10 Day Silent Meditation Retreat- My Experience

Hopefully you’ve already read my post about the retreat, here. As I said, I think it’s a very worthwhile program and it provides a valuable set of tools to attendees. So you may be asking why I only lasted 4 days. This post is unlikely to be as entertaining to read as (I hope) some of my other posts are, but here’s the unvarnished truth about my experience at the retreat, at least as I see it now.

The Dhamma course has trained thousands of students in the techniques of vipassana meditation, including a few of my friends. But there was a lot about the format of the course that didn’t agree with me. Before I get into that, I need to clearly state that I did not properly prepare myself for the intensity of the meditation prior to attending the course. I have meditated in the past, and I’ve been trying to build my own meditation practice for about 15 years with minimal success. I’ll meditate for a few days, then take several months off. I’ll go through this cycle twice a year. Obviously, this is no way to build a skill. If I had a daily meditation practice already established, I think the course would have been easier. I’m still not sure if I would have made it all the way through, but I would have had a better chance of completing the course. My lack of preparation was my fault and mine alone.

One problem that I had with the course is that most of the instruction was via CD or DVD. Since Mr Goenka passed on a few years ago, he’s not able to teach us himself (at least, not on this spiritual plane). Rather than have the assistant instructors try to teach at his level, they just play the CDs and DVDs for us and let Goenka teach us himself. The material is sound, but with this format, you can’t ask questions. It’s a silent retreat, so you can’t ask the teacher questions until the evening, at which point it may have been several hours since you heard the lesson. And if you ask a question like, “is this right?” you get a stereotypically Buddhist answer of, “Yes. Anything you feel is right. You are on the right path.” The answer, after hearing it in different phrasing and in response to different questions, struck me as a very ‘participant trophy’ mentality. “You’re here, and that’s all that matters. Have a trophy.” From the assistant instructor’s perspective, she might have been telling me her version of the truth. She may sincerely have believed that I was on the right path. But that doesn’t change the fact that I was still doing everything wrong. She and I used the same vocabulary, but we were speaking two very different languages.

On the morning of the first day, we were instructed to be aware of our breath; to feel it in our nostrils, on the inhale and the exhale. So I was aware of my breath. But while I was aware of my breath, I was aware of other things. I was aware of the cushion I was sitting on. The pain in my knee. The air conditioner blowing on my neck. But I was aware of my breath, too, and that’s what I thought the exercise was about. It wasn’t until the evening of the 2nd day when we were listening to a lecture about what we’d start working on the next day, that I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be ‘aware’ of my breath, I was supposed to be ‘focusing’ on my breath. I was supposed to be focused on it and training my mind to ignore all else. So I wasted two days because I didn’t properly understand the instructions.

On the morning of the third day, we were told to feel the sensation of our breath on our upper lip. Again, I misunderstood the instructions and I didn’t fully understand what they wanted us to be doing until the end of the 4th day. So I wasted two more days on the wrong technique. 4 days into the course, and I’d spent 4 days on the wrong things. I felt like I was way behind the rest of the class, and when the course is already challenging, it made me feel like there was little chance of me catching up.

I feel that, if there was someone who I could have talked to, that would have helped. Some of the students had been through the course before, so I could have asked them, “is this right?” and I could have gotten a straight answer. If I could have done that, I would have saved myself several days of incorrect training. I could have clarified the exercise on the morning of the first day and figured out what I was doing wrong and gotten back on track instead of spending two days going down the wrong path.

Alternatively, if they had shared each of the exercises with us in advance and told us at a high level how they all built upon each other, that would have helped me. By understanding the target result, I think I would have been more likely to understand what the current technique was supposed to be. But each piece of the puzzle is shared as needed, which left me blind to the direction of the process.

If we could have talked to each other, not just to the students who had been through the course before, but to the other new students, it might have helped foster a sense of shared challenges. It’s easier to go through difficulties when you know others are dealing with it as well. It’s like a support group. But when you’re sitting in a meditation session, you’re aware of every time you shift your body. Your knee hurts, shift. Your back hurts, shift. You’re slouching, shift. You know every time that you do. But when you open your eyes, everyone else appears to be in the same position that they started in. It’s very easy to feel like you’re the only one who’s squirming and that everyone else is locked into position and meditating peacefully. During my last meditation session, by which point I’d already decided that I was leaving, I kept my eyes open for a few minutes. I saw many other students adjusting their posture, and it made me feel a little less alone. But being able to talk to the students during meals or in the evenings, you could find out that, no, you’re not the only one who’s having a hard time. You know at an intellectual level that they all have to be hurting like you are, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

There is one other thing that occupied my thoughts for much of day 3 and 4, and I’m hesitant to bring it up because there’s no way to phrase it objectively, but I promised you the unvarnished truth, and this is a piece of that. The vocabulary that’s used is heavily biased, so please try to take the next paragraph or two with a grain of salt and remember that this is not intended to be pejorative in any way.

