Ten Days With Nowhere to Run, Only Walk
The things that I live for in this life are; growth, novelty, challenge, love, play. The only thing that was missing from my 10 day Vipassana course was the play part. It was definitely not fun, by any means. Even still, it was one of the most incredible experiences that I've ever been through in my life. It was new. I learned a ton. I grew a lot. It bred love and compassion. And most of all, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
I'm going to spare you the details of the meditation technique that we used and things like the schedule because all of that can be looked up online; just search Vipassana meditation course.
This story starts weeks before I even signed up for these 10 days. What happened before I left truly shows the divine presence in my life.
It was a Sunday afternoon, I decided to go train jiu jitsu. I don't usually train on Sundays, but this Sunday I decided I wanted to. When I got there, I was a little bit late, so the drilling had already begun. Everyone already had a partner except for me. A few seconds later, someone else stepped on the mat with me. By process of elimination, we teamed up to train together. I'd never met him before but as we got to training and talking, we realized we had a lot in common; interest in mental health, spirituality and wellness, among other things. I asked him to go for coffee. A couple weeks passed, and we ended up doing so one afternoon. Through our conversation, we talked about these things we had in common. One topic that came up was meditation. I told him I had been interested in attending a silent meditation retreat but that I didn't feel ready, nor did I want to spend a lot of money on it. Immediately, he said that there was no such thing as ready. He explained that one is never ready to embark on a journey that a silent meditation retreat brings you, but that I just needed to go for it. He told me there was a place about an hour and a half from here that offers 10 day retreats and that they are completely free for first timers. So he rebutted both things; my readiness and the cost. I felt I had to do it.
That was the only sign I needed. Without even knowing what the word Vipassana meant, I signed up for this 10 day course. I went for it.
I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I didn't look further into it. I practiced the "out of sight, out of mind" technique or I guess for a more direct way of putting it, I avoided the feelings that came up when I thought about it. As the date got closer and closer, I found out more information about it. There was no writing or reading allowed. All the food served was vegetarian. There were no dinners allowed. Still, even after finding all of this out, I was dead set on going for it.
The morning of my departure date, I felt a tremendous amount of anxiety. Like there were bricks sitting on my chest. I haven't felt that sort of anxiety since before I got sober. Still, I powered through. The interesting part of this all is that my method of dealing with my anxiety was by meditating. Yes, the anxiety that I had about going to a meditation retreat was lessened by doing that very thing, meditating. Ironic.
As I got there and started the check-in process, I realized that all of the signs were in french and that the volunteers helping us check-in all spoke predominantly french. At first, I saw this as my easy way out. "I signed up for the wrong course, I guess I gotta go home and try another time", I thought to myself. I asked someone behind the desk if this course was in english or french and they told me it was bilingual. I contemplated briefly, but ultimately knew better than to use justification to get out of this.
I had to face my fears. I had to face my anxiety.
On the first day, or day zero, we were allowed to talk to other people. As I was sitting in the forest, waiting for the time to pass and the course to start, another participant walked up to me and we started talking. I asked him if he too was nervous. I wanted to see if I was the only or not. Not only was he not nervous, but he told me he lost count of how many times he's done this course. He also told me it was one of the most unbelievable thing he's ever done. As my chest continued to feel like it weighed a million pounds, I didn't believe him. I did ask him, however, for any advice that he can give that might help get through this. He told me to allow the ups and downs of emotions to come and go. He told me to allow my feelings to pass, to not judge them.
At the time, I didn't realize how important this advice really was. I had heard this a million times; feelings are fleeting. I didn't realize how important this advice really was for what I was about to go through. I'll explain that soon, but this advice stuck with me through all ten days.
After this, we had an opportunity to have dinner before the course would officially start. Since it was before the course started, we were still allowed to talk. As we sat down, I was sitting at a table with three other people. One guy that I carpooled to the centre with. Another guy who was 18 years old. And the last guy, someone who told me he was there trying to quit cocaine. It was his first day of sobriety and he was hoping this experience could help him quit once and for all. The first thing I thought about was there was no way I'd ever be able to go through this course when I was in my first day of sobriety. Each of these 3 people brought their own reasons to inspire me to get through this course. But this one. This one hit really close to home. As he meditated in front of me all day for 10 straight days, he continued to push me to show up for myself and to get through the hardships that each day, each session brought.
After dinner, the silence began. We had our first meditation session. It was go time.
The first day was difficult, but honestly, it wasn't as difficult as I was expecting. The hardest part about it were the withdrawals. The withdrawals from social interaction and technology. The withdrawal from external validation, something I so heavily struggled with throughout my addiction and something I still struggle with until this day. For those 10 days, I had ZERO external validation. Zero. It was just me. Me, myself and I.
