I first heard of Vipassana when the film actress Amala spoke
about a course she attended where everyone maintained silence for 10 days. For
some reason, the idea appealed to me. After that, I came across information
about the course off and on but I just did not seem to find the most convenient
time for a course.
2016 November had seemed like a good time to plan to attend
the 12 day session in Dharamkot near Dharamshala, and I was very pleased when
my application got approved. I had chosen to attend the course at Dharamkot as
I was eager to be able to spend 12 days in the mountains, and the weather in
October/November would hopefully not be too cold for me. The form for
application for a session is normally enabled only for a couple of days before
the centres get the allowed number of applicants, so being able to apply and
actually getting a confirmation is quite a feat. However, the ITC Retirement
Programme was scheduled around the same time, and as that was not going to be
offered to us every year, Ravi and I chose to go to Agra, and I cancelled my
confirmation. This year, I sent in my application on 31st August,
while in the Calcutta Airport, before boarding a flight for Paris. Not having
been able to attend the programme last year, I was really thrilled when I
received the mail from the Centre at Dharamkot, confirming my attendance from
October 1st to October 12th. The advantage of Dharamkot as a location was
that I would also get to spend time with the family in Delhi.
He said our rooms would be allotted to us only after the
office opened at 9, and breakfast would be available from 8 a.m. in the dining
hall. Lunch would be served around
12.30.
The Dining hall was two floors above the office, and the A
wing of the rooms was another floor above. It really felt like it was very far
away when we lugged our suitcase up the stairs to the rooms. The room was a very tiny one, with a folding
bed with nylon tape, and a thin mattress. There were two blankets folded up
neatly but no cover for the mattress or the pillow. We were told that these
would be given to us after registration, when the rooms were allotted. The room
I used looked damp but it at least had an attached toilet, albeit very tiny. I
just decided to suspend all judgement till I was allotted what would be my
accommodation for the next 10 days.
I spent a major part of the morning sitting in a tiny café
outside the Center, having lots of black tea and watching the tourists – as it
was the start of a long weekend, there were lots of backpackers and carloads of
tourists heading for Triund, the peak which was visible from Dharamkot.
The participants started trickling in post lunch, and
registration forms were filled. We were assigned individual laundry bags and
lockers to keep away our phones, all writing and reading material and anything
else that could possibly distract us from the meditation practice. I had a
choice of either sharing a room with another meditator and having an attached
bath, or a single room with the common bathing area. Since I had seen the clean
(except for cobwebs) toilets and bathrooms, I chose to have a single room.
A Block entrance Corridor with rooms Twin sharing room
I helped myself to an extra blanket from the common storage
area in anticipation of it becoming colder, as it started drizzling during the
evening. The printed pillow cover and
sheet was not something I would have ever chosen, and the mattress was torn in
the edges but I decided to be calm and bear with it – one of the good points of
being an observer rather an active participant, I guess.
Breakfast Lunch
Meal schedule Dining Hall
Quite a few of the ladies were not first-timers and it was good talking to them and getting a peek into what was ahead for me. One of the first things we learnt was that the Silence period would be over on the 9th day of the programme so we could connect with family over the phone a day earlier than expected.
Noble silence Timetable
The ‘Mauni’ or Noble Silence was to start at 6 pm, after a dinner of very tasty khichdi, over which we made friends and had conversations that became louder and louder by the minute. For this day only, the door separating the Men’s and Women’s section of the Dining Hall was open.
The Coordinator spoke to the gathering at 6, re-affirming the
rules and regulations and answering a few queries. The conclusion of his talk
signaled the start of the Meditation course. The group walked up to the Dhamma
Hall (the meditation centre) where cushions were laid out on the carpeted
floor, 6 rows and 6 columns deep for the ladies and similarly for the men, with
a section of carpet dividing the groups. All the cushions faced a large screen,
and two raised seats for the male and female teacher/guide.
We were all given a tag with a number on it, called in one by
one by name, and told to locate the cushion with a number matching ours. All
this was done in almost total silence, except for the names being whispered.
