Vipassina Meditation Retreat

The experience of 10 days plus one of meditation for 11 hours a day is one that is hard to put to words. Having come from a life of very little formal meditation training and little practical practice I can say it was a crash course. I’m now sitting in a pub waiting for my train to Weymouth which is near the climbing area of Portland. I’m not finding time to reflect on my experience. I’m sure the train ride will provide even more time.

I feel at this moment, and have for the past 5 days, a sensation of being gently rocked as if bobbing in the rolling waves of the ocean. My back is a bit sore from the exertion, for the past five days we have done 3 of the 11 hours as hard determination where you do not move or change you posture. Needless to say this gives you ample time to work on the technique which essentially is to retrain the sensations good or bad to be view with the conscious mind in a state of equanimity.

The first three days of the course are set on sharpening the mind to the sensations (feelings) in the body through a meditation called Anne panna (sp?). The technique is focused on breathing and sensing the breath in the region around the nose. For these first days you are also free to rearrange your posture and stretch as needed.

On day 4 they teach you the primary meditation technique, Vipassina. This technique involves running your focus throughout the body to detect areas of pain or pleasure then viewing them as I said before equanimously (no reaction, no aversion, no craving). You see the body for how it is and how its feeling. This is also the point where they introduced the strong determination sittings and you try not to move or react to the sensations which in my case was pain.

By the 4th sittings on the fifth day I was questioning how I was going to make it through to the end of the course, the pain was so overwhelming. Then I had a sitting where I shifted my weight and all the pain and knots in my back melted away. I was good, and able to sit the entire remainder of the sitting without moving. I also noticed that in the following sitting I had the pain return but it was less and with each successive sitting it became more and more tolerable like the volume had been turned down. I had good sittings and bad ones after that but the progression was a steady decline in the amount I reacted to the pain, that is to say the pain was still there but didn’t cause me to real from the intensity.

One day 10 when we were finally allowed to speak again it sounded as though I was speaking through a megaphone. It felt almost uncomfortable to speak. Through after few hours it was returning to normal.

My whole experience didn’t seem like I had made to much of a shift in my outlook or perception till I got back into town and started walking around Hereford waiting for my train and I started to realize that I felt happy and open. I also could sense the tension created by all the distractions of walking down a main shopping street of a western town.

In a strange turn of events I ended up getting on the wrong train on my wait to Portland and ended up in Bristol. This wasn’t all that bad since I had met a friend Meilee up in Sheffield and she lives in Bristol. I was trying to get her to go to Portland so when I got on the wrong train and ended up in Bristol I just called her up. We went to the local climbing gym for the evening where she was meeting a friend that night. I bouldered and totally shattered myself.

I’m going to skip Portland now and head down to Dorset with Meilee for some deep water soloing (DWS).