Meditation Marathon - Part I

Before I begin, if you are interested in doing a ten-day Vipassana course, I suggest you not read what I have written. I recommend the course – it is hard but rewarding work with noticeable results. Neither my account of a very individual and personal experience nor my silly observations will serve you in any way. Find out for yourself!!

If, on the other hand, you are simply curious, or are wondering what the hell I did for ten days because you could never imagine doing so yourself, by all means, carry on J

Sometime shortly after Christmas I was reading In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore for second time, and it mentioned meditation as a good activity to reduce stress and help people slow down. I could do that, I thought. Reduce stress, have peace of mind, maybe get a handle on my fear-of-relapse anxiety - this sounded fantastic!

Normally I would congratulate myself for having such a great idea and file it away in the "I Must Remember to Get to That Someday" compartment in my mind. Unfortunately, like a pocket with a whole at the bottom, things seem to disappear from this place of safekeeping never to be seen again. How many life-altering ideas have I lost over the years? I'll never know. I keep meaning to get a voice recording device so that I stop forgetting...that idea is in there too, at the bottom somewhere I suspect, and only resurfaces when I realize I have forgotten something else.

Anyway, not wanting the meditation idea to go the way of all my previous flashes of genius, I did something about it immediately. I knew of two previous acquaintances who had participated in ten-day meditation workshop. I hadn't spoken to either of them about their experience, but certainly ten days was long enough to feel as though I'd really learned how to do it properly.  I googled it and clicked on the first link that came up: Vipassana Meditation Website. This was a worldwide organization with courses in many different languages in many different countries. Having decided that I would prefer to take the course in English, and therefore in Canada rather than Colombia (though it was also available there) I signed up to attend a course at a centre close to Barrie, Ontario. Then, I just sort of forgot about it for four months.

Closer to the day, I began to do some research about the technique. I looked at the daily schedule. Morning bell at 4:00am? Meditation for...calculating...ten hours every day?? This wasn't just meditation, it was like boot camp for your mind. But the website promised some pretty cool results (I won't detail them here, you can follow the link if you're curious) so I figured it would be worth it. Also, the course was carried out in silence - students aren't allowed to speak to one another, and that actually appealed to me. Ten days of quiet - at the end of the school year I couldn't imagine a more pleasant rest.

They say its ten days, but really it's twelve. You arrive on day zero and leave on day eleven. After registering I handed over my illegal goodies for safekeeping: laptop, kindle, magazines, phone, camera, and writing materials - basically anything that could potentially distract/entertain me. My room in the women's residence was clean and equipped with the essentials (I was lucky to have a room and bathroom to myself - some of the others shared). A list of chores was tacked to the inside of the door, implying that before leaving I would be cleaning the room myself for the next student. Interesting.

Keeping a journal was not permitted, and though I've read blogs of other people who have attended the course and secretly made notes, I wanted to follow the instructions thoroughly to have the complete experience as it is intended, so I am writing from memory, which as we have already established is, in my case, a bit sketchy. Here are the important bits, as I remember them:

(To be continued...)