Meditation centres are not a new thing. In the East, Buddhists have been building Pagodas for millennia for the sole purpose of allowing people to worship and contemplate. Pagodas are tajine-shaped buildings specifically designed to reflect the path to enlightenment laid out by the Buddha, with a tall central spire decorated in segments that represent each step along the path, ultimately topped with a gem and an ornamental crown; final nirvana. Fibre-glass imitations have been erected in the West, but most meditation centres are regular buildings kitted out to provide living quarters and communal mediation halls. The meditation centre at Montebello was previously a boarding school attended by the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and his father, Pierre, but these days it hosted groups of people on multi-day silent meditation retreats. It was nestled in the countryside, surrounded by forested hills with a winding access road.
I got a lift to Montebello with a guy attending the same course; an engineer from Toronto named Ussem. Like me, this was Ussem’s first course, and he wasn’t sure what to expect from ten days of not communicating with anyone. Driving along the 148, the view from the road was a patchwork of red and brown trees poised to shed their leaves for the incoming cold. A wooden sign reading ‘Vipassana Meditation Centre’ with a picture of a many-spoked cartwheel (the wheel of Dhamma) signified our arrival at the centre where a high vis jacket ushered us up the driveway to the main entrance. Men and women were required to segregate during the course, so we were instructed to drop our bags in a pavilion on the mens side of the site. I had read about the course segregation online and wasn’t sure what to think of it given that the course was advertised as strictly secular; dividing men and women had a religious feel about it. In the mens pavilion, three tables were arranged with staff ready to sign us in and take our phones. The man who gave me a floor plan with my room details had an manically cheerful expression and wore a t-shirt reading, “may all beings be happy”. He leant across the table, tongue lolling in an open-mouthed grin.
“Have a wonderful course” he gushed with a strong Quebecois accent.
I grimaced in a thankful sort of way, then followed the floor plan to the dining hall where the formalities were concluded with a short introductory talk, after which the ‘Noble Silence’ commenced. Noble silence meant no talking or communication of any kind with other students, including gesturing or pointing, the idea being to create the sense that each meditator was alone. This was to be sustained for the next ten days.
After a light dinner, there was time to unpack and look at the course timetable. The daily schedule was as follows:
- 4:00 – Gong
- 4:30 – 6:30 – Meditation either in your room or in the pavilion
- 6:30 – 8:00 – Breakfast and rest
- 8:00 – 9:00 – Group Meditation in the pavilion
- 9:00 – 11:00 – Meditation either in your room or in the pavilion according to the teachers instructions
- 11:00 – 12:00 – Lunch
- 12:00 – 13:00 – Rest and questions for the teacher
- 13:00 – 14:30 – Meditation either in your room or in the pavilion
- 14:30 – 15:30 – Group Meditation in the pavilion
- 15:30 – 17:00 – Meditation either in your room or in the pavilion according to the teachers instructions
- 17:00 – 18:00 – Dinner
- 18:00 – 19:00 – Group Meditation in the pavilion
- 19:15 – 20:30 – Discourse from S.N. Goenka
- 20:30 – 21:00 – Group meditation in the pavilion
- 21:30 Lights out
The schedule explained why meditation centres, which provide food and lodging entirely for free, rarely have issues with people signing up just to take advantage. The courses were intense and attendees who regularly skipped group sittings were asked to leave. Note that ten day courses were the minimum – it was possible to stay for up to sixty days.
The Vipassana system of meditation had been established by generations of gurus in Burma (modern day Myanmar), culminating with an Indian man named S.N. Goenka who took the teachings to the West in the nineteen eighties. Goenka, who died in 2013, had a saintlike reputation amongst serious practitioners. Previously Hindu, he had started his own meditation journey at almost exactly the turn of the twenty-fifth century after the Buddha’s death, a significant date for Buddhists, and was thus considered to be an important figure in the spread of Dhamma. The term ‘Dhamma’ refers to the fundamental teaching of the Buddha, which is to observe the truth of your own reality by direct experience; very roughly, ‘all things are impermanent’ (‘Annica’ in Pali). The method taught by Goenka was ‘Vipassana’; the act of observing sensations in the body.
Each room had a bed, a side table with drawers, a lamp, and a chair – nothing fancy but comfortable enough. On day one, the gong sounded at 4:00 and a silent crowd of groggy looking men shuffled to the pavilion, which was separate from the dorms so had to be accessed via an outdoor path lit by floodlights. With about three hours still to go until sunrise, the sky was inky black and beneath the brilliant glare of the lights the walkers downturned faces were coloured shades of grey. In the pavilion at the top of a flight of stairs, we filed one-by-one into a dimly lit hall about the size of two tennis courts with square foam mats placed in a grid across the floor.
