It had taken me 4 years of extensive research and soul-searching before I found myself a meditation technique that would fulfill my non-negotiable criteria:

1. no pay-per-insight commercialism;
2. no organized religion and all that comes wioth it involved;
3. no New-Age trinketry, such as magic crystals, secret names, mantras, holy rosaries, bewildering terminology in exotic languages;
4. no glorified self-persuasion, e.g., imagining a crystal Buddha inside your stomach;
5. no guru worship;
6. no statues or pictures of weird Oriental deities;
7. no consciousness-altering chemical enhancers;
8. no attempts to control my life through regimenting my sexuality or diet.

 

Amazingly enough, there IS such a technique, and learning it turned out one of the most worthwhile things I did in my life.

It is taught at Vipassana Meditation courses as taught by S.N. Goenka and his assistant teachers in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin.

The underlined passage is quite crucial as there apparently have been certain practioners who after finishing a Goenkan Vipassana course smelled money and are now offering the (hopefully) same technique for a consideration. Caveat emptor!

There are also cases of simple hijacking of the term when it is used to describe anything from sandalwood incense to bogus cult ideologies taught at money-milking retreats.

On Goenkan courses, 3 types of meditation are taught:

1. anapana sati — breath-observing meditation aimed at developing concentration;
2. vipassana — you use your sharpened concentration and dip it into your subconscious while staying totally aware. It is a truly amazing experience, once you get the gist of it. One of the crucial points is staying 'equanimous', in other words, you need to keep objectifying (distancing yourself) from subconscious experiences that can be possibly hurtful to your conscious Ego.
3. metta bhavana — literally "cultivation of loving kindness". This one is used to yank yourself from contemplating your own misery and suffering onto a sunnier wavelength.

The regular course lasts 10 days and is very demanding and strenuous. The wakeup call is at 4AM, last meal is at 11AM (tea and fruit at 5PM though) and the daily routine includes 10 hours of meditation. On top of such basic requirements as observing complete silence, abstaining from immoral acts and intoxicants and adhering to a strict daily schedule, the hardest thing you encounter in the course will be facing yourself.

There are no charges for the courses, donations are only accepted from those who have completed at least one course.

Truth be told, they do feed you a bare minimum of Buddhian ideology, but that is used to explain to you what is going on with your mind during the course. They make a sincere attempt at it and also it is told on a few occasions that the whole point is learning the technique while accepting their point of view is entirely up to you.

I did my 2 first courses back in 1999 at the Dhamma Kamala Center located in the rural province of Prachinburi, Thailand. Now, after a long lapse, I went for my refreshment course at Dhamma Pajjota in Northern Belgium.

A short video (5.7 MB) about the observation of breath and bodily sensations in this technique can be viewed with the free Quicktime movie player.

On benefits of meditation practice:

Personally, I use Vipassana as a tool for cleansing my mind of the so called "reactive patterns of behavior", the stock of accumulated emotional and physiological memories. They are recorded throughout our body and only our subconscious is aware of them. However, they have a profound infuence on how we behave and feel in our daily lives. Just think of anger bouts for no good reason, inexplicable "blues" spells or Freudian slips that we all experience from time to time.

Various approaches have been developed to deal with those, from Christian confession to classical psychoanalysis to dynamic psychotherapy to Dianetics coaching. They all have their merits and drawbacks, however, Vipassana is my choice one because:

• it's highly efficient;
• the results are immediate and obvious;
• you do not have to rely on a practioner/shrink/coach;
• it costs nothing;
• the methodology is clear and simple, sans psychobabble or New Age gobbledygook.

The benefit of such cleansing is the ability to stay in a calmly aware and emotionally balanced state of mind during your waking hours and beyond. By 'beyond' I mean the ability to fall asleep at the drop of a hat and enjoy deep, sound sleep until the alarm clock brings you back to the mundane reality. One more welcome change is that you also need less hours of sleep to feel rested and refreshed.

