34~ Vipassana Experience, Part 3: The First Memories

My medicines had run out, I wasn't getting better, and the idea of having hepatitis was haunting me a bit more. I drank as much water as I could, had been eating nothing but white rice and oats for days, and slept every free moment to let my body recover.

I decided to talk to the monk in front of the Great Hall – and in front of all the expectant attendees – 100 men and women sitting in meditation posture, waiting for some sound to come out of the master's mouth so they could take notes.

After detailing my personal health situation to him, after begging him to let a doctor in to “see” me, after his firm NO, and after repeating in front of everyone the 20 times a day I was going to the bathroom, I managed to get them to find me some medicine. The doctor couldn't come in, but at least one of the volunteers "saw" me and told me that – according to her – I didn't have hepatitis. A day later, the medicine arrived, as if we were truly isolated. Maybe we were – good thing it wasn't an emergency.

I calmed down a bit. At least "someone" had "seen" me. It was no longer just me and my mind creating catastrophic scenarios of death and destruction. India is a tribute to patience and the cultivation of mental control.That, too, is a true meditative practice.

I woke up a bit better. The medicine gave me hope, and I think the fear of feeling alone and vulnerable had eased a bit as well. I could now do more than just survive, and little by little, I began to put more energy into the practice.

The 4:30 a.m. meditations were tough. It was a challenge to meditate for two straight hours while it was still dark, without starting to nod off, or worse, falling asleep for a few minutes.

"Be aware," Goenka would say. "Stay attentive, conscious… Feel your breath… Feel each sensation in your nose… the air entering through your nostrils… the air zzzzzzzz... of your... gggggggggg..." Suddenly, you were dozing off, in some kind of daydream, or simply surrendering to the fact that it was way too early to keep your eyes closed for so long without tempting fate.

The first three days of the practice were meant to develop concentration – Samatha – based on the observation of one's natural breath – Anapana. This step was the preparation for achieving the mental stability that we all so desperately need and that we were going to need in order to focus later on the object of Vipassana meditation: the sensations of the body and mind.

The goal was to begin to understand how changes – physical and mental – move through us moment by moment, continuously, without stopping, both in meditation and, more importantly, in everyday life. A concept so central in Buddhism: Impermanence. Nothing is permanent in this life; the only constant is change. And from there, to begin to glimpse that under this premise, clinging to any of these ever-changing states – things, people, mental states, feelings – in whatever form, inevitably causes suffering. Simple and clear. So, after developing the necessary concentration, we were going to move on to the main course: starting to work on accepting reality as it manifests in the present moment. Happy, painful, annoying, calm, unsettling, ever-changing.

After listening to Goenka's talks and starting to understand a bit more about what it was all about, I began to put a different kind of effort into the practice. In the end, it wasn't just about meditating and blanking your mind, or experiencing something supernatural like we all thought, or seeing colors and shapes, but rather it was about more real, less phenomenal things – the kind that belong to real life and all the feelings that crossed our minds when we were meditating or, better yet, when we couldn't meditate.

It was about learning to manage the frustration of falling asleep, of not being able to concentrate for the entire session, of your mind floating as usual or jumping from branch to branch like a monkey in endless loops.

The goal of the Vipassana technique is to be aware of reality as it simply is – not as we want it to be – and to accept how your body and mind feel in that moment, whatever that may be: frustrated, in pain, angry, sleepy, focused... and from there, to return to the practice – to start again – with love, discipline, and tolerance. In the end, the only challenge was to accept reality as it was, here and now. Just that.

As if it were simple...

It sounded beautiful, peaceful, permissive, but no less frustrating because of it.

It was almost impossible not to feel like you were wasting your time when all those obstacles came up so frequently, right in the moment when you wanted to “train” yourself in meditation. It was hard not to get angry, to not get annoyed, to not lose the enthusiasm and the little patience we had managed to muster.

Returning was the key, just like in life. Things are rarely linear and smooth, but the real trick and challenge is the ability to come back, calmly, to the center. Coming back already implies two things: that we had the lucidity to notice that we had drifted and also the steadiness to return to our axis. Not a small feat.

As the days passed, we began to understand what the real battle was. It wasn't about performing well, it wasn't about doing it “right,” because in reality, there was no right way to do it – just like life itself. We were being invited to observe ourselves without the weight of expectations, even those related to being able to meditate. To let go of all desires and projections and simply surrender to the practice. Once again, surrender, surrender, surrender.

I had gotten up at 4 a.m., fallen asleep during the meditation, and, on top of that, I still hadn't turned into Jean from the X-Men, nor did I seem to be heading in that direction like I had hoped. Welcome to the real world! Reality isn't what we expect or want it to be. Sound familiar? Nothing new, right? The everyday reality of life. Maybe that's why the Buddha presented it as the technique for the liberation from suffering. That's exactly what it is: a way to try to endure the daily suffering of expectation vs. reality, the real and ultimate foundation of our afflictions.

