This is part 4 in a series exploring my Vipassana meditation retreat with the previous parts linked, in order —The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly—below.
DAY 6 dawned as usual — the sun rising as I was heading back to my cabin after breakfast for a snooze. Another night of maybe three hours’ sleep, and a coffee hadn’t made a lick of difference. With a belly full of porridge, this was my one reliable window for the deepest sleep of the day — about 45 minutes — before the first ‘sit of strong determination.’
But this morning, I don’t know if I was half-awake or dreaming. Lying on my right side, I felt my shoulder move in a way it never had before, sliding and spiralling back against the weight of my body — a way I didn’t think it could move. I noted it as strange and slipped back to sleep. If I were even awake.
Because I didn’t remember until later, when leaving the hall before lunch. As I checked, reaching my left hand across to press the front of the shoulder and moving my elbow away from my body — a habitual test — it kept going. Past the 45 degrees from the body that had been its limit on a good day, and all the way, bicep-to-ear. Then full arm circles, backwards and forwards. Then a walk-like-an-Egyptian corkscrewing and other contortions — no matter how I moved the arm, it did not hurt. I could even make an overarm throwing motion. At first gingerly because I could not believe it, then building up to full force.
Something I hadn’t been able to do for over a decade. The original injury, along with a torn rotator cuff (infra and supraspinatus) to boot, had me tossing tennis balls for the dog with a backwards, underarm action.
Gobsmacked gave way to jubilation. Silent jubilation, of course — making it a private party, though probably a puzzling one for those wondering why this guy was suddenly busting moves and pretending to throw things.
And looking very happy about it.
I still don’t know what happened. My best guess is pain had been restricting the motion of an unstable joint — serving a protective purpose — but hours of scanning gave the brain an accurate, up-to-date map of the area instead of a knee-jerked danger signal, residual from injury.
Even so, despite the improvement and the slide-and-twist I’d felt, there was no change in how the shoulder felt when scanning. It didn’t seem any more like a shoulder, no more distinct as a ‘part’. Only the memory of that dreamlike shift alerted me to the change; nothing in the two hours of scanning in between.
And I don’t know what to make of that.
But following a lunchtime in which I not unreasonably surmised that, given the shoulder was such a trouble spot, I could look forward to a series of similar miraculous inroads to the many more areas of pain and damage, I was ready to rock and roll.
Rearing to go. In classic craving fashion, you’ll note.
It was severe migraines that led Goenka to his first retreat. Unhelped by medical care across Europe, America, and Japan and with no cure except morphine, fearing addiction, he turned to Vipassana. The relief he found ultimately inspiring him to teach the technique worldwide. Nonetheless, expectations — of any kind, much less the miraculous variety — are discouraged.
The emphasis remains on disciplined practice and patient observation: the work. Always.
But, even in light of these repeated, now remedial, errors, I continued to make incremental but undeniable progress. In no small part courtesy of this newfound energy that, misguided or not, proved critical. Because work it was.
Very different to any sort of meditation you might imagine — certainly to anything I’d experienced previously— the level of concentration required to maintain focus, keep track of where you were, and resist drift was draining.
One of the more consistent sensations was the unnecessary, but instinctive eye flickering—moving backwards and forwards under the eyelids, scanning.
Less blissful than busy. And intense.
FREE OF CHARGE
Equanimity was becoming the default. Not perfect, but the exposure therapy of hundreds of trips through the body, now struggled to raise an eyebrow, much less the early fireworks. Familiarity bred… if not contempt, then at least weary predictability.
And besides, a studied indifference is easily mustered when you suspect another miracle is in the post. A squaring of the psychological ledger that put me squarely back in the firing line for its flip side: physical pain.
The sittings of strong determination—absent the sensory effects—were a trial. By now, I could usually make it to about the 45-minute mark before gritting through the final quarter of an hour. Far worse— and not twice as bad but more like 10 times— were the longer 2-hour sits. While technically allowed to move, the relief offered by any adjustment was measured in seconds.
Torturous though it was, this is not the point. While it is practice—an inoculation— for the many times in life we can’t escape pain or other unpleasant sensations, still, the idea is not to endure.
At least not in the teeth-gritted, white-knuckled, embracing-the-suck manner, you imagine. The training is to remain calm and equanimous while keeping the focus on pure sensation. To realise that without stories, labels, judgments, and ownership, the sensation often changes—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.
Not better or worse, just different. A sensation, not my sensation.
The trouble is that the only way out is through. And teeth-gritted, white-knuckled, embracing-the-suck, may not be the destination, but it is the way. So being able to guarantee pain in such a safe and reliable manner—just don’t move—made these sittings the perfect training ground.
And there’s a science parallel here. Gate control theory holds that the brain regulates incoming pain signals before they reach conscious awareness, effectively dialling the volume up or down based on what else is competing for attention. It’s why rubbing your shin after you bang it can bring instant relief — you’re feeding the brain new sensory data that partially closes the ‘gate’.
