My 7-Day Mindfulness Meditation Experience

 

Image: Sanjog Shankar

I’d signed up for a Vipassana meditation retreat that would involve 7 days of doing absolutely nothing. No mobile phone, no Netflix, and worst of all, no social interaction whatsoever. Ok, I am exaggerating a little. I was going to do something while I meditated — namely, watch my breath. If my attention strayed, I would bring it back to my breath. From 7am to 9 pm every day, I would alternate between sitting meditation and walking meditation, an hour at a time each, with breaks only for meals and a brief Q&A session with Santikaro, the Buddhist monk leading the retreat. This intimidating routine was going to make me mindful, which I was told would quiet the constant chatter inside my head, switch out my negative thoughts and emotions for mostly positive ones, and allow me to sleep like a child at night instead of counting sheep in the wee hours.

Vipassana, translated as insight, is a type of mindfulness meditation that was taught by the Buddha himself 2500 years ago, and popularized worldwide in the late 20th century by the Burmese Indian teacher Satya Narayan Goenka. We’ve all heard of taking a deep breath to calm down. Vipassana takes this to a much deeper level. In practicing sitting and observing your breath and bodily sensations, you develop a new level of calm that is deep-rooted and unshakeable. Loosely, here’s how it is supposed to work:

• By learning to observe your breath and your body, you develop the “muscle” to observe your thoughts and emotions as things apart from yourself.
• By creating a distance and letting your thoughts and emotions arise and fade without getting caught up in them, you weaken their power over you.
• Your breathing becomes smoother, triggering the body’s parasympathetic or relaxation response. Your muscles loosen and unclench.
• You have more room in your head for creativity and new insights, or to resolve hidden baggage (we all have some!) that rises to the surface .
• With regular practice, these benefits become permanent.

While I was familiar with other meditation techniques that used music, visualization and concentration, this retreat would be my introduction to the art of doing almost nothing. Further, the most sitting I’d ever done at a stretch was my 45 min morning routine, epitomized more by its non-performance. At the last minute, due to a COVID case at the meditation center, the retreat would now follow a less-rigorous virtual format where we would practice from home. Nevertheless, could I sit for many hours in a day without being overwhelmed by aches, pains and restlessness? I was about to find out.

Day minus 1: In preparation for the upcoming week, I read The Equanimous Mind, an account of his first Vipassana retreat by Manish Chopra, a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. I even sit watching my breath for two hour-long sessions, desperately fighting sleep every inch of the way. As the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy before going into battle”.

Day 0: I surprise myself by bounding out of bed at 5 am and meditating for 90 minutes before the 7 am group meditation, the first session of the retreat. With the enthusiasm of a new convert, I have clocked another three hours of meditation by the 1:30 pm Q&A session with Santikaro. When I report feeling a new found calm and clarity, he says I’ve experienced samadhi, a mind established in equanimity. I sleep like a child that night.

Day 2: I wake up at 5 am once again. I clock more hours of meditation. As my mind becomes calmer and quieter, I become aware of a tightness in the muscles of my scalp, neck and shoulders. Santikaro thinks it could be due to underlying stress or negative emotions. I’ll discover its cause in a few days, on Day 7. Once again, I sleep blissfully at night.

Day 3: At the 7 am session, Santikaro leads a guided meditation contemplating Support. With the other participants, I contemplate how the entire Universe has supported me on my journey to where I am at this moment, doing what I am doing. On this journey, I have been supported by my parents, extended family, friends, teachers, society as a whole, my workplace Microsoft, the Earth, and my own body. Even my detractors and opponents, unconsciously, have led me to being where I am now. We rarely think about this, focusing instead on the negative things in our lives. This occurred as a deep insight, not as an intellectual thought, and made me realize how much I should be grateful for.

Day 4: Things take a downturn. I wake up late and missed part of the group meditation. My efforts to sit and be mindful are lackluster. I fight the urge to sleep all day. My mind wanders in a dream-like delirium, dredging up various negative thoughts and emotions.

Day 5: I fall off the pedestal. Discouraged by the previous day, I don’t meditate at all. I have no knack for this, the first few days were a false dawn, I tell myself.

Day 6: I am late again for the morning group meditation and miss Santikaro’s instructions. I remind myself that it’s the last day. The agony will end soon. I sit and attempt to put into practice the instructions from the previous day. I breathe gently, with my whole body. I bring kindness into my meditation, instead of judging myself for my lack of “progress”. Suddenly, my mind expands into boundless Awareness, with my breath at the center. My thoughts and emotions are still present, but are a tiny part of this infinite space, clustered around the breath. I can observe them with detachment, as if they belong to someone else, not me. The tightness in my scalp, neck and shoulders that has been nagging me since Day 2 eases up. Santikaro validates my experience in the afternoon’s Q&A session. I float unperturbed in an ocean of inner silence for the rest of the day. It's as if I am meeting an old friend after years, whose company I've forgotten how much I enjoyed.  I am Mindful with a capital M.

Day 7: I am up early once again, after a restful night’s sleep. The retreat ends with the morning meditation. The space and quiet in my head from the previous day continue unabated. Until 11 am. I am on a phone call with one of my doctors. The conversation turns contentious and I get worked up. I feel the muscles of my scalp, neck and shoulders seize. (Aha, this is one of the places my body stores stress!) The next four hours are a fall from grace. My mind is taken over by rumination and the phone call replays repeatedly in my head. Six days of mindfulness have evaporated in an instant and my self-esteem is at rock bottom. At 3 pm, I decide I am going to fight back. I am going to put the lessons of the past week into practice. I sit down, close my eyes and start observing my breath: in-out, in-out. It takes about a half-hour, but I manage to regain some of the sense of calm and equanimity that I felt on Day 2. The tension in my muscles eases up. Not quite the Infinite Awareness of Day 6, but I’ll take what I can get.

Post-Script: In my previous post, I’d shared the story of Jeff, who brought his hypertension under control with the daily practice of mindfulness. Herbert Benson, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has extolled the benefits of mindfulness on the human body — reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and depression — as early as 1975.In his best-selling 2011 book When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté has convincingly shown the connection between stress and diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and diabetes. Nipping stress in the bud with a daily practice of mindfulness seems to be a no-brainer in our quest for healthy mind and body.