Sitting with Goenka
by Jason Farrell

For three of us the journey began as a sprint on the TransCanada from British Columbia through the Rockies, an incredibly wide swath of impossibly dramatic peaks. I wouldn't have said so at the time, but each sparkling slope gave silent testimony to the central doctrine of Buddhist thought - anicca, impermanence. Seemingly eternal, these mountain sides were part of an ocean floor scant millions of years ago. The physical evidence is rich and fascinating, fossilized sea life acting as another powerful reminder of the inevitability of change and the possibility that this mighty range may one day be miles beneath the waves of a future sea.

I was on my way to my ninth Vipassana retreat and I admit to having felt heavily jaded. I was attending with a been-there-done-that attitude. My first retreat had been in India 31 years before. I'd wanted to become a monk, to give away all my worldly belongings at 21 and become a student of the dhamma, the truth, the law of nature, on my way to a quick and romantic enlightenment. Like many young acolytes, I soon found the path to be steeper than I had bargained for and stepped rather quickly back into my comfortable householder slippers. But the habit of regular meditation had stuck, along with a pattern of suffering the occasional ten day "tune up" so highly recommended by Gotama, the Buddha, as the true path of ultimate liberation.

At 52 I had fathered three children, and had developed a teaching, writing, and workshop facilitating career, along with an attitude of cynical amusement at the whole charade of human endeavor that was eating, acid-like, at my ability to experience joy to any depth. Seeing a young family walking down the street, the couple hand-in-hand, the father carrying his new baby in a snugli, I would routinely be struck with a jolt of sadness. I couldn't help but experience the family in terms of the great metaphorical mountain ranges and deserts so many of us have struggled over and trudged across. Dukkha, I would think. Endless pain, endless trouble, endless suffering So I arrived at the Bragg Creek camp where the course had been organized knowing full well that the basement of my heart was choked with the junk of decades, that my two hour daily meditation practice hadn't even begun to clear away the weighty debris. I knew that I was barely "maintaining," that I needed help of some sort that I hadn't been getting. I'd done three types of group therapy, four Vipassana courses, and seen one therapist within the past couple of years. Good stuff, perhaps, but it all failed to get to the root of my problems. It was clear that I needed something else.

My woman friend of one year had been a Vipassana meditator for about thirteen years and was adamant about the Goenka style of Theravadin practice. I had quite liked the routine of sitting alternating with walking meditation periods that are standard Vipassana practice in India and Thailand, and at both IMS and Cloud Mountain retreats in the States. Goenka courses, by comparison, had been characterized to me by a few survivors as "boot camp," the associations of pain and grim endurance being all too clear. There are no walking periods in the daily routine of the Goenka practice. The first sitting period is at 4:30 am and with the exception of two vegetarian meals (plus "tea" for the new students) the students sit all day long until they stop for the night at 9:00 pm. At times they work at their own pace, taking breaks when they want; at other times they join in one hour group meditations when they're asked to work more intensively. But for 11 hours a day, the emphasis is on sitting meditation.

So I was apprehensive going into the ten day commitment, but I also welcomed the challenge. I knew that there would be a fair bit of tapas (fire, friction) generated and that that was exactly what I needed before I would start to feel any clearer and lighter. After checking in and being shown to my room in the summer camp dorm, I felt some mild let-down. Oh... this again, said my mind. We've done this before and ... here we are again. What, exactly, is the point?

I really wasnt sure.

On day one I experienced little more than resentment and disorientation. My central meditation technique involved a sixth chakra focus of attention (between the eyebrows). The anapana technique that is practiced during the first three days of a Goenka course requires one to focus on the area at or just beneath the nostrils where the breath passes. I had been programming myself for years to feel that if my eyes fell beneath the horizon line, I wasn't meditating; I was just wasting my time. Plus the fact that, as a "new student," I had been seated with the rest of the people who were doing their first Goenka course. This meant sitting in the midst of shifting, rustling, coughing, stretching, loudly breathing, and sometimes snoring or sighing meditators whose vibrations of pain and tension were sometimes louder than their physical manifestations of restlessness. Of course the vibes I was broadcasting were doubtless some of the most vile, and I was correctly placed without a doubt, but my ego was stricken. "New student" like hell! it screamed. I've been sitting for decades and have a solid two hour practice! How dare they stick me in the Peanut Gallery!

So, of course, everything was wrong, wrong, wrong ... especially the teacher who was present only on video and cassette tape. On the first morning I could see no reason why his chanting should go on and on and on. It seemed to be nothing but a very annoying intrusion. And by that night I could see no reason for the assistant teacher's presence at all except as a low grade techie, his job being the insertion and extraction of a never-ending series of tapes. By day two I had nick-named the teacher and his assistant, Captain Video & the Disco Kid.

