Vipassana Meditation

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A friend back in Germany had first told me about Vipassana meditation. Being notoriously mistrusting against all kinds of esoteric organisations I first was sceptical about attending a Vipassana course. What finally persuaded me besides my curiosity was the fact that all the courses are given for free on a basis of donations from former students. Vipassana centers can be found all over the world with most of them running a more or less continuous course schedule. So it was not to difficult for me to integrate a course into my journey. Since I was traveling for almost six month already I wanted to use it as a short break and a time of reflection and recovery.
With the latter I was off the track as I should find out because learning Vipassana can be quite exhausting. It's not done just by sitting in Lotus position and dreaming the day away.

Before you can take part in a ten day course you have to sign that you will obey certain rules during your time in the meditation center. The basic rules are not to kill any living being, not to steal, not to engage in sexual activity of any kind, not to lie, and not to use drugs of any kind (including cigarettes and alcohol). Furthermore you should endeavor seriously to learn the meditation technique, don't talk to anybody the full time of the course (unless to clarify organisational issues with the course management or to talk to the teacher), and you cannot leave until the course is over. Especially the last point was a difficult promise for me to make.
But once the course had started I felt pretty well. I really could enjoy the silence and the peaceful atmophere in the meditation center. Located quite remote in the beautiful Yarra valley, surounded only by nature, the center offers excellent conditions for meditation.

The main emphasis during the course is, off course, to meditate. Or better to learn to meditate in a certain way. I had always imagined meditation as a kind of sitting in silence with nothing special to do. But in Vipassana you have a certain task to work on.
The first three and a half days you practice to concentrate your mind. You do this by so-called Anapana meditation. Here you focus your attention on your natural flow of respiration through the nostrils and over your upper lip. By concentrating and reducing the area you focus on, you sharpen your attention and sensibility more and more until you are able to be aware of more sensations in this particular part of your body. Also aware of sensations caused by other reasons than the passing of your respiration. What I describe here may sound not to difficult, but it can be hard work already.
The first problem is to concentrate your mind over a longer period of time without thinking about all the other stuff that comes up. Usually just a few minutes after you start your meditation you will catch yourself thinking about anything but your respiration. Everytime this happens you just go back to your real task. The second problem is not to change position all the time. Every sitting position seems to become uncomfortable after some time regardless how many cushions you use. To still cope with the task you do have to exercise.
The daily schedule starts at 4:00 am in the morning with a gong ending your dreams. After a short phase of wake up (I usually needed a cold shower as well) the first two hours of meditation get you going into your Vipassana day. A one hour break follows where you have breakfast. Next is a one hour group session and another two hours on your own again. After a one hour lunch break you have one hour to relax in your room. Like this the whole day consists more or less of meditation with short breaks to recover or have food. The last food you have is the tee with fruit in the afternoon, there is not dinner. Around dinner time a lecture takes place. This is the time when you are told what to do in all the meditation sessions.
The lecture is not given by the teacher which gives the course but by S.N. Goenka via video tape. In this way the form of the meditation is tried to be preserved in its original form. In the video Goenka gives all instructions in english, students that don't speak english well enough can listen to a casette tape in their own language instead. In the beginning I listend to the German casette tape, but later I realized that the Goenka tape is easy to understand (his english sounding quite Indian though) and can be quite entertaining somtimes.
The function of the teacher that gives the course is to help with problems that occur and to answer questions of the students. This is the last event of the day, at 9:30 pm is lights out.

After some session I got used to the meditation. My mind started to calm down and I could concentrate better. I also found a halfway comfortable position to sit in.
And then came the fourth day, Vipassana day. On that day you really start to practice Vipassana meditation. This basically means to you the point of focus that you got from your Anapana meditation and shift it in systematical way through your body. Starting from the top of your head you scan all the surface, first of your head, your face, your neck and throat, your arms and hands, the front and the back of your torso, your legs, and your feet down to your toes. In each part of your body you try to feel all the small sensations present. It is assumed that you have such sensations all over your body all the time. If you don't feel them you are just not sensitive enough. So you wait and concentrate your mind on this part of the body until you fell them.
Very important is that you do not crave for those sensations or if you have them. If you have them and they are strong or even painful, for example because you start feeling uncomfortable in your sitting position you should also have no aversion against them. You should always try to be equanimous and just observe your body and the sensations in it neutrally.
The theoretical understanding and motivation for Vipassana meditation is th following. It is assumed that the deepeset layer of your subconciousness is directly linked with the subtle sensations you have in your body. The usual way humans react to an influence from outside is to have a sensation corresponding to the reception of the infuence in their mind. If the mind likes the sensation it reacts with a craving which is represented on the physical level by a liking of the sensation. This creates more craving. The same is true for an influence that created aversion and a sensation that is disliked. Complexes that build up in your mind through this mechanism are called sankaras. The next time you are exposed to the same influence again you will feel the same sensation again. If you react with craving or aversion again the sankara is reinforced. But if you manage to be equanimous towards the influence and the created sensation, if you are able to just equanimously observe them, they will not be reinforced but will decrease and finally disapear.

So how does Vipassana meditation help in this context? Well, you are full of sankaras from the past influences of your life. Practicing Vipassana helps to feel all the sensations in your body and makes the connected sankaras to surface. Practicing Vipassana is vitually scanning your subconscious part of your mind for complexes. When you observe a part of your body, feel some subtle sensation, feel it become stronger, and observe it until its gone you freed your mind of a sankara. So by practicing Vipassana your step by step can peel away all the complexes in your mind that otherwise would make you react with craving or aversion in the corresponding situations. In practicing the equanimous observation it helps you not to build up new complexes, to form new sankaras.

In reality it is difficult to practice Vipassana. You have to concentrate very hard, it's difficult to do so and at the same time be equanimous towards any sensations you feel. But at least sometimes it was possible for me. After all the sessions with Anapana it was quite amazing in the beginnng but got more difficult afterwards. Somedays later it started to get more easy again.

In theorie you can go to more advanced forms of Vipassana later on. In the moment you don't have any strong sensations left in some part of your body and observe it well enough you are able to feela free flow of very subtle sensations. This free flow can also be felt in larger parts of your body to the point of shifting it rapidly up and down your whole body. But as a new Vipassana student I was happy to be able to scan my body at least once or twice every hour-long session.

In general the Vipassana technique is of Buddhist origin. The more you advance, the fewer sankaras are left inside you, the closer to the state of nirvana you get. Nirvana is the final state of freeing your mind from any attachment.

After nine days in total silence the tenth day is used to get ready for going back into normal society. For this reason you are allowed to speak to your fellow students. This is a remarkable event, to speak to somebody that you sleept in the same room with, that you got up with every morning fucking early, that you silently spooned up your soup every day with and that sat next to you with his eyes closed for more than ten hours a day every day. And that you never in your life spoke to before. Seriously, it was good fun to exchange experiences and to get to now some nice guys and girls from around Melbourne.

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