Vipassana Vault: Day 3
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 3
A dangerous thought by this time is to start playing a game of numbers. Begin counting up the days, or ticking them off, and you may find yourself sorely disappointed. There is a whole lot more time left than you realise. The best ploy is to stay in the moment. Easier said than done, though.
Song of the Day
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan
It isn’t as though I felt I was literally knocking at the gates of heaven today. In fact, Day 3 was quite good, all things considered. The song is catchy, though. It reminded me of surfing trips to Noosa with Josh and Lily. It has a certain positive quality to it. Like a weary smile. Given all the silence around me, I often felt I was scoring my own film. Maybe this seemed an apt choice for one specific scene early in the day and then just carried through.
In the mind palace of my bedroom, I open my sliding cupboard doors on Day 3 to reveal myself lying down, sleeping. There were a few meaningful discoveries made today in relation to sleep. First, I slept in, all the way until 6am. Significant for many reasons.
For starters, the exhaustion was real. Mental fatigue absolutely takes a toll, just as much, if not more than physical exertion. Often the effects get muddied amongst a busy day, but when you have nothing to occupy yourself with, you can observe your own tiredness quite effectively, and realise where it arises. Additionally, it occurred to me that I’d been sleeping surprisingly well since arriving here, contrary to my expectations. The mattress was thin, the room cold, and the wooden slats made their presence known. Yet, it worked. I was always knocked out shortly after 9:30pm and usually awoke to a sleep score in the high nineties according to my watch (99/100 on this day!). The accuracy of such a statistic can be debated, of course, but I was happy to accept the confirmation bias. Likewise, another discussion worth revisiting: my nightly heart rate variability (HRV) was meaningfully raised throughout the entire retreat. The metric is confusing, but in simple terms, it reflects the recovery capabilities of the body, plus how effectively it can switch between sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous stimulation. Links with meditation have already been established in the literature, so I found this an intriguing personal anecdote.
Placing the science aside, it was also a profound realisation to understand that I can just sleep straight through the morning meditation session. There are no ramifications. No one is here to be responsible for you, or ensure your diligence. Everyone is on their own journey and, for the most part, can opt in where they see fit. Deep into the week, some religiously attended the 4:30am sitting. Others gave it a miss. For me, I was happy to stay in bed. Eventually, the other four guys sharing our dorm room reached the same conclusion. Perhaps it detracted from the true, purest essence of the course, but I didn’t mind. Seeing 6am rather than 4am on my watch face brought me a smile, and I think that was important in itself.
Another notable moment from the morning that would be remiss of me to ignore occurred in the dining hall. Carlos and I were the last to leave breakfast, each going back for just one last piece of toast with butter. Simple pleasures. In my rush to ensure my punctual departure from the hall, I tried transferring a little cube of butter to my bread, only to walk away without any butter. The cube was still attached to the knife. I froze and turned around in slow motion. Carlos handed me the knife, looked up, and smiled. I couldn’t help but turn the corners of my lips upwards, too. The simplest exchange. But I cannot overstate the impact that had on me. It was slightly forbidden. Wholly human. Ridiculous, in some ways. Special. That plain old toast tasted amazing as well.
In my imagined stop-motion sequence for the day, I awake from my slumber and emphasise a few things. Love. It was today that I began to catch on to the importance of love during this retreat. The shared, external, interpersonal kind, and the deeply internal, self-directed kind, too. Loathing makes productive meditation near impossible. At times, I absolutely loathed my circumstances and also their self-inflicted nature, causing a spiral of guilt, frustration, and anger. Remembering those I love helped to break that negative loop. I started sending wishes to family and friends. The relative strangers practicing alongside me as well. I wanted to let those close to me know that I was thinking of them, even though, of course, they weren’t going to telepathically receive my messages. Nevertheless, it may seem silly, but it made a world of difference. I felt like I could tap into a shared pool of strength. It started allowing me to grit through long sits with more success.
With a more sustained focus window, my meditation also improved. I could now isolate sections of my body more effectively, selecting only a small area of skin and fixating on tiny sensations there. I noticed sensations everywhere else, too. The usual culprits like pain, itching, or numbness still reared their heads, but with less potency. I visualised my body as a web of particles, like if you were explaining the particle theory behind solids, liquids, and gases to a Year 5 student. The area I sought to focus on had bright green orbs. Everywhere else was grey. The grey sections still moved aggressively sometimes, but they were now out of my sphere of attention. The razor focus held for a few excellent sits, then shortly thereafter dissipated again. When I fell back into struggling with my practice, the depression set in again once more and the day rapidly descended into quicksand.
Through it all though, I made an important commitment. One to unwavering consistency. I would walk 10,000 steps. No excuses. There was enough time. There was the space. I just had to be content with wandering in circles. I most definitely was. It helped that there was an older Japanese man, Sato—who I will never forget for seemingly having the biggest heart in the world—who was equally dedicated to the same morning power-walking routine. Following his footsteps round and round brought me joy.
Day 3 was meaningful. It brought important breakthroughs, alongside a fair share of low moments. I still cried a lot, as would become customary, but I emerged a better person from this day, without a doubt. One of my most memorable.
