I woke again to a distant bell ringing somewhere in the jungle above. It had first called twenty minutes earlier, at 4 am, as it did yesterday and the day before, but again I continued to lay motionless in a lucid dream on top of my thin mattress under a down blanket, determined not to move until it was absolutely necessary. Someone threw the switch, and the cold and damp dormitory was rinsed by the abrasive light of a single fluorescent bulb. My Nepali roommates rose slowly from their beds, got dressed, and left the room. I noticed the empty bed across from mine that the Frenchman had abandoned on day one as I got up to throw on layers. I stepped half-asleep out into a cold, foggy, jungle hillside; with concrete footpaths winding up and down, and short lampposts interspersed to illuminate the humid void. Moonlight couldn’t penetrate the dense canopy above, so it was only for these lamps that I could make out the path, and the shapes moving silently along it upward into the mist. The figures were the silhouettes of men - shuffling sleepily upward as if bearing heavy burdens toward the meditation hall.

I followed the sleepwalkers upward, noticing only the patter of sandals on stone, my breath rising and falling, and the omnipresent stirrings of the surrounding jungle. The bell from above chimed once more in warning, and soon we were all seated in our places on the floor of the hall, about to sit silently together in silent, unbroken meditation. For ten hours today, we would sit as still as possible, trying to empty our minds, focused only on our breathing, with all awareness trained on the small patch of skin below and around our nostrils. We would hold this posture until breakfast, having only three breaks in our meditation between 4:30 am and 9 pm.

Vipassana means “to see things how they truly are,” and was developed as a meditation technique by the man who came to be known as the ‘Buddha’ some 2,500 years ago. We had all committed a period of ten days to study and practice this technique, directed by a nightly video discourse recorded by Burmese Vipassana instructor S.N. Goenka in 1991, along with assistance from on-premise instructors and volunteers. We had surrendered all of our valuables for 11 days, taken a vow of silence, and would refrain from any act of communication or physical contact. No external influence would distract us from this sacred, disciplined inner journey.

—--

Vipassana is chiefly concerned with purifying the mind, which can’t effectively be attempted until one’s mind is sharp and balanced enough to examine its deepest levels, and therefore observe the most subtle of bodily sensations. Obtaining that ability to balance the mind requires disciplined practice, and is why we spent our first three and a half days focused only on the small area below the nostrils. Those able to practice correctly became able to observe the most subtle realities. For example: the sensation of air touching the skin or hair of the upper lip and inner nostrils, or the awareness of a slight difference in temperature between the air being inhaled and the air being exhaled. The mind’s ability to observe the most subtle of bodily processes and sensations is key to practicing the meditation technique.

Much to one’s chagrin, sitting still for ten hours a day requires the utmost mental and physical endurance. Within seconds of beginning, the mind instantly desires stimulation and becomes bored when it doesn’t find a suitable distraction. It then starts to wander, and visits one’s past: recalling figures one hasn’t thought about in decades, replaying in-depth conversations that one didn’t know they remembered; or it starts to plan one’s future - hopes and fears become calculated, analyzed, brought before the mind’s eye. Soon I’ll realize, “I’ve done it again.” And I promptly return my attention to my breathing and continue to focus for another thirty seconds before becoming bored again. I’ll discreetly glance at my watch, and find only two minutes have passed since the last time I checked it.

When it isn’t my agitated mind that’s plaguing me, it’s my restless body. My legs, knees, and hips start to protest after sitting cross-legged for even a few minutes. I feel burning, itching, and throbbing sensations popping up all over, especially in my right knee, which I abused the hell out of during two months of almost constant trekking in the Himalayas. I keep wanting to itch this or stretch that, lean this way, or crack that joint, and I soon realize that my entire foot has fallen asleep, as countless, formless icy needles start to assault it. I begin to doubt why I even signed up for this nonsense. As soon as I regain my physical composure, my mind wanders again, and vice versa. I start to think about how many of these dreadfully boring days remain, and how I will possibly maintain my sanity through all of them. The two hours here before dawn seem like an eternity, but by some miracle, the clock eventually strikes 6:30 and the bell rings for breakfast. We break posture one by one, and I struggle to rise to my feet with muffled groans, as my throbbing and strained muscles protest at the act of rising again.

