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Published: December 16th 2008
Well I have now experienced the best part of my trip so far in India, and the most unique thing I have ever done in my life, the ten day vapasana meditation course that Cami and I had been planning on doing as a part of our trip here in India. We got to sarnath where the meditation course was being held and stayed at a tibeten temple for one night before the course. It was not such a bad place, only 3 dollars a night to stay there, and we got to go inside the temple where they worshiped every morning. You could make a donation in the temple too and I made a small donation, and then signed the book saying that I had made one. In the book there were so many different people writing that they hoped the tibetens got all of their land back, even the chinese which I found a little comical.
The Vapasana course started the next day and we were to arrive there from 2 to 4 pm. We got there around 3 and sat around for a while because they were trying to register everyone and so it took a while. We finished registering around 4 30, and registration included turning in all of our valuables, money, electronics, etc. so that we had noting to distract us from our meditation. Afterwards we were sent to your rooms, which were literally like prison cells. Extremely plain, bars over the windows, and crappy beds that were uncomftorable. They gave us a sort of schedule written on a pamphlet which when I first got into my room I read over and over again wide eyed, and this is how it read.
4am-wake up bell
4:30am-6:30am meditation in hall
6:30am-8am breakfast at rest
8am-11am group meditation in hall
11am-1pm lunch and rest
1pm-5pm group meditation in hall
5pm-6pm tea break and rest
6pm-8pm group meditation in hall
8pm-9pm video discourse (man on video tells us what we felt that day and what to do etc.)
9pm-9:30pm practice new techniques and ask question if needed
9:30pm lights out
I could not believe what I was seeing! 11 straight hourse basically of meditation, and yet I had no idea what meditation was and how I was going to react to it. I spend till around 6pm the first night in my room not knowing if we were supposed to be taking our vow of silence already and not knowing exactly what we were supposed to be doing at the current moment, as no one had given us ANY instructions besides where our rooms were. Around 6 I heard and Irish kid talking to and Australian guy and I went out and joined the conversation. The Irish guy had taken a course before and said that we could talk at the moment because the course hadn't started yet, and that were were also served dinner at 6:30. If you noticed, dinner is not in the schedule, only tea times, so I was really releaved to hear this because I was starving. After dinner we wen't to the video discourse and he told us what we would be doing and what to expect and all that sort of thing, and then we went off to bed.
I'd have to say the hardest thing about the course at first was the 4am wake up bell. I grew to hate that bell so much by the end of the course, I absolutely dreaded hearing the sound of it. The first day we went to meditation we were told to just sit and monitor our breathing, that was it! Just feel the breath going in, and then feel it going out. We did this the entire first day, and it wasn't so bad except it was really hard on the legs and back sitting like that for so many hours per day. The second day was horrible though, just as the man had said on the video discourse at the end of day one. You start to get so angry, and you think crazy thoughts that you would have never thought, or remembered, if you had not been alone with your mind. I wanted so many times to run away and get the hell out of there so many times that second day, which made me realize why they had barbed wired walls completely surrounding the entire place. My only salvation that second day was when we had break times, I would walk non-stop around the garded that was in this enclosed area. The garden was beautiful, probably because they had around 5 indian men whose soul purpose in life was to keep up the garden. I would walk around the garden over and over again, observing nature and thinking of realizations that I had had while meditating. During video discourse on the second night we were told that we were to observe only the area below our nostrils and above our upper lip, only that small little area. We were to feel the air touching this area going into the nostrils on the in breath, and then the again on the out breath, but we were to give no attention to any other place on the body. If you felt a really intense prickling or tickle on your shoulder, or cheek, or anywhere else on the body, you were to completely ignore it. Accept that it was there, but ignore it and only pay attention to the designated area. This also applied to your pain that you felt, you were to accept that you felt pain and that it was the reality of the moment, but you were to not pay it any attention and only focus on the one area. This was by far the hardest part of the meditation. These first 3 days you were not expected to sit still the entire time during meditation, and they gave us 5 minutes breaks every hour or every 2 hours on the long sessions and you were allowed to stretch your legs during the hour or 2 hour long sessions, but that changed. It was actually really interesting focusing all of my attention to this one area of my body, because by the end of the day all I could feel on this part of the body was an intense tingleing sensation. I was on the right track, this is what was supposed to happen.
