My Experience: Ten Days of Silent Meditation

The last human interaction I experienced before entering into ten days of silent meditation occurred as I was walking from my car to the Porta-Potty at a park where I’d been playing guitar, sounding out the last few hours before I gave myself over to silence.

 

A man called to me from his car, “Hey! How ya doin’?”

 

I approached and peered through the open window. He was on the far side of middle-aged, pot-bellied, wearing only a pair of shorts. His legs were spread and his bare feet were up on the dashboard.

“Doing well,” I said.

“Yeah! Well, my doctor said I needed to keep my feet elevated! So I figured I could do it here!” He seemed extraordinarily pleased with himself. Indeed, it is being present for the simple pleasures in life, such as sitting half-naked in a hot car with feet on the dash, that gives our days meaning. I couldn’t argue with him there.

“Looks like you’re doing pretty well for yourself, man. Enjoy,” I said with finality, wanting to cut the conversation short before he had a chance to continue.

As I walked away, he hollered after me, “Hey! That girl walking by is good-looking!” His yelling then disintegrated into something pressured and unintelligible. I walked on, thinking to myself, I really don’t think I am going to miss talking to people.

And indeed I did not. Many people seem to be impressed by the idea of spending ten days in silence–and at retreats such as the one I attended, there is not a word or even a glance or gesture exchanged with another person, and no outside stimuli available to distract the mind. It was not difficult for me, although I had read numerous “horror” stories on the Internet and was quite prepared for it to be the hardest thing I’d ever done. This is not to brag; this merely points to the fact that I am an introvert and quite comfortable inside my own mind.

During those ten days, the pressures of human interaction completely fell away, and I found myself feeling revitalized and even ebullient, freed as I was of the energetic burden of interacting-as-acting, the anxiety of having to manifest a persona. A lovely spell of silence and attention was cast. Experiences such as the feeling of grass on my bare feet or watching the clouds at change at midday became pleasurable and absorbing to a degree that I knew was possible, having once been a child, but had rarely been able to revisit in my adult life.

 

Living inside the strict routine of the retreat was also enormously freeing. Guided by bells, I moved through my day effortlessly. There was not a moment’s energy wasted on wondering what I would do next; there was none of the usual, slightly anxious weighing of options in order to determine which course of action promises the best return on investment. We retreatants rose at 4 am and retired at 9 pm. The time between was filled with ten hours of meditation (broken up into sessions lasting between one and two hours each), eating delicious and satisfying vegetarian food, resting or walking the grounds, and watching a recorded talk by the enormously likeable and down-to-earth vipassana teacher, S.N. Goenka, in the evening.

 

The first three and a half days we practiced anapanasati, a type of concentration meditation where the attention is focused on the touch of the breath entering and leaving at the nostrils. On the fourth day, we began to practice the technique of vipassana, or insight, meditation.

 

I came to the retreat with six months of strong anapanasati practice behind me, and I was fairly uninterested in vipassana, which is said to produce enlightenment. I knew that anapanasati is capable of producing states of blissful absorption, known as jhanas, in the meditator, and attaining such a state was my goal. Next to the promise of bliss, the idea of true enlightenment–the complete liberation from suffering–seemed distant and theoretical and not at all sexy. I don’t need complete liberation from suffering; I just want to feel ecstasy, I thought. But when the time came to learn vipassana, I absorbed the instructions  and practiced attentively. I am glad I did.

 

The vipassana technique I learned involves scanning the attention through the entire body repeatedly, looking for some sensation on absolutely every millimeter of skin. It sounds simple, and it is. Each sensation, pleasurable, painful, or indifferent, is met with awareness and equanimity. One has equanimity because one understands that all sensations, whatever they may be, are impermanent, constantly changing. They are impersonal, and to identify oneself with them is to generate misery after misery. By repeatedly and attentively performing this body scan, one comes to understand at an experiential level the three characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and no-self, which penetrate all reality.

One’s mind sharpens, and subtler and subtler sensations are discerned. On the first day of practice, I experienced many “blind” spots on my body where I could not feel any sensation, and many pains–some strong enough to throw me into a state of wild panic. With a little practice, however, I was able to discern a very smooth, tingly, almost minty feeling flowing over my whole body. I watched sharp pains with detached curiosity as they pulsated, fragmented, and disappeared. It is said that with time and diligent practice, the vipassana meditator experiences the body’s apparent solidity dissolving into the mass of vibrations that it actually is. The nature of reality–down to the quantum level, where everything that appears to be real and permanent is actually constantly flipping in and out of existence–becomes apparent at an experiential level.

One of the fundamental teachings I received at the retreat has to do with the nature of suffering. We suffer, whenever we suffer, because we experience craving, aversion, and ignorance. We crave pleasant sensations, we feel aversion for painful ones, and we ignorantly identify ourselves with these impermanent and undependable sensations. I can see the truth of this shot throughout my entire life, coloring every moment. Even the mind’s habit of compulsive thinking, which has baffled me so much in my concentration meditation practice, arises from a form of craving: the mind craves the stories it tells itself, the satisfaction of pleasant thoughts.

 

Before I went on this retreat I understood a little about the power and joy that comes from equanimity. I knew from my life experience–in particular, the repeated experience of depression and remission from depression–that outer circumstances are quite secondary and that real peace comes from the balance of one’s mind. But it was a mystery to me why I sometimes possessed such a deep equanimity, and why it just as suddenly would leave me and I would be plunged into a solid despair, where everything was extraordinarily painful. I have now learned a technique for systematically cultivating equanimity. And I cannot think of anything more valuable.