Survived meditation, moving on!

Wow - the 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat was very tough but I got a lot out of it. We meditated for 10 hours a day and for 3 of the 1-hour sessions had to remain perfectly still the entire time. That is tougher than it sounds and involves a lot of pain. I had some kind of old knee injury that would start to spasm after 35 minutes, so a big part of the retreat was learning to deal with that. Which was cool - the technique teaches you to not react to pain (nor to overly crave pleasant sensations), and once you get the hang of it, you realize that most of the pain that you feel is your own reaction to the initial sensation. You start to think, "I will not multiply my suffering", which is pretty effective. Vipassana itself involves a deep investigation of the sensations of your body, and your reactions to them, and I found it useful. At the end of the retreat I felt light and happy - I plan to continue to practice it.

The location was quite beautiful and peaceful, in the middle of the Kerelan jungle, and we looked out onto a rice plantation and coconut grove with mellow grazing cows. Lots of birds, huge snakes, mongooses (which look like sleek, cute squirrels), turtles, frogs, armies of ants and enormous spiders. They tell us that animals don't disturb meditators because we don't give out panic reactions, which was tested when we found (toward the end of the session) a wasps nest in my neighbors bunk. They didn't seem to be bothered by us at all so we left them alone.


Many people at the retreat were on the verge of leaving at some point in the middle of the session, but only one did. We were all glad to have stayed. Not least because on the 10th day you could start to talk to each other, and it was interesting to find out what people were like after you spent so long imagining their personalities from their appearance.