The Art of Living: Vipassana meditation
The Art of Living
Vipassana meditation as a tool to heal deep wounds and liberate you from continuous suffering.
The missing link
Having travelled, worked, and lived all over the place for the past year and a half has brought me to so many exciting and unknown destinations. Being on the move and discovering new parts of myself was priceless. I thought I’d never get tired of it, but the past time I’d been yearning for something different. The newness had started to wear off, and my old habit patterns of getting lost in thoughts and doubt gained power again. It’s as if, while I was growing, I kept touching on the boundaries of my old self. True, my ego has been shattered and built up numerous times, but every time I healed only to some extent. It’s these scars inside of me that had been dictating my mood more than I would’ve liked them to. I didn’t want to be pulled and pushed around anymore, so a real change needed to take place.
Over this period, I had already acquired so much knowledge on how to be happy in the here and now. But I also learned that knowledge gained through books and podcasts remained nothing more than someone else’s wisdom. It’s impossible to make that our own, so although the message of books like The Power of Now resonated very deeply with me, it didn’t bring any actionable change to my life. I was missing one crucial part of the puzzle - a method to implement this intuitive and intellectual knowledge in my life.
By travelling and attracting the right people, I was fortunate enough to get in touch with Vipassana meditation. I signed up to follow a 10-day course in Sweden in October 2022. During my Camino, I was already naturally attracted to silence. Because of this, I was initially intrigued by the rule of Noble Silence. During the course, you’re not allowed to communicate (verbal or non-verbal) with anyone. This helps quiet the mind and bring the attention inward. But as I started to read more about the meditation technique, I realised that Vipassana was the actual missing piece I was after, and silence was just a means to achieving that. I went in trying to tame my expectations, but I can already say that the experience has blown even the wildest of those out of the park. Read on to discover what Vipassana is, how it works, and how it can change your life as well. I won’t go into detail as the only proper training you’ll get is by joining a course yourself.
What is Vipassana meditation?
Vipassana is a 2,500 year old meditation technique. It was discovered and taught by the enlightened Gotama Buddha.
Vipassana means to see reality as it really is, not as we want it to be.
The technique is incredibly simple; you close your eyes, sit still for about an hour, objectively observe your physical sensations, and try to keep your attention on the here and now. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. As said by Leonardo Da Vinci, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. As you observe yourself, a purely natural being, you automatically gain experiential wisdom about the law of nature. There are a couple of concepts that are key to understanding Vipassana meditation.
The origin of misery
Why talk about misery when we want to attain happiness? Because it’s only by its eradication that we can achieve our goals. And how do you get rid of something, if you don’t know exactly what the thing is? That’s why we first need to have a clear understanding of what misery is and how it arises.
To cut to the chase — misery originates when we don’t accept the reality as it is, thus reacting to it. That can happen in two directions. Either by clinging to 'good' sensations and creating craving, or by fleeing from 'bad' sensations and creating aversion. Like this we pull and push ourselves constantly out of the now, out of reality as it is.
The eternal disconnect between reality as it is and reality how we want it to be will always lead to misery.
It’s our habit patterns that keep us in the loop, so it’s vital to cut this flow of misery off. But where?
The following flow chart gives a clear overview of our habit patterns. If we want to stop being dragged along by them, we need to remain solely with the sensation. The moment we start interpreting, we’ve wandered, and need to return back to the objective awareness of our senses.
Sankhara
Sankhara means the reaction pattern, or the mental conditioning. Your reaction pattern can be compared to planting seeds and growing trees. We plant numerous seeds every day, but there are only a couple that get all the attention (sun and water) to grow. Let’s take the example of someone being rude to you at work. The moment you hear the words and recognise their venom, is when the seed is planted. Now, if you were to not react, but simply observe the sensation that arises in the body, this seed would die out on its own. Sadly enough, we rarely ever do this. Instead, we react by replaying the conversation in our heads, we find out what we should've replied, or we indulge in the negative feeling it brought along. Everyone has a particular way to react to such words of venom, but
the outcome is all the same; we get knocked out of balance, lose track of the present moment, and grow a false reality full of negativity. This is our habit pattern.
By continuing to live in ignorance of its existence, we feed it until it grows into a humongous tree with very deep roots.
Moment to moment, we create new sankharas or feed old ones. In order to get rid of these sticky behaviours, we need to eradicate the tree to its roots. If even a trace of the roots stay behind, the tree will have a chance to grow again. That’s why, while practicing Vipassana, the main goal is to not create any new ones. The sankharas will come begging for attention, but you simply starve them. This is step number one: remain aware of the sensations in the here and now, don’t react, and observe. Only then will old sankharas, buried deep in your mind, come to the surface. You eradicate them in the same way; allow them to arise, don’t react, and feel them disappear again. Like this, huge trees will come up and get eradicated layer after layer. The process might be long, but eventually the tree will show its roots, and those will also be eradicated, leading to liberation.
