my exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of vipassana, silence and spiders | society | the guardian

My exhausting meditation retreat:10 days of Vipassana, silence andspidersI went to New Zealand to break my brain and put it back together, without everhaving meditated before. I had no idea what I was in for

Jodi Ettenberg

Thursday 31 March 2016 15.30 BST

I signed up for a Vipassana course in a moment of quiet desperation. Iwas coming up on close to a year of insomnia. I found myselfexhausted by the anxiety of not sleeping, yet unable to find any

meaningful rest. For the first time in my life I was having panic attacks.Nightly, they were triggered by the dawning realization that sleepwould elude me yet again.

I was also dealing with chronic pain. A bad accident as a kid followedby a series of rib fractures and back injuries over the years generated astate of permanent hurt made worse with the lack of sleep and anexcess of cortisol.

I chose this specific course, which took place in New Zealand, becausedespite the trendiness of meditation classes and apps, Vipassanaseemed to be about equanimity, discipline and hard work – right up myalley. I am not the most woo woo of humans, and the idea of a giantdrum circle of positive thinkers made me want to run away screaming.

Vipassana is different from mindfulness meditation, which focuses onawareness, or to transcendental meditation, which uses a mantra.Instead, it dictates a blanket command of non-reaction. No matter thepain as you sit, or the fact that your hands and legs fall asleep and thatyour brain is crying for release. You are instructed to refocus attention

My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence a... http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/31/meditation-retre...

1 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

on the objective sensations in your body, arising and falling, as you doa scan of your limbs in a specific order. By doing so, over 10 days, youtrain yourself to stop reacting to the vicissitudes of life.

While descended from Buddhism, the modern-day courses are secularin nature. The father of these retreats is the late SN Goenka, who wasraised in Myanmar and learned Vipassana from monks there.

When a friend asked me why I was willingly heading into solitaryconfinement, especially since I had never meditated before, I told her Iwanted to break my brain and put it back together again.

“I need to defrag my hard drive,” I quipped. “It isn’t runningefficiently.” I compared it to hiring a personal trainer to help me at afirst-ever gym session.

She disagreed.

“No, it’s like running a marathon having never run before. Jodi whatare you doing to yourself?”

On the first day, a bell rang outside my door at 4am, reminding me thatdespite the darkness, it was time to wake up.

I was not, nor will I ever be, a morning person. I felt a rush of anger riseup in me when I heard that sound, and fantasized about taking thegong and flinging it into the forest. So much for equanimity.

I tumbled out of my cot and got ready for the 4.30am meditationsession. The first day’s focus was on awareness of breath. That’s it.When your mind moved from that awareness you brought your mindback to the fact that you breathe. The simplicity of this instruction feltincredibly futile.

I had a hard time focusing on my breath because of the persistentburning in my back. Regardless of how many pillows I piled under myknees, it bubbled up until it hit a crescendo.

You are allowed to speak to the teacher during office hours, and I wentthat first day, knotted in pain and panic. Eyeing me serenely, he askedhow long I had been meditating. Sheepishly, I explained that I hadn’t


2 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

actually meditated before. Plus my back was falling apart. Plus I didn’tknow how to focus on my breath. I should leave, right?

With total calm, he told me to disassociate my panic from the pain. Iwas making it worse for myself by focusing on the hurt, which onlymagnified it for me. He told me to do my best, whatever that was.

I snorted before I could help myself.

“Oh, you’re one of those,” he said with a soft smile. “Perfectionismwon’t help you here.”

I trudged back out of the meditation hall and into the bright NewZealand sunlight, reeling. The teacher offered a wooden L-shapedcontraption to help prop up my back during the meditation. As towhether I was meditating correctly, he was silent.

The message was clear: I was competing against my best self, notanyone else’s.

After the first three days of focusing on breathing, we were introducedto Vipassana. This involved sequences of long body scans in a specificorder. Throughout, we were instructed to be aware of the sensations orpain we feel. By not allowing ourselves to react to what our bodies felt,we were training our minds to build a barrier against blind reaction.

