Vipassana Vault: Day 7
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 7
Again, on a plane. This time from Shanghai to Lijiang. Another chapter beginning. Another ending. A particularly fond one. The past week-ish spent with family has been incredibly relaxing, fun, and important. Carrying less of a decision-making and planning burden, I felt really present. Sure, a few things fell into the background—like my writing efforts—but I felt less tense and greatly enjoyed my time. Now, an opportunity to reset once again. It was an amazing time, but I can’t cling to it. Several other incredible chapters are soon to write themselves.
Song of the Day
Bloodhail by Have a Nice Life
Certainly, this is an incredibly bleak, depressing song. The entire album is perhaps once of the most sombre I’ve ever listened to. The title, Deathconciousness, feels apt. Yet, today was actually one of my better days. Although the tone is not uplifting in the slightest, this album is quite motivating for me, epitomised by Bloodhail. It is one of those tracks I could play in my headphones to instantly enhance my focus slightly. Day 7 was a highly focused day. I worked diligently. This far into the piece, it would possibly be more difficult to approach the technique with ignorance or half-heartedness. The days were long either way. You might as well embrace the work at hand.
I remember that Day 7 revealed some silver linings. At this stage, we were seriously deep into the retreat. You weren’t backing out now. That didn’t make things easier, but knowing that a week had passed allowed you to move on from several initial anxieties. Whatever had gone up in flames whilst I was away had now been burning for a week. Worrying about it any more wouldn’t extinguish the problem, but it would cause needless stress. In that odd way, I felt lighter for recognising the helplessness of my scenario with respect to everything outside the retreat centre. I’d invested too much to let these last few days pass by aimlessly. I wanted to buy in.
In my mind palace, this day is marked by the image of a miniature figurine walking up and around a DNA double helix model. A little funky. It represented my technical strides and fresh glimpses of perspective, plus a steadfast commitment to walking. By this point, I could routinely feel a free flow of subtle vibrations in nearly every part of my body as I shifted my focus throughout. Particularly in the morning sits, they were completely under my control, revealing their nature as I scanned the surface of my skin in a spiralling fashion. As promised, the sensations I could feel were becoming more subtle.
Also—walking! I’ve discussed how important this was for me in past instalments, but it was firmly entrenched as a daily practice by this stage. I was aiming for 10,000 steps each day. Of course, the difficulty lay with the monotony of those steps. My movement was circular. To weave in variation, I started completing backwards laps and reverse laps, small loops and large loops. Sometimes barefoot. Perhaps across the moss, the grass, or the mud. It was fun.
Despite the excellent morning, doubt crept in after lunch. I had a scary encounter with reality during the middle group sit, one that quickly blossomed into a sense of nihilism. Conveying this feeling post-retreat has been difficult, and remains so here. Through the heightened awareness of every little sensation on my body, down to subtle particle vibrations, I fell down an existential well. From the experiential level, I could feel the truth; our body is no more than an ever-vibrating bundle of particles. Just like everything around it. But for whatever reason, this realisation caused me to spiral philosophically. I felt a void of purpose. Pointlessness. I struggle to encapsulate why, but I practically ran out of that session. My sense of self felt hollow. In reality, my self-image is entirely concocted and shares the same fleeting nature as everything around it. The discourses touched on the dissolution of ego. I became incredibly scared of it. I actually didn’t want to lose the—flawed, perhaps—way of thinking that filled me with curiosity and meaning and self-worth.
I wanted to escape my mind; run away physically. But the wisdom of Pema Chödrön stuck with me. In When Things Fall Apart, a physical book I tragically left in Owase, she advises that those moments of uncertainty and fear are exactly the times we should sit and observe. Without placing judgement, we can find the valuable insight usually hidden within these moments. In this instance, I realised that, although I might not be able to comprehend our conscious mind, and we may all just be blobs of particles, striving to better understand the human mind-body connection is a purpose worth pursuing for precisely the fact that it isn’t well understood.
In the evening, snow fell. Objectively, weather that is no better than the preceding dark, cloudy skies. Interesting. Yet I view it through a completely different lens. Beautiful. Rare. Comforting.
Overall, Day 7 was productive. As always, it wasn’t perfect, but I certainly came out the other side as a better person.
