Dear friends, I've just finished a ten day vipassana meditation course. The experience was nothing that I can really compare it too. Bizarre and wonderful, difficult and enjoyable, just me and my mind -- which led to a sometimes bewildering interaction. Join me on an extraordinary expedition that earmarks the elusive endeavor to find egoless equanimity. (As seen on eBay)

Memoirs of a Young Man Losing His Mind

(from the "Letters from Prison" series: pt.1)

Let me set the stage for you:

Ten days. No reading, writing, music, or exercise. No talking, no groaning. No physical contact or even eye contact with anyone. Ten days sitting in silence for most of the day and night. From four in the morning to nine-thirty at night. You're given two five minute breaks within four hours of sitting meditation. During this whole time (the longest ten days of your life), your goal is singular: purify your mind.

The method is based on the principle of completely equanimous observations of the subtle sensations throughout your physical body -- inch by inch. Sound easy? Just don't ask me, "So Raku, how was your vacation?"

Read on to learn more about "Mental Reprogramming: My Experiences With Vipassana Meditation" (or "The Mind is a Dreadful Neighbor to Invite for Dinner).

There is a compound about four hours east of Bangkok, halfway between that sprawling megalopolis and the Cambodian boarder where we will be for the next ten days to "purify our minds." After day one, it's obvious that this isn't any "meditation retreat" since that implies some sense of casual relaxation. Come the end of the day, after we have been sitting for eleven hours trying to concentrate our minds, we are all zonked-tired. Nine-thirty at night and everyone's in bed getting ready to start all over in a few hours. Bell chimes at four in the morning.

Rather than a retreat, it might be more appropriately thought of as a summer camp for sadists or a boot camp for the spiritually minded. I tend to think of myself as falling into that latter category but sometimes during this intensive course, I wonder what my real angle is. Perhaps I mistakenly got on the wrong bus at the Buddhist temple in Bangkok and they've dropped me off at the Dalai Lama's elite Delta Force security training program.

Psychologically, most of us have some idea of the lack of control we have over our minds. We have a sense of what goes on inside our minds, about the problems that we have in our day-to-day lives -- but we don't really know our own deeper realities because we haven’t really watched our minds close enough. After all, what observes the mind anyway? Even trying to approach an answer to that question is an obstacle that reroutes most of our consciences to something easier, another distraction -- a course of lesser resistance.

I guess that's why I am here, to really know through experience the wild temperament of this library of my world, of my experiences, of my life. Will I become enlightened in ten days? I doubt it! But I will be ten days closer than I was before I started.

For the past thirty hours of meditation, all we have done is practice being acutely aware of the air that moves in and out of our nostrils. We are cultivating an intimacy with that area above our upper lip and below our nostrils, observing the sensations at the rim of our nasal passages. Nothing has happened to me -- I mean I am not glowing when the lights go out nor am I levitating yet. I am wondering if I am following the directions correctly.

Tonight in the discourse, Goenka the teacher of this method of meditation tells us that the vipassana meditation, the actual work, starts tomorrow! (So what have we been doing for the last thirty hours?) He says that so far, we've had to practice being able to make observations on a very subtle level that we are usually turned off to. We have just been preparing ourselves, getting to know ourselves through actual experience for the real work. The real work?!

After being able to inhale through one nostril and exhale through another just be directing my attention (I thought, "wow, cool trick" -- but I don't think I will be telling the teacher about my new skill), it wasn’t long before I was able to re-experience every knee and ankle injury I have ever had. The long sits with buckled legs triggered amazingly fresh reminders of all my physical weaknesses. I was delivered moment-by-moment instant replays, in slow motion, and from a variety of angles too. Very professional coverage! I was even watching close-ups of my own facial expressions as I was going down in agony. ohh! My new lover has become my medial collateral ligament on the inside of my right knee. It was one particular diving block that I made in an ultimate frisbee game not too long ago. It was spectacular but it only lasted a moment. Now, the trade off doesn’t seem to be such a good deal. Anyhow, I massage it whenever it calls out for a little attention, I send it sweet, loving thoughts, I have become so close to it -- what a relationship!

“Why do we have to sit so damn long?”

Goenka seems to say that the pain, the misery is an essential component to the practice because only through the experience of seeing its impermanence will we be able to move past the mental anguish and apply this transformation to the rest of our lives. With practice, we will be able to begin eliminating all of the other miseries that are just temporary in nature, based for the most part on our cravings and aversions. It's a gradual process, will certainly take work, and will lesson the sufferings that we all experience in our lives. Sounds good to me but the jury's still out on any transformation on the loving relationship I have with my right knee. He also seems to say that by creating a controlled environment where we can essentially invite physical pain, we will also create the opportunity to be with it and move past it. Well, this certainly jives with my experience as a long distance runner and a coach of long distance runners. "I'm with ya, I'll hang in there."

Goenka makes an interesting point when he compares the untrained mind to a wild elephant. Both can be dangerous when they interact with people. But with training, by harnessing the power of our minds, like a wild elephant, a tremendous amount of work can be done.

We all have assigned spots where we sit in the meditation hall. During the course of eleven hours of meditation, I think how cool it would be to have some sort of time-lapse camera trained on my spot. I am in essentially the same spot but I find myself experimenting with every sitting posture and pillow configuration known in this part of the world, plus a few that are currently being fine tuned in a quiet MIT laboratory. I start with the half lotus, then to the "preferred jewel for man" and later to the "preferred jewel for woman" -- I am desperate. I ease into the "American Style" (the-sitting-on-the-floor- in-a-circle-in-your-kindergarten-classroom one). It's not long before I attempt the "baby scorpion" and the "Burmese circus contortionist" also known as "third degree jade pyramid" and then into the "flying Chinese crackerjack man" -- I know, it sounds like a dance move but it's not. The hours go by and I feel like I am slowly growing stronger and more flexible.

The knee's need for attention and even acknowledgement seems to be letting up so I try a few of the more advanced and elaborate positions such as the "inverted Cambodian water fowl", "Swami Saraswati's happy meal", the "Turkish prisoner" and finally find total balance in "monkey-in-a-bottle." I am a meditating machine – at least for the moment. Now I just have to deal with that annoying neighbor upstairs, "Mr. Mind."

I use the thin sitting pillows in ways the average human would never imagine interacting with a cushion. I watch carefully how "old students" manipulate layers and angles to geometrically tilt and elevate their pelvic girdle and folded legs. Soon I exhaust all modeled possibilities to give my knee ligaments respite and I begin to innovate an art I call, "pillow origami." Essentially, they are designs based on 3-D rendering work done at Pixar animation studios in the late nineties.

At one point, before leaving the dorm for the meditation hall, I smear Thai Monkey Balm in ovals around my knees over where all the tendons and ligaments connect. I don't feel the warming sensations that I remembered the last time I used this stuff so I continued to apply it to paste-like proportions. "There, that ought to do it." Five minutes into the two hour sitting, I realized that I had maybe overdone it. No, I knew without a doubt, I had definitely overdone it. Beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. It was only four-thirty in the morning.

In the evening discourse on the first day, after eleven hours of complete mental and physical exhaustion, Goenka begins by announcing our progress (as he does in each of the night's discourses). "You have finished day one. You have nine more to go." At that point, many of us let out a mental sigh, a non-verbal groan that articulated an exhausted, nauseated dumbstruckedness -- "Oh God!"

Stay tuned for part 2...