Hoi allemaal,
Even geen verhaal over Anne-merlijn maar heel iets anders. Het is nogal een lang verhaal dus voor degenen die de laatste ontwikkelingen van a-m willen lezen klik dan hier.
Onderstaand een indrukwekkend relaas van een collega van mij, Elisa Delaini, die een 10 daagse stilte meditatie heeft ondergaan in Italie tijdens kerst en nieuwjaar. 10 dagen niet praten, niet communiceren, ook niet non-verbaal. Om gek van te worden zou je denken maar tegelijkertijd lijkt het me mega interessant. Zal ik het doen, of zal ik het niet doen? Wie weet ooit.
Ga er voor zitten, het is echt indrukwekkend. Hier zijn haar belevenissen.
"While I was travelling in Tamil Nadu in May I found a small leaflet about Vipassana. It described this technique of Buddhist origin as 10 days of silent meditation during which people 'look inside,' to discover the deep processes going on in their minds, to learn to clean themselves from all negativity and sorrow and to be able to develop love for all beings. It sounded wonderful, but at that time I wanted to enjoy my rides on public transports and my backpacking in the south of India rather than staying in the same place for so long. The curiosity seed was planted, though.
Once I went back to Europe, I discovered that there were centres all over the world offering it and my decision to do a Vipassana course was a bit kamikaze. I signed up without knowing anything at all about it, except that for 10 days I wouldn't have talked with anybody, read, written, listened to music, but only meditating. The day before leaving I checked the address of the centre just to give it to my mother for emergency contact, I knew it was somewhere in the mountains in Tuscany but for some reasons the details were not important. A shuttle bus would have taken me from the train station to that place and I knew everything would have been fine. Even so, the days before starting I had a stomach ache as I started to feel a bit upset. At the centre, there were around 60 people who would have done the course with me, all very silent already, while I wanted to still talk a bit and laugh. I needed to laugh!
The first meeting explained all the rules to be respected during the 10 days: people could not talk with anybody or communicate with gestures, looks, or writing; everyone agreed to respect the five moral precepts of "shila" (which include no stealing, lying, etc.) and we were sent to the meditation room to have our fist session, after which the 'noble silence' started.
The next morning, I felt like I had joined the army. At 4 AM the gong echoed all over the house and I went out of bed, got dressed and went outside with –10 degrees and a lot of snow, to climb up the frozen path of the hill that led to the meditation room. Then, what I called the 'survival session' started. From 4.30 to 6.30 AM the only objective of my meditation was managing not to fall asleep and roll on the floor wrapped up in a couple of blankets, or getting frozen. At 6.30 AM it was breakfast time, after which I went back to bed. Gong again, and meditation from 8 to 11. Then lunch and time to rest (back to bed, eheh), until another gong started the afternoon session (1 PM to 5 PM) and then it was time for a cup of milk with two pieces of fruit, the last thing we could eat until the next morning. From 6 to 9 pm it back to the meditation hall, then a warm shower which made me forget the cold for 5 minutes, and then to bed under 5 blankets, totally unable to move even a finger as I was so compressed under that weight, equipped with wool socks and a heavy pajama.
For the first 3 days we did exercises that had the objective of sharpening our mind.
"Observe your breath: don't regulate it nor change it, just observe it, feel the air coming in and going out," were the instructions of day one. Breathe in, breath out, and the mind is gone, starting to think about something. After 5 minutes 'oh no, the breath!' and back to the observation. 3 breathings and the thoughts started again, and this time I was lost for half an hour. It was absolutely frustrating, also because in the meanwhile my body was aching for the long sitting position, and every 5 minutes I had to move a leg, an arm or my back and my shoulders hurt. At 7 PM there was the evening talk. 'The first day has finished. Now you have 9 more days to work. I know it was difficult, you need to focus on the breath, but the mind won't allow. It just starts to wander away, over and over.' Ok, so this is how it was supposed to go! I felt relieved. Everyday, this is what happens. The mind is in the past, remembering positive or negative experiences, or in the future, imagining positive or negative scenarios. It is never in the present.
During day 2, the focus moved to the 'touch of the breath,' the small area that the air touches when it enters the nose. Again, the mind played against this effort for the whole day and the architecture of my meditation place was constantly changing.
