Sunday, July 17, 2011

Meditation Marathon - Part III

DAY FOUR 
or 
THE DAY OF THE TWO-HEADED OCTOPUS

The gong that was rung to call students to meditation, or to a meal

Today has been the hardest day for me, for a number of reasons. I am tired and I want a rest from the intensity of this experience, but mostly it was a shit day because of the octopus. 

Day four is Vipassana day. That's right - up until now, we've just been preparing our minds for Vipassana. I knew from reading other blogs/reviews that this was how the course was run, but still I feel as though I've been tricked a bit. They didn't bother mentioning before today that we haven't been doing the 'real thing'. One lady dropped out last night - I wonder if she knew she hadn't really even begun?

If we are ready for Vipassana, then we are apparently also ready to do sittings of "Great Determination" - when you are "greatly determined" you don't move. At all. For an hour. I don’t feel greatly determined today. I feel “Greatly Pathetic” and also “Greatly Wondering What The Hell I’m Doing Here”.

At the 6 o'clock sitting, my back started to hurt. Understand, this was not a little ache. This was a twitching, writhing, spastic two-headed octopus of pain. Its heads (I don't know why it had two, that's just how it appeared in my mind, even though we’re not supposed to visualize anything) weighed down on my spine between the shoulder blades, and its tentacles extended in all directions, squeezing muscles and my desire to meditate with an equally strong destructive force. It was overwhelming and I couldn't concentrate on my meditation so instead I just sat on my cushion crying, feeling sorry for myself, and mentally cursing this whole bloody exercise, because how can this much pain do anybody any good at all?

The silence in the room implied that everybody else was concentrating and sitting still, and because the coughing, sniffling, shuffling, farting and swallowing noises have generally ceased, the sound of my tears hitting the cushion seemed vastly amplified and I broke my 'strong determination' to catch them before they could fall, which only made me feel like a bigger failure.

Fuck it. I opened my eyes. I saw that another woman sitting a row ahead of me was wiping her eyes with her blanket. Maybe she was sad, or she had an octopus too?  It is perhaps shameful to take comfort in someone else’s tears, but seeing that I wasn’t the only one who was struggling made me feel a bit better. (Only at the end of the course when noble silence had ended did I learn that almost every woman I spoke with had bawled her eyes out at some point.)

After an hour of this torture, the discourse video was played. In addition to using unusual expressions and speaking with a rather charming accent, Goenka tells great stories. A few more tears may have escaped at the beginning of his lecture, but by the end my resolve to make the most of this experience – pain or no pain – had returned.

Tomorrow is going to be better.


*****

Below are two videos (Part 1 and Part 2 of the same talk) of Goenka explaining a little bit about the ten-day course, and the technique itself, in case you are curious :-)


1 comment:

  1. I liked the part of the video that speaks of how persons know vices (like gambling and smoking) isn't good but becuase they cannot control their minds, they are at the mercy of vanity basically. Sounds like a well worth it course for you. Hope it turned out to be all that you wanted. Hope it helped you be at peace. Email me one day, im going to JA next week. H

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