Seeing Reality As It Is
10 days of Silence | Present Sense N.29
I’m not speaking. No verbal words, nor written ones. No laptop, nor cellphone.
I wrote this piece in the past, scheduled it for the future, so that I can be more present. I’m off grid until February 9th, on a ten-day silent meditation retreat.
Today is Day 3. At this point, I’ve lost track of whether it’s Thursday or Monday. Those labels become insignificant when time is measured by the gong of pre-dawn wakeups, group-sits, and meal times. I rise in the dark each morning, brush my teeth, layer up to face the cold, and walk to the meditation hall under a starry sky.
Each morning, afternoon, and evening, we quietly make our way to our respective spots, and then sit. Time is oddly elastic on these retreats. An hour can feel like eternity, yet twenty minutes can also go by in a flash. The schedule is the same each day, no matter which retreat center one attends. There’s something reassuring about the repetitive rhythm, and the lack of surprise in this external structure. Especially when the mind and body have their own set of unexpected content.
Over a hundred students sit and meditate together every day. Yet each of us is alone with our thoughts, our body, our inner landscape. Surprisingly, what we experience isn’t singular. There are many similarities in terms of what each day brings, both in terms of its challenges and rewards. But we all carry our own emotional history, physical limitations, and current state of mind to the cushion.
Even though we’re in silence, there are sounds. Someone might be coughing, or burping, or fidgeting in their seat. A woodpecker is likely to peck against the roof of the meditation hall. I’m internally cursing those who are disturbing the calm and quiet. Oh how fickle the mind is! It loves to point the blaming finger, instead of seeking the internal compass. As it is advised: “Take great care that your actions do not disturb anyone. Take no notice of distractions caused by others.” It’s a challenging tightrope to walk, especially when the mind has no training.
Tomorrow, we’ll be learning the technique of Vipassana. The first 3 days are dedicated to Anapana meditation, which uses the breath to focus our awareness. When we first arrive, our minds are so overfilled with activity that it takes a few days to just settle down. So we’re first guided to pay attention to a small area (the triangle between the nose and upper lip) to give our mind a precise point of focus. Whenever a thought (or a thousand) pop in our head, we simply return to that small area where we can feel our breath. It’s like training a puppy to walk – or the analogy they use is taming the “monkey mind” which swings from one thought branch to another. Those first three days confront us to how unruly our minds are, running a gamut of chaos.
Once the mind is calm enough, we’re ready to learn Vipassana on the fourth day. Vipassana literally translates to “seeing reality as it is.” If that sounds like an obvious endeavor, we quickly realize our strong resistance to reality. And according to this meditation teaching, that is the cause of much of our misery. We fight reality, negotiate with it, and try to bend it to our will. It takes a lot of training (10 full days) to arrive at a state of acceptance.
We come to those conclusions ourselves, simply by observing the sensations in our body. We train the mind to simply notice the various physical sensations, without craving or aversion. Again, it sounds like a simple feat until we realize how reactive we are to each sensation. When we feel a pleasant sensation, we usually want more of it (craving) and when we feel an unpleasant sensation, we tend to want to eliminate it (aversion). But as we train ourselves to not react, and simply observe, we realize no sensation lasts forever. That is the law of nature: everything changes, all is impermanent.
Whatever starts in the body evolves into emotions, and then behavior. In our everyday life we rarely perceive that before we yell (or honk) at the driver that cuts us off, we first feel a sensation in our body. Anger often manifests as heat, perhaps a tightness in our stomach. In an attempt to ease that discomfort, we react – we lash out, whether through words or actions.
The same goes for pleasurable sensations. We take a bite of that chocolate chip cookie, and it launches a wave of endorphins. We want to recreate that feeling, so we grab another cookie, then another… until the package is empty. Feel free to replace cookies with cocktails, sex, TV shows, social media… There is nothing intrinsically wrong with those activities, but they can quickly veer into an endless loop of craving and aversion.
As we learn in Vipassana, we often play the “sensation game” and it’s one we tend to lose. Training ourselves to notice the sensation of the body and our thought patterns give us agency to choose. It creates just enough space, a pause, to then make choices that benefit our well-being. We’re no longer slaves to our reactions and instead start steering our mind to a more peaceful way of living.
Of course, this doesn't happen overnight. It takes a lot of practice, which is why the Vipassana technique is structured as 10 day long retreats. Even then, we’re encouraged to nurture a daily meditation practice when we return home. It can seem challenging to incorporate time to meditate into our busy schedules, but meditation actually expands time as we train our mind to not jump to the first distraction available. It doesn’t just add quantity to our day, but also infuses quality – building an inner refuge of calm, no matter the external state of the world. It seems to me that we need it more than ever.
For today’s Present Sense edition I’m including below the sensory world of Vipassana retreats, sharing what I SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE, TOUCH, BALANCE and ENVISION while I’m there. I’ve also included an audio meditation of Vipassana, guiding you through this practice so that you may try it at home.
A reminder that you can also access my guided meditations on sevensenses.world/meditations. Paid subscribers can find the password for the full meditation library HERE. If you’re not in a financial position to become a paid subscriber but would benefit from this offering, email me and I’ll comp your subscription.
In Joy,
Sabrina
PS: if you have any questions about Vipassana, feel free to email me (sabrina@sevensenses.world) and I’ll do my best to address them upon my return.