A simplistic example of the Vipassana technique: if your leg falls asleepas you are scanning your neck for objective sensations, your mind maywander to whether you’ll ever stand up again. You don’t move your legto compensate. Instead, you refocus on the neck and ignore the part ofyour brain that is begging you to give attention to the leg pain. Youremind yourself that the pain is temporary, just like everything else.

In addition to the body scans, day four marked the beginning of “hoursof strong determination”. They occurred three times a day, duringwhich we were not allowed to move. Your leg hurts? Too bad. You itchlike mad on your nose? Can’t scratch it. For the entire hour, you sit andyou scan your body. Along the way if there are points of pain, youobserve them impersonally as your scan reaches those points, knowingthey are impermanent.


3 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

In response to these new requirements, a wave of people left thecourse. It took all of my energy not to walk out myself.

I tried to remind myself it was only 10 days. Surely I could handle 10days of repetition and focus? I held on by a thread, until day five.

An arachnophobe walks into a Vipassana meditation courseWhen I was two, a family member took me to see Raiders of the LostArk. I had nightmares about spiders for years, waking up screaming inthe middle of the night. My arachnophobia has never waned, and I amashamed to admit that it has dictated some of my travel plans.

Before the meditation course began I worried about the long days ofsilence. I did not worry about spiders. This was a mistake. The coursewas on a bird sanctuary outside Auckland, and I arrived only to findthat spiders carpeted the wooden buildings, inside and out.

When you take a Vipassana course, you agree to abide by five precepts:no killing, no stealing, no lying, no sexual misconduct and nointoxicants. No writing, no talking, no eye contact, no communicating.

At the end of day one, I noticed a daddy longlegs struggling on thecarpet but heading toward the door. I reached for the course schedule,only to realize I was about to kill something with a document that saysyou won’t kill anything.

Instead, I took a deep breath, skirted around the creature, and openedmy door. I stood there silently cheering its departure from my room.

In the meditation hall, daddy longlegs dropped from the ceiling,feeding my anxiety. Huge black spiders dotted the corner of the roomwhere we picked up our pillows, watching over us as we shuffled intoyet another meditation session.

In response, the organizers provided us with a “spider catcher”. Thiswas a Tupperware container plus a piece of paper to slide under it forease of transport. I did not find this helpful.

Then, on day five, I hit peak spider. Just before bed, I caught a glimpseof a bulbous black spider in my peripheral vision, dropping out of atiny hole near the ceiling. Unlike the many spiders on the veranda, this


4 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

one was huge.

I leapt out of bed in a panic. Every time I tried to reach the spider, itwould crawl in the hole again and disappear. I left the light on, driftingoff only to dream about spiders and wake up breathless. Finally I shutthe light decisively. At 2am, I awoke to a feeling of deep alarm andturned the light back on. The spider was dropping from the ceiling,right above my head.

Gasping, I fell sideways out of the bed. The spider, as startled as I,hastily clawed its way back toward the ceiling. I watched in horror as itspent the rest of the night eating other spiders in my room. I did notsleep at all.

Studies have shown that people who are blind or deaf have heightenedability in other bodily senses. When the brain is deprived of one inputsource, it is capable of reorganizing itself to support and augmentother senses, a phenomenon known as “cross-modal neuroplasticity”.

I felt a small, temporary version of this phenomenon at the course. Icould not speak or write, but my mind was whirring away at analarming speed. Trapped in a cognitive cycle of shame and blame, myphobia of spiders was magnified.

The next day, I swallowed my pride and broke my noble silence. Ibegged the female volunteer leader to let me switch rooms. At thatpoint in the course several people had left, and I was able to move to adifferent cabin.

For the rest of the week, as everyone else sat on the grass enjoying thesun between sessions, I stayed in my room, too scared to leave.

It’s funny what your brain can do to you. A friend once said that in life,worrying ahead of time was futile, because what you are scared ofnever manifests. Instead, what you least expect creeps up behind youand scares you out of your mind. Or in my case, drops down from theceiling in plain view.

I wish I could say that the spider incident was a turning point. It wassimply a bump along the way. I did fulfill my goal of making it to theend, but the course remains one of the most difficult things I’ve ever


5 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

chosen to do.

