Woman, reWilded #5 – Desperation rhymes with respiration

A 10 Day Vipassana Meditation Retreat

The fifth of a 7 part series Woman, reWilded on reclaiming cycle wisdom, woman wisdom in spring season.

Spring, the season we look forward to. Warmer days, lush, new growth and the perfect time for spring cleaning the body and our interior spaces that accumulate junk over winter. But what of spring cleaning the mind? 

To mark 10 years of living in Australia, a life punctuated by periods of trauma/PTSD, I decided to do something radical this spring. I committed to my own personal trainer in mental discipline, S.N. Goenka and embarked on a 10 day Vipassana Meditation Course. 

This is an account of the experience that left me like a spring lamb on wobbly legs not sure when the butcher was coming. The butcher never came and though I am still the same person, I have more resources, space and resilience to be with the vicissitudes of life.

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Four times I’ve wanted to run from this macabre comedy of torture and punishment. The first time – it’s only Day 1 – there’s no space in my throat for air. I do run, in strangled gasps outside the hall so as not to disturb the other 60 meditators and release spluttering coughs and a stream of tears. 

Gently I’m brought back by the female manager to join the other meditators to “start again, start again, start again,” as Goenka intones at the beginning of each recorded meditation sitting. “Students will have to stay for the entire period of the course, “ says the code of discipline that I’ve signed on this 10 day Vipassana Meditation retreat with 4.30am starts and 8 blocks of at least 1 hour of meditation ending at 9.30pm. At the moment it could be a prison. 

Why then are Goenka Vipassana courses so popular, booked out with long waiting lists? To witness the happenings of the mind and engage in spirit work as Stephen Jenkinson, shamanic poet, spiritual activist, teacher, author and farmer, says is “a response to the troubles of the times, not freedom from them.” I could say it was part of my addiction to self improvement. Deeper than that I wanted a workable response to my own personal and cultural aversion to discomfort, suffering and the inevitability of death. 

Very few of us are prepared for this experience and that’s the point. Who can prepare for brain surgery; self performed removal of shrapnel and patching up of old exit wounds with no anaesthetic? Suffering IS the point. In Buddhism, it’s the first of four Noble Truths. Crisis is the perfect training ground for the varying degrees of personal and collective grief, rage and fear we are experiencing in one way or another. To develop mastery of the mind, where NOW is the only place to occupy, a future so nebulous and uncertain, Vipassana seems to me a logical response. 

I also wanted to know what it meant to stay, sit still in a body deprived of four senses – sight, sound, touch and kinesthetic movement – and how I would be at the other end. We must close our eyes, tune out of sound, no touching, no speaking, no eye contact and for me the biggest one, no movement. From Day 4 onwards no moving hands, feet or legs in what are called sittings of Strong Determination, Adhiṭṭhāna. Itchy nose bad luck. Pins and needles bad luck. Three times a day, unmoving, we scan the body from head to toe for all of these sensations and just watch the drama unfold.

After the first attempted escape from prison, I have an interview with the humble, supportive and compassionate assistant teacher.
 “I’m really connected to Goenka’s choice of words”, I enthuse. “When he says be alert to your desperation, it really lands for me.”
Poor Petra has to gently break the news to me. 
“I think he means respiration, be alert to your respiration.” 
“Oh…”.my voice trails off.

My mind was looking for an acknowledgement of my suffering in Goenka’s words, but there is none. All instruction is clear and concise and devoid of anything the mind can grasp for comfort. A recorded 11 day audio program is switched on in every sitting by the teacher. A static click reminiscent of wartime bulletins from the BBC signals the start and finish of a sitting. It takes a few sits before we’ve stumbled onto our first collective craving; the sweet relief of the final static click. It’s the end, for now. An audible exhale and untangling of limbs of my fellow meditators means I’m not the only one unravelling.

In those first few days, we are asked to observe our respiration, then on Day 3 keep our attention on the area below the nostrils and above the lip in the first step of the practice of Vipassana meditation, anapana. The surgery has begun; concentrating and sharpening the mind ready for deep incisions, I alternate between desperation and respiration. My mind is a hungry beast needing its daily quota of thousands of ruminating, senseless thoughts. In moments where I deprive it of food, I drop into the void, the dark, yin, deeply  feminine space of no thing, via negativa. It’s fruitful, creative and painful when I see with a jolt what I’ve thrown into the void to fill the empty spaces. It’s what stopped my breathing on Day 1. Buddhists call this realisation, ignorance or moha.

We dive deeper into the potent liminal space together. All 60 meditators are sliding, tripping, tumbling down, down inside the mountain of doubt, grief, fear, anger, rage, judgements, self criticism. As we switch concentration to sensations, my body screams with dense areas of pain: knees, back, head vibrating in varying intensities. The whole body IS the field of practice as I dive down, disciplining the mind to observe pain and suffering with equanimity – anicca, (pronounced aneecha), anicca, anicca – impermanence, changing, everything changing, rising from and passing away into the quantum field.

In brief moments I experience mind and matter merging; sub atomic particles, the smallest units of physical matter or kalapas resonating in the universal field of consciousness. Observing this phenomenon, I’m on my way to the next training, pañña (pronounced panya), wisdom and insight that purifies the mind. It’s a special kind of seeing that observes reality within oneself. Waking up to the body and breath allows mind and matter to coalesce. To observe sensations that are the harbingers of emotions, to see them for what they really are and not get caught in the story is the doorway to the divine; to experience the sacred always, already hereness of each moment. 

