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Yusef here. I’ve been teetering on doing one of these 10 day silent Vipassana (‘mindfulness’) retreats for a while, with THE LAMEST excuse for not going for it: “I’d have too many emails and shit to sort through when I’m back”. Precisely the thing you’re supposed to be detaching from…

Meanwhile, we’ve seen 2 Propane Athletes complete it and experience some transformative results. This is Al’s experience, serving as enough of an advertisement to just do away with the excuses and go for it.

Retreat

I had to walk the last hundred metres. After a sleepless overnight flight from Sydney, surviving three hours of mountainous Subcontinental roads from Colombo to Kandy, the last stretch of dirt road was impassable for my van driver courtesy of the long tail of the Sri Lankan wet season. It was a fitting metaphor. This was no yoga-slash-surf retreat. To get where I wanted to, I’d have to do some work and it was gonna get messy.

Vipassana Retreats, I’d heard, were ten days of meditating, no talking allowed. Sounded tough but I was determined – and now I’d committed I was not going to suffer the embarrassment of telling everyone I bailed. Most people’s first reaction to the thought is an involuntary yelp. But silence was the easy bit. It was the remaining roster of rules no one told me about that made me sweat. No touching, eye contact or communicating in any way with anyone. Not the staff, not the seventy other meditators. No sexual activity, no lying – c’mon, I’ve been lying about my sex life for years. And I have a thing for bohemian chicks, but they separated the boys and girls to remove temptation.

No killing – ever tried to detach a leech with magnanimous kindness? No exercise – I was in the middle of hardcore training for my first marathon. No reading, writing or technology. You had to hand in your worldly comforts to the office for safekeeping; extravagances like your phone, books, food, pens and paper.

This is the one rule I broke: I used a stick and blood from a leech bite to jot an epiphany on the back of a receipt one lunchtime.

You are provided an ascetic concrete room actually called a ‘cell’, a thin mattress and just two meals a day. Though the food was amazing. This doesn’t include the ‘dinner’ of black tea and three dry crackers, which you don’t even get if it’s your second retreat. In fairness, come the end of a day’s hard meditating, they’re the best crackers you’ll ever have. If you’ve seen the bit about crackers in Eddie Murphy’s Raw, just like that.

And it was all totally free, the whole ten day extravaganza. Though, like most people, I donated my estimate of what my stay cost them. Ten times that would still be a screaming bargain considering what I got out of it.

The days were highly structured and the practice was explained every step of the way through grainy cassette to CD recordings from the late teacher. It’s taught in exactly the same way in the hundreds of centres the world over. Awake at 4:00am, lights out at 9:30pm. About ten hours of meditation a day, over eight sessions, seated on a cushion on the floor, no moving allowed during meditation sessions. Each day finishes of with a ninety minute video lecture on anything from the history of Vipassana, to practical tips for meditating, tothe nature of the self. So even if you want to break the rules you’ve hardly the time or energy. Oh and to top it off my course started on the 23rd of December. I skipped Christmas and New Year’s Eve. What possesses someone to give up ten days of precious annual leave and Christmas ham leftovers for this?

Anxiety

A decade earlier I’d decided it was time to get on top of my anxiety and depression. It was about to get me booted from uni and while all my mates were flourishing I was drowning. My psychologist later told me I was the hardest working anxiety client she’d ever had, a strangely proud moment. Eastern philosophies had played a big role after being exposed to them at the School of Practical Philosophy in Sydney.

My white, Aussie, middle-class up-bringing didn’t spend a lot of time on the true nature of the cosmos, self and love. The ideas had great therapeutic value and had proved to be endlessly practical. The School also taught me Transcendental Meditation which was a game changer for managing my brain. It took the sting out of the lows and made room for the best me to emerge.

Earlier on in the year of the Retreat I got kicked in the nuts with depression so hard it took me a fortnight to get out of bed and four months to stop grimacing. Six months later I’d taken up endurance running as therapy, work was going well and I was feeling myself again. The difficulty of that time and some years absence from The School had me missing the peace that came with the philosophising and meditation. My best me got lost in the mess. The time seemed right for a mental and spiritual cleanse. So I decided to substitute Christmas for a different spiritual holiday. Soon after I was walking up that muddy trail.

Struggle

Jump to day seven. Aching body. Constant rain and humidity has my cell and backpack mouldier than Alexander Fleming’s petri dish. Feet itching from leech bites. It’s 20 minutes before pretend-dinner. Outwardly I’m a picture of Buddhist serenity in a motionless, bolt upright half-lotus. Inwardly I’m having a full-on anxiety attack. My central concern is the sound of a non-existent mosquito that had been playing in my head for thirty-six hours.

On the flight over I’d listened to a podcast about a woman who drove herself to schizophrenia through stress. This was all the proof I needed that I’d lost it or at least broken a bit of my brain.

The teachings we’d received that the true nature of my being was beyond my mind and body was little comfort. I considered bailing, but figured the damage was already done and the finish was in sight so I pushed on. Later I found out I wasn’t the only one going through something like this.

So, what is this hellish meditation technique anyway? It’s based on Buddhist tradition but it’s in no way dogmatic or preachy. As their story goes, Buddha was a real guy, called Gautama. The son of a chief or king of some peripheral clan in India or Nepal 2500ish years ago. Following a hunch that there was more to life than his closeted, regal lifestyle, he went out into the world. Bing, bang, boom. He reached enlightenment through meditation and spent the rest of his life teaching the method to people in northern India.

His method is Vipassana. Modern teachers in this global network of centres contend that it’s the perfectly preserved version of Buddha’s practice.