I was aware that sitting cross-legged for hours would be painful so I fetched a stool, placed it on a mat, and put myself in a kneeling position. Others had already sat down, some on mounds of cushions complete with lower back support, and some sitting cross-legged with no accoutrements at all. Just before 4:30, a small, white haired man drifted in quietly, sat down neatly at the front, and pressed play on a speaker system.
A chant oozed out over the speakers. It hummed and grunted, and I began to question what the hell I’d signed up for. Before long however, the voice transformed into words that invited us to close our eyes and focus on the sensations of the breath leaving and entering the nostrils. We did this for two hours with occasional encouragement, pausing for ten minutes in the middle to stand, stretch our legs, and use the toilet. When the meditation was over, I stood up like a new born calf and staggered to the breakfast hall to recover over breakfast. A faint orange glow lit the faces of the meditators as we left the pavilion, the first shades of morning spreading over the centre. The course designers had clearly decided that it was important to feed the students well, so each morning we had a buffet of porridge, fresh fruit compote, cereals, yogurt, and sourdough bread with various spreads. Seating in the dining hall was assigned and, by coincidence, I had been put at a table of six, sitting directly opposite Ussem. When I sat down, my first instinct was to nod politely, an instinct he clearly shared, but we both caught ourselves after a microsecond of eye contact, remembering the rules of the course; no communication whatsoever, verbal or non-verbal. I looked at his bowl of porridge for a moment, and he looked at my plate of peanut butter on toast. The clinking of cutlery eventually convinced us to just start eating.
As the sun rose higher, we proceeded with hours of breath observation, so I took the opportunity to experiment with different seating positions; cross-legged on the mat, cross-legged on a pile of cushions, kneeling on a cushion, etc. By the time evening settled, I had decided that kneeling on a stool with a cushion felt like the least painful option, although my feet still went numb after about forty minutes. Though the discomfort was gradually abating, nothing particularly profound seemed to be happening.
Back in the dark, we returned to the meditation hall to watch a recording of Goenka giving a talk – he had been the voice doing the chanting. Goenka was chubby, with enormous cheeks, cheerful little eyes and a grey comb-over – like a friendly toad squatting next to his smaller but equally toad-like wife. When he finished his talk, he gulped contentedly and began another croaky chant.
I was expecting a good nights sleep, but having only bought a blanket with me to the centre (a gift from Kaitlin and Doug on Wolfe Island), I was cold and uncomfortable when the gong sounded at 4am. The day progressed much like the day before, but with the added discomfort of sleep deprivation. I made one more tactical cushion adjustment in an attempt to maintain blood supply to my feet, had a big breakfast, and mentally prepared myself for another long day of sitting in silence. I think it was on day two that we started practicing ‘Sammadi’. Goenka invited the meditators to draw their attention to the triangular region formed from the top of the nose to the top of the upper lip, and to observe any sensations that arose. This then progressed to just the upper lip, where it was possible to feel the faint touch of the breath. A day or so passed like this, during which time I noticed my mind becoming more and more capable of noticing tiny sensations, before we progressed onto the next stage, Panna (pronounced ‘panya’) at around day five.
Panna was the unique selling point of Vipassana meditation. It involved scanning the body from top to bottom, bottom to top, noticing any sensations that arose along the way. Whether pleasant or uncomfortable, the meditator was instructed to feel neither craving nor aversion. We would start at the very top of the head and work downwards, bit by bit, drawing attention to each body part along the way. Things started to get weird here. I started having vivid daydreams. Images, stories and scenarios exploded in the mind in high definition unlike anything I’d experienced before. It was staggering just how vivid everything was, but Goenka laid out clear guidelines; we were to observe sensations in the body, and mental activity was to be recognised as the minds way of escaping the present moment. I started to realise that I was an infant in the world of mindfulness. My attention was constantly being washed out to sea by a deluge of images and ideas, and as the day progressed I found that I was spending more time mesmerised by thoughts than paying attention to sensations. The natural reaction was to be frustrated with how slippery the mind could be but, as Goenka pointed out, this too was just a distraction.
During the rest periods, I decompressed by roaming around a cordoned off plot of forest. This was the only outdoor space available for walking outdoors, facilitated by a network of paths that weaved between the trees, up slopes and over ditches. Bold chipmunks bounded through the undergrowth, surfing the thin layer of leaves that had started to litter the ground. Otherwise unfazed, they would occasionally stop to stare at the walkers passing silently by. With everyone not communicating, the peace of walking alone in the forest would sometimes be shattered by the dawning awareness that someone was walking towards you in the other direction. With eyes fixed determinedly on the ground, we would veer off the path and into the foliage, then continue to walk past each another leaving the walkable section of the path completely empty. If the path was too narrow or the banks were too steep, one walker would stop well in advance, step off the path and stare chipmunk-like at a tree or a fallen log until the other man had passed by.