Having your mind well balanced, unperturbed by emotions has a four-fold merit:

• the overall feeling of serene and mindful happiness - not quite a rush of adrenaline, nor victorious eation and nothing like abandon of intoxication or substance-induced bliss. This one you have to experience to know what it is like.
• rational, thought-through reaction to daily events and situations - you do not fall into your usual routine patterns of behavior nor do you get so easily swayed by a rash of emotions, in other words, you manage to"keep cool" throughout the day, increasingly so without having to remind yourself to do as much;
• more tolerance towards minor and even major annoyances and discomforts that previously would have spoilt your day, week, even life, but now do not even amount to the scenery outside your train window;
• improved decision-making ability - it is amazing when you start noticing how quickly and coldly your brain starts performing, taking very adult, Solomonic choices when before you would have gotten bogged by emotional biases, indecisiveness and unsorted-out priorities.

Another additional benefit is an increased attention span. By nature, we are monkeys and our attention never stays on one object for longer than 3-5 seconds at a stretch, constantly swinging from one branch onto another.

To illustrate this on a practical example: sit down, close your eyes and see how long you can keep your mind observing your breath without switching to think of something else.

You are lucky if you will just remember to come back to observing your breath in 5-10 minutes. Most likely, you will get bored in a couple minutes and get up to go and do something else, thus effectively failing the test.

The increased concentration, the ability to keep your mind focused on existing in the present moment, brings about 2 major changes:

1. "Cleared up" sensations: that applies to our sensory, visual or taste facilities or even aesthetical apprecitation. While the untrained mind neary constanty stays "dimmed", "hazed", even without us noticing that,
2. The fact that your mind does not travel any more between regurgitating on the past events and anticipating future ones results in the boosted enjoyment of "living here and now", the ability that we, more often than not, never miss since we neither have it nor know what it is.

This state of being "plugged in into the actual reality", mentally focused and emotionally poised, goes hand in hand with an almost mystical experience when you start having what I would call "epiphanies of wisdom". In other words, you begin internalizing a lot of life truths that you possibly have heard before, even accepted them on the intelectual level, but they have never had any bearing on your life.

A bit of theory.

In Buddhist philosophy wisdom, knowledge is classified into 3 types:

1. preached wisdom (sutamaya panya) - something that you have heard and read and you know about it;
2. acquired widsom (jintamaya panya) - something that you accepted on the intellectual level beause it apppears sensible or logical to you;
3. empirical wisdom (bhavanamaya panya) - knowledge that has become a part of our value system.

To use a real life example: remember all the wise words your parents had told you when you were a teenager but you only realized how true they were when you grew up (and in some cases it was already too late).

This sort of experiential wisening up happens at a rapid progression when you start practising Vipassana.

Among very welcome side effects of Vipassana are such things like ridding of various psychosomatic conditions like insomnia, irritabillity, inexplicable pains here and there, even gastratis, ulcer, migraine, hypertension and many more . For example, during my first course I kissed goodbye my recurring knee ache that had been bugging my existence ever since I was 6 and no doctor could explain, let alone, treat it.

To summarize, the benefits of practicing Vipassana are numerous and substantial, while the only "drawback"I see is that it takes a lot of effort and motivation. It is not something you can relegate to your shrink or a Supreme Deity, acquire from a textbook or an audio course.

One more important point: all those benefits are not mysteriously vouchsafed unto you upon the completion fo a 10-day course. They come about as the result of a long mindful and persistent meditation effort, gradually increasing in quality and quantity in commesuration with how much you invest into the practice.

Also, Vipassana is not the be and begin of all. While it is a great tool for self-development, it won't add much Like my Mom says: "You can only pour out of the jug what you put in there."

If you are interested to find out more on practical and theoretical aspects explained in plain English you can check more information about what Vipassana meditation is like and about.

 

Last updated 07 Nov 2006

© 1996-2006 A. Mitski