On the end of the 3rd day in the video discourse, we were told how to do our vapasana meditation, the main reason why we were there, and also told that from 8-9am, from 2:30-3:30pm, and from 7-8pm we were to practice this new technique and not to move a muscle at all for each of these hours. No stretching, no relaxing your perfectly straight back, no moving your clammy hands from their same position, nothing! Vapasana meditation is extremely frustrating, and requires so much awareness and attention that it got extremely tiring. You basically start at the head and move your way down over every single square inch of your body, and I mean every inch, and are supposed to feel whatever sensation you possibly can. Then once you get to the feet, you move your attention back to the head fromt he feet and focusing on every ince of the body again. This entire time though, you are supposed to practice the law of inpermanance. This means that you are to realize that every sensation that you feel is inpermanant, that things are constantly chaning. You are not supposed to show craving towards a particularly good sensation, or aversion towards a particular bad sensation. You are only supposed to recognize that the feeling is inpermanant wherever you are feeling it, and focus your attention on the area of the body that you are on. The next couple of days where complete hell. Getting up so early in the morning made me grogy in the first place, but then trying to focus all my attention on meditation proved really difficult. I would constantly find myself thinking about this girl or that girl, or about how I was wronged by someone in the past and what I would do if I was in that same situation now. I would day dream about things that could happen in my future, or things I could have done in the past to make me look really cool. When this would happen you are suppposed to recognize that you have lost your attention in meditation, and just tell yourself that the mind has wandered away, that is all. You just say to yourself that the mind has wandered away, and then go back to meditating. I don't think I was the only one who found the whole thing grueling though. An elderly indian man of proabably around 60 who was sitting next to me distracted me from my meditation around the 5th day by repeatedly slapping himself in the head over and over and over again, probably because he wasn't getting any sensation in that part of the body. Another time he distracted my by rubbing his left arm with his right hand once from shoulder to palm, then his right arm with his left hand from shoulder to palm, one after another. Each time he had these little outbursts the assistant teacher would get up from the front of the room, walk over and tap the old man on the shoulder, and just give him the no gesture of a slash through the air with his flat hand, and then go back and sit down and the old man would just go back to meditating. There was also an Indian man sitting right next to me on the right who really pissed me off, probably because I was already so frustrated, but still I think anyone would get angry at what this guy was doing. When a normal person has to burp, they kind of burp under their breath so they don't disturb people, or gross them out right? But not this Inidan man, he would just open his mouth wide and make this UUUHHHPPPP sound over and over again. He would literally do this every 5 minutes while we were sitting down for meditation. One time he did this and instead of just a burp he actually vomited all over the floor in front of him. If I am expected to meditate through this and practice the rule of inpermanance during this, than forgive me for failing. I was 100% disgusted at this guy, so after the vomit incident every time he would start his UHP burping I would tune my ears to see if he would throw up again or not, it became very hard to concentrate. After he vomited all over the floor we finished that meditation session and went for one of our 5 minute breaks. When we returned I looked at the floor where the puke had been. It had all been cleaned away and was now just a wet spot on the floor, but then leading from this wet spot were drops of water all the way back to MY meditation pillow and then past! WHAT THE HELL! Was this half puke half water droplets from a rag they had used to clean up this mans puke that now soaked through my meditation cusion?
