After 10 years of meditation, this was the missing link

lessons from Vipassana part 2

This is the second piece about the 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat that I completed recently. I’d recommend first reading the earlier post because it contains more context about Vipassana and focuses more on the practice and experiential side.

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Instructor Goenka insists that the theory of Vipassana is less important than the practice, which is observing respiration and sensation. He remarks that since people from all backgrounds try Vipassana,

it is quite possible that some may have found part of the theory unacceptable. If so, never mind, leave it aside. More important is the practice of Dhamma. No one can object to living a life that does not harm others, to developing control of one’s mind, to freeing the mind of defilements and generating love and good will.

However, after a decade of meditating, I found that learning more about the theory of Vipassana helped me strengthen and be more intentional about my meditation practice. It answered the question of “why” that I did not receive from the other disciplines that I studied, such as: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), yoga teacher training (i.e. Hinduism), general western meditation and Buddhism. In this sense, Vipassana is the missing link.

Here are the four pieces of the theory that resonate with me most.

1. Meditation is a means, not an end

Meditation, which helps to balance and calm the mind, is the means to purify the mind, which is the end goal.

This idea starkly contrasts to many, if not all, of the meditation apps or techniques that I had tried previously, in which concentrating the mind was framed as the end goal. While it’s true that if we can calm the mind, we will probably feel less stressed for a bit, the agitation always returns because we have not addressed the root cause of our suffering.

We suffer because of all of the sankhara, i.e. reactions or mental conditioning, that we have accumulated and continue to accumulate throughout our lives. All of the impurities keep us as prisoners of our own minds. By observing our own respiration and sensation, we create space for the sankharas to arise and pass. When we can observe sensations and remain equanimous regardless of whether the sensation feels pleasant or unpleasant, the sankhara loses its power and withers. Through this process, we purify our minds and can experience real happiness.

2. Mind and body are two sides of the same coin

The problem of human suffering is ancient and universal. Many wise people before our time have attempted to solve it, to various degrees of success. It’s like treating chronic pain with ibuprofen; it is a temporary fix and it does not address the core problem. Ultimately, it is the solution which addresses the root cause that will successfully solve the problem. Still, it can be helpful to understand why other techniques may not be as effective.

The first is a technique that we are all familiar with — distraction. For example, if someone is going through heartbreak, their friends tell them to go drinking, shopping, partying or anything to take their mind off of the person. And, while distraction may temporarily relieve us from the suffering, it’s only a surface-level fix. What we’re actually doing is suppressing the thoughts and emotions. Deep down, they are still festering, like a dormant volcanoes. Eventually, they will erupt.

Clearly, distracting ourselves is not the answer. Another suggested method is to stay with and address the emotion. This seems like a good idea, because we are confronting the situation instead of ignoring it. However, when we feel a strong emotion, such as heartbreak, it often crashes over us and we are already reacting before we’ve even had a chance to examine it. Emotions arise from the unconscious and by the time they reach the conscious level, they have already overpowered us. Even if we are able to control ourselves and not react straight away, we often then focus on the person or situation (i.e. external stimulus) that made us sad, as opposed to the emotion itself. Thus, it is not practical to focus on emotions because they are too abstract for us to sit with.

Vipassana, on the other hand, preserves the idea of addressing the emotion through the practical technique of observing our respiration and sensation.

When we become angry, for example, our breathing becomes irregular. Our heart starts beating faster. That one problematic area of our body, such as the upper back or shoulders, starts tensing and aching. Both our breath and our body sensations are alerting us that something has changed: we are angry.

This is why the mind (thoughts/emotions) and body (respiration/sensation) are two sides of the same coin. Whenever we feel an emotion, our bodies have an analogous response that involves shifting away from homeostasis by changing the breath and creating sensation via biochemical reactions. By observing the breath and sensation, we now have something tangible and practical to work with. The emotion is no longer abstract — it is visceral.

The more we practice and observe ourselves, the more we realize that at some point, the emotion passes. Like all things, it is impermanent.