We ascended silently in the pre-dawn light, up steep paths to the men’s dining hall. There at a clearing at the top of the ridge, I turned back to watch the sun’s rays anoint the icy and distant spires of Himalayan giants: Machapuchare, Manaslu, Annapurna: seen from miles away, the forlorn, gargantuan peaks seemed more remote than the surface of the moon. Closer at hand, the morning mists had started to dissipate off the surface of Begnas lake below, and the screams of roosters carried from across the waters. The aluminum trays and dishes started to clang in the dining hall, so I left the fragile dawn to find my plate and get in line for food.

We eat, and live really, as monks do - aside from the robes and the shaven heads. We have no menu to order from, and we are paying for neither food nor housing. We take what is given, provided solely by the donations of students who have come before, and watch without words as our plates are filled by the servers at the table, then go back to the benches to eat in silence, save for the loud, abrasive smacking of lips of the Nepali boy eating beside me. We then wash and dry our uniform, aluminum dishes and set them back at our assigned places, then cover them with a turquoise linen napkin. After admiring the horizon of snow-capped mountains after sunrise for a few moments, I headed down to brush my teeth, then collapsed into bed in our cold room, and slept until the 7:50 am bell rang. There were eight more hours of meditation that day; eight more hours of focusing all my awareness on a patch of skin no smaller than a few square inches.

One’s mind and consciousness are like the ocean. At its surface, the ocean is in contact with the sky, and it is here that it is at its most turbulent. Winds and storms can make this boundary zone a violent place. Similar to the ocean, as one delves below the surface level of the mind, one observes currents and secrets there, but also a stillness that is not accessible at the surface. Journeying deeper reveals even more mysteries, realities, and even another world. After spending four excruciating days trying to balance my mind, I began on day five to really dial into my meditation, and sink deeper into more subtle levels of my mind and consciousness. By practicing Vipassana, and expanding my awareness beyond my upper lip to rove slowly over the entire surface of my body, I came to feel brief, isolated sensations ignite everywhere my focus resided. As these continued to ring out as my focus deepened, I felt that I was no longer at that shallow, surface level of my consciousness. Whatever it is that I refer to as “I,” dwelt no longer on the sensory edge of my body, aware only of my external surroundings - it was starting to withdraw deeper within me, retreating into some inner sanctum. I was no longer concerned with stimuli originating from elsewhere in the room, I was aware only of matters on the inside; as if the external surface of my body was the periphery of all that mattered, where all experience ended, not where it began. I then felt what the teacher refers to as “uniform subtle sensations,” in the form of constant, warm vibrations all over my body. I realize how odd this may sound - I had always been a skeptic around meditation and spirituality, but I can’t emphasize enough how shocking it was to experience some of these tangible, palpable sensations.

As my focus deepened, I felt distinct waves of energy coursing over me, like strong tides advancing across the ocean that was my body’s surface. And as I realized what was happening, I lost awareness of time, and soon these warm waves began to move not just over me, but through me, as if a current of energy was contacting me at my front and completely passing through every molecule of my body until exiting out my backside - only these distinct waves pulsated several times a second, from front to back. What I felt in those minutes or seconds, was the complete dissolution of my physical form - “I” was no longer a solid object, but was aware instead of the mass of microscopic pieces that make up “I,” and intimately feeling them individually, as energy coursed through every fiber of my being. Eventually, the flood of feeling within me subsided, and my mental balance inevitably toppled as I returned suddenly to the surface of that inner ocean. I immediately stood up from my place in the hall to step outside and process what had just happened. I came to the realization that I had stumbled upon an elusive boundary that lies on the razor-sharp border between body and mind where I could experience them independent of each other. What I experienced was personal and profound, yet fleeting. For a series of moments, I had just begun to scratch the surface of what Vipassana meditation can show me.

