~6 minute read, 1100 words
I’m trudging along, hauling my wheelie suitcase down an unsealed bitumen road that leads to the S.N. Goenka Vipassanā Retreat Centre. I’m about to do my first silent meditation retreat and I’m incredibly nervous. I’ve been meditating consistently and reading about meditation, but it now becomes apparent that I really have no idea what I’m in for. Another retreatant, travelling lighter with a shoulder bag, silently overtakes me. It was a busy day for me, clearing my to-do list and tying up loose ends, communicating with others and putting on auto-responders, packing, and then rushing to the train to head two and a half hours out west into the Blue Mountains. On the train ride I try to read a bit more from the meditation manual I’ve been studying, hoping that cramming in a little more meditation advice will help me navigate this experience.
I’ve recently turned 30, finished my PhD in data-generated audio-visual art, and given myself this 10-day retreat as a gift. Throughout my PhD studies I experienced the worst mental health of my life, with depression and anxiety keeping me bedridden for days at a time. Although my mental health has been improving thanks to yoga, meditation, and a pared-back schedule, my hope for this retreat is that it will help me put those dark mental spaces behind me for good. It’s clear to me now that there’s more to the mind and conscious experience in how I’m perceiving the events of life and I yearn to find the kind of understanding that will bring relief.
When I arrive, I put my suitcase with the ragtag pile of luggage in the alcove and then stand around awkwardly. I’m confused about the centre. There’s a bunch of normal rural houses mixed with gravel walkways and lush ponds that seem to invite the bush to encroach and take over. I gradually look around and poke my head into a room to see people lining up to check in. Someone greets me, takes my name, and tells me which dorm room I’m in, giving me a name tag to put beside my bed. They point me in the direction of the dorm and I head there by myself, but when I find my allocated area — reminiscent of the components of a Japanese capsule hotel: a bed with dividers on either side, a few compartments for storage, and a curtain for privacy — I see someone else’s name tag still in the little plastic sleeve. I assume that I must have been given the wrong number and I go back to the reception to wait in line again. This time the volunteer comes down with me and assures me that it was someone from the previous retreat who accidentally left it. It’s this moment that it hits me just how anxious I am. I wish that this process of arriving and checking in could be clearer and warmer. In the dorm, I sit down on the bed and see a tally scratched into the wall, like someone waiting out a prison sentence. The scratches stop short of 10.
There’s a kind of peacefulness here, but I also pick up on a tone of severity. The lack of talking seems to land me in a space of being back in school, or in a library in a foreign country; I don’t know who I can speak to or how things run. However, this also ties in with a palpable presence, that I can only describe as being bright and clear, austere and striking. I feel a sense of awe and anticipation. It seems that this sense of sacredness is being created by the volunteers and the shared sense of commitment. I’m yearning for some kind of powerful shift in my life and I wonder, apprehensively, if this could be it, if I can commit to this enough for it to lead to deep change.
During the retreat I experience many things. I feel an extreme range of emotions from joy and bliss to frustration and anger, while also battling boredom and sleepiness. I earnestly try to attend all the sits, even at 4:30 am, attempting maximum diligence. Then I crash. My body rebels against the strictness and denial of comfort as I give in to the soothing warmth and comfort of a hot shower. I find myself unable to get out, and when I finally do, I have to sprint to the scheduled meditation session, barely making it in time.
I find my practice deepens and expands; I find new aspects of my mind that I hadn’t come across before. I experience some sensations of pressure in my head that feel to me somehow completely wrong, with incredible tension and a sense of energetic blockage. In question time I go up to the teacher and ask about this tension, fully expecting them to be shocked at the situation. Their response: “try deconstructing it”. The conversation ends abruptly, I get up and leave the hall, feeling like I am missing something.
I’m almost ready to give up from an exhausting two days of precisely investigating and deconstructing sensory experience, when I reach a clearing in the mental space — a kind of beautiful opening where things seem to flow and shift. I can only describe this with vague language and imagery as it is an experience that I can’t match up to anything I’d felt to this point in my life. I feel as though all that I perceive turns into water droplets running down a glass pane — I even see this in my visual field as the light seems to trickle in and soothe my weary brain. There is a sense of flow, smoothness, and ease that I had never felt before.
This experience evaporates when I get frustrated that all the vegan dessert has been eaten and all that’s left is the vegetarian option. Despite eating a lot less than I normally do, I don’t feel hungry, but I also notice a growing disconnection from the signals of my body — getting easier and easier to ignore sensations such as hunger and discomfort. By the end of the retreat I realise I’ve unintentionally lost weight.
I find the teachings powerful, funny, and deeply meaningful, aided by the relief of stories and entertainment after 10 hours of silently observing sensations. I also feel incredibly conflicted at how different this lifestyle is from my regular life. The mandate to sit two hours a day to continue on this path seems impossible to maintain. I leave the retreat floating, but also confused; dizzy from the highs of deep meditation and feeling like a traveller dropped into a new land without a map.
Something opens up, something closes.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to try out a retreat experience that is warm, supportive, and aimed towards integration, there are still a few places open for the 10-day retreat in October.