The session started with an introduction given by Mr S N
Goenka – this was a precursor for the days to come – all instructions to the
group were pre-recorded, interspersed with some chanting by Shri Goenka himself. The instructions were in English first, and
then repeated by him in Hindi. The male guide mostly just repeated the
instructions at the end, sometimes all he had to say was ‘take rest, take rest,
take rest’.
The time from 7 pm to 8.30 was allotted to a discourse by Shri
Goenka, and while the Hindi discourse was projected on the screen in the Hall,
those wishing to listen to him in English were instructed to walk up to another
meditation hall. One of the girls had suggested that I listen to his discourses
in Hindi as they were better, but I decided to first try the English, as I was
a bit concerned about my ability to fully understand the complicated
terminology.
After the discourse, which covered what we would be doing the
next day and some clarifications about some of the practices, we all returned
to the Dhamma Hall for another half hour of meditation before retiring to our
rooms at 9 pm.
The pattern for the next few days was strictly according to
the timetable. The three mandatory guided meditation sessions were held from 8
to 9 am, 2.30 to 3.30 pm and 6 to 7 pm in the Hall, and for the rest of the
time, depending on the instructions, we were expected to meditate either in our
rooms or in the Hall. Basically, 10.5 hours every day were allocated to
meditation.
I got used to waking up
at 4, washing up and being at the Hall by 4.30 and sitting there till 6 when we
went straight for breakfast. I reserved
the time after breakfast for cleaning the room and a bath, a short walk, and
then sitting in what became a favourite place watching the trees and a few low
peaks far in the distance. The period
post lunch, from 11.30 to 1 were the toughest for me – time weighed heavily on
my hands, and with nothing to do except just sit, I was very soon bored out of
my wits. I really feel I would have enjoyed the process more if I had something
to do with my hands for just half an hour during this break. Quite likely it
was expected that meditators would use this time to catch up on their sleep but
since I slept by 9.30 and got a good 6.30 hours of sleep, I wasn’t able to
sleep in the day time. Also, to leave the sunny open area and spend time in the
small damp room was not encouraging at all. Very often the non-guided
meditation sessions and the constant sitting in a darkened room became a bit
too much for me, and I would get out of the Hall to take a walk or sit in the
open. I saw quite a few of the participants doing the same thing. Since the
silence was maintained anyway, I suppose we were not breaking any rules.
My favourite space
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Path to the Dhamma Centre
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Through out the next few days, the monkeys really proved to be
the best entertainment for us – they would arrive in gangs, making their way
overhead, jumping from the trees onto the hard plastic sheets that were laid
out as roofs to over the paths connecting the various buildings, and swinging
down to the grassy areas to sun themselves. It was really funny to watch how
they would walk right up to any lady sitting on the grass, even reaching out to
touch her if she didn’t immediately move away.
That touch was enough to send the lady scuttling away, and was the
signal for the rest of the gang to come and settle down. The grooming session
was really a sight to see, and it was made more hilarious by the fact that this
break is when most of the participants could be seen grooming themselves.
The Meditation
practice:
On the first day, we were instructed to concentrate on the
breath moving in and out of our nostrils, without in any way actively changing
the pattern, but observing the process. The mind would tend to wander all over
the place and we were instructed to try and bring the focus back to the breath,
without feeling any irritation about not being able to control our minds. The
focus for the next three days was basically on watching the breath, first at
the nostrils, then up the nasal path, and finally only at the space between the
upper lip and the nostrils. It was all about learning to observe rather than
being a participant by focusing on a tiny part of our body. On the fourth day, the actual Vipassana
process was taught – this involved focusing our mind on every part of the body
one by one, starting with the fontanel at the top of the head and ending at the
toes, and then repeating the process in reverse order.
By the sixth day, when we had learnt to move our focus from
part to part, we were advised to allow the flow of thought to cover more than
one part, watching the sensations at each spot. and then finally the whole body
at a time. The process then became to allow the ‘dhara pravaah’ to travel up
and down the body once or twice, and then to focus on each part of the body and
then to repeat the entire process – basically alternating between the full body
and individual parts. It was a very powerful experience and I could really feel
the warmth spreading from the top of my head to my toes.
On the final day, we were taught the process of Mitta –
spreading goodwill and wishing the benefits of our meditation to be spread to
our family and friends and humanity at large.