—-

The sixth day came and went almost exactly like the preceding five. The most notable difference was that Khan, the slight Turk seated to my right, had vanished from the Dhamma center. He was the second man (by my count) to leave the course so far - the first being Serkan, the French bartender from my dorm who didn’t last through even the first day. Just the night before, Khan had broken down weeping at his place next to me in the otherwise dead-silent meditation hall. After a few minutes, he had regained composure, and had seemed cheerful and upbeat during Goenka’s discourse later in the evening. He began the 6th day seated in meditation with us at 4:30 AM, and then disappeared without warning at some point after lunch. Due to noble silence, I couldn’t confer with any of the other men about his departure, and so we passed the remaining days without acknowledging his absence.

The other big difference was that on day six I was feeling as if I had regressed in my practice. Ever since the moment of my breakthrough on day five - observing palpable waves of uniform subtle sensations coursing across and through my body - I had struggled to replicate that sensation, and my entire body felt blind to what had been so real just the day before. Because I now felt a very noticeable absence of those sensations, I became impatient and frustrated with myself, making it even harder to focus my mind and regain that precise mental balance I had reached earlier. At my current state, finding that level of equanimity and stillness seemed more difficult than stacking an egg on top of the eye of a freestanding needle. I had stood on that precarious point myself for a moment yesterday, and now I couldn’t get back there at all.

I wasn’t the only one struggling, I noticed. The Nepali boy who sits next to me in the dining hall with his obnoxiously loud lip-smacking, Prakash, also sat diagonally to my upper left in the meditation hall. From my vantage point behind him, I could see he was far from focused. More often than not, he sat slumped forward with elbows resting on his thighs, and his chin cradled in the heels of hands, much like a bored little boy sitting resigned in a corner in ‘timeout.’ He’d play with his hair, crack his knuckles (which was an almost deafening, startling sound in a silent meditation hall), or just gaze around the room, sometimes across the dividing line to where the women sat on the other side of the hall. At least once per day I’d notice him doubled over forward, hands folded up in his lap, and head bobbing and dangling precariously forward over his slouched shoulders as he slept in place. Why the teacher never snapped at him for this, I don’t know. I started to become increasingly, almost obsessively irritated by Prakash’s restlessness and lack of discipline, noticing every noise of movement from him, and amplifying it in my mind. I found myself wishing he would just leave like the other two men who had the courage to do so, so that I wouldn’t keep getting distracted by him. To make this annoyance worse, some virus was working its way through the men, and I was adding to the chorus of sniffles, throat clearing, and general discomfort that abounded in the hall.

Days seven and eight were a struggle as well. Between the cold symptoms, and driving myself up a wall noticing and judging each of Prakash’s minor disturbances, I still couldn’t get back to that state of equanimity I had reached on day five. Instead of keeping my mind still, I let it wander, as I was too mentally exhausted to keep reeling it back in from each of its little escapes. It’s amazing how much ground you can cover when you spend an entire day thinking, the depths that you can go to within your own mind, the names and the faces from the past that come to you that you had thought were all but forgotten. Childhood friends, moments with family members long dead, and trying to make sense of why these images came forward here at this moment. Those uncomfortable hours spent inside helped me dredge up weights from my past that still had a pull on me, and helped me to change the way I saw things past and present. In our few breaks of the day, I wandered the jungle paths wondering what I was doing there, and how it was affecting me. I was in constant dread of the inevitable chiming of the bell calling us back to the meditation hall. However, with the help of Goenka’s video discourses, I quickly realized that I was creating my own misery by allowing myself to become frustrated by Prakash. I still thought it was dumb for someone to just waste ten days by sitting in a jungle without working seriously towards an objective, but letting his actions affect my practice was my choice to make. So I decided to ignore him completely. Except in the evenings, when I would discreetly slide my untouched dish of cantaloupe over to his spot at the table, to which he would respond with the biggest smile, and then bring the juicy fruit over to his place.

