Vipassana: Insight

I’ve been doing this 10 day silent meditation course - called vipassana - for the past three years. Many people have asked what it’s all about, and why I keep returning, so I figured the blog was a good a place as any to (try to) explain.

In one sense, vipassana is not directly related to human rights and/or development (the ostensible focus of this blog), but in another much broader sense, it's the art of living - and therefore related to everything.

And anyway, as you may have noticed heading into the fourth year of this blog project, I'm getting less discriminating about the topics I choose. It feels good to write about what is interesting me or (more often) confounding me at any given moment, and I’ve received enough feedback to feel confident that they are more often than not things that you’re either grappling with now, have in the past or will in the future.

So here we go.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. 

Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. 

This is a kind of death.

ANAÏS NIN

Loosely translated, vipassana means insight.

It is the practice of non-reactive observation to sensations on the body. In other words, awareness of and equanimity with whatever arises - pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. In a 10 day course, you intentionally eschew all the trappings of everyday life (no phone, no books, no journals, no music), take a vow of silence, and meditate in 1-2 hour segments for about 10 hours per day, from 4:30am to 9:30pm. Twice daily, you eat vegetarian food prepared for you by other returning meditator “servers,” and take no food after noon. Absent the distractions of life and constant input from other people, even the busiest of minds (such as my own), quiets down after a few days. This surface level calm allows other, deeper things to surface (and usually disrupt).

You begin by observing breath, which serves to sharpen your focus, and gradually move to systematically observing sensations that arise throughout the body. These might be subtle (tingling, vibration, prickling), strong (heat, cold, discomfort, pain) or non-existent (numb or blank areas). They might be pleasant or unpleasant. It makes no difference what the sensation is or how strong or weak it is - what matters is your response to it. Your aim is to maintain balance in the mind, developing neither attachment to the pleasant sensations nor resistance or aversion to the unpleasant ones.

Sounds simple enough. And it is, really. But it’s amazing how something so simple can be so difficult.

For starters, sitting upright on a little cushion for 10 hours a day is harder than I ever imagined. Inevitably, the body begins to rebel. Especially since, after a few days, during three of these one hour sittings you are meant to remain completely immobile. These “sittings of strong determination” are where I truly began to understand the difference between enduring discomfort and accepting it. Until Day 6 or 7 of my first 10 day course in 2020, I was using sheer willpower and discipline to grit my teeth and bear the pain in my back and side. It was pretty agonizing. But at some point (aided by a series of recorded “Dhamma talks” played each evening), I was able to somehow unclench and watch, rather than fight or resist, the pain. In doing this, I saw that it didn’t remain the same. It changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. As I continued scanning from head to feet and feet to head, I’d notice that sometimes it went away completely - only to return at some later point.

So it is with life.

I understood - intellectually - that attachment was the source of suffering long before I came to vipassana. It’s a pretty easy concept to get behind. If everything in life is impermanent, what’s the point in getting attached to any of it? A wanted thing happens, and you’re happy - but then it goes away, and you’re sad. An unwanted thing happens, and you’re sad. It goes away, and you’re happy. On and on, a constant flux, an unstable emotional and mental state. It makes sense that this attachment would bring suffering.

The question is: how to actually apply this in life.

Something about seeing within the framework of my own body that nothing remains the same really helped to crystallize this intellectual understanding into more of a corporal knowing. If the pain in my back that seems permanent and awful is actually and necessarily constantly shifting, and if I have witnessed that by acknowledging it as the reality of this moment (instead of resisting it and wishing it weren’t so) it will eventually change and even pass away, couldn’t that also be possible for my approach to life more generally? In the end, our bodies are just a mass of tiny molecules arising and passing away. Life is just a series of moments, arising and passing away. The more we can not only “live in” but accept each moment as it arises, knowing that it will pass away, the less unhappy we are.

This is not to say that we become passive, especially not in the face of injustice. Acceptance does not mean surrender. It means acknowledging reality - the present moment - as it is. Not as you would like it to be. Keep working for a better life, and better world, but be realistic about the way your life and the world are at this moment. From that pragmatic and grounded place, orchestrate the revolution.

Now, I’m not saying that I live this way. Far from it. Most of the time I am ruminating on the past or fretting about the future. But there are moments of being really, fully present. Seconds really. Brief flashes. These are important and beautiful little windows.

And that’s why I go back year after year, and try to meditate daily: to keep strengthening that muscle of present awareness. Like any other endeavor, it takes practice. And - quite honestly - it’s often not that fun. But it seems worth it, to me at least.

There’s so much more I could say about my own experience, and if you’re interested, people with much more authority than myself have written entire books on the subject.

For now, though, I’ll leave you with the words of the teacher S.N. Goenka:

be happy.