By day six, I felt exhausted by the pain, the sleepless nights, and amind slowly unspooling. Some people talk about intruding memoriesof childhood or overly sexual thoughts during their Vipassanaexperience. For me, the challenge was suppressing the urge to runaround like a toddler.

Instead of doing a body scan, I fantasized about flinging off my pillowsand running through the empty space in the center of the hall,screaming like a banshee. I daydreamed of doing snow angels on theworn carpet, making a mockery of the meditation.

Day eight was the first time I sat through a “strong hour” withoutmoving. When the gong rang, I was covered in sweat from the effort ofthinking past the pain.

By the end of the course, students often report feeling full body flow ofenergy during meditation. I did not. I felt shelves of pain along theway, no fluidity between them. But by the last day I could scan fluidlythrough arms or my right leg. More importantly, I could refocus mymind away from the pain.

It was progress.

Lessons learnedI emerged from the course a calmer, temporarily less anxious versionof myself. I started to sleep again. The relief of rest was palpable.

I wrote down the following takeaways once I was reunited with mypen and paper:

1. Our collective obsession with finding happiness is not a reason tomeditate.

Logic and neuroscience might ground the modern rationale formeditation, but to meditate in order to be happy is counterintuitive.The practice is a counterweight to the jagged peaks and valleys of thehuman experience. To remain stable when life goes awry is a happierresult than grasping for whatever society tells you will make youhappy.


6 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

2. So much of what complicates our lives comes from assumptions wemake and our reactions to them.

In the quiet of those 10 days, you see how much your mind distorts thereality you perceive. You don’t know the background of the peopletaking the course with you, but you create lives for them in your mind.You project your fears on to their perception of you.

For me, this meant creating inaccurate stories about the otherparticipants, as well as their reactions to me.

I kept falling asleep during morning session, keeling over into theperson next to me. I heard the snickers of the group as I righted myselfagain, and vowed to apologize to that woman as soon as the coursewas over.

When I did say sorry, the woman looked at me askance. “What? Don’tapologize – it was the only thing that made me smile during the last 10days!”

In the strangled silence, my brain had lost perspective.

Often, anger or fears are reactions to a reality we have created in ourown minds. A reflection of the stories that we tell ourselves. We takesensory input as objective, but what we see, hear and feel is notobjective. It is colored by what we have known, and the grudges wehold without even realizing them.

3. You have to do the work.

Shortcuts exist in life, but to train your brain you need put in asignificant amount of effort. The first few days are devastating becausethe work is both mindless and extremely taxing. But you can see achange in a mere 10 days, with disciplined practice.

4. Perfectionism can be dangerous.

Believing that doing your best isn’t good enough is dangerous. There isno perfect, and there is no objective measure of what “right” can be.The course reminded me that if you have a value system that thriveson making decisions with integrity, for the right reasons, doing your


7 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

More features

TopicsHealth Mindfulness Meditation Health & wellbeing

Save for later Article saved

best is good enough.

5. Training yourself to stop reacting can help in tolerating pain.

As someone with chronic pain, this lesson was important. I would nothave come to this conclusion without the course either, because I’mfar too stubborn. I can see with hindsight that by obsessing over thepain, I exacerbated it tremendously.

Sometimes we hold on to what we fear and hate. While I still ache, thatache has less power over me. The distinction sounds slight but it hasbeen liberating.

One year laterThe Vipassana did not cure me of insomnia or anxiety permanently.Instead, it provided me with a valuable tool: it showed me that I couldmanage my mind more than I realized. By doing so, I felt more incontrol of the catastrophizing, despite the fact that it is always there.

A full 10 days of constant meditation created a barrier between theworrying and me. It allowed me to observe the anxiety moreobjectively. The whole process calmed me at a deep and inexplicablelevel; I am still the same neurotic person I always was, but it imbuedme with a sense of perspective I now maintain and am deeply gratefulfor.

Would I do the course again? Definitely. A yearly 10-day silent course isrecommended for those who meditate, but given the way that this onetested my body and mind, I suspect I’ll wait a little longer.

Maybe 2017 is a good year to schedule my next brain defrag.

A longer version of the piece can be found at legalnomads.com


8 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

Reuse this content


9 of 9 31/03/2016, 17:43

my exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of vipassana, silence and spiders | society | the guardian

Documents