While his method was bastardised through the ravages of time, in a backwater of Myanmar it was perfectly preserved, passed from teacher to student awaiting a prophesised rediscovery. In the second half of the 1900s it was chanced upon by a Burmese businessman, S. N. Goenka, who was the man to reintroduce it to the world.

A sort of chubby, grandfatherly, South-East Asian Dalai Lama. It’s his voice you come to love and hate as the narrator of each and every meditation session and his warmth and wisdom that rejuvenates you during the day end videos.

As a basic outline, the method starts with scanning your body, moving your awareness from the top of your head (inside joke for alumni) to the bottoms of your feet and back. Repeat. As you scan you must pause until you feel any sort of sensation on a small area of the body before moving on. You will find areas where you can’t feel anything. This is where the magic happens.

The theory goes that any external stimulus that comes in contact with the mind has to pass through the five bodily senses. As such, your mind and body are intrinsically linked and emotional baggage is stored also in the physical body.

The blank areas are the baggage made manifest that need to be let go (cravings and aversions in Buddhist-speak). It might take seconds or several reincarnation cycles (yup!), but as feeling floods the blank areas you can consider the trauma released and yourself marginally less messed up. New blanks appear, repeat till they’re all gone, welcome to enlightenment. You are now all loving, free from pain, free from desire, free from self, you just are.

Revelation

Now back to day seven mozzie brain. Long gone was the joy of day five when Hoes in Different Area Codes by Ludacris was on mental repeat. The mozzie noise was reaching a crescendo, my own personal string quartet screeching a horror movie score, the bit just before the bimbo gets it. Then. Pow! Pure awareness. You know the feeling when you avoid telling your boss for a week about how you messed up and when you tell her she couldn’t care less? Times that relief by a thousand plus your grandma telling you everything will be OK times a million.

The answers to four big life questions that I wasn’t even aware of were delivered to my conscious mind. My heart rate returned to normal. And the mozzie was gone! Even the incessant rain had stopped. Bird song suffused the meditation hall and monkeys were playing on the roof.

Up to that point my practice had been progressing well, matching benchmarks set by the teachers while the body language around me suggested others were struggling. The jerky stop and scan of the early days had become a smooth and relentless search and destroy mission on my blank spots. Wherever I directed my attention I could summon a warm tingly glow and visions of my body dissolving in an effervescent cloud. But the instant after my mini-absolution, my whole body was blank again, zero sensation. In the remaining three days I never got anywhere near bubbly clouds again. According to the instruction of Mr Goenka, I’d resolved enough small stuff that some big stuff came to the surface. I’d dramatically swept it aside and deeper miseries were vomited into the vacuum.

To write this piece I revisited the writings and memories of the months after The Retreat. I can hear the confused sceptic struggling to shoehorn the experience into a materialist world view. It was confronting. I mean, I was a huge Dawkins fan.

To me positive energy came from solar panels not organic veggies. As useful as meditation was I’d conceptualised it as nothing more than concentration practice. The world was black and white.

Enlightenment

Confronted with experiences I couldn’t explain away and those of a small number of other meditators; imaginary bugs crawling on their faces, stomach aches and the strangely common crushingly painful pressure on the bridge of the nose, I had to rethink things. I didn’t start believing in souls and positive vibrations but I opened up to the unexplained. I began to appreciate the depth of the mind-body connection, which has been incredibly enriching, not to mention useful. From learning to listen to my intuition. To releasing mental stress(which is just an expression of a fear) by finding and releasing it from its physical location in my body. To doing weights and finding the mind-muscle connection needed to really smash a set.

Just listen to the way Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about bicep curls, he’s clearly operating at a higher level than your average Bro.

We’re all wired for novelty and stimulation, and as cliched as it is to say, the modern world relentlessly exploits this. Vipassana retreats don’t come any shorter than ten days because even in times past the teachers recognised how long it takes to quell our monkey mind and make some progress. You need to be still with yourself and see what happens. Even if you don’t get imaginary bugs on your face, you’ll go deep and have no choice but to confront what arises and overcome it. I learnt then, and still believe today, that it’s part of being an adult to take steps towards enlightenment, small as they may be, in whatever way it makes sense to you

The whole cosmic-self thing is tough stuff to get your bean around. Whether you care for it or not becomes irrelevant. Your everyday self gains enough from the experience. On re-entering the normal world I was still me, but the best version. I’ve never felt so crisp and free.

I had zero filter and love was flowing out. I knew what to do in every situation. We’re all looking for peace, whether we know it or not. I can tell you it’s worth pursuing. It did wear off over the next five days. Which was OK because my mosquito had returned on day eight of the retreat, thankfully with less vigour, and I was happy to hear my little spirit animal go (I always hoped it’d be a skateboarding dragon). But the understanding was in my bones and when my meditation practice has been regular since (meaning 20 minutes a day for at least three weeks) I get some of that crispness back. This is not to say that standard meditation needs a Vipassana retreat to work. It doesn’t. The science is clear, meditation works. But a Vipassana retreat supercharges it

Finally, it showed me a side of reality my mind was closed to. You may or may not buy into the concept that the nature of reality as we commonly think about it is just a very convincing illusion and the real ‘you’ is somewhere beyond the meat suit you were born into or the monkey in your skull. But the experience of ten days meditating will certainly give you food for thought

Conclusion

So if you’re adventurous. If you’re into self-development. If you’ve done the first ten segments on the Headspace app. If you like psychedelics and yoga. If you like a mother of a challenge. If you can’t face another holiday to Ibiza with the lads. If you feel like there’s more to life. If you’ve ever had a shoulder ride during your favourite song at a gig and want that feeling to last longer. If you wanna be able to lie on your deathbed knowing you tried everything. You need to try this out. I’m definitely going back one day

It’s free and there’s one near you. www.dhamma.org