My Exhausting Meditation Retreat: 10 Days of Vipassana, Silence and Spiders - Society - The Guardian

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My exhausting meditation retreat:

10 days of Vipassana, silence and
spiders
I went to New Zealand to break my brain and put it back together, without ever
having meditated before. I had no idea what I was in for
Jodi Ettenberg
Thursday 31 March 2016 15.30BST
signed up for a Vipassana course in a moment of quiet desperation. I

was coming up on close to a year of insomnia. I found myself
exhausted by the anxiety of not sleeping, yet unable to nd any
meaningful rest. For the rst time in my life I was having panic attacks.
Nightly, they were triggered by the dawning realization that sleep
would elude me yet again.
I was also dealing with chronic pain. A bad accident as a kid followed
by a series of rib fractures and back injuries over the years generated a
state of permanent hurt made worse with the lack of sleep and an
excess of cortisol.
I chose this specic course, which took place in New Zealand, because
despite the trendiness of meditation classes and apps, Vipassana
seemed to be about equanimity, discipline and hard work right up my
alley. I am not the most woo woo of humans, and the idea of a giant
drum circle of positive thinkers made me want to run away screaming.
Vipassana is dierent from mindfulness meditation, which focuses on
awareness, or to transcendental meditation, which uses a mantra.
Instead, it dictates a blanket command of non-reaction. No matter the
pain as you sit, or the fact that your hands and legs fall asleep and that
your brain is crying for release. You are instructed to refocus attention
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on the objective sensations in your body, arising and falling, as you do

a scan of your limbs in a specic order. By doing so, over 10 days, you
train yourself to stop reacting to the vicissitudes of life.
While descended from Buddhism, the modern-day courses are secular
in nature. The father of these retreats is the late SN Goenka, who was
raised in Myanmar and learned Vipassana from monks there.
When a friend asked me why I was willingly heading into solitary
connement, especially since I had never meditated before, I told her I
wanted to break my brain and put it back together again.
I need to defrag my hard drive, I quipped. It isnt running
eciently. I compared it to hiring a personal trainer to help me at a
rst-ever gym session.
She disagreed.
No, its like running a marathon having never run before. Jodi what
are you doing to yourself?
On the rst day, a bell rang outside my door at 4am, reminding me that
despite the darkness, it was time to wake up.
I was not, nor will I ever be, a morning person. I felt a rush of anger rise
up in me when I heard that sound, and fantasized about taking the
gong and inging it into the forest. So much for equanimity.
I tumbled out of my cot and got ready for the 4.30am meditation
session. The rst days focus was on awareness of breath. Thats it.
When your mind moved from that awareness you brought your mind
back to the fact that you breathe. The simplicity of this instruction felt
incredibly futile.
I had a hard time focusing on my breath because of the persistent
burning in my back. Regardless of how many pillows I piled under my
knees, it bubbled up until it hit a crescendo.
You are allowed to speak to the teacher during oce hours, and I went
that rst day, knotted in pain and panic. Eyeing me serenely, he asked
how long I had been meditating. Sheepishly, I explained that I hadnt
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actually meditated before. Plus my back was falling apart. Plus I didnt
know how to focus on my breath. I should leave, right?
With total calm, he told me to disassociate my panic from the pain. I
was making it worse for myself by focusing on the hurt, which only
magnied it for me. He told me to do my best, whatever that was.
I snorted before I could help myself.
Oh, youre one of those, he said with a soft smile. Perfectionism
wont help you here.
I trudged back out of the meditation hall and into the bright New
Zealand sunlight, reeling. The teacher oered a wooden L-shaped
contraption to help prop up my back during the meditation. As to
whether I was meditating correctly, he was silent.
The message was clear: I was competing against my best self, not
anyone elses.
After the rst three days of focusing on breathing, we were introduced
to Vipassana. This involved sequences of long body scans in a specic
order. Throughout, we were instructed to be aware of the sensations or
pain we feel. By not allowing ourselves to react to what our bodies felt,
we were training our minds to build a barrier against blind reaction.
A simplistic example of the Vipassana technique: if your leg falls asleep
as you are scanning your neck for objective sensations, your mind may
wander to whether youll ever stand up again. You dont move your leg
to compensate. Instead, you refocus on the neck and ignore the part of
your brain that is begging you to give attention to the leg pain. You
remind yourself that the pain is temporary, just like everything else.
In addition to the body scans, day four marked the beginning of hours
of strong determination. They occurred three times a day, during
which we were not allowed to move. Your leg hurts? Too bad. You itch
like mad on your nose? Cant scratch it. For the entire hour, you sit and
you scan your body. Along the way if there are points of pain, you
observe them impersonally as your scan reaches those points, knowing
they are impermanent.
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In response to these new requirements, a wave of people left the

