Vipassana Survivor of Dehradun

• Globalgramma's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Dehradun

Trip Start Oct 09, 2007 Previous
Entry Trip End Mar 10, 2008 Next
Entry

  Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India
Thursday, March 26, 2009

Hi Everyone,

I am back from the Vipassana Retreat in Dehradun...very happy I did it, and also glad that I was flying blind when I decided to go. I might not have done it if I knew more about the retreat itself and the facility at which it was held. But the core practice is exactly what this 62 year old woman needs to rein in her wild, untamed, often torturous mind. I have never felt more hopeful of actually being able to do that now that I have this practice. I highly recommend Goenka Vipassana to anyone who is fed up with getting beaten up by their own mind. Just be prepared to do some real work. I am not so sure I would recommend that you take a course in India, however.

The retreat involved 10 days of Noble Silence. If we had any problems, we were supposed to talk to our teacher assistants. The women's teacher assistants spoke little to no English, and gestures often failed as well. The oldest woman sometimes spoke to us in streams of Hindi, though we could not understand a word she said. The other woman just shrugged her shoulders, looked at us blankly, and said "teacher" (as in talk to the teacher).

Dehradun is only an hour and a half away from Rishikesh. The trees are taller, and the air is generally cool in the shade, but in the direct sunlight, it gets very hot quickly around midday. With a tin roof on the meditation hall that sits exposed to full sun, and with the natural and seemingly endless Indian forbearance of heat, the many fans were never turned on (not once!). The doors were always shut, and while the windows were opened, the curtains were not at the teacher's specific instruction, impeding any air flow. So the two early afternoon sessions were literally like meditating in a blast furnace. I would wet down my pants and hair to cope with the heat, but that drew ants and other bugs to me like I was a gallon of honey. Great fun meditating!

Note: Vipassana practice is designed to end all aversion and cravings and to develop enduring equanimity of mind. Oh, did I have opportunities to practice non-aversion by confronting my intense inclinations toward it!

Of course, my tendency to try to fix everything immediately kicked into high gear. During meditation, besides drafting about 16 blogs and remembering everything I have left undone for the last 2 years, I planned all sorts of strategies for solving all the retreat facility's problems ... from bringing the western toilets up to a reasonable standard of hygiene and usability (they seemed to leak from every point, making for a most creepy experience), to burying the garbage (they now just toss it over the fence just like the rest of India), to reducing the heat in the meditation hall. I planned (mind you, this is while meditating) on installing a thatched roof over the tin one, leaving all doors and windows open in the hall after the morning meditation and running the fans for just 5 or 10 minutes before meditation and during our 5 minute breaks to draw the heat out of the building rather than have it build up so intensely. I even wrote an extensive note to the teacher (breaking one of the rules against writing) listing my suggestions and offering to make an extra donation if it would be spent on good toilet repair so other retreat participants would not have to endure what we were. The teacher was not particularly interested in my suggestions during the middle of the course and told me to practice non-aversion. (He was right...it was not the right time to be problem solving. I was diverting myself from the real focus of the retreat and was getting carried away.)

Nonetheless, I often caught myself wondering: Are all these fans for show? Do they have an exact point (near death) at which they surrender and actually turn them on? ....115+ degrees outside, 130+ degrees inside? (I realize that they didn't want to run fans during the meditation sessions since we were focusing on subtle body sensations as the essential practice - and the air would be a gross sensation that overpowered our ability to discern/experience more subtle ones. But I questioned and argued with them internally: Would fans and moving air be any more overpowering than this ridiculously intense (and avoidable) radiant heat is?

The good news is that Goenka Vipassana is the pure form of what Buddha practiced to attain enlightenment and what he taught to others. It is imminently worthwhile, whatever I had to go through at this particular facility. The practice only survived in its pure form in Burma. It is an incredibly focused technique, absolutely universal and non-sectarian. And it is given in simple and uniform in instruction at donation-only retreat centers all over the world.

However simple the technique is, though, it is real work. This is no warm fuzzy, ecstatic form of meditation, but it makes up for that in effectiveness. It is not simple to actually DO with a neophyte's mind and lifelong emotional patterns jumping all over the place. You end up seeing just how out of control your mind is while observing your body sensations to whatever degree you are able. By the time I left the course, though, I had a bit of a handle on it, and my commitment in place to use it, with some real rigor.

So I survived, my ten days of 4 AM wake up calls, and 4:30 AM - 9 PM meditations (10 hours a day for 10 days + meal breaks sandwiched in). And I learned a lot about myself in the process. I have been assured by other participants who have done courses elsewhere that retreat facilities in other countries have more western sensibilities and standards in place.

If you get a chance, check out the film: Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. It is an inspiring documentary film about how Vipassana courses are being used in Indian prisons. The Vipassana website is: www.dhamma.org, in case anyone wants to learn more.

Dehradun hotels Share

Previous Entry Next Entry