And Thus, I Emerge

I want to share how my vipassana meditation course went, but I don't even know where to begin. I certainly wouldn't call my experience "good" or "fun" -- it was transformative. We spent our time trying to train our minds. As an athlete, someone who spends a vast amount of his time training his body, I assumed that training my mind would be similar. The factor I utterly failed to take into account was how untrained my mind was before starting the course.

Let me put this in cycling terms, so that I, and perhaps more of my readers can understand:

Imagine a ten-day course where people are asked to pedal their bicycles for eleven hours each day. Now imagine that a wide range of people sign up for this course. Some people, having completed the course before, know exactly what challenges lie ahead, while others don't even know how to ride a bike.  Everyone, regardless of fitness, will find this course challenging; however, someone like myself, who rides his bike constantly, will adjust to this extremely intense environment much easier than someone who hasn't ridden his or her bike since childhood. A good athlete, with a solid understanding of what his body can do, is likely to choose an appropriate pace to pedal for those eleven hours. An out-of-shape person, fresh off years of sitting on the couch eating Arby's, will almost certainly overdo it on the first day, and spend the course floundering.

So it felt with me in this meditation course. My mind was utterly unprepared for the challenge -- prior to this course, I'd never meditated more than ten minutes at a time. My mind, never having exercised like this in it's life, tried to keep up the first day or so, but, let me put this lightly, imploded catastrophically shortly thereafter. I found this experience traumatic, painful, and yet somehow inspiring.

I found that training my mind, especially my sub-conscious mind, is like training a large, powerful, extremely distractible, and extremely hyper labrador retriever named Shredder how to sit. I showed up at canine obedience school thinking I'd get Shredder to sit on the first day, while in reality this goal was totally unattainable -- "Sit Shredder," I'd say, and Shredder would go bounding off into the distance to hump legs, sniff butts, and fight the other dogs. I've taken the first step, but Shredder will need weeks, months, or years of steady, patient, persistent work before he'll be a good dog.



Keep at it Shredder. You'll be sitting in no time.

Meditate on This!

For the next ten days, I'm going to be taking a course in Vipassana meditation outside Sun Valley, Idaho. I'm slightly nervous about what I'm getting myself into -- ten days of not talking and sitting still sounds pretty challenging. To date, I think the longest I've remained both silent and still was for roughly two hours and forty minutes. I was sleeping at the time, and this happened over ten years ago, so "challenging" might be an understatement. Learn more about what I'm doing here. Needless to say, blogging is not allowed during meditation courses, so as much as I'd love to give you detailed, firsthand accounts of the changes taking place in my psyche, I can not do so. I will, however let you know how it went once I get back. Good night, and good luck.
-S