Unlike Vipassana where we internalize all our feelings, this involved
imagining all the goodwill spreading outwards from us.
Vipassana as a
practice/concept:
The idea was that every sensation in our body was a physical
depiction of our experiences, whether pleasant or unpleasant. The pleasant sensations kept us rooted to
this world, thanks to the desire to feel more such pleasures. Similarly the disgust for unpleasant thoughts
or feelings prevented us from rising above the unpleasantness in our lives,
thereby slowing our steps to Moksha or Nirvana.
The word that was constantly repeated as the perfect feeling
to have was equanimity – this would
help us to watch pleasant and unpleasant sensations in a balanced manner, not
reacting to either type of sensation. Each time we allowed ourselves to watch a
sensation without reacting to it, it tended to go away from our body along with
the feelings behind the experience.
This would help us understand that every thing in this world
is impermanent (Anicca – Pali word), and passes away, with or without any
intervention from us. The human body, like everything in nature, is made of
tiny atoms and there is constant breaking down and reconstruction at the
cellular level, leading to this impermanence.
To quote from
http://www.vridhamma.org/The-Experience-of-Impermanence-through-Vipassana - The great Vipassana
meditation teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, wrote: "Impermanence (anicca) is,
of course, the essential fact which must be first experienced and understood by
practice." Anicca is a gateway, an opening. The complexity and
multiplicity of the phenomena of the world can appear like a thicket, but as a
person walks the path of Vipassana meditation, suddenly there is an emergence
from the tangle. Anicca is the clearing. U Ba Khin wrote: "Anicca is the
first essential factor-for progress in Vipassana meditation, a student must
keep knowing anicca as continuously as possible." The pali word anicca is
translated into English as impermanence or change. But anicca is not merely a
concept. Far more, it is a sign, a marker like the stone cairns a pilgrim encounters on one of those
cloud-hugging paths in the Himalayas, signposts to indicate the trail that other true pilgrims have
blazed. Anicca is a word-indicator that points to a fact of reality beyond any
concept: the ceaseless transformation of all material in the universe. Nothing
is solid, permanent, and immutable. Every "thing" is really an
"event." Even a stone is a form of river, and a mountain is only a
slow wave. The Buddha said, sabbe sankhara anicca-the entire universe is fluid.
For the practitioner of Vipassana, anicca is a direct experience of the nature
of one's own mind and body, a plunge into universal reality directly within
oneself. "Just a look into oneself", U Ba Khin wrote, "and there
it is-anicca."
Afterwards :
By the afternoon of day 9,
after Mitta, the period of Noble Silence ended, though the two
Meditation sessions would continue, and silence was to be maintained in and
around the Meditation Hall. Along with being able to talk to each other, we
were also permitted to access our phones and other belongings. It was wonderful
to be able to talk to the family again, and to actually be able to read.
There was a lot of chatting and lunch was a very noisy affair
– actually too noisy after the long silence.
The chatting carried on late into the night. The next morning, some of
us helped to clean up the Meditation Hall, and the store rooms, and prepare the
place for the next Vipassana programme. It was very relaxing to be actually
doing some strenuous physical work. We then packed up and left the rooms, which
had been our home for 10 days. This was followed by a walk down to Mcleodganj,
and a noisy lunch with 8 friends. A Whatsapp group was quickly formed, and
photos shared. While the group then split up to go shopping, I picked up some
tiny gifts for the family and then headed back to the Centre.
I had a wonderful hour of meditation at the Tushita
meditation centre next door, and then went down to a café called Morgan’s Place
which turned out to actually be Murugan’s place (!) to read in peace. The
feeling of having achieved something really difficult stayed with me as I
watched the Triund peak in the distance.
Morgan’s Place
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Triund from Morgan’s place
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Vaishali turned out to be my co-passenger on my return too. The
bus ride back to Delhi was uneventful for the most part till we then got stuck
in a traffic jam near Ashoka Univ, Sonepat, for almost 2 hours. It was
wonderful reaching Usha’s place finally.
I do not have a specific time for meditation but I feel
wonderful when I do manage to spend a few minutes in silence. Vipassana,
instead of becoming a distinct activity, seems to have become a part of me, and
that, I think, is exactly how it should be.
