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After returning from my Vipassana meditation course I thought I’d give it a few days for the effects to sink in and to see how the benefits I had got from the course manifested in my everyday life. It’s still early days yet, but it seems like a long time ago and I want to get my thoughts down here before I forget anything crucial.

It was, in all honesty, the most difficult thing I think I have ever done. It was also sufficiently rewarding that I will be doing it again at some point.

The retreat I was on was a silent one. There was no speaking, no reading or writing materials were allowed, the proscription of communication even extended to trying not to exchange nonverbal gestures with the other students on the course. For me that was an absolutely critical part of the benefit of the course - not only does the silence create a conducive atmosphere for meditation, it also is therapeutic in itself. When you can’t run your normal pattern of distracting yourself by communication with others, reading, listening to music or in some other way preventing yourself from being left alone with yourself then a lot of unconscious material comes to the surface. You desperately seek any form of mental stimulation which would distract your from yourself - everyone on the course later realised how pervasive this habit is, and how desperate the ego is not to let go when you quieten down. We constantly redefine our ego based sense of identity through our interactions with the world and other people - it is one way in which we continually reiterate to ourselves who we are. Once you quieten down and stop doing this for a few days you are left alone with yourself and you have to process and deal with repressed issues which you had been distracting yourself from. This process takes a couple of days of silence to even get properly started, by day 5 you are getting pretty deeply into your problems and it is extremely difficult to deal with, by day 8 or 9 you are still going deeper but you feel the load beginning to lighten - perhaps because you see the end of the course in sight.

In terms of the practice of meditation itself, the first part of the course consists of Anapana meditation. This involves honing your awareness by concentrating on breathing. At no point are any breathwork or breathing excercises performed - just simply observing the breath and the feeling of the breath on the area around the nostrils so as to become capable of feeling more subtle sensations.

Once this has been performed to the point where subtle sensations can be easily perceived the focus of attention is gradually expanded outwards into the body, to feel sensations on other parts of the body - at first part by part. The principle behind Vipassana meditation is that every negative emotion - every aversion or craving - has a corresponding physical sensation on the body. We create misery for ourselves by our aversions - by pushing things away we add energy to them. We create misery for ourselves by our cravings - by grasping at things we push them away and throttle the life from them. The root of our misery and the place where we carry out our aversion/craving behaviour is on the body - in the subjective experience of the body. Whenever something which we don’t like happens we have a physical sensation as a reaction to it - it is this physical sensation which we then react to with aversion. Whenever something which we do like happens we have a physical sensation as a reaction to it - it is this physical sensation which we then react to with craving. When practice just observing our bodily sensations without reacting with aversion or craving we are breaking this habit - a habit which creates misery for us. This is the practice of vipassana.

At first this can be a very physically demanding process - it can involve fairly intense physical pain, of which much can be attributed to the fact that you are processing the repressed events and complexes which correspond to those physical sensations. The sensations you feel can be very strong, solidified and unpleasant. Learning to allow them to be, without judging them is part of the process of becoming free of your habitual aversion/craving pattern which creates nothing but misery for you.

As you practice this equanimous, indifferent awareness the solidified, strong sensations begin to dissolve into more subtle sensations on the body - it is the physical parallel of the way you are breaking down and processing the aversions and cravings which correspond to the sensations. By day 9 you start being able to feel subtle sensations on every part of the body, your awareness becomes tuned and sensitised to the point where you can literally feel the subtlest sensation imaginable on any given part of the body.

On day 10 you start talking again - this is quite frankly very odd indeed. You become so accustomed to quietness that emerging from it and restarting the social process is not as straightforward as it may seem - it seems odd to talk, and you are acutely aware of how talking affects us. This last day of gradually reintroducing talking in an environment where everyone has been through the same shared experience is essential - coming straight off the course at an earlier stage and being plunged back into the everyday social milieu would be a very jarring experience.

Another thing you become aware of on day 10 is how, no matter how much you thought you didn’t, you prejudge others based on appearance. I do not care how much you think you don’t do this - you do it badly - very badly. Everyone I spoke to at the course agreed that they had been extremely surprised on talking for the first time to the other participants to find that they weren’t as the had expected them to be at all.

Having emerged back into the world at large it has not taken even a week for me to largely revert back to “normality”, if if anything about me could really be described as normal! Undoubtedly the benefits are there: calmness, less aversion/craving, less reactivity, less baggage. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I look and feel younger. In fact, looking around on about day 5 of the course I remember thinking that everyone there looked about 5 years younger than when it started and at the end several other people commented to me that the same had occured to them. I am convinced enough of the benefits that I will be doing another course and practicing the technique whenever I can, but I find it very difficult to put the benefits into words.