly beneficial independent of any technique I was learning, and I seemed to be more focused, productive, at work and balanced in personal relationships. As I went into thesis preparation mode having found meditation so successful at mind hacking, I made sure meditation would be a near daily event, and coupled with me turning into basically a monk a year in advance, I was able to sail through my thesis submission and defense without getting so much as a headache (in my Bachelor’s thesis days I was hospitalized with migraines briefly so I planned a year in advance to forestall any such event).
As I began to meditate more, I would often bring it up in a relevant conversation (people often ask me “how do you get so much done?”, and part of it is “extreme discipline” for better or worse my meditation habit falling squarely in that sector) and a group of active meditators shared with me that they *really* wanted to do a vipassana retreat. After some discussion, I decided I would do this whenever I got the opportunity.
Taking a Vipassana Course
There are vipassana centers around the world, courses are free (room, board, teaching), run by volunteers, and last 10 days. The courses fill up extremely quickly. I saw there was a center near LA in the southern California desert in 29 Palms, and put on my calendar the day I needed to sign up, the day signups opened. I did sign up that day in March, as it seemed did most other participants for our August course.
After I signed up I started to share the plan with more curious people and came to an understanding of how difficult the endeavor would end up ultimately proving. Several friends had left (after 2, 4 days), the friends who had completed said it was worth it but commented on hallucinations, wanting to run, crying, and extreme physical pain. So I went into the retreat expecting two things:
- the novelty of being out of communication (at certain times of my life I programmed my house lights to turn on when I received emails from clients, which would turn on to wake me up so I could respond near instantaneously. Once, when I took about 1 hour to respond to an East Coast email sent by a colleague who emailed often due to presently scaling a 1800m peak in snowshoes, she thought I had quite possibly fell into a crevasse)
- this to be an extremely demanding, and not enjoyable but nevertheless rewarding activity
The course itself
I posted the emergency contact information of the center to my friends and family, setup an autorespond for my email, arrived at the center after a lovely 2 hour drive, and within a few hours, had turned in my phone, car keys, and even, voluntarily, my prescription migraine medication. All this was somehow liberating. After a few minutes of awkward small talk with the fellow female participants (we were already segregated by gender), I was looking forward to the “Noble Silence” which began that evening after an introductory meditation.
Silence fell.
…to be continued…
Part II is now live here: https://medium.com/@corbett/the-matter-behind-someone-who-chose-to-spend-10-days-in-the-mind-of-a-monk-406e857b1d68