course. It took all of my energy not to walk out myself.
I tried to remind myself it was only 10 days. Surely I could handle 10
days of repetition and focus? I held on by a thread, until day ve.
An arachnophobe walks into a Vipassana meditation course

When I was two, a family member took me to see Raiders of the Lost
Ark. I had nightmares about spiders for years, waking up screaming in
the middle of the night. My arachnophobia has never waned, and I am
ashamed to admit that it has dictated some of my travel plans.
Before the meditation course began I worried about the long days of
silence. I did not worry about spiders. This was a mistake. The course
was on a bird sanctuary outside Auckland, and I arrived only to nd
that spiders carpeted the wooden buildings, inside and out.
When you take a Vipassana course, you agree to abide by ve precepts:
no killing, no stealing, no lying, no sexual misconduct and no
intoxicants. No writing, no talking, no eye contact, no communicating.
At the end of day one, I noticed a daddy longlegs struggling on the
carpet but heading toward the door. I reached for the course schedule,
only to realize I was about to kill something with a document that says
you wont kill anything.
Instead, I took a deep breath, skirted around the creature, and opened
my door. I stood there silently cheering its departure from my room.
In the meditation hall, daddy longlegs dropped from the ceiling,
feeding my anxiety. Huge black spiders dotted the corner of the room
where we picked up our pillows, watching over us as we shued into
yet another meditation session.
In response, the organizers provided us with a spider catcher. This
was a Tupperware container plus a piece of paper to slide under it for
ease of transport. I did not nd this helpful.
Then, on day ve, I hit peak spider. Just before bed, I caught a glimpse
of a bulbous black spider in my peripheral vision, dropping out of a
tiny hole near the ceiling. Unlike the many spiders on the veranda, this
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one was huge.

I leapt out of bed in a panic. Every time I tried to reach the spider, it
would crawl in the hole again and disappear. I left the light on, drifting
o only to dream about spiders and wake up breathless. Finally I shut
the light decisively. At 2am, I awoke to a feeling of deep alarm and
turned the light back on. The spider was dropping from the ceiling,
right above my head.
Gasping, I fell sideways out of the bed. The spider, as startled as I,
hastily clawed its way back toward the ceiling. I watched in horror as it
spent the rest of the night eating other spiders in my room. I did not
sleep at all.
Studies have shown that people who are blind or deaf have heightened
ability in other bodily senses. When the brain is deprived of one input
source, it is capable of reorganizing itself to support and augment
other senses, a phenomenon known as cross-modal neuroplasticity.
I felt a small, temporary version of this phenomenon at the course. I
could not speak or write, but my mind was whirring away at an
alarming speed. Trapped in a cognitive cycle of shame and blame, my
phobia of spiders was magnied.
The next day, I swallowed my pride and broke my noble silence. I
begged the female volunteer leader to let me switch rooms. At that
point in the course several people had left, and I was able to move to a
dierent cabin.
For the rest of the week, as everyone else sat on the grass enjoying the
sun between sessions, I stayed in my room, too scared to leave.
Its funny what your brain can do to you. A friend once said that in life,
worrying ahead of time was futile, because what you are scared of
never manifests. Instead, what you least expect creeps up behind you
and scares you out of your mind. Or in my case, drops down from the
ceiling in plain view.
I wish I could say that the spider incident was a turning point. It was
simply a bump along the way. I did fulll my goal of making it to the
end, but the course remains one of the most dicult things Ive ever
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chosen to do.
By day six, I felt exhausted by the pain, the sleepless nights, and a
mind slowly unspooling. Some people talk about intruding memories
of childhood or overly sexual thoughts during their Vipassana
experience. For me, the challenge was suppressing the urge to run
around like a toddler.
Instead of doing a body scan, I fantasized about inging o my pillows
and running through the empty space in the center of the hall,
screaming like a banshee. I daydreamed of doing snow angels on the
worn carpet, making a mockery of the meditation.
Day eight was the rst time I sat through a strong hour without
moving. When the gong rang, I was covered in sweat from the eort of
thinking past the pain.
By the end of the course, students often report feeling full body ow of
energy during meditation. I did not. I felt shelves of pain along the
way, no uidity between them. But by the last day I could scan uidly
through arms or my right leg. More importantly, I could refocus my
mind away from the pain.
It was progress.
Lessons learned
I emerged from the course a calmer, temporarily less anxious version
of myself. I started to sleep again. The relief of rest was palpable.
I wrote down the following takeaways once I was reunited with my
pen and paper:
1. Our collective obsession with finding happiness is not a reason to
meditate.
Logic and neuroscience might ground the modern rationale for
meditation, but to meditate in order to be happy is counterintuitive.
The practice is a counterweight to the jagged peaks and valleys of the
human experience. To remain stable when life goes awry is a happier
result than grasping for whatever society tells you will make you
happy.
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2. So much of what complicates our lives comes from assumptions we