Or like a flow state, where all available attention is locked into the task at hand, leaving no room for self-consciousness or intrusive thoughts. Vipassanna isn’t ‘flow’ in the joyful, creative sense, but it hijacks the same mechanism in a more deliberate and sustained form. By ensuring the brain is occupied with a detailed and specific task— a precise, ordered sweep of the body demanding sustained attentional absorption—it leaves little room left for pain.
And that’s what it feels like. It’s not that nothing hurts, but that the pain is ‘over there’. Sometimes waiting in the wings, and other times waaaay over there. But you only take the sting out by learning not to address it, to see it as just another passing sensation, not a personal enemy.
Oddly, I never caught this shift in real time. Only retrospectively did I realise — oh, it’s over there now. That the switch could go unnoticed amid such obvious pain made it stranger still. Perhaps a sign of the quality of my moment-to-moment awareness, I would’ve bet everything I owned on the fact I’d notice any relief immediately, but I never witnessed this tipping point.
I was witness to the fact that when it happened the first time, I foolishly believed that was just how things were now, and I’d easily find my way back to this state. Yes, siree, that’s the end of painful sits for me.
Repeatedly witness.
And so I started to break up the longer sits by doing half in my room —with back support— and half in the hall, and a short walk in between to unwind.
My new throwing arm aside, the big change on DAY 6 was the scanning pace.
The zooming function was still adjusting for distance, but not 24 hours earlier, I’d been racing through scans, barely landing on each point. Now I moved from top to bottom in about five minutes — the pace we’d been instructed to start with. Others, meanwhile, with the basics down, were speeding up. Focusing less on ‘part-by-part’ and more on pure sensation. A point I’d already arrived at, not out of insight but necessity — there was no ‘recognisable’ part for me to land on.
This marking the first of a few instances when I seemed out of synch with the program, with my experience now running ahead of discourses that were explaining things— unhelpfully— after the fact. Things like;
SURGERY OF THE MIND
And the concept of saṅkhāra: the deep habit patterns of the mind — accumulated reactions of craving and aversion that condition how we experience the world. By observing bodily sensations with complete equanimity, you stop generating new saṅkhāras and allow old ones to rise from the unconscious and dissolve. Goenka likening this process to a surgery of the mind—without anaesthesia.
Like any deep operation, this can be uncomfortable, as buried pains and patterns surface. Especially when they are highly emotionally charged.
No shit.
As far as I’m aware, this has no scientific underpinning, but I still could have done with hearing it 2 days earlier. And after hearing the scanning instructions repeatedly, something else occurred to me.
If you do not feel any sensation in a particular area, simply pause there for up to a minute. Maintain equanimity, keep your attention focused on that spot, and observe with patience. If nothing is felt after about a minute, move on to the next.
As above, if staying still intensifies sensations, maybe the reason for concentrating attention and strong determination was that many, if not most, people are numb and find it difficult to discern any sensation.
I was all sensation. All the time. And, if anything, had needed to wind things back, to move forward. An idea that might have given some weight to the idea that pain and suffering act as some sort of accelerant to this process, except in other respects, I was stuck fast.
Like the change when scanning from gross sensations to the subtle, as awareness gradually penetrates to deeper levels. I had developed far more control and equanimity as described, but, by this measure, I was super superficial, and all sensation was still very much more unmissable than subtle.
Everything now was so routine that from late on DAY 6 to DAY 8, it all starts to blur, and I can’t be sure of the timeline, but equally routine was the progress, realising one development or another for every 3-4 hours of meditation.
Most notably, the ‘chain of conditioned arising’ shift from a theory to practice. Which is to say, seeing it. Or at least part of it. Beginning to parse out the threads of the experience.
The threads of all experience.
BREAKING THE CHAIN
Usually described as a 12-link chain, Dependent Origination maps how suffering is generated—and therefore how it can be stopped. On retreat, it can be observed in micro-form:
A. Observe an object in consciousness (a thought)
B. Feel it—pleasant or unpleasant
C. Tag it—good or bad
D. React
We don’t react to the object itself, but to the sensation it elicits. Meditation helps untangle these links, breaking the automatic cascade of thought → feeling → reaction.
So you don’t crave a glass of wine or your phone. You don’t hate Justin Bieber or supermarkets. You’re reacting to the pleasant or unpleasant sensation these things elicit—not the thing itself.
This might seem obvious for —feels great— wine, but the narrative of our entire lives is the melding of these stages. That’s what a narrative is. And unless we untangle them, the best we can hope for is to pinball our way through life at the mercy of one thought and the next.
If we’re lucky. Because an untrained mind doesn’t only cause undue suffering, it can do a lot of damage. As Sam Harris says:
…that lack of distance between consciousness and its object. That is a thing that leaves us hostage in each moment to the emotional and behavioral implications of each thought.