After a while I started to hate everyone guy who was there to meditate. I deemed the man next to me with the name pukey to myself, and had angry thoughts about everyone else that was there. We were completely segregated away from the girls so I never saw them so I had no angry thoughts about them, but the loathing was endless towards the men. Every guy had something about them that I didn't like: This man burps too much because he is a smelly indian, this guy relaxes and stretches his legs too much because he is a pussy and can't take the pain, this guy sits in a chair sometimes instead of on his cusion because he made up some story about hurting his leg. These were the types of wild ideas my mind would come up about people that I actually knew nothing about. It didn't last like this forever though, as I started to learn the technique more and more and became more and more aware of my body and stoped letting my mind wander as much to think these thoughts. It was actually really interesting how in contact my mind became with my body after just sitting there and trying to feel different sensations on the body. You could literally pinpoint a certain part your boyd and feel the current sensation there. Wheter it be from pulsing to prickling or pain, you could feel everything. It was a little hard to draw the line between being neutural about feeling a sensation or not and craving to feel a sensation in a certain area that you were having trouble with. It was amazing what realizations you would have during your one hour sessions where you weren't allowed to move. This whole technique is used to drop everything on the intellectual level which is only the surface level, and go deeper into the experiencial level, or the unconscious level. At around 45 minutes in you would begin to have extreme amounts of pain and really have to experience with your mind how to get through the current situation by not over reacting to what you were feeling and making the situation worse. By the end of the course I could sit through all 3 one hour meditation sessions and was beginning to feel sensation on parts of the body I never knew existed. The man on the video said that many enlightened people who practice this technique over and over again all day every day can eventually feel every part of their body, including their organs inside their body and their entire spinal chord. They can literally break down the little sub atomic particles to realize that their are 8 sub atomic particles or something like that to make up an atom. They had said this even before scientists realized it through science, which I found very interesting. By the end of the tenth day when we were allowed to talk, everyone was soo excited and happy and all my hatred towards everyone completely vanished once we were allowed to talk to each other. This really showed me how quick my mind is to pass judgement on people without even knowing how they really are deep down inside. One guy that my mind completely passed wrong judgement on was a guy named Rusty. He was from Utah and was the guy who sat in the chair sometimes because of his "supposed" knee problem. He was so interesting in intelligent, and of course he really did have a knee problem from skiing, my mind just wanted to make up a reason to hate someone. He had so many ideas and was so keen on finding out the true meaning of life. He grew up morman and actually just recently left the morman church because he didn't approve of all their ideas. He always reads books about the meaning of life and is currently on his own journey to find out the truth with his wife Kelsi. Rusty made a really interesting comment about something he had read about how psycologists did a study on buddism back home and realized how psycological budism really is. This meditation is just a type of way to train your mind to not react to emotion and let it cloud your better judgement, it is purely on a psycological level I believe and is a great way to train your mind to obtain pure wisdom. We were told at the end of the course to practice this meditation for an hour in the morning and an hour at night, and I am definitely going to try and fit that into my schedule. It is really great though to travel around and meet all these great people. Ever since I began traveling for the past 2 years of my life I have been looking for someone to look up to, and have always in a way been let down by some of the people I have put faith in. I always find someone who is extremely intelligent, but has arrogance to top it off, or someone who is really humble, but not so intelligent. I really think Rusty was the first person I have some across so far that I can truely look up to with no trouble at all. He had a thrist to learn, but he only wanted to do it for his own cause, and he was not cocky or arrogant about what he knew in the slightest. He gave me some great ideas on what I could do for the next couple of years of my life, and inspiration to always do what I want to do no matter what to back it up. I will always remember him and I hope our paths cross again sometime.