Reactivity to events outside – things people say or don’t say, things that work out or don’t – trigger sensations on the inside with a cascade of emotions and biochemical triggers around the body. There I go again, literally falling off my perch of cushions; falling asleep in a habitual trance of the mind. It’s a lifetimes work to awaken, bear witness to oneself and see another, expanding capacity to be present and available; to hold a loving, compassionate listening space where everything is included.

In Vipassana Meditation we are taught to discipline the mind to objectively observe craving and aversion, the root of “mental defilement” without getting caught in the personal story. Detaching from the pain and suffering, creates a spacious awareness for my prison to become a prism. All the cravings and aversions bounce back to me into the stunning possibility of falling instead into the grace of surrender – “no I, no me, no my.”

Outside the meditation hall, on the land of Dhamma Rasmi, Gubbi Gubbi country, in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, lies the lush and lovingly tended landscaped gardens. On high ground near the meditation hall are stunning views of Mt Cooroora, a volcanic plug rising 439m to meet the clouds. An afternoon of torrential rain, sees the mist rise its side up to the apex, to be swept away dispersed, atomised into the sky. There’s my mountain of desperation, with a visible pathway going up its side. But here where I’m standing, entirely in the caress of here and now, the journey is going downwards. 

“It’s as if the mountain pointed to the centre of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending suffering we move towards the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move into it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes…..we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in waking from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of Bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things we find the love that will not die.” (Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)

The green edge of Dhamma Rasmi gives way to a perimeter of natural bush and that’s where I go on breaks between sittings. A track on the fence line is worn down by the restless foot fall of caged lions deprived of space to roam free. I find a sit spot around a stagnant heart shaped pond that feels perfect in every way. It’s a natural meeting place for rufous fantails, black cockatoos, wrens and dozens of other native species as well as the small mob of grey kangaroos that rest in the shade. 

I come to speak to the trees, to hear their wisdom – “keep breathing, keep listening, be still, we are here for you.” A grand planetary gesture of oxygen, cool, shade; a temporary admission pass into the sacred temple of wild things that leaves me agape. How did we ever get the notion we are the apex species? Their wisdom tells me that I must stay; with a strong back, broken heart and wild mind in slow melt down.

Day 7 with a few more abandoned attempts to escape and finally the sweet scent of surrender. Shrapnel of cravings to comfort eating, having a defined amount of sleep every night, a raving, rebellious aversion to mental discipline are brutally exorcised from my brain; bloodied shards lying inert on the operating table next to crude self styled surgical instruments. Here there is no escape from the theatre, no where to run, no solace in a comforting evening meal, 8 hours of sleep, human connection, music, writing, reading or the endless, endless distraction of work or devices. 

I learn to live simply. Simple nourishing vegetarian meals. Simple sitting without a mountain of cushions to prop up my pain. For the first time in my life I experience deep rest without sleeping. Every break, I rest in the simplicity of shavasana – corpse pose – feeling my body humming, a vibrating collection of kalapas – made up of fire, water, air and earth – my weight and substance surrendering into Mother Earth. 

My life on the outside looks simple but it’s a complex house of cards of rituals and routines, cravings and aversions, neuroses and negativity,. Complexity is, after all, just a way of padding life with comfort and safety, busy for the sake of busy, a time and energy sapper to control anxiety – of what? Fear, change, uncertainty, desire. Bouncing from craving material objects, hooked on repetitive thoughts and feelings, for the pleasant sensations they give as though the sensation is permanent when it’s entirely ephemeral – here one moment gone the next. 

The late S. N. Goenka delivers Vipassana meditation in all its purity and simplicity. In the evening during the 1.5 hours video discourse we get to meet the man that took Gautama Buddha’s teaching back to its home in India from Burma and from there to the rest of the world. I find him a humble, funny, compassionate man who makes my neighbour and I chuckle with his quirky hand gestures, facial expressions and bedtime stories that bring each day to a close. 

Day 10, noble silence ends and I’m floored by social anxiety, so much and no thing to say to whom and what? It’s traumatic as my words tumble out through tears of relief and gratitude that I stayed, I made something of it, I didn’t give up on myself. But how to take it back home? How am I going to do this new slow way of being that honours an hour of morning and evening meditation? In that split second of doubt and confusion, I drop a bottle of essential oil in the bathroom and glass shatters into shards on the tiles. Perfection, seriously perfect! In this suspended moment the whole room resonates with rose geranium; I make a pact with myself to give it a year and come back next year. 

On the bank of a creek where I’ve decided to rest for a couple of days, I watch the dragon flies and gnats flit and dance on the surface. A snake glides into the water, startled by my presence. The log I’m sitting on slows the fast flow to a pond, the still water teeming with life. My hand trailing in the water looks like an old woman’s breaking the surface tension with a single question. So how will I live the remaining years of my life?

The hand is my hand, my mothers and grandmother’s hand. This hand must translate something new, wise and potent for my daughters and my community. Timelines collapse in this moment when I meet myself. I see this seed of Vipassana planted more than 15 years ago growing inside me,; I’m sure more than I ever have been, that I am necessary, that life has need of me.