by Chett Vosloo
CHAPTER 22
With mountains towering behind and a nature reserve bordering the centre, you could hardly have wished for a more quiet and suitable venue to practice meditation. There was nothing fancy about the place though. It had only what was needed, a meditation hall, a dining area, ablutions, an office, and small bungalows for the staff and guests taking part in the course. The bungalows for the men and women were kept as far apart as possible, making it clear that they wanted you to focus on your meditation, and not on the opposite sex. At our welcome dinner that evening, the lady in charge went through a list of rules of all the things that weren’t allowed during the course. There was to be no music, no reading of books, no perfume or deodorant, no use of medicine without their consent, no eating of anything besides what was provided during the course, no eye contact, and above all no speaking! The entire ten-day course was to be done in complete silence, noble silence, as they called it. Once she had finished reading through the rules she looked up at us with a wry smile and asked if anybody wanted to pull out. Nobody did, but I’m willing to bet that the other nineteen people sitting next to me were all shitting themselves as much as I was at this point. Initially, I had actually thought that the vipassana course was going to be a fun experience, but now it felt more as though I was about to go through some hard-core initiation ceremony.
Soon after dinner, the bell rang to signal the start of noble silence, which would continue right through until the last day of the course. That evening we had our first meditation. It was only a short 45-minute session and I guess was there to help ease us in for what lay ahead. Each person was allocated their own spot in the meditation hall, women on the one side, and men on the other. We weren’t allowed to use chairs to sit on, but there was a stack of pillows and blankets at the back of the hall that we could use to make things a little more comfortable.
The instructions they gave us for our first meditation were extremely simple. For this meditation, and for the next two days to come, we were to sit with our eyes closed and to put all our attention on the nostril area. With each ingoing and outgoing breath, the idea was to feel sensations in only the small area at the bottom of the nose. The meditation ended at 9:00 pm sharp and immediately after, we all filed off to bed. Little did I realise how tired I would be at this time the next evening.
***
At 4:00 am the next day, the bell rang for the start of day one. The daily schedule was as follows:
4:00 am wake-up
4:30 am to 6:30 am meditation
6:30 am to 8:00 am breakfast and rest
8:00 am to 9:00 am meditation
9:10 am to 11:00 am meditation
11:00 am to 1:00 pm lunch and rest
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm meditation
2:10 pm to 3:30 pm meditation
3:40 pm to 5:00 pm meditation
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm dinner and rest
(dinner being popcorn and fruit)
6:00 pm to 7:00 pm meditation
7:10 pm to 8:15 pm evening discourse
8:15 pm to 9:00 pm meditation
9:00 pm sleep
I very quickly realised on the first day of the course that the vipassana technique was not so easy. To keep my attention on my breath without the mind wondering off was one thing, but then to feel sensations at the base of my nose was something else. In fact, in the beginning it was a real struggle for me to feel anything at all. If this didn’t make it challenging enough, there were also the aches and pains from having to sit for such long periods of time in one position. First it was backache, and then it was agonising cramps in my thighs and my hip. After each session I’d very often find myself at the back of the hall scratching around for another pillow to sit on, hoping that this would take away the pain. It was of some encouragement for me to see that many of the others were doing exactly the same thing between sessions, clearing suffering just as much as I was.
At lunch on day one, I was already starting to wonder how much more of this I could take. How the hell, I thought, am I going to get through the rest of the first day, let alone nine more days of this? We’d already meditated for five hours that morning and still had another six hours to go before lights out. It was just too much, but nobody had thrown in the towel yet and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the first to give up, so I stuck it out. I tried to forget about the pain and to just take it one session at a time. By 9:00 pm that evening I was so bloody exhausted that had Miss Universe knocked at my door in a little silk nightgown and told me that it was my lucky night, I probably would have closed the door on her and told her to go and give her good luck to someone else. I was that tired! My head had hardly even touched the pillow before I was lights out.
Thankfully the second day was a little easier than the first day had been. My body was still killing me, but I had a better idea of what to expect and therefore I didn’t feel the pain quite as much as before. On the third day we were told to observe sensations on the upper lip, as well as at the bottom of the nostril, and only on the fourth day were we told to start feeling sensations in all parts of our body. This definitely made things a lot easier. What also helped was that I was now starting to get the hang of vipassana meditation. Slowly, I would scan through my body from head to toe observing all the sensations I felt in my body. In the four days since the start of the course it amazed me at how much more I was able to feel, especially in my arms and hands. All I had to do was to take my awareness to those areas of my body and I would immediately feel energy tingles, as if an energy current was flowing through me. If I felt a strong sensation in my body, for example an itch on my right shoulder, I would take all my attention to only that specific part of my body where I was feeling the itch, then I would closely observe what it was that I felt. I realised that what my mind was labelling as ‘itchy’, was actually a vibration. The itchier it was, the more intensely I felt the vibration to be. What’s more, I could also see that if I was able to keep my awareness on the sensation without scratching, the sensation would eventually lessen and fade away. This was the essence of vipassana meditation. Vipassana meditation didn’t only help you to get a better awareness of what was happening in your body, but it also showed you that all sensations, whether good or bad, are in a constant state of change. They come and go like clouds passing across the sky. Therefore, to only observe the sensation – neither clinging to a pleasant sensation nor trying to avert a bad sensation – this was the secret to vipassana meditation. This is what we were there to practice. By doing this, it would give you a sense of space between you, the watcher, the observer, and the sensation.
