Day Six

Task for the day:  Practice Vipassana in two directions (head to toes, toes to head; head to toes, toes to head …)

I didn’t sleep well last night (again); lots of tossing and turning.  I suspect this may come to bite me in the butt today.  We’ll see…

My 5:45 am meditation today was a combination of subdued and relaxed.  The experience was very dark, and floating – it was what I imagine the womb feels like; it was very peaceful and soothing.

During my 8 am meditation, it was suggested that if we are experiencing pain, we can use the pain itself as an object of meditation.  Instead of running away from the pain, or ignoring it, or wishing it would go away, we can get right up next to it and examine it, explore it, perhaps even “embrace” it as an opportunity to learn something about ourselves.  Well, what the heck, I’ve got an hour, right?  So, I decided to really look at the pain today, to study it non-judgmentally.  I picked a spot that pained me (my rear), and noticed precisely where it started on my body (just above my tailbone), where it ended on my body (the fold of skin between my rear cheeks and my upper-most back-of-the-leg area), and the exact quality of the pain (a combination of prickly numbness, uncomfortable pressure, and some mild pulsing/throbbing that comes and goes).  But here’s the wild part: As I was studying the pain, trying to get REALLY clear on what the experience of “pain” was like, the pain itself was not as bad.  It’s only when I shifted my attention/examination to something else that the “feeling” (experience?) of pain intensified, and became more uncomfortable and, well, painful.  Is that kooky or what?

Yet through all of this, it became amazing to me to learn how painful being sedentary is; I really don’t know how people do it all day, every day.

Sometime before lunch today, this random thought came to me: “This center is like meditation boot camp.”  And I mean to imply every analogy one can imagine.

Anywho…

After lunch we learned more about the “philosophy” of Vipassana:

1)      The goal of life is to have a good death (apparently so the last thought you have in this life sets you up nicely for your next life).  However, the only way to have a good death is to have a great [happy!] life.

2)      The goal of this meditation style specifically is to eliminate sankaras – reactions of either craving or aversion.  The thinking goes that if we can eliminate sankaras, we will reach a state of true peace/bliss/Nirvana – and that means we will have an end to the suffering that occurs in life, and have the absolute BEST death possible.

3)      So, “success” is defined in Vipassana as being in a state where we are equanimous to all sensations.  “Pleasant”, “unpleasant”, “happy”, “sad” are all irrelevant; the sensations that arise do not matter at all – what matters is our reaction to them (and specifically, that we DON’T react to any of them.  I.e., we don’t try to avoid the painful ones, we don’t cling to the positive/”good” ones; we don’t crave or desire or avoid ANYTHING).

Now, I’m not about to get into a discussion of re-incarnation, re-birth, the “real” goal/aim/purpose/meaning of life, or any other theological/belief discussion.  What I think the purpose of today’s teaching was for ME as it applies to my meditation journey, and my life in general, was to help me learn about and practice equanimity – i.e., accepting everything that comes my way, whether I “like” it or not.  FULL acceptance.  “Radical acceptance”, as Jon Kabat-Zinn calls it.

For example: Do I feel like I am “ready” to go home right now, and skip the remaining five days of this experience?  Yes.  Do I want to leave?  Yes.  But a part of me is willing (and wanting) to trust this process, to experience all of it; because I just believe that it is designed to teach me something every single day.  And if I leave early, what important life lesson might I possibly miss?  I don’t want to short-change myself.

(Mid-afternoon) Uh oh.  I feel like I am getting ill. Suddenly I feel trembly/shaky, simultaneously hot/feverish and cold/chilly, and a strong urge to sleep.  Walking the three minutes from my room to the meditation hall was exhausting, and trying to focus in my meditation was really a struggle.  Uh oh.

About 45 minutes into the meditation, I thought, “I just want to go home.  I just want my life back.”  Uh oh.

And yet, I also don’t want to miss out on the rest of the experience.  I’m over halfway done; can I hang in there a few more days?  Just a few more days?

Mind over matter… I’ll tough it out tonight, and see what the morning brings.  I can do this.  I can do this.

[Full disclosure: I had some difficulties at dinner, and basically went into a tailspin (mindspin) about this whole experience.  I bounced everywhere internally.  I’m not going to post all of the insanity – if you are a close friend/family member and want to hear the details, let me know and I’ll likely share with you; suffice to say, at the 6 pm meditation session, I approached the teacher and told her I thought I was getting the flu, and perhaps it would be best if I left the center and drove home so as not to make anyone else sick.  She smiled at me, and said, “Well, do you think you could hang on until the end of this evening’s discourse?” (The discourse ends at 8:30 pm; so, stay in the hall for another 2 ½ hours.)  I said I could; and after the discourse, I felt slightly better.  When the teacher and I re-connected at 8:30 pm, she said that sometimes this meditation experience brings up emotional “stuff” that then sometimes manifests physically, like headaches, nausea, etc.  She said I could take my temperature, and if I was running a fever I could go home; but if I wasn’t, she really encouraged me to stay.  She analogized the experience to an operation; and if I left at this point in the process, it would be like me leaving the operating room after the surgeon has opened up my chest and was in the middle of fixing my internal bleeding - but had not yet completely finished the mending, nor had a chance to close up and bring me out of the anesthesia safely.  So I said I would stay through the night, and see how I felt in the morning.  And when the morning came, I was willing to continue on with the experience.  So, we move on to Day Seven...]