Vipassana, Day 1: Stripped Grief
Original post date July 30, 2017
Once noble silence began it was as if we were on a movie set and the director had called, “action!” The energy of the group in contrast to the day prior was striking. Silence. Peace. Order. In each of our heads there could’ve been wars being fought, but one would have never guessed it just by observing us. The silence and the setting created a slightly eerie tone in the atmosphere. The tone was very reminiscent of old times, like when there was no such thing as electricity or running water.
Sitting for a continuous hour to observe sensation as my breath enters through the tip of my nostrils and exits the same way (Anapana) could’ve been more difficult for me, but given my background in yoga and my already established meditation practice, it wasn’t so bad. For a few months now I’d been meditating by keeping my awareness on my breath; however, I’d been resting my awareness on my belly rather than on my nostrils. This deeply rooted habit of noticing my breath in my belly was a difficult one to break. The brain resists change when habits run deep. But after all, that is what one attends Vipassana for, right? To allow subconscious habits and patterns to arise and to release them, so I submitted to the technique and with some struggle I retrained myself to practice Anapana. I struggled with the change in technique (from belly awareness to nostril awareness) up until the last day. Habits run deep.
I could not find a comfortable seat during Group Meditation. I’d pulled a hamstring at the gym a few weeks prior and it was pulling on my lower back. I had hip, knee, and lower back pain in my half lotus position. Frustration and aversion surfaced for me due to my discomfort. I changed my seated posture several times, I added and removed cushions, I tried kneeling, but nothing could help me forget the pain. On Day 4 we would move from observing the breath to observing sensation in the body (especially pain) and that would reveal a universal law of nature for me, but until then the pain would prove to be very distracting for me.
As I sat in meditation and as my mind kept replaying my ex -as well as my friend with whom I’d had a disagreement- suddenly and out of nowhere an image of my 15 year old son in the hospital surfaced. He’d been in a car accident about a month prior in which he was ejected from a speeding car breaking his sacrum and a vertebrae. Miraculously he survived. The image was of him sitting up, his brace holding his spine in alignment, with his visiting friends surrounding him. Tears began to stream down my face. I did not feel sadness. I did not feel worried. In fact, I felt peaceful and accepting. In that moment, I was finally processing the accident and all of the events that had led to it. From the moment the accident happened everything had moved so fast. I hadn’t had any time to absorb the events. I was doing just that, absorbing and processing, as I sat uncomfortably in half lotus in the meditation hall. Then, it came to me. I just grieved. I just did it for the first time stripped of the suffocating helpless feeling that accompanies grief and that has tortured me almost my whole life. I just did it with full acceptance and what I was grieving was what I’d projected on to this child; the hopes and dreams that he could and should be any particular way because he’s MY child. Acceptance.
