10 Day Silent Meditation Retreat

Einstein said that time is relative, and I’m inclined to agree. Sitting in your fourth meeting of the day discussing the new cover sheets for TPS reports, each minute drags on without end. If you’re spending an evening with someone special, hours can pass in the blink of an eye. Einstein also said that, as you move faster and approach the speed of light, time slows down exponentially. Based on that theory, the meditation retreat that I just attended must be moving faster than anything else in the known universe.

Dhamma, a term that encompasses both the teachings of the Buddha as well as the Buddhist universal law of nature, is the fundamental principle behind the Vipassana meditation techniques taught at the Dhamma center. The Dhamma center has locations around the world, and provides instruction to thousands of students per year in the vipassana tradition as taught by the late S.N. Goenka, with roots purportedly back to Gautama Buddha himself. In keeping with the original teachings, course attendance is free to all. In fact, you are not allowed to donate to the school unless you have attended a 10 day course and felt that you benefited from the teachings. In the interest of developing my own meditation practice, I recently attended a 10 day silent meditation course at the Dhamma center in Delaware.

Located in a residential neighborhood, the Delaware Dhamma center consists of 2 1-story buildings on about an acre and a half of land. One building houses the men’s dormitory, the kitchen, male and female dining areas (yes, they’re separate), and some of the administrative offices. 50 yards away, the second building holds the female dormitory and the main meditation hall. The property also includes two short walking tracks, one for men and one for women. When you check in, you are assigned to a bed in a dorm room that sleeps 7 people, with a single bathroom shared among 15-20 students. You are also asked to turn your car keys and cell phone in to the office for safe keeping. During the 10 day program, you will not eat meat, drink alcohol, use non-prescription drugs, read, write (including taking notes during instruction or keeping a journal), use any electronic devices, or speak outside of brief conversations with the instructor in the evening. You are to focus on meditation and nothing else. I lasted 4 days. That’s 3 1/2 more than some of my friends were expecting. The schedule each day was the same:

• 4:00A — Wake up. 4:00A is early. Farmers are still asleep and even their roosters are hitting snooze. Hell, when I was in the Army in basic training, we didn’t have to wake up until 5:30A. I never thought I’d reminisce wistfully about being able to sleep in when I was in basic, but here I am…
• 4:00A – 4:30A — Use the bathroom and brush your teeth. You don’t shower at this time; you have an assigned time slot later during the day.
• 4:30A – 6:30A — Individual meditation in the meditation hall or in your room. The first day, most people meditated in their room, but I think they all fell asleep, since they all went to the meditation hall every morning after that.
• 6:30A – 7:15A — Breakfast. Breakfast was an all-you-can-eat line of oatmeal, some sort of rice based gruel, prunes (as a sweetener), cereal, fruit, toast with butter, peanut butter, and/or jelly, plus coffee or tea.
• 7:15A – 8:00A — Rest. I don’t know what we’re resting for. We haven’t done anything yet.
• 8:00A – 9:00A — Group meditation in the meditation hall. Each group meditation started with listening to a short instruction (less than 2-3 minutes) on a CD, followed by an hour of meditation.
• 9:00A – 11:00A — Individual meditation in the meditation hall or in your room.
• 11:00A – 11:45A — Lunch. Like breakfast, lunch was an all-you-can-eat line of a vegetable based soup, brown and white rice, salad, fruit, and tea. Sometimes there was a dessert of cookies or cake.
• 11:45A – 1:30P — Rest. More rest. Why? Who’s so tired after a rough day of sitting and eating that they need to rest?
• 1:30P – 2:30P — Group meditation in the meditation hall. Just like in the morning, with slightly different instructions.
• 2:30P – 5:00P — Individual meditation in the meditation hall or in your room. I’m sure you’re starting to see a pattern here. We did a lot of meditating.
• 5:00P – 6:00P — Dinner. I use the term loosely. Dinner was fruit and tea. If you had completed the course in the past, you are supposed to abstain from the fruit and only have tea. We get an hour for dinner since, I assume, people have to rest after eating.
• 6:00P – 7:00P — Group meditation in the meditation hall. New instructions.
• 7:00P – 8:00P — Discourse. This is a 1 hour video of Goenka presenting at a retreat in 1991. Each day, it’s a different video, discussing what we’ve done so far and what we’ll be doing the next day.
• 8:00P – 9:00P — Individual meditation in the meditation hall or in your room.
• 9:00P – 10:00P — Optional private chat with the instructor, otherwise get ready for bed.
• 10:00P — Lights out

If you only did the group meditation and wasted time the rest of the day, you’d meditate for about 3 hours per day. Conversely, if you squeezed every reasonable minute of meditation out that you could, you could get around 14 hours per day. I think most people were meditating around 10 hours per day, just because there was nothing else to do. During some of the rest periods, many of us took to walking around the walking track, which was approximately 1/7 of a mile around. We’d just do laps, not talking to each other. As I mentioned, the center is in a residential neighborhood, so we heard kids playing and lawnmowers mowing, and we smelled the smells of fresh cut grass and, unfortunately, delivery pizza. So we got to enjoy those sounds and smells during our walks. Among the other things that I learned during my short stay at the center, I discovered the meaning of the term “bored shitless.” It’s when you are so bored that you go to the bathroom, just for the sake of doing something. For me, ralizing this was an epiphany similar to what the Buddha must have experienced when he realized the Truth behind all of reality. Hopefully he didn’t have his pants around his ankles at the time.

While you’re trying to clear your mind, you’ll find that your mind fights back. We live in a world where, if you think of a song or a movie, you can go online and listen to that song or watch that movie clip within seconds. As a result, our minds have grown accustomed to instant gratification of those types of desires. It’s like having a 4 year old child, and any time they ask for something, you give it to them. You end up with a spoiled and undisciplined child. That’s what our minds have become, and that becomes really apparent when you’re locked in your own head with nothing to amuse your mind and keep it entertained.

You end up thinking of things for your to-do list. You end up having conversations with other people in your own head. Eventually, even they stop talking to you, so you start talking to yourself.

You end up singing songs in your head, over and over. You’ll sing songs that you know and love and you’ll sing songs where you know some of the words but you know they’re not the right lyrics (“Hold me close, Tony Danza.” – Ironik’s ‘Tiny Dancer’). You’ll even sing songs where you have no clue what the words are (“blah-blah blah-blah, blah-blah blah-blah, Jo DiMaggio!” – Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire). You’ll even sing a single verse of a song on repeat for several minutes before you realize that you’re supposed to be focusing on your breathing.

But, in time, your mind starts to slow down and behave. You’re not going to undo decades of mental chaos with a few hours of meditation, but you’ll start to feel a difference. If you stay for the full 10 days, I can imagine that the difference is exponential.

In many ways, the retreat was tougher than basic training. Sure, we weren’t going on 15 mile road marches with 50 pounds of crap on our backs. We weren’t camping in the rain and eating terrible food (despite being vegetarian, the food at the retreat was surprisingly flavorful). But it was still a very intense and challenging experience, in a way that I was not prepared for.

If you can handle it, if you’ve got a base of meditation experience already under your belt, and if you’re mentally strong enough, I think that vipassana meditation has tremendous benefits to offer to people. In fact, I can only think of a few people that I know who might not significantly benefit from the practice.

It’s a tough program. But if enlightenment was easy, we’d all be Buddhas.