Vipassana Vault: Day 9
Context
After more than a week spent mulling over the experience, losing the plot at times, forgetting everything I learned and felt, and being swept back up into the real world, I finally have set aside time to reflect—in writing—upon my 10-day Vipassana retreat in Kyoto, Japan. I tried my best to keep a mind palace throughout the ten silent days (plus the two additional days as well). Mercifully, I dumped everything into a series of voice memos on the train back to Ōsaka, which has allowed me to let go a little bit over the past week, knowing that my in-the-moment thoughts are there to return to.
In short, a mind palace refers to the mnemonic technique of mentally placing information in specific locations along a familiar route or space. For me, I chose my bedroom growing up, with each day being allocated a particular section within it. To recall the information, you simply take a mental walk through that space and pick up what you left there. It leverages the strong spatial and visual memory of the brain to encode otherwise abstract or hard-to-remember information. I tried my best to make up little stories and objects scenes that would stick in my mind more easily.
Hence, I’d originally titled this series Inside the Mind Palace of a Mad Man, but that felt too complicated in hindsight, and kind of misses the major detail about these reflections in that they relate to a Vipassana course. So, the Vipassana Vault it is instead.
Over the next ten days, I’ll share my Vipassana adventure with you through this mind palace lens, hopefully offering a light-hearted spin on the whole journey and using it as a gateway to dive deeper into what I felt. Ultimately, this is both an exercise for myself in aiding my own digestion and processing of the retreat, but also a medium to share everything I experienced with others.
I should clarify: each day from one to nine was essentially the exact same, in terms of schedule. You can hopefully find a simple snapshot here. Whilst the minutiae of how I exactly used these chunks of time varied from day to day, the overall gist was unchanged. These mind palace reflections, therefore, intend to highlight mainly just the moments or thoughts that stood out to me, rather than attempting to capture every detail in a running commentary fashion.
Day 9
Hey! We’re almost halfway through the year already. Time flies. But you already knew that.
By now, I’m certainly far, far removed from this Vipassana thing. In some aspects. It still shapes my life in significant ways, though. I’ve had more of an opportunity to sit still, reflect, and meditate whilst we’ve been here in Thailand. Returning back to the technique is difficult. Life gets in the way. I haven’t yet been able to consistently recreate the subtle awareness that I spent the retreat days cultivating. Nevertheless, I’m still committed to carrying over the practice into daily life, albeit in short stints. I continue to find it helpful!
Song of the Day
Lost! by Coldplay
Nostalgia meets timely messaging. Viva La Vida is a quintessential childhood album. Coldplay in their prime. Lost! is a song I’ve returned to with fondness only fairly recently, but the track is fun and the anthemic nature can be quite uplifting.
It speaks to being, well—lost—and the futility in trying to make sense of it all, but also perspective and resilience. These were strong mental themes for me by this end stage of the retreat.
The first chorus goes: “Every river that I tried to cross. Every door I ever tried was locked.” Then, the second adds: “Every gun you ever held went off. Oh, and I’m just waitin’ ’til the firin’ stopped.” Both culminate in Chris Martin “waitin’ ’til the shine wears off.”
These lyrics paint the picture of someone who is lost, but not because they aren’t trying to find a way out. Rather, they feel so lost because everything that they do try seems to be futile, or even turn against them. Thinking in circles, each time they eventually just decide they’re better off waiting it out.
They may not be able to change their circumstances—every effort they make seems to bounce right back at them—but they can shift the mindset. The very first lines demonstrate this realisation: “Just because I’m losin’. Doesn’t mean I’m lost. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop.”
Feeling as though you’re “losing” is temporary, but being “lost” implies that you’ve taken that on as a part of your identity. You’ve resigned yourself to a state-of-being that doesn’t actually align with reality.
For me, there were many times during the first nine days of this retreat where I felt hopelessly, irreversibly lost. Yet, as I sit here and write this, it has all passed.
By Day 9, I still felt incredibly overwhelmed and disorientated, but the light at the end of the tunnel was there. I knew it would pass. Impermanence rose to the fore once again.
Day 9 was bittersweet. From one angle, I’d never been so close to actually finishing this thing. But the other second of that coin was dangerous. Because I finally felt I could reach out and touch the finish line, I yearned so much more for everything lying on the other side.
Partially, thinking about my family, friends, and plans that lay ahead was motivating. It filled me with a lot of strength. Yet, it made the process harder. Ultimately, this longing wasn’t serving me. Regardless, the time would simply pass by at exactly the same rate. Fixating on the future simply left me with a distaste for the present.
Overall, the practice felt relatively easy today. Relatively. It was still difficult, but I was extremely grounded in the daily routine by now, and I’d grasped the technique. Sitting quiet and still for an hour was no longer the challenge. I was developing reasonable equanimity towards sensations, but objectively observing the mind was where I struggled.
The mind palace from this day centres around a small mirror in my childhood room. Whatever I feel as I look into said mirror, the inverse emotion is staring back at me. If I smile, a frown meets me in my reflection. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more volatility in my emotions. I found it difficult to reason with.
A realisation I was grateful to have made was observing, in myself, just how strongly one clings to routine—as trivial or mundane as it might be—when the mind is met with emotions it is unwilling to feel, whether fear, or boredom, or anger. The list, of course, is endless. Suddenly, making your bed in the neatest way possible, or having three showers a day, or taking a little longer to wash your face and brush your teeth become the most exhilarating tasks.
It also dawned on me just how blind we often are to our own progress. In contrast to earlier days, I’d come so far just in terms of surviving these sits, let alone extracting immense value from them, yet I still found myself dissatisfied.
As the day wrapped up, an amusing image popped into my head. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but in Only Murders in the Building, there is a scene where Oliver Putnam is describing a show he watched where someone kept continually falling off a set of stairs on stage, only to bounce right back up onto the next step. This explanation was overlayed satirically by Oliver himself falling onto his back and springing right back up after a painful encounter with his son. Falling and bouncing. Falling and bouncing.
The amusing memory lightened my mood, but also shared some insight. I like thinking of meditation as building a trampoline. Through meditation, you’re investing in your faculty of resilience. You’ll keep on falling. That much is certain. But whether or not you can rebound is a skill. This understanding placed the volatility I’d felt throughout the whole retreat into valuable perspective. It is all an exercise in recognising impermanence, and responding with resilience. Everything. Not just the meditation itself. I’ve taken that away strongly, now four months removed.