Not keen on the idea of a repeat of the previous night, I found the centre’s ‘spare bedding’ cupboard and borrowed some sheets. Getting good sleep massively improved my meditations, and as the days progressed I started experiencing vivid memories that I hadn’t realised were still stored in my unconscious. All the while, Goenka laid out the same guidance; whatever the mind presents, come back to sensations in the body; remain equanimous.
I made an error on day six that very nearly ruined the whole experience. One of Goenka’s favourite things to say was ‘annica’ – Pali for ‘constant change’. Through meditating, the hope was that we would directly experience the reality of the mind and body; that it is impermanent, in constant flux: annica. I was surprised therefore to find that whenever I scanned my face during meditations, I found a slight vibration wherever I settled. I could even move the vibration around by directing my attention to a new part of the face. My error was to develop a strong aversion to the sensation. A vibration is, by definition, constantly changing, but I convinced myself that it was undermining the whole concept of annica by being constantly present – if things are always changing, then why could I always feel it?
I decided to speak with the white haired man. Whilst Goenka’s role was that of the teacher, every course had an assistant teacher (AT) to help the students with queries and generally keep an eye on the meditations. Our AT was named Michel; an experienced practitioner who had spent many years in India during his youth to sit courses directly with Goenka. I sat down with him in the empty pavilion during the afternoon question session, kneeling on a cushion in front of his chair, and described my problem.
“Aha, the mind is not what we think, eh?” he chuckled unhelpfully. “When we come to the sensations in the body we find things are always changing, changing…” He continued in this vein for a while, not actually answering the question whilst I tried to embody a feeling of patience and empathy.
Eventually he settled on a piece of advice, “don’t try to force your attention anywhere, just place it”.
I attempted this, but was clearly overthinking it. Over the next couple of days, I became increasingly annoyed and disheartened with the idea of meditating at all. On day eight, I had a raging headache. The days had become so short that the first glimmer of sunlight didn’t appear until after breakfast, by 18:00 the sun had set, and the trees in the forest stood bare and uninviting. I decided to skip the 20:30 meditation to get an early night. Just before turning in, I attended Goenka’s discourse, during which he told a fable that stuck with me. It went like this;
“In a small town in ancient India, there lived an elderly man with two sons. The man was not monetarily successful, but he was known for being calm and kind, and was well loved in his community. He lived a long and happy life until dying peacefully of old age, content and surrounded by loved ones. After his death, his sons were instructed to divide their father’s belongings equally between them. When they searched his home, the sons found a small bag hidden in the wall that contained two rings. One of them was ornate and covered with jewels, and the other was a plain silver band. The elder of the two sons took the opportunity to use his ‘older brother privilege’, and claimed the ornate ring, insisting that his younger brother take the plain one. His brother agreed; surely the plain ring must also have immense value for his father to have hidden it away. Overjoyed at his good fortune, the older brother sold the ornate ring for a vast sum of money that he used to acquire things that he craved. But these things didn’t last, and ultimately left him irritable and constantly in search of new things. The younger brother had taken the plain ring home and studied its surface by candle light, curious as to why his father would have kept something so innocuous so well hidden. On the inside face of the band he found an engraving that read, ‘this too shall pass’. He decided to wear the ring everyday, as a constant reminder that whatever good-fortune or bad-fortune came his way, it would pass in the same way that everything in the world eventually does. As years went by, he developed a calmness and wisdom that made him loved and respected by his community.”
I decided to commit to thinking ‘this too shall pass’ with respect to my newfound meditation agitation, so on day nine I returned to the breath, Panna.
Day ten ended and the silence was lifted, allowing the men to gather in the dining hall and share their experiences. Stories ranged from mundane to miraculous. One guy had lost his high frequency hearing years prior to the retreat, but during one of the meditations he had been focussing on sensations in his ear when he experienced a ‘pop’, and the hearing came back (I discovered later that his hearing regressed some weeks after the retreat). Another guy had found himself crying in his room for an hour, overwhelmed by feelings of compassion for everyone and everything. One guy was at the centre for his fourteenth retreat and had reached a point where, by focussing his attention on the centre of the forehead, he could induce a full-on psychedelic high. For many, ten days of meditation had given them new insights into their lives; from relationship issues and business ideas, to having more certainty about big decisions.
I didn’t think anything particularly profound had occurred, but I had a sense that the experience had been important – somehow meaningful in ways I hadn’t yet recognised. It was only as the subsequent weeks unfolded that I realised that something had shifted in a big way.