Anyways, we got our first real life experience outside the walls of the meditation center almost immediately after our ten day course. We went to the train station to catch our train that was supposed to get there at 3:30 pm, got there around 12 noon, and sat in the tourist center which was really nice while we waited. We then decided around 1 30 pm to go to get some food at mcdonalds before our train left, so we left our bags in the tourist center with a girl who said she would watch them and went to eat. As we returned we found 2 guards outside of the tourist center with the lights of the center out. The center had closed at 2, the girl watching our bags had left, and our bags sat in the room and were thought to maybe contain BOMBS! They saw us approach and immediately asked if the bags were ours, we said yes and relieved that they weren't bombs gave us our bags. We then went to our platform and waited for our train, but then we heard on the intercom a lady speak- "Train number 2395 (our train) from varanasi to delhi has been delyed from 3:30 to 4:16 at." If you'll notice there was an extra "at" at the end of that, well that is where they were supposed to say which platform number it was on now, but they didn't ever say what platform number it was changed to. So we didin't think anything of it and sat there until 4:16 came and went and train after train ours never came. We just thought it had been delayed more and more although we didn't hear anything on the intercom and continued to sit there until 6:30 when a boy came along and told us our train had already left. After inquiring with a few people we found out that it was true, or train had come and gone, and we had missed it. We then had to go wait in a giant line full of indian people cutting in front which made it take twice as long, and had to get a refund on our ticket of only 50 percent, and then get a new ticket. We had missed every single train that was heading towards delhi while waiting in ques accept one that was supposed to have come at 4:30 pm earlier that day and had been delayed to 10:30 that night. So we got the refund on our ticket and then when I asked about gettng a new ticket on the other train he said that we needed to get a general ticket on the other side of the station. So we went to the other side, at this point getting really frustrated after being there for so long, and cami got in the womans line to buy our tickets because it is MUCH shorter. I waited by the bags while cami went up to get our tickets. As I sat back and watched I noticed cami talking to the lady at the counter, and then turn around and push her way out as hard as she could, and the anger pulsing within, she was PISSED. They told her we had to go to the place we had just come to get the ticket we wanted to get, and she began to cry and said she wanted to go home, she had lost it. We stopped and I hugged Cami and told her everything would be alright and that we were going to be fine, and finally once someone saw she was crying someone decided to help us. An indian man came over and asked if we wanted his help, I said yes and he told went with us to the other line we had just come from, pushed his way to the fron of the que, and found out what the man had failed to mention to me- that the class of ticket we wanted to get was sold out so we HAD to get a general ticket from where we had just come. So he took us back to where we had just come and pushed his way back to the front of that que and bought us 2 general tickets for that last train that was delayed till 10:30 that night. He then sat with us and told us we needed to calm down and that everything would be alright, and told us that we would just get on the sleeper class and tell the train TT, or the man who came and checked the tickets, that we wanted to upgrade our general ticket and get on the sleeper class. He sat and talked with us until 11:30, but our train kept getting delayed more and more because of the fog. The man was SO nice and its remarkable how much kindness some people here show towards others. He intended to stay with us until the train came so he could help us talk with the TT and get our tickets upgraded, but he said he had to get going home and was on his way, but not before we exchanged information so we could call him and e-mail him. Our train didn't end up coming until around 3am in the morning of the next day, and we spent our time sitting with all the tourists who were waiting for their trains too on a platform. One guys who was french named Jerome we found was going to the same place as us, so we sat with him until our train came. He was on sleeper class so we just went with him to his compartment and when the TT came, had no trouble at all upgrading our ticket and getting seats. We then immediately went to sleep to get some rest and the rest of the 12 hour trip was spent talking with the indian people in our compartment, and for some strange reason they all spoke really good english. When we slept through lunch, an indian couple sitting next to us shared a giant meal they had brought with them from home. A young christian indian was sitting in our compartment too, which was supprising seeing as only 2 percent of india is christian, and cami said he was the first young indian man she didn't get a sleezy impression from. Our train ride was so nice, and it just backed up what we had learned about the law of inpermanance, and how letting your emotions take you over just causes more stress and panic.