The law of impermanence
“But my back is killing me! I can’t stay in this position any longer! I have to move!”
That’s your sankhara screaming for food. Our ego is used to immediately react to it. That’s its main purpose, to protect us from pain and suffering. But paradoxically, it’s this overly protective behavior that is keeping us in the loop. This will change once you learn about the law of impermanence.
Everything is always in motion. Not one thing in the universe is static. We are all born to die. This law goes for the smallest of organisms to the biggest of stars. I challenge you to think of something that lasts forever. You'll notice quickly that nothing really holds up, leaving you no choice but to accept this as a universal truth.
This isn't a pessimistic worldview, It’s sheer realism!
It's true that this can be rather hard to accept intellectually, and even if you do, why would it change anything?
“If I feel pain, I should react to alleviate it, or at least distract myself from it.”
By reacting we only nurture the tree again.
“But the pain…”
Yes, pain is an unpleasant sensation and we don’t like to stay in it too long. It brings that much suffering, because we’re making it a mental torture. If you take the interpretation away, you already cut the misery in half.
“Even half misery is too much to handle!”
That's where Vipassana comes into play; as you sit on a bunch of pillows for a while, the body starts to ache. It’s then a matter of living through as many “here and nows” as it takes, before the sensation follows the law of impermanence and dies out on its own. No matter how much you read about this phenomenon, it's only the experiential wisdom that can make this law settle down in us.
Like this, we learn that misery is misery, and that too shall pass.
A big misunderstanding we humans have is where our emotions originate from. We think that we’re angry/sad/frustrated because of some external input. Take again the example of someone being harsh and unreasonable to us at work. As a result, we feel sad about it for an entire day. In reality, this event happened at a specific time. It’s only then and there that it was absorbed by our senses. Some sensation arose in our body before it faded away again: impermanence. This sensation can vary from aches, pulsations, itching or fluxes in temperature. We naturally react and make a mental thing out of a physical phenomenon. It’s through our reactions that we feed a seed that’s bitter from the get-go. No matter how much you think/worry about it, the fruits of this tree will carry on those exact same characteristics.
What needed to last only an instant in time, got stretched out and deformed to pure agony. If we really want to be happy we need to stop these reaction patterns from hijacking our life.
Equanimity
Like Kendrick Lamar said in his latest record, “we're all walking zombies trying to scratch that itch.” Once we scratch it, the annoyance is gone and we can continue. It's by reacting that we get pushed or pulled out of the here and now. The message is to not react. So no matter how disturbing the reality may feel, you remain a psychological stability and composure.
Your only job is to objectively observe the sensation.
If we stop our objectivity and react, we immediately start labeling sensations as 'good' or 'bad,' and we automatically create feelings of craving or aversion. In both cases we're not accepting the reality as it is, instead we're creating our own stories. In return, we shape our own unhappiness by widening an unbridgeable gap between desire and reality.
The mind has to be perfectly balanced in order to walk on the thin line of the ever-renewing now.
If we notice we’re tangled up in thoughts (which we do thousands of times throughout the day), it shouldn’t result in frustration or anger towards the self. Instead, we should accept it, smile at how stubborn our habit pattern is, and kindly bring the attention back to the body (sensations & respirations). This is the only way to remain equanimous through the trials and tribulations of practicing something contrary to the way you’ve always lived.
The way out!
Combining all this intellectual knowledge will only lead to liberation when we can transform it into experiential wisdom. This can be done with the tool of Vipassana!
We eradicate suffering by sitting still, closing our eyes, noticing our breath, and objectively observing our sensations, all while remaining perfectly equanimous with a clear understanding of the law of impermanence.
You’ll see rather soon that loads of pain, traumas, and obsessive thoughts will creep up, trying to push you out of your balance. If you keep shrugging them off in the now, that is, by not feeding them for longer than the sensation of its origin lasted, you’ll start to eradicate them. And like this, you’ll also start to slowly change your habit patterns. You’ll still wander off into false realities, but you’ll find your way to the real one quicker. Eventually, you’ll start to tip the scale. Where normally you’d spend an entire day daydreaming, a true wakefulness will take over. Equanimity will become the modus operandi of your mind.
Life will stay chaotic, but it won’t knock you down every step.
As a result, the endless brainstorm of mindless thinking will shrink and only a mere sliver of what it once was will remain. Be cautious though, because this piece will stay sharp, and even in its smallest form could cause great harm. Yet, if one practises long enough, all these defilements will be eradicated and enlightenment will await. But let’s not get lost in the craving of this final destination. Let’s live the journey of truth step by step! Only this way we’ll get closer to reaching the end.
P.S. If reading this blog resonated with you, I highly recommend that you sign up for a course yourself. It’ll require 10 full days of your life to learn the technique. Looking back, those ten days were such a unique opportunity. If you’re dedicated, you’ll thank yourself, and walk out with something really valuable for the rest of your life. More information can be found here.
May all beings be happy!
Blog out,
Durim, Sweden