Some of the policies and procedures and things that I experienced at the retreat reminded me of psychological indoctrination. If you look at the psychology behind indoctrination, brainwashing, or mental reprogramming, they tend to follow the same general principles, whether it’s the Heaven’s Gate cult or the US Military in basic training. The only difference between the two is how we as a society view the results. If someone says that they’re going to join the Army to improve their lives, often the response will be along the lines of, “Good for you! It’s tough, but it’s worth it. It’ll make a man out of you and make you a better person.” If someone says that they’re going to join a cult, we’re quick to try to get them mental help. (I’m not suggesting that the military is a cult, I’m just saying that the indoctrination process is very similar.) Likewise, I found many of the same patterns in the retreat’s policies:

• Isolation: You are not allowed to talk to family or friends back home. All ties to your former life are severed for a specified period of time.
• Sleep and caloric deprivation: As I noted, we weren’t doing a lot of actual exercise, so we weren’t too sleep deprived. Normally, I get 8 hours of sleep per night. During my short stint at the retreat, I was fine with 6. But I saw many people catching cat naps during the day, which suggests that they were either really bored or they were tired. And the food wasn’t starvation rations, but it wasn’t as much as we would probably have liked to eat. Both sleep and caloric deprivation lead to reduced strength of will.
• Surrounding you with a new social group: You are surrounded by peers who are going through the same thing that you are. In cults and the military, you are allowed to talk to each other, which fosters a sense of camaraderie and fellowship, whereas at the retreat, you could not. But, conversation or not, these were still your new peers.
• Establishing themselves as an authority figure: In cults, the military, and at the retreat, you are expected to accept someone relatively unknown to you as an authority, either over a single aspect of your life and knowledge (in the case of the retreat) or over your entire life (in the case of the military or a cult). Goenka made sure to emphasize that you should not accept what he says as truth just because he says it; this is a fundamental premise of Buddhism. You have to discover the truth for yourself. But there’s something oxymoronic about having a leader tell you not to follow him.
• Rites, rituals, and a special vocabulary: From chants in a cult to the Army’s “Hooah!”, a special vocabulary helps foster the feeling of community with your new ‘in’ group. In the case of the retreat, there was a blessing delivered at the end of each session which translated to “May all beings be happy,” and the appropriate response was along the lines of, “I agree that this is a worthwhile goal.” (Both the blessing and the response were delivered in a foreign language that dates back to the Buddha, so it’s not one that anyone in the room was actually familiar with.) It’s very similar to, “The Lord be with you,” and “And also with you.” There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with either sentiment, but there’s a sense of peer pressure involved when everyone around you is saying the expected response.

As I said, I don’t think that the Dhamma organization is a cult. I want to make that very clear. I firmly believe that the work that they do can be tremendously beneficial to most people (myself included) and they have good intentions in the work that they do. By the time I postulated the theory that they were a cult, I was already in a relatively bad mental place, trying to find flaws and faults with the program that I was having so much difficulty with. Once I started thinking of them this way, I found evidence to support the theory, and that just dug me further into the hole that I was in.

I understand that the program is designed a certain way for a specific reason. When I was in the Army, basic training was also precisely laid out for a specific reason. But in basic, we could see the long term plans and we could see how things built up. We’re doing an 8 mile road march this week because we have to do 10 next week and 12 the week after, building up to 18 for graduation. We’re learning how to dismantle and reassemble our rifles today because tomorrow we’re learning how to clean them in the field. Knowing why I need to be aware of my breath would have helped me realize that I need to be focusing on my breath, not just aware of it.

Thousands of people have gone through the program successfully and benefited, so it’s clearly working. Either I came into it with my own biases and misconceptions, or I’m just over-thinking things. Or I’m just not strong enough to complete the course and I’m looking to shift the blame onto someone else’s shoulders. Or all of the above. Regardless, the program didn’t work out for me.

I think the tools that I learned (once I figured out what the tools actually were) will be helpful in my own practice. If I’d made it through the full 10 days, I am certain that I would have seen tremendous value from the course, and it would have been easy to translate that into an ongoing practice. With just 4 days of experience, it’ll require more self-discipline to build that practice, but now I have a better understanding of what it will take to build that practice, and that gives me hope.

So while I didn’t complete the course and I didn’t get everything out of it that I potentially could have, I still think that I got some value from the program, and I’m hoping to continue to build upon that value moving forward.