The abundant mental clarity over the preceding week had given me so many personal breakthroughs - new ideas of people to reconnect with, topics to write about (I had been writing in my head every day for lack of the permission to read or write, hoping I could remember enough of it for when I got back to Pokhara), new projects, and even epiphanies regarding my own thought patterns and habits and flaws. In obsessing for hours over my sister’s dilemma with the Indian “fiance” she has never met, I came to the conclusion that a lot of my stress around the situation, and with her relationship in general, stemmed from the fact that I have an unhealthy tendency to hold other people in my life to my own standards. Never before had I been able to dislodge myself from my harsh scrutiny of her, and instead reflect and observe my own thoughts and actions toward her. I realized it all comes back to the meaning of Vipassana: to see things as they truly are.

The final two days were no less full of struggle and grappling with my own mind. I was conscious of the fact that time was quickly running out, and that I had completely stalled in my meditation practice. How was I ever going to succeed in meditation in my personal life if I couldn’t even figure out how to do it properly in this setting? I was getting impatient, and desiring another breakthrough, trying to will and manifest one before the course’s end. Before I knew it, our final sitting under noble silence had come to an end. The instructor stood up and left the hall by his private exit without saying a word, and soon other students started to trickle out the student doors one by one. I felt as if I had failed, convinced myself that I hadn’t tried hard enough, that I had wasted ten days of my life and still didn’t know what the hell I was doing, or what had happened to me five days before. I had again felt nothing as that session had come to an end, and was still struggling to quiet my restless mind.

I then left the hall, to find the course volunteers standing outside the entrance, awaiting me with big smiles on their faces. “How was it?” they asked. Seeing their expressions and feeling their energy wiped away all of the regret and doubt I had been feeling, and I was awash in joy as I realized I had come out on the other side of one of the most difficult things I have ever undergone. It was over! And I knew I was changed in some subtle way, though I couldn’t yet describe how. I was a bit reluctant to start socializing with the other students, content to just wander around with an ear-to-ear smile glued to my face. I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment and peace. I reclaimed my wallet from the steel chest that was being reopened and made my dana (donation) so that others may benefit from the training I had received at the generosity of others. We then had a jovial lunch after the bell called. Everyone was radiating joy and contentment - we couldn’t stop smiling.

The final morning, we awoke at 4 again, although the servers had to shake me from slumber at 4:25 since I had slept through both bells. After an early hour of meditation, we watched one final discourse by Goenka, and had our last breakfast together before having our personal effects returned to us and being granted leave. Soon, I was on a local bus back to Pokhara, with my phone steadily vibrating with the accumulated notifications of eleven days. It felt refreshing to reenter society, and to hear from and send messages out to my loved ones, and know that at the end of this bus ride, I’d have a city full of cafes and eateries at my disposal.

On that ride, I reflected on the abundance of joy that the retreat had filled me with, the weights of baggage that lifted off of my shoulders, and also a complete lack of anxiety or worry. I felt truly fulfilled and content for one of the first times in my life. The one doubt that lingered, however, was of my ability to continue to strengthen my meditation practice all alone, and outside of the tranquil setting of the Dhamma facility. I had struggled fiercely with the technique during those final days, and expected that I would continue to decline with my individual practice, and ultimately, give up altogether.

On my first night back in Pokhara, I sat on the bed in my room at Green Peace Lodge, as a thunderstorm raged over the lake outside my window, and I began to just observe my breath, as I had been taught. I let go of all expectation or desire to experience anything other than stillness. Within minutes, my body’s surface lit up all at once in waves of vibration and sensation. I sat and fought with myself to hold balance and sink deeper into my consciousness. I directed a free flow of my awareness and sensation along the surface of, and through my body until the lightning and thunder outside seemed no longer to even register with me, over the course of an hour that felt like ten minutes. The sensations were more potent and intense than anything I had felt at the meditation center. Even after I stopped and stood up to stand on the balcony and watch the storm outside, my hands still tingled as if smoke or spirit were issuing forth from a million flames in unison across my hands. I was somehow more at peace, more alive, more aware than I have ever been. I looked out at a storm-battered lake, but was simultaneously looked out across some other realm within myself that was now accessible to me, seeing it now clearly for the first time.