Sitting on a pillow and keeping two others lower to rest the knees didn't work, so I added more, moved one here and the other there, but the body was really sore, no matter how I was sitting. The day after I found a wooden sit that seemed to have solved my problems but after two days my butt convinced me to take it away again.
On day 3, we had to focus on any physical sensation experienced in a very small area that went from the nostrils to the upper lips. Just feel the sensations, that's all. Slowly the mind was starting to become sharp and to notice things that we are normally not aware of.
It was still actively thinking though, and at night that day it started to remember some really funny moments I had in high school. I was living them again and feeling amused. Soon I wanted to laugh, and I told myself 'no come on, don't do it. You simply cannot.' But as the time passed and I kept on remembering funny moments, it was harder and harder to hold the laugh and I suffocated one, coughing immediately after to mask it. I really started to panic, what would have people thought? At a certain point I just took one of the blankets and hid my head under it, while my body was shaking because of this attempt not to make any noise.' It lasted for about half and hour and then it was time for the questions with the teachers. Feeling really stupid I told on of them 'I don't know what is happening, I just feel like laughing, but really hard, without stopping!' And there she said that it is normal, it is a sensation that can come out and the only thing I need to do if it gets too strong is to leave them meditation room for a minute so that I don't disturb others. At least it was nice to know that being myself was ok.
On day 4 we started with the Vipassana technique, which consists in observing any sensation in the whole body. You might feel cold, warm, tickle, pressure…any sensation, and tell yourself that there are 'anicca.' That means, that they come, they stay and then they go away. That is the only characteristic that they have. While the recording was telling this, and guiding up and down the body, covering every part, it went 'and while you do this, for an hour, you will sit with the strong determination of not moving legs, arms, hands or opening the eyes.' In that moment I was sitting in a very uncomfortable position that I would have probability changed in the next minutes and I couldn't believe my ears. What, not moving for an hour?? But I was determined to follow the instructions, so I spent the longest hour of my life, feeling a pain in the leg that gave me the impression I was being tortured. After a while, I heard someone crying on the other side of the room. Then, after 55 minutes, the teacher started the tape with the singing. At that point, both my legs were numb, hurting like hell and I was just cursing that voice thinking "what the heck, stop and tell me it is over, stop and tell me it is over NOW!, and it finally did. I opened my eyes and distended my body on the floor, thinking that I would have fainted. Everyone seemed really shocked. From that moment on, we sat in that position for 3 times a day, until the end. It is called Adhittana, and it means 'sitting of strong determination'. At night, the evening talk explained that there is a reason to practice it, and that it does feel like torture (ok, so it is not only me!). After 3 or 4 sessions, remaining calm you manage to observe the pain. It has a centre, where it pulses, and it can be "divided." If you don't feel any aversion towards this pain, you will manage to observe that it is also anicca. It comes and passes away. This was the most important teaching and it was a discovery for me. It was true, if I remained calm, it just started to dissolve, if I was upset my mind was making this pain the most horrible thing ever felt.
What happens during our life can be summarized in this way. We have a sensation (visual, physical, or mental, etc.) and we feel pleasure or aversion for it. If it is pleasant, our mind puts it in the 'good' box and we will produce a good reaction to it. It if it is unpleasant, it will be labeled as 'bad' and we will react negatively to it. This is something that happens in our subconscious and we are not aware of it. The problem is that, if the sensation is good, we will develop a craving for it, and our body will always look for it, feeling unhappy if it doesn't feel it anymore. If it is bad, our body will reject it, and we will generate aversion. In both cases, we will be unhappy. That is the origin of all sorrow. We are constantly craving or rejecting, deep in our mind and without noticing, and we are constantly suffering. This creates roots of negativity which are called 'sankara'. During our life, and for who believes that also in our past lives, we accumulated so many sankara that we are slave to automatic reactions and we attribute the reason to this to the external world, to other people words, actions, etc. Instead, it comes from within. And we are so attached to our ego, to "I" and "my" that everything that happens that touches this sphere (and that includes myself, my friends, my ideas, etc.) we perceive it as an attack to ourselves. So if a person expresses his opinion to us, which might be different than ours, we might even feel that he is attacking ours, while for instance if he would have said the same thing to someone else we would have stayed neutral. We react negatively, and we keep on generating unhappiness.