I don’t know why, but during the meditation sessions old memories of things I’d completely forgotten about kept popping up, especially old memories of sex. I must have had flashbacks from every girl I’d been with. After a while I was starting to think that maybe there was a problem, as more memories of sexual encounters kept surfacing. It wouldn’t stop. I did my best to block them out and to keep my focus on the sensations in my body, and not on the sex, but it was a losing battle. Later on in the day, right in the middle of a two-hour meditation session, someone in front of me farted. You can imagine what this was like. For the past four days we’d been sitting in noble silence when, all of sudden, someone let out a loud, squeaking fart. I needed every bit of will power I could muster not to start laughing. The teacher taking the course came across as very serious, and so if I had broken down with laughter, it would have gone down about as badly as if I had walked into the meditation hall with a few six packs of beer and told everybody to have a drink. The entire day I’d been working hard to restrain myself from thinking about sex, but now I did the complete opposite. I immediately started to think of one sexual fantasy after the next, hoping that this would take my mind off the fart. It helped for a while, but I still couldn’t seem to shake off the laughter that was bursting to come out. When I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and I knew that I was going to explode any second, I quickly got up and made a dash for the
outside bathroom away from the meditation hall. Once in the bathroom with the door shut, I sank back onto the toilet seat and let it all come out. I laughed and laughed until I couldn’t laugh any more. How good it felt to feel normal again.
***
Unlike the first five days of the course in which my challenges had been mostly physical, a sore back and aches and pains in my legs, from the sixth day on my struggles became more mental. My mind had by now become very restless. It was coming up with every possible reason why the course was a complete waste of time and how there was absolutely no value in vipassana meditation at all. The doubts kept coming up, one after the other. Sometimes I was able to observe my thoughts from a distance and not to identify with what my mind was telling me, but for the better part my mind had the upper hand and dragged me into believing everything it was telling me. I had heard before the start of the course that for many people day six was supposedly the worst. There seemed to be a lot of truth to this as it was on the sixth day that I started to wonder whether I was losing my mind. From what I saw, I wasn’t the only one who thought this. During our lunch and dinner breaks you would see guys, myself included, pacing the pathway outside the meditation hall as if we were in a mental asylum, eyes facing the ground, a blank expression, each one of us lost in our own world. If someone from the outside had dropped in to pay us a visit at the centre, I’m sure that they would have thought that this was some kind of special home for the loony, as that is exactly what we must have looked like.
As funny as it may sound, what probably kept me going at this tough stage of the course was the peacock that roamed about the centre and the ant holes that I’d discovered on the pathway. I’d spend my short breaks between sessions squatting down on my haunches watching the ants at work, filing up and down in lines, each one carrying a twig or a small piece of something into the ant hole. I was amazed to see how efficiently they worked. Before I’d always thought of ants as nothing but ants, but I was now looking at these little creatures with total wonder. Sometimes I’d go out during my breaks and find that there was no sign of them. I’m sure you must be on the threshold of going crazy when you get disappointed that the ants that you were hoping to see are not there.
***
If day six and seven had been tough days for me, the eighth day was going to get even worse. For the better part of the meditation course I’d been able to forget about my skin problem and to put it aside, but on the eighth day I lost all control.
It all started when I took my daily shower during our lunch break. For some reason my skin had flared up more than usual. I quickly spiralled down after seeing this and was once again, as I’d been so many times before, at the mercy of my own mind. My negative thoughts completely consumed me. I knew in theory that I mustn’t identify with these negative thoughts passing through my mind as this will only make my suffering worse, but very often I’d feel so utterly powerless that it would be just about impossible for me not to. The last thing I felt like doing now was to go back into the meditation hall for the afternoon sessions, but I had no choice. I had to.
Once in the meditation hall, I sat for ages wallowing in misery thinking about nothing other than my skin and how bad it had become. At times like this when the tunnel seemed so dark and never ending, my strength to keep fighting would all but disappear. I was, at this point, so lost in my own world of despair that my eyes even started to mist up with tears. Then, the most unexpected thing happened, something that had never happened to me in my life before. I heard a voice. It wasn’t a voice from somewhere outside, but rather it was a voice from within. I knew right away that the voice was coming from a different, wiser part of myself that was somehow separate from the whole drama taking place in my mind. In a slow, yet totally dispassionate tone, the voice said, Stop worrying about your skin. Focus on healing yourself from within. Leave your skin for now. That was it. I heard nothing else after that. Just as a child does after being scolded by its parents for doing something wrong, I immediately snapped out of the mood that I had been in. My depression lifted at once, as though it had never been there. For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about the voice that I had heard.
