Day one and two I worked really hard at being in bliss. It still hurt.
By Day three I was out of the bubble and counting the days until it was over.
Day 10 and 11 I really began to appreciate the interim days of
depression and seemingly endless pain. Anu, the Estonian girl who
signed up first and started the four of us on this Vipassana journey,
told me she took three naps a day during the course, skipping some or
all of the non-required meditation sessions. She had three days of
real bliss and came out glowing, smiling, giving hugs and massages.
Prior, I would've described her as the most reserved of our group. I
looked at her, listened to her story, especially the part about
realizing that she wouldn't want to meditate if she was in so much
pain and decided to take it easy on herself, and looked at myself
beating myself up about missing ten minutes of a meditation.
I've learned so much, especially in hindsight. Inside of it, it felt
interminable and like it was already over. Going into it, I knew I
would survive, but Days 3-9 were hard. They did get progressively
easier, with less and less of the day feeling like a prison. My main
thought was to leave Australia, set up shop in Eugene somehow and um,
start living. I'm learning every time I have this thought not to trust
it, to attribute it to ego, since I don't feel I have a home in Eugene
or anywhere. Almost ten days of ego! Argh!
The schedule is strict - 4 am wake up, 2 hrs meditation before brekky,
3 hours after, 4 hours after lunch and 3 hours meditation and
discourse after tea break. It's smartly laid out around the comfort of
meals, with the sessions getting shorter with more breaks as the day
progresses. I looked forward to Goenka's evening discourse each
evening, feeling like it was feeding me exactly what I needed to hear
to help me make it through another day. In the evenings, I went into
the hall dreading being there and half way through the discourse I
would begin smiling and sitting straighter in my understanding and
practice of equanimity. There's nothing like pain to teach you about
impermanence and understanding that good and bad are just labels. I
never got to the point of enjoying my pain, as one of Goenka's
students told him, but I understood it was possible by the end.
The more time I have out of the retreat, the happier I am with the
result. Having space in my mind to simply be - wow! When I do metta
meditation, it's not a matter of bringing love into me, but allowing
it to express itself out of me without censoring the feeling,, or
judging or covering it up with shoulds. It was there all the time!
This is probably the most exciting thing to come out of sitting. Other
things are having the strong determination to have a morning and
evening practice, to be aware of my body and myself in the moment
instead of projecting what I think I should want on myself, realizing
the negative voice in my head is just that - a voice that I don't have
to listen to . How great. I realized I went in with expectations and
pushed myself to meditate more, better, whatever to "get the most out
of this experience." How can you get any more than what you're going
to get? Learning to be gentle on myself - now that's a lesson worth
learning. I'm getting an idea of what it means, and practicing
gentleness and kindness more and more on myself.
The four of us that did this sit have a special energy, a
synchronicity together, an energy that we have that feels so natural,
it's impossible for me to imagine us without it. Other people notice
our energy, and especially noticed when we left, the hole, the
emptiness. And when we returned, the energy changed again. Being a
part of this community that feels so natural, so like family, so open
and giving and compassionate, is what I imagine my own community will
feel like, whenever and wherever that happens.
Peace and love, my global family