If dreaming is the processing of our day — of our narrative— meditation is the deconstruction of it. And, I’ll note here that while many activities are thought of as meditative, and although they might be beneficial, none are a substitute for it.
But having experienced this in meditation, it then became an easy enough trace, and I started to feel my way through the day, looking for the sensation before any label of good or bad— and learning to drop the label altogether.
What does breakfast feel like?
What does the gong feel like?
What does boredom feel like?
What does a dropped plate feel like?
But all the way down to each —fraction of a second—moment-to-moment-to-moment. It keeps you busy. And it keeps your mind free of thought.
And if that seems like a hassle, you’re doing it anyway. Well, part of it—the same feeling your way through the day and life more generally that we all do, only reacting, usually unconsciously, to the label. To a never-ending procession of thought.
This unceasing awareness was meant to travel with us off the mats, but I could only keep it up for so long. But I now found at night time—any downtime, really— the unfiltered, sharp, crystal clear memories, and again not mere glimpses, but what seemed like minutes of pure, precise, experience with every detail: a classroom from when I was about 8 — the paintings on the walls, what we were wearing and knowing names.
I have an eidetic-esque memory in that I am usually able to remember something by deciding to remember it, and can then see the passage or quotes from books clearly in my mind—reading them in my mind off the same side and place on the page.
Now, along with clips from movies, I was reading whole passages from books I had never remembered and not only listening to music— I found I could mix in my mind.
Thankfully, none of these playbacks had the high emotional charge either positive or negative. Neither favourite nor hated songs, books or movies, and like the flashes of this happening in the first few days, only seemed to be a gallery of the unremembered. A godsend nonetheless, in long, long nights when advice to simply observe sensation then too was more than wearing thin.
Although the likelihood of little sleep had also now been broached, with the explanation that the mind and body are simply in a different mode and that the need for sleep decreases as mental agitation quiets.
An explanation supported by my only full sleep on DAY 4, but one also a little late in coming.
THE HOME STRETCH
More late dropouts were a surprise, but with the near end now steeling me with a new resolve, DAY 9 was marked by the most dramatic shift of all.
I was still more methodical than free-flow and a million miles from the rapid, fluid body scan, like ‘awareness dumped on your head and falling to your feet like a bucket of water’ that Goenka described.
I had the same easy, relaxed, calm, I’d experienced in my best moments, but now with a light focus. With no corresponding reduction of detail, my attention had diffused like ink into water. It was softer. Not reaching, but receiving. Less a laser than sunlight.
By now, I’d wised up to the fact I might always expect this but—and perhaps because I didn’t—with brief blips, it was the whole day.
But I wasn’t the only one. For a couple of minutes towards the end of a few meditations, from my prime position at the back, where I could see everything, I enjoyed watching a hall now transformed. The fidgeting, coughing, sniffling and squirming of the first few days had resolved into a perfect stillness and quiet that was alien.
There is no other word for it. With 70-odd people in a hall, I couldn’t even hear any breathing.
The next morning, we left the hall after the meditation before lunch and into noble speech—a ‘soothing balm to help heal our wounds’.
After some whooping and hollering and a few high fives, we sat down to lunch in the same places with the same people we’d been sitting with the whole time. And introduced ourselves.
Having no obligation to engage in small talk with strangers is a fantastic idea if you ask me, but this transition back to speaking and interaction felt strange, not because we hadn’t been speaking, but a clear inversion of ‘together alone.’
Families or couples will sit on a couch, even eat together, lost in the digital. In silence, but sharing the same extreme experience, we had, in some respect, never been less alone.
The newbies sharing stories of similar experiences, but also hearing from students attending not their second or third retreat— although there were plenty— but their 10th. Or 30th. Putting any sense of achievement firmly in perspective.
Even before learning our teacher had arrived to this retreat directly from a 60-day one.
But the meditation after lunch proved to all of us how critical that silence had been, with our minds now stirred by the interaction. And by thoughts of home.
I could feel my awareness splintering along these axes. And—not really in keeping with— the final days mettā bhāvanā (loving-kindness meditation) was marked by a sadness and reverence. A sense of loss.
And a final night of no sleep.
DAY 11— departure day was a final pre-dawn meditation and breakfast, both sideshows to the excitement of departure. We cleaned rooms and other housekeeping duties that seemed to drag on forever, before getting our personals returned and clearance for takeoff.
I turned on my phone, but didn’t look at it. And after all the talk in the final day or so it was only relief to get in the car and back to silence.
I drove back to the world, waiting for it to puncture my bliss. A word that seems strange, and one that requires the further qualification that I don’t mean extreme happiness, more a complete happiness.
Less an emotional sentiment than a refined, intentional radiation of peace that, rather than dimming with every mile travelled back to the real world, only increased with my excitement at seeing it.
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Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI
Thank you. I've had trouble sticking with long articles that I feel I should read because they look interesting. But I needed this one. Like a plant finally getting water.
https://substack.com/@collapseofthewavefunction/note/p-170168037?r=5tpv59&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action