The final two days of the course were a breeze. I no longer had any problem sitting for one to two hours at a stretch, and my mind was no longer resisting me being there, as it had been for the past few days. When the bell rang on day ten to signal the end of the course, the group of us who had taken part gathered outside the dining hall to eat lunch and share our experiences. I had a good laugh to hear some of the guys saying that they couldn’t stop thinking about sex during the course, so it wasn’t just me after all. Of the 20 people who had started the course ten days before only two people had dropped out, one on the fifth day and the other on the sixth day. I was actually surprised that there weren’t more, as the vipassana course really was an incredibly testing thing to go through.
***
Two people who had been on the course with me were looking for a ride to the airport. It wasn’t that far out of my way and so I offered to drop them off on my way back home. For most of the way to the airport the three of us spoke about vipassana meditation and shared our own experiences from the course, but then Jackie, the lady sitting in the front seat next to me, happened to tell us something that had happened in her life a few years ago. Jackie said that she had been working as an actress at the time, and that from all the stress that she was going through in her life, she started getting hives on her hands. She went to a number of different specialists to find out what was happening, but none of them were able to help her. She said that this went on for some time, until one day she discovered the cure. By now I was hanging on her every word, as her story seemed all too similar to my own story.
“The cure,” she smiled, “was simpler than you can imagine. Whenever the hives would come up I would kiss them and send them love, and tell them that everything was going to be okay. Soon after, the hives would miraculously go away.”
How grateful I was that Jackie had shared this with us, as I would start using the same technique with my skin condition. Jackie’s story was yet more confirmation for me that the answer to my problems was within me, and that what was needed was love.
***
A slow and relaxing drive back home was exactly what I felt like. I wanted to have some time to reflect on everything that I’d been through over the past few weeks. I thought back to my sessions with James, my valuable time spent with Jenny in the forest, and the vipassana meditation course that I’d just been on. I guess that when you do something as intense as a ten-day vipassana meditation course, the full benefit that you get from it is hard to measure at the time. Yet, still, I had absolutely no doubt that I had grown and learnt so much from the course. Looking out of the window at the surrounding farms, I was overcome by a tremendous feeling of peace. I’m not quite sure what trigged it, but suddenly my eyes started to well up with tears. However, they weren’t tears of sadness, as they had been before. This time they were tears of joy and gratitude. After all these years of suppressing my emotions and not being able to feel, how wonderful it felt to just let go and cry. The walls that had imprisoned me for so long were finally starting to crumble, and my heart, which had been closed for so long, was opening.
As difficult as this journey was for me to go through, I knew that all this pain that I had to face up to was going to change my life forever. It was going to teach me how to live, to really live, and the irony of it all was that what I had always imagined to be my greatest curse in life, my skin condition, I’d one day come to realise was, in fact, my greatest blessing. It was after all my skin problems that were forcing me to look within and to let go of all the emotional baggage that I had, unknowingly, been carrying around with me for so long. If I hadn’t been faced with this hardship, then there’d be no real reason for me to change. When you have a nice dream you have no desire to wake up, but when you have a nightmare you want to wake up as quickly as possible. In the sa
me way, I would have carried on with my life as I was, quite content to carry on chasing after the relatively small and fleeting joys that I had previously enjoyed. But for now, I was still undergoing the transformation process. There was still a lot of hard work ahead, or should I rather say there were still so many old habits and so much old junk that I had to let go of before I would be able to truly open up to life.
CHAPTER 23
I arrived in India at the end of October. After the vipassana course and the hypnotherapists that I had seen, I felt as if everything that needed to be done in South Africa had been done. What I wanted now was to spend a few months in Amma’s ashram in Kerala. Amma was still away on her European and North American tour at the time, and so the ashram was a lot quieter than usual, yet this didn’t bother me. When it was as quiet as it was, it made it that much easier to focus on my spiritual practices.
My daily routine at the ashram was more or less the same. I’d wake up at around 4:00 am, freshen up and get dressed, and then go down to the hall for the morning chanting. The chanting (a call and response in which one person led and everyone else followed) lasted for just over an hour, and ran from 4:50 am through to 6:00 am. After the chanting, I’d grab a cup of chai tea, and then make my way to the beach for a seated meditation. Although an early start to the day, it always left me feeling good and ready for the day ahead. The rest of the day would be spent doing a few hours of seva, reading from one of the spiritual books that I had with me, and then taking some time to rest and relax in my room after lunch. In the late afternoon I’d head down to the beach to watch the sunset, followed by an hour of devotional singing in the hall, and finally dinner in the canteen at around 8:00 pm. On most nights I would get to sleep between 10:30 and 11:00 pm.