At the 7th day, something incredible happened. I was scanning my body in every part, telling anicca here and anicca there, and I have just finished a couple of rounds.
When my attention moved to the top of the head I suddenly didn't feel my body anymore. It evaporated, there was not a single sensation and I was the sky. I was not in the sky, but I myself was the sky. It was a complete state of ecstasy that I can only describe by saying that I perceived infinity. It lasted for I think a minute, and was substituted by a feeling of fluidity in the whole body. I was pure energy, and could move in a free energy flux everywhere. For half an hour I was in a dreamy state. When I told this to the teacher, she said ok, don't get attached to this sensation, keep on scanning the body, and I felt immediately hurt by what she said. During the whole afternoon, like a hungry animal looking for a prey, I just searched that sensation, over and over again, but it didn't come back. By night time, I was feeling totally depressed and I could feel really painful sensations in my body. I was angry, sad and frustrated. During the evening talk, I heard 'it may happen that at the 7 or 8 day, or after a couple of courses, some students may enter the state of Bhaga. There you will not feel your body anymore but only a wonderful peace. Be very careful, the Buddha described it as a very dangerous state. After that, we can become stuck in trying to reach it again and that only generates more craving, so more sorrow.' There I understood what had happened to me and realized fully that also wishing for a positive sensation can lead us into mental slavery. I understood because I felt it fully, on me, and now I now exactly what it is. For the following days, I just moved around the free flow of energies in my body, keeping on eliminating sankara and trying not to generate new ones. I realized that I was thinking less and less, and for the first time in my life I thought 'there is no dream better than the reality.' In the meanwhile more and more things about myself and about my own mental patters came to surface, together with a deep awareness of my essence. We are just fluxes of kampala, energy, or atoms, but it is not something we can read, or learn. I felt it and now I know that we are.
Is that the victory of science and relativism then? We are atoms, we come and go, nothing will stay and nothing matters? The circle wouldn't be complete if everything that happens in our lives would be just dismissed as energy flowing. Because once we realize that a natural law (Dhamma) exists, then we can open our eyes and look "outside" and see that everyone is suffering in the same way, or even more, for the same reasons. This should fill our hearts with compassion and unite to other people even more. For that reason, after 10 days of silence, before breaking the rule of the silence, a new meditation, the Metta, was taught. After having explored the labyrinths of our mind, all concentrated on ourselves, we open up to the outside world and share our merits, love and happiness with the whole world. At that moment I felt a warm vibration coming from every side of the room, as everybody was doing the same, and it felt like having a sun shining inside.
Starting to talk again was the strangest sensation. I asked to someone 'Did you talk already?' and she looked at me and said 'No…,' so I started to laugh. And it didn't stop, I just talked and laughed with everybody for the rest of the day, and my throat was sore! We didn't even know each other's name, even if we had lived as sisters during those days, and the faces changed so much just by seeing a smile, hearing the voice.
As we started to share experiences it was clear that even without having talked or communicated with each other, we had an opinion of everyone else.
Letizia, the girl sleeping next to me, who was also sitting next to me in the meditation room, told me that she had taken me as her 'model.' So in the morning to have the strength of getting up she looked at me and thought 'she is so diligent,' or in the meditation room 'she is so concentrated.' Hearing this really shocked me because…for 10 days she had been my model, the person who gave me strength when I was feeling tired and that I was always look up to when I needed inspiration. We had given each other the role that we needed to give to someone, and discovering that was amazing. Every time that I was not concentrated in the meditations and looked at her, she was sitting still. Every time that she was feeling tired, she looked at me and I was sitting still. We barely have conscience of what happens deep inside our minds, and about who we are, and still we project ourselves on other people, all the time, even if we didn't even talk or exchanged anything with them. The result is that we live of illusions and false projections.
I feel like I have discovered what I was looking for, a deep understanding of the processes that we live everyday, nothing that a convincing philosophy, a religion or an abstract theory could have given me. I have experienced on myself that we are one, that all our answers are inside us, and that we have a very powerful instrument, our mind, that can be the cause of all our misery or an ally. Even if it will take me a lot of effort to liberate myself from old mental patterns, now I know that I am not destined to be a slave of my mind anymore. I am just an under-waged employee, planning to get full rights ;-), and I do hope that I will use it to make it a benefit of the people who are around me. '"
"May all human beings experience real love, real peace, real happiness."
