While trekking in Nepal, I met a couple of people who had just done a vipassana. They explained to me that vipassana is a 10-Day silent meditation course ran on the basis of donations. They also told me that it was one of the most profound experiences of their lives and highly recommended it.
Unfortunately I didn't have time to do it while in Asia but a seed had been planted. When I was in Vietnam 6 months later, my mate sent me a podcast with a guy called Colin O'Brady who had just became the first person to traverse the land mass of Antarctica, unassisted and unsupported. He also credited the importance of vipassana for helping him accomplish such challenges. Now the seed had started to sprout and not long after returning to Manchester I'd started to research where I could do one in the UK.
It took me a good few years to get round to it but in 2022, I attended a course at Dhamma Dipa (island of cosmic law and order) in Hereford. The only things I'd heard about it were positive so Gordon Bennet did I get a shock a few days into it. It involves sitting on the floor for over 10 hours a day. On Day 4, 'strong determination sittings' are introduced, where you can't change posture for the whole hour. There are three of these each day. This is when it started to get serious and back and knee pain took off.
I thought that if I could ride out the pain for a few days then eventually it'd subsist. These expectations plagued my experience. I couldn't stop feeling sorry for myself, I was expecting a blissful, drug-like, transcendental experience and all I was getting was agony. One aspect of vipassana is impermanence. It teaches that all things are impermanent and to observe their arising and passing away. However, my back pain didn't seem to be following the cosmic order.
I continued to expect it to disappear and felt sorry for myself in the meantime. On the final day, either due to acceptance of reality, or the fact that it's a lighter day (only 6 hours of meditation), the pain finally went and I had a great insightful experience where I acquired wisdom through direct experience - another core aspect of vipassana. The wisdom that no matter how much suffering we're in, it has an expiration date. Also the realisation that we make our problems much worse by latching onto them with our egos and feeling sorry for ourselves. The pain itself is endurable but the miserable story we attach to it makes it unbearable.
So I returned home glowing after 10 days of healthy solitude, full of enthusiasm for life, after living like a monk on gong time for 10 days. The memory of the pain rapidly faded and the benefits of the insight and continued practice remained. These rose tinted glasses led me to go back for more a couple of month ago (Nov 2024).
The first few days were challenging, mostly missing home life and thinking about all the stuff I want to do when I get back. Physically not too tough. End of Day 4 though, fuck me. During the introduction to vipassana (after four days of preliminary practice), sitting there unmoved for an hour and half, I could've cried.
This time my knees were absolutely sound but my back was in pure agony and I started to remember the struggles of last time and wonder 'what have I got myself into here?'. The thought of enduring this pain for another six days was very troubling. Thoughts of quitting circled my mind occasionally for the next couple of days, knowing full well that I would never do that.
Slowly the insight of last time, combined with the knowledge from the nightly discourses began to sink in and I started to get to grips with it. You're not allowed to write while there so the order of events is a bit blurry. I do remember though, having many moments throughout each day, often even long periods, where the pain would be under control. Almost always present, but sometimes, with hard work, under control.
I remembered how much worse we make our pain by identifying with it. When you observe the pain as it is, it's not half as bad. This wisdom is so applicable to daily life. Think how much worse we make things in our head. For example when we miss a train, causing us to wait half an hour until the next one, not only do we pay the price of being late, but we also berate ourselves over it for hours, which becomes the main source of misery. It's up to us if we let being late bother us or not. I know it's far easier said than done, but we could just accept it instantly and sit patiently waiting for the next train with a smile on our face. It was the thought of being in pain for six days that was unbearable, not the pain itself.
When I really concentrated on the technique, scanning my awareness through my body, my attention was more dispersed and less intensely focused on the back pain. How is this lesson relevant in daily life? When we focus on our problems, we magnify them. But when we focus on the big picture, they shrink and become more manageable. During the 'strong determination sittings' I managed to stay focused on this for most of the time, allowing me to get into a pain addled flow state. The reduction of the pain being the leading motivation for concentrating my mind.
By Day 7, I'd fully accepted that my back pain wasn't going anywhere (other than the second I stopped meditating). This acceptance helped me prepare my mind for going to war with myself every time I sat down. Every time I got through an hour of not allowing the pain to beat me, I grew in confidence and was happy with myself for managing to focus on the technique and keep my head in the game.
The benefit of training the mind not to react to pain with craving (pleasure) or aversion (of the pain), is that we condition the mind at its depth, at the unconscious level, not to react to things. So much of our behaviour is just conditioned reactions to external cues. Vipassana teaches us to observe the instinct to react in a detached fashion and do nothing. Just observe the sensation. Observe the mind. Remain equanimous (balanced, calm, composed). Respond consciously with the proper intent.
How many times do we crave something and before we've had time to observe the physical sensation of the craving, we've already ate the biscuits, ordered the pint, picked our phone up, put the next episode on, etc. etc.? Vipassana teaches us to increase this gap between stimulus and response so that we can act in accordance with what we actually want to achieve rather than satisfying the unconscious craving for constant comfort.
Thoughts often came to me about how else this practice can help in daily life. I recognised that a true test of our equanimity is when we're facing life's challenges. Before the course, I'd ordered gear and made plans to get into wild camping/orienteering/trekking. So naturally my mind wandered to how this technique will apply to these adventures. It's all well and good being calm, patient, and focused when sat on a cushion in a hall. But doing it when trying to sleep in a wind-battered tent, in the cold, in the middle of the moors - that's a proper challenge.