make and our reactions to them.
In the quiet of those 10 days, you see how much your mind distorts the
reality you perceive. You dont know the background of the people
taking the course with you, but you create lives for them in your mind.
You project your fears on to their perception of you.
For me, this meant creating inaccurate stories about the other
participants, as well as their reactions to me.
I kept falling asleep during morning session, keeling over into the
person next to me. I heard the snickers of the group as I righted myself
again, and vowed to apologize to that woman as soon as the course
was over.
When I did say sorry, the woman looked at me askance. What? Dont
apologize it was the only thing that made me smile during the last 10
days!
In the strangled silence, my brain had lost perspective.
Often, anger or fears are reactions to a reality we have created in our
own minds. A reection of the stories that we tell ourselves. We take
sensory input as objective, but what we see, hear and feel is not
objective. It is colored by what we have known, and the grudges we
hold without even realizing them.
3. You have to do the work.
Shortcuts exist in life, but to train your brain you need put in a
signicant amount of eort. The rst few days are devastating because
the work is both mindless and extremely taxing. But you can see a
change in a mere 10 days, with disciplined practice.
4. Perfectionism can be dangerous.
Believing that doing your best isnt good enough is dangerous. There is
no perfect, and there is no objective measure of what right can be.
The course reminded me that if you have a value system that thrives
on making decisions with integrity, for the right reasons, doing your
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best is good enough.

5. Training yourself to stop reacting can help in tolerating pain.
As someone with chronic pain, this lesson was important. I would not
have come to this conclusion without the course either, because Im
far too stubborn. I can see with hindsight that by obsessing over the
pain, I exacerbated it tremendously.
Sometimes we hold on to what we fear and hate. While I still ache, that
ache has less power over me. The distinction sounds slight but it has
been liberating.
One year later

The Vipassana did not cure me of insomnia or anxiety permanently.
Instead, it provided me with a valuable tool: it showed me that I could
manage my mind more than I realized. By doing so, I felt more in
control of the catastrophizing, despite the fact that it is always there.
A full 10 days of constant meditation created a barrier between the
worrying and me. It allowed me to observe the anxiety more
objectively. The whole process calmed me at a deep and inexplicable
level; I am still the same neurotic person I always was, but it imbued
me with a sense of perspective I now maintain and am deeply grateful
for.
Would I do the course again? Denitely. A yearly 10-day silent course is
recommended for those who meditate, but given the way that this one
tested my body and mind, I suspect Ill wait a little longer.
Maybe 2017 is a good year to schedule my next brain defrag.
A longer version of the piece can be found at legalnomads.com
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