But I had agreed to give everything I had to the technique and by day three I started to notice some subtle but very interesting changes. Observing the breath, focusing on the sensation of air passing through the nostrils, I was feeling not a sense of "lightness" exactly, but a breaking up of the density that had been my "normal" experience.

Leaving the hall on the third morning, I encountered an orange tabby cat. She looked at me while I was slipping into my sandals and I saw that she was missing her right eye, just like me. My instant reaction was that this made her special, not lame or in any way deficient as I had always semi-consciously considered myself to be as a result of my disfiguring accident at age three. My immediate acceptance of the cat transferred to myself instantaneously and I burst into tears. Wow! Pure self-acceptance! What a wonderfully unlooked for joy!

This was my first experience of a crack in my thick and well-kept armor that allowed a little exultation to seep through. It was such a relief to be able to think of myself or to feel myself as whole, as being perfectly and gloriously who I am, weird-looking blind eye and all.

Through day five the mornings continued to be a struggle with resentment. Resentment, I had learned previously, is the mind's most abstract version of anger. It is very judgmental and aloof. It holds itself apart and above the object of its ire. It continuously questions. Why am I here? Why do I need to do this? Who is this Goenka and why should he be in charge? I've been listening to this sort of stuff for many many years and I'm still miserable. Why go on?

But in spite of my very active mental judge and jury, by the afternoons I would have forged a degree of peace. My back and left ankle would start to loosen up, the incessant stream of thoughts would abate, and I could stay with the arising and passing away of the breath for longer and longer periods of unbroken concentration without great effort.

Since I'm quite used to mentally moving up and down the chakras during Kriya yoga, the vipassana "sweep" technique was easy and familiar to me. Moving attention from "the top of the head to the tips of the toes" made perfect sense, as did observing sensation. During a course with Shinzen Young at Cloud Mountain Retreat in Washington state that I found to be immensely valuable, he spoke of particle and wave theory, (a la Frttjof Capra) of the scientific evolution of these terms and of how they can be applied to Eastern thought. We can choose to see ourselves as solid or as complex waves of energy, as bundles of vibrations and sub-vibrations. Goenka was saying much the same thing, speaking of the central purpose of the vipassana technique. By refining our awareness of sensation, we can reach a sub-cellular level wherein our "solid" flesh is directly experienced as vibration, from gross to extremely subtle. And as soon as we, as meditators who are new to this technique, start to work beneath the surface with good attention, long held "solidities" of all sorts begin to loosen, and come to consciousness, to the surface of our attention. Also, it's no longer possible to sit with resentment when this process begins because the imaginary "space" between the resenter and that which is being resented disappears.

By day six I started respecting our televised teacher quite deeply. As a teacher myself, I don't accept instruction from others easily. Every teacher I come into contact with has got to pass the test, convincing me that he knows his stuff and can convey it with humor, clarity, and grace. Goenka accomplishes all of this in spades. After nearly forty years of studying, practicing, and teaching the dhamma to thousands of students, he is the perfect example and spokesperson. And, further, he would be the first to say that it has nothing directly to do with him personally or even with the currently recognized Buddha; all power, all recognition is given to the dhamma, the law of nature that exists apart from any human treatment. The Buddha (Siddhartha Gotama) is merely one of the many Enlightened Ones who has discovered the dhamma and applied it in perfect practice to his own being.

By day eight there was an amazing amount of old "stuff" or sankharas (karmic knots) bubbling to my surface consciousness and sloughing off. Genuine forgiveness had taken a central position in my deepest processing. It's quite informative, at this point, for me to look back and compare the quality of progressive mornings, especially the 4:30 to 6:30 session when I was experiencing the most difficulty. On the first day I was wholly the resenter, I had a very difficult time handling my noisy fellow meditators, my recorded teacher, and my enforced and seemingly superficial new meditation technique. By the fifth morning, what other people were doing simply didn’t matter; I had too much going on inside to give noises and judgments any energy. And by the eighth morning I was more than capable of beaming loving acceptance to all my brothers and sisters, the blessed sangha, the brave and gallant souls who had chosen to plumb the depths of their own inner waters for all these tempestuous days. My heart was absolutely open to all of them and no resentment was possible or even conceivable.

In fact, on the morning of day seven I just had to break a rule and write down what I was feeling. As a writer and life-long journal-keeper, I couldn't help myself and reasoned that I could handle the cost in karma whatever it might be. I wrote, "This is my first good (non-struggling) morning, but, in a way, these last four days will be difficult because I'm a fully charged dynamo ready to zap the whole world with the wonder of Buddha-mind. My own practice has become a very small part of this. I'm like a grain of sand on the beach, a star in the whole wonder of sky. The universe is singing and dancing for joy and I carry it entire in my own tiny heart."

