Vipassana Vault: Day 4
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 4
Tough sledding this one. Vipassana day. With the introduction of a new technique—the real one—there was hope. But in hindsight, I now know that there was never a secret sauce. Results came from your work alone. Hope can be dangerous. On this day, I was clinging on.
Song of the Day
Ave Maria by Mac Miller
For me, this song fits like a glove over everything Day 4 was. It might be less familiar to you than the Bob Dylan entry from yesterday, but this song is one with deep personal significance for me. Miller’s 2014 Faces project means a lot to me at large. Within this off-kilter track, there was one passage my mind couldn’t shake. Repetition of the line “eat, drink and let the merry go round,” alongside “it all just keeps spinning, gotta keep swimming” encapsulated my state of mind very aptly. I was in a survival state—swimming. Every direction I turned there was no escape. It was a merry-go-round with no end in sight, and I was alone on this ride, accelerating towards a terminal velocity. The first line is particularly fitting, as I really leaned into the mealtimes on this day. The wonderful food was a welcome reprieve. Warm lemon and ginger water was savoured. I started having multiple coffees. Maybe not a great decision. I crashed a little bit in the evening.
Anyway, a song today that arose naturally from deep in the internal catalogue and matched perfectly. Thank you Mac.
In the upper-right quadrant of my imaginary cupboard, a present was left for me on this day. A surprise. I envision a surgeon carefully making a incision through the gift wrap. Vipassana day.
I knew virtually nothing of the technique. It was shrouded in mystery, and had the allure of some silver bullet solution to worldwide misery. Of course, I was reluctant to buy into that narrative pedalled by some, but I was definitely fascinated. So, when it came to the extended two-hour group sitting post-lunch where all the secrets would be revealed, it fell a little flat. It shouldn’t have. The progression was actually very logical, deliberate, and sound. In hindsight, I feel very glad that three whole days were dedicated to first developing proficiency in Anapana. But that specific sitting was tied to resentment due to the painful length and the 90-minutes-plus spent listening to drawn-out, sometimes vague, and unnecessarily flowery instructions delivered by the Goenka tape, followed always by monotone Japanese translation.
It was also from this point forward that these group sittings required perfect stillness for the full hour. No breaks, no repositioning, no looking around. Just statue-like determination for an hour, living with whatever discomfort arises. Again, in hindsight, this line in the sand was important. But getting through those first few instances was a uniquely painful experience. It felt like running a marathon, taking a break, and then coming back to run another one in the same day.
Despite my negativity, the technique made sense and was delivered well, particularly when you strip it down to the core principle only. Vipassana is a sensory practice. This isn’t a post dedicated to dissecting it, but in brief, the two primary objectives are awareness and objectivity. The first three days were training in awareness. The mind felt felt sharp. Alert. Highly perceptive. The heightened acuity was noticeable. But being aware of your physical sensations is only half the battle. Inherently, some are very unpleasant. Pain, for instance. The real difficulty arrives in seeing pain everywhere and doing nothing. Noting it as no different from an itch, a warmth, a contraction. Despite progress made in the first discipline of awareness, this objectivity faculty had a long way to come. Hence, I was back to square one.
In the mind palace, a surgeon opens this new foray to represent a terrifying analogy Goenka used on this day to describe the remaining process. Brain surgery, without anaesthetic, performed by oneself. A frightening task. Each day from here on out would mean returning to the same incision, reopening the wound and moving deeper, subjecting yourself to whatever arises. It made sense, perhaps more so at the time, but it didn’t inject my outlook for the week with a lot of joy. This would be a hard road ahead, no doubt.
The evening was a real slog and it was one of my lowest nights. At least I filled up a hot water bottle to accompany me though!
That being said, I did have a lovely morning. Again, I was shoes off, out in the sun. I even wore my hat today! I put sunscreen on! I probably was at no risk of being sunburnt, but it reminded me of home. The smell transported me back to the beach.
I walked through the melting ice, over the mossy grass, and through the muddy tracks. It was gratifying. I felt like a child in a playground, filled with an untethered curiosity for the raw experience of sensing the physical world around them. It also meant I had an excuse to enjoy a quick trip to the shower so I could wash my feet before heading inside. Contrasting the cold shock with that subsequent warm respite was deeply relaxing.
All-in-all, a day that started well and headed down a bleak road. I felt like running away many times as the sun was replaced by clouds in the afternoon. The hope I felt in the morning was extinguished quickly and that scared me. The emotional volatility of this day would follow me. But, I made it through. Crossing off the four and replacing it with a five was a significant arbitrary marker in my mind. Nearly halfway!