3. As the seed, so the fruit

Goenka teaches that all physical actions are results of vocal actions, which are results of mental actions. The flow is: mental > vocal > physical. He continues:

One who learns to observe oneself quickly realizes that mental action is the most important, because this is the seed, the action that will give results. Vocal and physical actions are merely projections of the mental action, yardsticks to measure its intensity.

An extreme example of how negativity can flow through these stages is suicide. If physical action is a yardstick to measure the intensity of mental action, then this act represents what can happen when negative thoughts increase exponentially and overpower an individual. Of course, this is by no means an attempt to shame people for their negativity. Rather, by using an extreme example, we can highlight the importance of mental action when it comes to creating the type of life we want to live.

On the flip side, real auramaxxing involves planting seeds of positive thoughts, words and actions to grow fruits of positive aura. If we want sweet mangoes, then we cannot plant seeds of neem, which is a bitter tropical fruit. Goenka explains:

One may ask why nature is kind to one plant and cruel to the other. In fact nature is neither kind nor cruel; it works according to set rules. Nature merely helps the quality of each seed to manifest. If one sows seeds of sweetness, the harvest will be sweetness. If one sows seeds of bitterness, the harvest will be bitterness. As the seed is, so the fruit will be; as the action is, so the result will be.

The problem is that one is very alert at harvest time, wanting to receive sweet fruit, but during the sowing season one is very heedless, and plants seeds of bitterness. If one wants sweet fruit, one should plant the proper type of seeds. Praying or hoping for a miracle is merely self-deception; one must understand and live according to the law of nature. One must be careful about one’s actions, because these are the seeds in accordance with the quality of which one will receive sweetness or bitterness.

In other words, we reap what we sow. If we want to live a good life, then we need to think good thoughts, speak good words and do good things.

4. We are our own oppressor and liberator

The bad news is that we can save ourselves. The good news is that we can save ourselves.

When we do not accept things as they are, have craving or aversion, or complain when things don’t go our way, then we create more knots, or sankharas. We keep tying these knots, not knowing that we are multiplying our own suffering. This is why many people stay miserable forever; they are unaware that they are, day in and day out, creating their own suffering.

For example, if we have a body pain flare-up, like on our upper traps (which I struggle with), not only does it hurt physically, but it also starts to hurt mentally. We think thoughts such as: “I hate this…my body is so weak…I can’t believe this is happening to me…I know that all other pain will go away, but this pain is going to last forever,” which only makes things worse. We proliferate the pain by having negative thoughts.

Another example is anger. If someone does something that makes us angry, we may spit back with vengeful words, or worse, with physical violence. We are ignorant to the fact that the first victim of our anger is always us because we have planted a seed of hateful mental action.

Instead, when we learn to accept things not as we’d like them to be, but as they are, we not only prevent new knots from forming, but we can also slowly work on untying our most twisted knots. These are the most deep-rooted sankharas, created from decades of work. If we can allow them to arise and pass, then they will lose power over us and evaporate. In the words of Goenka,

This is Vipassana: experiencing one’s own reality by the systematic and dispassionate observation within oneself of the ever-changing mind-matter phenomenon manifesting itself as sensations. This is the culmination of the teaching of the Buddha: self-purification by self-observation.

By living a wholesome (i.e. moral) life, balancing the mind and understanding ourselves, we become our own liberator instead of oppressor.

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At the end of the retreat, Goenka encouraged us, the students, to not accept any of the theory blindly. He tells us to try Vipassana first, and then only accept it if we feel like it works. He adds:

This is not a dogma to be accepted on faith, nor a philosophy to be accepted intellectually. You have to investigate yourself to discover the truth. Accept it as true only when you experience it. Hearing about truth is important, but it must lead to actual practice.

The reason why I am writing and sharing more about Vipassana is because through my own practice, I have experienced, and continue to experience, the benefits of the technique. I know that I am a long ways away from the end goal of purification of the mind, or the Ultimate Truth, but I don’t think that the point is to reach the destination. Rather, it’s the lessons that I am learning along the way — each time that I practice patiently and persistently, or make a mistake and smile and start again — that make the journey meaningful.

And, by walking The Path, I know that I am also walking it for others. Because if we could all untie a few of our own knots, the world would shine that much brighter.

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