Israel Vipassana Meditation Center.What is Vipassana. There are numerous other Centres throughout the world: see Service opportunities for old students for more details enter the old-students website. Courses are organized at the Israel Vipassana Meditation Center Dhamma Pamoda adjacent to Kibbutz Deganya B, near the Sea of Galilee.
For the first time in my life I was having panic attacks. I found myself exhausted by the anxiety of not sleeping, yet unable to find any meaningful rest. I was coming up on close to a year of insomnia. It was rediscovered by Gotama Buddha more than 2500 years ago and was taught by him as a universal remedy for universal ills, i.e., an Art Of Living.I signed up for a Vipassana course in a moment of quiet desperation.
At present, courses are conducted at a retreat center in Elbert, Colorado, about 90 minutes south-east of Denver.Dhamma Sukha Meditation Centers mission is to research, practice, preserve and teach original Buddhist teachings and meditation as found in the earliest.I was also dealing with chronic pain. The Cedaredge courses continued every summer for many years. The first course was held at a retreat center in Cedaredge, Colorado. Goenka was introduced to Colorado by his students in 1982.
I am not the most woo woo of humans, and the idea of a giant drum circle of positive thinkers made me want to run away screaming.Vipassana is different from mindfulness meditation, which focuses on awareness, or to transcendental meditation, which uses a mantra. It is a practical method of self-awareness that allows one to face the tensions and problems of daily life in a calm and balanced way.I chose this specific course, which took place in New Zealand, because despite the trendiness of meditation classes and apps, Vipassana seemed to be about equanimity, discipline and hard work – right up my alley. Vipassana is one of India’s oldest techniques of meditation, first taught 2,500 years ago. The courses are organized and run by Patliputra Vipassana Trust.Introduction to Vipassana. This centre has been developed and dedicated to the public by Government of Bihar.
I told my friend I wanted to break my brain and put it back together againWhile descended from Buddhism, the modern-day courses are secular in nature. By doing so, over 10 days, you train yourself to stop reacting to the vicissitudes of life. You are instructed to refocus attention on the objective sensations in your body, arising and falling, as you do a scan of your limbs in a specific order. No matter the pain as you sit, or the fact that your hands and legs fall asleep and that your brain is crying for release.
So much for equanimity.I tumbled out of my cot and got ready for the 4.30am meditation session. I felt a rush of anger rise up in me when I heard that sound, and fantasized about taking the gong and flinging it into the forest. Photograph: Jodi EttenbergOn the first day, a bell rang outside my door at 4am, reminding me that despite the darkness, it was time to wake up.I was not, nor will I ever be, a morning person. Jodi what are you doing to yourself?”The grounds of the mediation retreat near Auckland. “It isn’t running efficiently.” I compared it to hiring a personal trainer to help me at a first-ever gym session.“No, it’s like running a marathon having never run before.
Regardless of how many pillows I piled under my knees, it bubbled up until it hit a crescendo.You are allowed to speak to the teacher during office hours, and I went that first day, knotted in pain and panic. The simplicity of this instruction felt incredibly futile.I had a hard time focusing on my breath because of the persistent burning in my back. When your mind moved from that awareness you brought your mind back to the fact that you breathe.
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I should leave, right?With total calm, he told me to disassociate my panic from the pain. Plus I didn’t know how to focus on my breath. Plus my back was falling apart. Sheepishly, I explained that I hadn’t actually meditated before.
The teacher offered a wooden L-shaped contraption to help prop up my back during the meditation. “Perfectionism won’t help you here.”I trudged back out of the meditation hall and into the bright New Zealand sunlight, reeling. He told me to do my best, whatever that was.“Oh, you’re one of those,” he said with a soft smile.
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 asleep as you are scanning your neck for objective sensations, your mind may wander to whether you’ll ever stand up again. Throughout, we were instructed to be aware of the sensations or pain we feel. This involved sequences of long body scans in a specific order.
You itch like mad on your nose? Can’t scratch it. They occurred three times a day, during which we were not allowed to move. You remind yourself that the pain is temporary, just like everything else.In addition to the body scans, day four marked the beginning of “hours of strong determination”. Instead, you refocus on the neck and ignore the part of your brain that is begging you to give attention to the leg pain.
Surely I could handle 10 days of repetition and focus? I held on by a thread, until day five. It took all of my energy not to walk out myself.I tried to remind myself it was only 10 days. Along the way if there are points of pain, you observe them impersonally as your scan reaches those points, knowing they are impermanent.In response to these new requirements, a wave of people left the course.
I reached for the course schedule, only to realize I was about to kill something with a document that says you won’t kill anything.Instead, I took a deep breath, skirted around the creature, and opened my door. No writing, no talking, no eye contact, no communicating.At the end of day one, I noticed a daddy longlegs struggling on the carpet but heading toward the door. The course was on a bird sanctuary outside Auckland, and I arrived only to find that 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 no intoxicants. I did not worry about spiders. My arachnophobia has never waned, and I am ashamed to admit that it has dictated some of my travel plans.Before the meditation course began I worried about the long days of silence. I had nightmares about spiders for years, waking up screaming in the middle of the night.
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Unlike the many spiders on the veranda, this one was huge.I leapt out of bed in a panic. Just before bed, I caught a glimpse of a bulbous black spider in my peripheral vision, dropping out of a tiny hole near the ceiling. Photograph: Jodi EttenbergThen, on day five, I hit peak spider. I did not find this helpful.The ‘spider catcher’. This was a Tupperware container plus a piece of paper to slide under it for ease of transport. Huge black spiders dotted the corner of the room where we picked up our pillows, watching over us as we shuffled into yet another meditation session.In response, the organizers provided us with a “spider catcher”.
The spider, as startled as I, hastily clawed its way back toward the ceiling. The spider was dropping from the ceiling, right above my head.Gasping, I fell sideways out of the bed. At 2am, I awoke to a feeling of deep alarm and turned the light back on. Finally I shut the light decisively. I left the light on, drifting off only to dream about spiders and wake up breathless.
It was simply a bump along the way. Or in my case, drops down from the ceiling in plain view.I wish I could say that the spider incident was a turning point. Instead, what you least expect creeps up behind you and scares you out of your mind. A friend once said that in life, worrying ahead of time was futile, because what you are scared of never manifests. At that point in the course several people had left, and I was able to move to a different cabin.For the rest of the week, as everyone else sat on the grass enjoying the sun between sessions, I stayed in my room, too scared to leave.It’s funny what your brain can do to you. I begged the female volunteer leader to let me switch rooms.
For me, the challenge was suppressing the urge to run around like a toddler. Some people talk about intruding memories of childhood or overly sexual thoughts during their Vipassana experience.
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