As the course got into full swing, this advice that the person on the first day gave to me came back to me. As my anxiety was hitting me super strong and I had no outlet, there was nothing I could do but observe it. When these hard feelings come up, it is an awesome opportunity to simply observe them and let them go. Even if I wanted to do something about it, the only thing I can really do was go for a short walk. Other than walking, there were no distractions, nothing to divert my attention from my anxiety. As the course went on, I started to learn that if I observed it, it would inevitably go away. Feelings are fleeting. Like I said, I'd heard this before, but I had never been able to put it to practice like I was able to during these 10 days. One thing the instructor said during the course was that "this will change." The weather will change, the relationships we have will change, the days will change and feelings would change. If we knew this, we could get through anything.
For me, the hardest part by far was not being able to write. I had so many thoughts in my mind, so many things that were coming up. A lot of them were things I didn't want to think about, of course, but a lot of them were growth lessons, ideas, reflections, things that I so desperately wanted to write down. But I couldn't. The only way to remember them was to continuously repeat them in my head. After a while, this got super frustrating and I would just try to let those go too, the same way I let my feelings go. On day 5, I came across a pen that I had in my bag that I didn't know I had. As tempted as I was to use it to write some of this stuff down, I decided to throw it away. Before I threw it away though, I looked at it. I thought very deeply to myself. I knew nobody would know. I could write down all the things that had been swirling through my head for the last 5 days. I knew though that this rule of not writing was for nothing other than to benefit me and allow me to get the full experience and benefits of this course.
It was really interesting, as many rules as there were, there was nobody policing us. If I wanted to write, if I wanted to read, even if I wanted to have my phone, I could have had it. The rules though, were there for our own benefit.
One thing I also wanted to touch on, that I'm sure many people are wondering about, was the food situation. The food was good. It was fully vegetarian. I ate toast, rice cakes, bananas and peanut butter for breakfast. For lunch, they served rice, pasta and some vegetable stew on most days. The one kicker though, there was no dinner. As a first time student, we were able to have fruits around dinner time, but the returning students weren't allowed to eat anything. Me, being a first time student, I was able to eat and I sure took full advantage of that. I had about 3 bananas for dinner each night. With breakfast and dinner combined, I was having about 4-5 bananas per day. This was one of those things that I looked forward to most throughout my days. I mean, there really wasn't much else to look forward to. You can imagine when on day 5, they ran out of bananas, I was a little bit panicked to say the least.
Every day that I was there, there would be an instance or two or TEN throughout the day where I would be counting down the days left, the number of meals left, the number of hours of meditation left before I would get to go home. As soon as this started happening, I had to catch myself. I knew I had to take things one day at a time. I knew I had to take things one moment at a time. This was something I learned in 12 step programs, but I never needed to put it more to practice than I did during these 10 days. As soon as I would get to the morning meditation session, I would tell myself "Okay, you made it to the morning session." When I would make it to lunch, I would tell myself "Okay, you made it to lunch." That is how I got through the days. Moment by moment. Session by session.
I thought that the first few days would be the hardest and that if I got through the first 5 days, I would be over the hump. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Day 6, 7 and 8 were the hardest for me. I was feeling restless, I was feeling tired and I had had enough of being there. My meditation sessions weren't going well and I was so ready to go home and hug my family. I had to do my best to not judge myself, to not get down on myself and to allow the time to pass. I did just that. I made it through those days, no matter how hard they were, I made it through.
I started with the idea of divinity and I wanted to end with it too. One of the things that made this whole experience so divine and so right for me was the technique itself that we were taught. Basically, the technique was a body scan and to become more in touch with the feelings that we have in our body. This was extremely serendipitous because like I said, I had no clue what Vipassana meant, so I only found out that this was the basis of the technique when they started teaching it. The reason it was serendipitous is because just recently, in April, I started to go back to therapy to work on my feelings and truly feeling them. One of the core things about feeling feelings, or so I have learned, is that we need to be able to truly feel them in the body, not just the mind. I have done some somatic work, and this meditation technique complimented the work that I have been doing.
All in all, this experience was one of the most incredible experiences that I've ever experienced in my life. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. I truly learned so much. I didn't just learn things intellectually, but I learned things by practice. I learned things because I was sitting there for 10 days and I didn't have a choice but to experience them. That was the whole premise of the 10 day course. They were going to teach us the technique and we were to spend 10 days practicing it, rigorously. And practice it rigorously I did. I didn't have a choice.
A lot of people asked me, so you didn't have your phone, you weren't allowed to write, you weren't allowed to talk, you weren't allowed to read... so what did you do? I meditated, I slept, I ate and I walked. That was it.