That's why I practice meditation at the end of the day. To be able to deal with life's challenges better. To remain neutral to the elements when you're soaked through and 30 miles into a hike, that's when the smiling acceptance is a genuine triumph. To be able to do this, it helps to put the training in on the cushion first.
O'Brady credited vipassana for saving his life while attempting to be amongst the first mountaineers to summit K2 in the winter. When delayed by a vicious storm, sat in his tent with fellow adventurers, he observed his mind and analysed where his desire to summit the mountain was coming from. Was it a craving for fame and achievement? If he quit would it be an aversion of pain? He found his gut instinct telling him to get back to his wife and dog so he turned back. He later discovered that the group that went on without him had died. This emphasises the importance of awareness and equanimity in endurance and adventure.
Some time around Day 7 I recognised the ridiculousness of my constant obsession with counting down the days until the course was over. I was compulsively delaying my happiness until a future date. 'When I get to Day 7 I'll be alright, then Day 8' etc. I laughed to myself about my constant inability to be satisfied with the present moment. Always that next experience, next acquisition, satisfaction and happiness always just around the corner. Never now. This realisation cracked me up for a bit and made me feel a bit jolly for a while but inevitably this lightness would also be impermanent, because when it's time to sit down again, being jolly was a big ask.
Another teaching that sank in at the experiential level was the teaching of sankaras. The idea that a thought is planted and we water it with further thought and ultimately it turns into a tree that grows fruit and plants its own seeds, in an endless cycle of self-inflicted misery. I came up with a future goal and then the incessant strategizing, number crunching, problem causing and solving part of the brain went into overdrive. I watched myself plant the seed and almost uncontrollably water it, creating an enormous tree with bitter fruit which drove me round the bend. I began to understand at a deeper level, that goals are good, but obsessing over uncontrollable outcomes is insane. Once the goal is set. All that's remotely in your control is the process. All you can control is how hard you work, what you say 'yes' or 'no' to. The outcome is completely uncertain but if you do your best to achieve your goal, that's all you can do.
There was no point in me worrying about how much money I could save up for a mortgage/Nepal trip. There was always a chance that something could go wrong. My van might need work doing, might get stolen, we might get put in lockdown again. So much was out of my hands but I recognised that all I can control is how hard I work and if I say 'yes' or 'no' to holidays, nights-out, buying expensive things etc. By the last day, when these thoughts began to pop up, my mind was conditioned not to react and I just noticed them, remembered that the outcome is uncontrollable, and carried on doing what I was doing.
With every day that passed I grew stronger because I knew that the end was getting closer. It's the thought of the pain continuing that is worse than the pain itself. The thought of two days of pain makes the pain more bearable than the thought of five days of pain. The pain didn't actually get any better towards the end. In some ways it got worse and even spread to my ribs. My ability to tolerate it, even kind of being friends with it, increased. I knew that if it wasn't back pain, it'd be something else testing me e.g., a repetitive thought, tiredness, a fantasy, craving coffee, or whatever. And sometimes it's better the devil you know.
I had to accept that this was going to be my vipassana. There was going to be no transcendent bliss. No holy, radiant light. No glimpse of nirvana. For me, it was going to be sitting in various levels of pain for 10 hours a day and learning to be OK with that. Pain teaches us a lot about ourselves. There isn't much to learn from pleasure. Only how to be happy when it's absent. But pain shows us what we're made of. What we can endure. Through not letting the pain defeat me, I learnt that I can sit in pain for large parts of the day and be fine. This is helpful to know about yourself because unfortunately pain is coming. And at the deepest level of the mind, pain is pain, whether it's physical, mental, or emotional. So for me, vipassana was boot camp for the shit storms of life.
It was an opportunity to put myself in an uncomfortable situation and remain present, patient, equanimous, aware, and detached. If I had a pleasant 10 days, what would be the lasting benefit? Would it make me any less reactive when I was feeling provoked? Would it allow me to remain calm and composed in adverse weather, when balls deep into a long run or a multi-day trek/camp? Probably not. It would have its own benefits but it wasn't worth considering them. I had to face reality.
You realise how long of a time 10 days is when you're in there. But I knew that it was impermanent and that soon enough, I'd be back to regular life so I had to try and stay present. Now that it's over, I'm happy with myself that I didn't cave in. Even though dropping out wasn't an option, I didn't even mentally drop out. I kept my head in the game every single time I sat on the cushion. Obviously I had plenty of moments of weakness, but I kept on pulling it back.
Not much has changed in the grand scheme of things but I am a little bit more equipped to face life's challenges. More appreciative of what I have. More aware of my inner and outer landscapes. Almost painfully aware of how bloody noisy it is in Manchester!
Unless I continue to practice and develop my wisdom, through reading spiritual/philosophical literature, or listening to wise folks chatting on podcasts etc., but more importantly through direct experience, it would've all been a waste of time. I've got to keep fanning the embers of the fire.
It's much harder to practice in the noise, demands and relentless cries for our attention in day-to-day life. The mind is unwittingly (or not) filled with undesired witter. Vipassana was a reminder to slow down, be happy with what I have, even though there is the desire for progress. To cut through the bullshit. To put the phone on aeroplane mode. To get more time in solitude, in silence, in nature. To work hard. To enjoy the work. That I am capable of smilingly sacrificing and suffering in pursuit of self-development. And most importantly that the inner world is more important than the outer. Because if the inner world isn't healthy, we're not going to be able to properly navigate the outer world. The outer world can bring us pleasure, but not joy or peace. We can't control the outer world but we can train our minds to be equanimous with whatever arises.