I learned this valuable insight on my first silent meditation retreat in South Africa five years ago.
I was a novice meditator. I had just moved to Cape Town and attended a meditation group that practiced “focus-on-an-object” meditation. The object was a candle. I wasn’t good at this. My eyes would burn from staring at the candle and I would spend the session wondering how much time had passed. After one of these sessions (I only went to about three), a gentleman asked me if I had ever done a silent retreat. I did not understand what he was talking about but I wanted to know more. He said he thought I would benefit from attending the Vipassana retreat at the Dhamma Patakka center in Worcester, Cape Province. Ten days of sitting meditation for 11 hours per day, no food after the noon meal and you can’t talk to anyone. At first this sounded like a cult where I would be brainwashed and end up in a commune, wearing a white robe, and forced to renunciate all worldly pleasures.
After doing some research, I learned Vipassana was a form of meditation and meant “seeing clearly”. It’s also referred to as “insight meditation”. There are variations within the Vipassana practice depending on the teacher and the tradition but the goal is to pay attention to whatever is arising in the moment and let it appear and disappear without interference or judgement.
So I went on retreat. For 10days. No phone. No entertainment. No books. Just sitting and eating and sleeping in silence.
In the silence of the sitting I began to get a glimpse of the inner workings of the mind: how the mind releases thoughts that will tell you to go in one direction one minute and in another in the next minute. These thoughts just show up, unannounced, and can either ruin a lovely moment, or cause a release of pleasant sensations, or go unnoticed in the background of the mind. There’s no knowing what kind of thoughts will arise and when they will disappear. The mind just “leaks” thoughts because that is what it does. If we don’t pay attention, we get seduced by the thought and follow it around, become entangled in the story, only to “wake up” and find we are sitting cross legged in a mediation hall in the mountains of Worcester where the birds are chattering under the African sky and the person next to you just took a deep breath.
I don’t have to believe everything I think.