Once in Delhi, we went with Jerome to find a hotel and found one right across the street from the rail station very easily, and then went to meet Jerome for dinner. We went to a nice restaurant and talked about indian music and how it differs extremely from our music back home. We then went back to our hotel to get some rest because we had a train to catch the next morning at 6:50 to Haridwar so we could make it to Rishakesh, or at least so we thought. We took hot showers, which we both hadn't had in a while, and then went to bed. We go up the next morning with no trouble at all, packed our bags, and were just sitting in our room watching some tv before we left for the station when for some reason I got a urge to look at our ticket. I took it out and looked at the time of departure- 6:50 am, perfect. I then looked at the date of departure- december 15, 2009... It was the 16th... I told Cami this and she was pretty shocked, but it actually amazed me how calm we both were about it. We realized that it doesn't really matter, we could just go today and get new a new ticket for the 17th and get a refund on our old ticket. Before I go into the next part I have to mention that Rusty, the guy from Utah that we met at our retreat, had just so happened to tell us something very useful that happened to us and really saved us from any more added stress. He told us that when he tried to get into the station a man would stand in front of the metal detectors with a clip board and ask for your ticket, acting like he worked there and had to see your tickets. He told the man he didn't have a ticket and had to buy one, and the man told him he couldn't go into the station until he bought a ticket and told Rusty and his wife to follow him. So they followed him back across the street of the station and were taken to a tourist center for a ticket. They guy then left them at the tourist center and went back to the station. Thiking they had just been helped buy this guys that "worked" at the station, they began talking with the man at the tourist center. The man at the center claimed some exorbatant amount of money for the tickets they wanted, so they realized it was a scam and left. They went back to the station to try and get in, for their lonley planet book said the real tourist center was inside the station. When they got to the metal detector again the same man asked for their tickets, Rusty said the other place wanted too much money and they wanted in the station, but the man said they couldn't go in until they had a ticket, and took them to another tourist place. The man left again back to the station, and Rusty and Kelsi once again realized this place wanted too much money, so they went back to the station. This time when the man approached him he just shouldered past him and walked through them metal detector. Kelsi, shocked, ran past the man too and through the metal detector. They said a police man was standing on the other side of the metal detector and as the man that Rusty had shouldered by yelled after him to come back, the police man just stood there and did nothing. Once they go in the station and found the REAL tourist center, they found that you do not need a ticket to get into the station, and that this man was part of a scam and got their tickets for the correct price. So today when me and Cami went back to the station from our hotel to get a new ticket and refund our old, as we approached the metal detector we were approached by a man with a clip board and who was dressed nicely. He asked for my tickets and at first I almost talked to him because he seemed so authorative, like he undoubtabely worked there, but when I saw the metal detector behind him and the officer standing behind that I remembered Rusty's story. I walked right around the man and didn't acknoledge him at all, and as he grabbed at by arm and kept saying excuse me, I just kept on walking and walked through the metal detector and right past the police officer and Cami followed. It's amazing how listening to other travelers experiences can make something so simple when otherwise it would have been so hard. It was funny too because me and Cami had an argument earlier before this happened. She was saying that Rusy had said that this "conman" was right outside of the tourist center doors, I had said that he was outside of the station at the metal detectors. So right after this happened I gloated and talked on and on about how I was right and she was wrong as she tried to argue her case, priceless! We bought new tickets, but unfortunately found out that it was too late to get any refund on our old ticket so we didn't get any of our money back 😞 I think we are starting to get the hang of traveling here, and I'm sure once we master traveling in India we can travel anywhere, but we are still having some troubles here. It sucks that we were unable to get any refund, but in reality we only lost around twenty dollars, so it is not THAT big of a deal.
We now have a day to spend in Delhi before we leave for Haridwar, which I'm actually in a way grateful for so we can get a little bit of rest and get our feet on solid ground. We have plans again to eat with Jerome later again because we saw him on the street earlier today and told him that we missed our train, again! I'm pretty sure he thinks we are completely incapable of traveling, and he may actually be right, but sooner or later we will get this whole thing down. I will also mention that we decided randomly that we no longer wanted to just stay in Rishakesh and do yoga for a month and a half, and that while in Varanasi waiting for our train we planned out that we were going to stay in Rishakesh for a little less than a month, and than travel to 5 other places by train before leaving from Delhi to Paris in April. We found out a lot of information from all the people we did the meditation course with and after being here for so long and really starting to appreciate the culture we couldn't resist going to some other places. This may be a once in a life time trip, and we have decided on a whim to make the most of it. I don't even know the names of all the places we are going off the top of by head, but we are going to a place that is described as a type of smaller tibet. Then we are going back to delhi to do this Rusty told me about called that Landmark Formum which sounds SOOO interesting, and if you have time get on google and type it in and check that out. If you have heard of it before, you'll know that in America doing the Landmark Forum costs around 400 dollars for 3 days, here it costs around 70 so we jumped on the opportunity. After this we are going to do a camel safari for 2 days, and then going to another temple to see a temple that is made out of gold and apparently has a ton of friendly people living there, and then we will return to Delhi and leave for Paris. It may be overwhelming at times, but at least I wont regret not spending every moment here in India the way I should have.
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