All I wanted to do was share what I had experienced inside. More days of meditation began to seem like mere indulgence, but at the same time I knew that I had a very long way to go on the dhamma path, a lot to learn as a relatively new student. Our assistant teacher was extremely helpful in this regard. From my first conception of him as "The Disco Kid," master of cassettes, he had become a rock, a practitioner who was very obviously meditating at a much deeper level than the rest of us and was dedicated to helping us, through daily interviews, to work past our stumbling blocks.

It was on day eight that the giggles began to visit. Most veterans of ten days sits will know what I'm talking about. It's pretty clear that these bouts of merriment are a product of hard work. If you've been doing almost anything for a very long time, you'll tend to get a little punchy. Things start to acquire a funny edge. Doing a lot of meditation adds a few twists to this phenomenon since the work involves going inside and staying with sensations (as opposed, for example, to a long drive or great stacks of paper work). I was finding that things that had made me angry in the very recent past were cracking me up. My task had been to clean up the cluttered basement of my mind. I had begun it with a great weight of drudgery attached like a ball-and-chain to the job, but there I was on day eight in the same basement and with much of the same garbage cluttering it up and I was feeling pretty good about it. The sole difference was my attitude. I had come to recognize on a very deep level that I could love my own silly garbage. I didn't even have to chuck it all out immediately and discovered that it was lots easier to laugh about it than agonize over what to do with it.

Also, my creativity was on overdrive. I wasn't allowing my mind to drift off into its usual debilitating tape loops so it had all kinds of energy for new and different directions that were often delightful and full of childlike innocence - strange juxtapositions, wild contrasts and comparisons galore. Distractions as well, of course. In the meditation hall I would choke back a fresh set of giggles, gently informing myself that this is not the work. They may be fun and they may be a relief but, in the end, they're just something else to observe with patience and then return to the breath, return to the sensations. The giggles, after all, were no more than an expression of nervous tension, bubbles of mirth escaping from newly relaxed tissue.

Back to work. But the work itself was greeted with warm enthusiasm during those last three days. Each breath was a wonder and a joy, and there was little resistance in the sweep technique, consciousness soaking easily through the body. At that point, I was working on continuity, staying with my focus of awareness without drifting away into the past or future, into fantasy, or just losing intensity. The breath had become soft and pliant, and the body in which it ranged had started to become dimensionless, losing its accustomed boundaries and definitions. It was during these last three days that metta started to flow naturally. Metta means loving-kindness. I had been accustomed to directing it toward others, and, on the last day, this does become a focus for the whole group, but, for me, it began as a focus on myself. Even the giggling was an expression of this. I had been placing awareness on body sensations with great intensity for many hours and during those last three days, my body seemed to be responding with spontaneous gratefulness. Let out of the unceasing bondage of the mind, it began to radiate the simple joyousness that I believe to be our natural birthright.

With the end of the course in sight the writer in me began to be curious about the progression of others. We had been working very hard in this "boot camp" of Goenka's. How were others faring? So I cleared it with our assistant teacher to circulate a very short questionnaire during the farewell breakfast on day eleven.

Needless to say, the results I got couldn't be called scientific, but the general impression I derived from both old and new students was very solidly enthusiastic. The old students averaged six courses. I was wanted to know why they kept coming back, what repeated benefit they consistently re-experienced. Here's a paraphrased list of their answers: react less; need less sleep; clear decision-making; calmer, "nicer" according to my family; better understanding; deeper understanding of nature; less worry, fear; helps to maintain daily practice; much better in touch with myself and more able to act in the world; better relationships; increased capacity for work. And the most quotable answer was: "I alway feel about 100 pounds lighter after a course." I can relate!

Each new student affirmed that she or he would be doing more courses in the future. Just looking into their faces proved it. We were all a little lighter; we were all a little more in contact with each other in a new way; we all knew just a little more about who we were and what we were doing here in this often confusing landscape of endless psycho-drama.

Doing the clean-up jobs following the final breakfast with my dhamma brothers and sisters was a great joy as was recrossing the Rockies with two different sangha members, a father and son who also happened to be Farrells This was the second of his children the father had introduced to Vipassana. His son had been drifting - 22 years old and no clear focus. The course, he said, had given him an absolute direction. Everything seemed clear and simple to him now. And guaranteed to change.

It had been hot during those ten early spring days in the foothills. Flood warnings were up, sand bags were being laid in low-lying areas, and those "eternal" peaks were bound to fall under the waves again given enough days and nights, enough snow and wind.

Just observe, I told myself as we crossed from east to west and as I, too, headed for a new life. Just observe.