Now we were putting it into practice on a meditation cushion, but the concept was a central idea that extended to everyday life. The battle wasn't just when we sat cross-legged in each session, but it was also outside of it – and mainly there – in the everyday reality of life, second by second: Accepting reality as it is and letting go of our constant need for the present to always be exactly as we want it to be.

And we still think meditation is just about not thinking and reducing stress... In the end, it's always about being more awake and expanding our consciousness, in every direction and in every possible way. In the end, meditation is not just sitting with your eyes closed. Meditation is a way of living, of being, and of doing with presence and self-awareness, both on and off the cushion. So, what Vipassana was giving us wasn't just concentration – it was a life philosophy for understanding how to suffer as little as possible.

“The sadhana – one’s personal practice or spiritual path – is that blissful process through which you realize there is nowhere to go. When the need to go ceases, your sadhana is successful. Then you simply sit.” Sadhguru

Walks in the sun brought me so much peace. My body slowly regained enough energy for my mind to wander on its own, and little by little, memories from my childhood began to emerge. Those fuzzy ones, more like sensations, the ones you thought were almost forgotten, but no...

I saw myself as a little girl, 5 or 6 years old. I saw myself suffering, and I wanted to hold her.

When did I start feeling sad?  I wondered.

Was it when my parents separated? The tense, shouting-filled environment where I grew up? That constant sense of anguish? Those endless arguments, when they would send me to the downstairs room so they could fight “in peace” while tearing each other apart in the living room, forgetting about everything? Even about me? As if a few steps down a staircase could somehow make the whole situation invisible... Not even loud music could drown out that feeling of fear, the fear of being small, of not understanding, of not knowing what would happen next. Because even when you’re just a kid and don’t fully grasp what’s happening, you still know that something isn’t right. That innate childhood wisdom.

Or maybe it was when my dad, already at his breaking point, would leave the house, but not before telling me how bad things were, that he was only staying for my sake, that I was the only unbreakable thread holding them together. Together or stuck? Hurting each other.

That thread was suffocating us. It suffocated all of us, and it felt like I was that very thread.

That’s when I realized that I had started writing as a form of escape. I wasn’t writing, I was vomiting sad feelings. “I don’t want to grow up anymore,” I once scribbled on my chalkboard, inspired by some TV show where the teenage protagonist took pills to disappear from the world. She had become my heroine. I was too young to realize it, but even then, life felt unbearably heavy.

As I grew older, I rebelled just enough to bury that scared little girl and managed to hide all that violence and pain, which for a long time felt like something normal. Did I really manage to do that?

I had only forgotten about that fearful, sad girl, the one who only ever wanted a “normal” family – if such a thing even exists. Maybe now, even as I tried to play tough, I was still looking for the same thing. Even if I hid behind a rock band t-shirt, a fierce drum set, loud laughter, sarcastic jokes, and endless beers.I was searching for what I had never had: a family, or more precisely, a partner who felt like home.

27 years later, walking among the trees in Bodh Gaya, India, I saw her again. She was still sitting on the same couch in the town of my childhood, wearing her frilly dress, her huge smile, and her long hair. I saw her visiting her dad in the boarding house where he had moved, baking cakes in the kitchen and going together to buy supplies for the crafts she saw on TV. She was starting to cry too.

After a dark period in my teens, when my pill-popping heroine materialized for a while, my cousin took me to a Christian youth group, and at 16, I started looking for God – or maybe it was more like a reunion.

That’s when I realized that maybe I had always been looking for God, for some kind of God. I remembered that when I was 6 or 7 years old, without knowing anything about anything, I started saying that I was Buddhist or Hindu, that I believed in reincarnation. I didn’t really know the difference or what it meant, but that’s what I kept repeating over and over. I don’t know where I got those ideas from, no one in my family had them. But now, for the first time, I’m starting to think that maybe, in a past life, I really had been one of those.

In reality, what I had always been searching for, even as a child, was a bit of peace. Maybe that’s why I became a psychologist, not just to help others, but to help myself in the process. Later, you realize it doesn’t work that way, that you will still need that Other to show you what you can’t see on your own. Time passed, but what I still seek, even as an adult, is the same thing: a little peace.

“When you start to open your consciousness and your perception, you can discover who you ‘were’ in your past life. You just have to pay more attention to those childhood memories that appear without any apparent reason. Those ideas that sometimes seem random are often – or almost always – things we carry from other lives...”

Slowly, the image began to fade, like in the movies, and Joan returned, slowly, as if he didn’t want to intrude. The mind is like a film reel, the problem is that it tends to be repetitive and monotonous.

“What if we gave ourselves another chance? What if we met again in Bali, like in the movie, and tried again, far from everything, just like we always dreamed?”A real ultimatum... I was ready to leave everything behind. In fact, I already had.

“God, how far do you want to go, woman?” my superego replied, talking to itself.

My mind had already begun to plan how I would tell him, when, and with what tone of voice. With the sun on my face, walking through that peaceful garden, and all that calm flowing through my body,I felt like I could forgive him for how much of an asshole he had been in the last months - not the most recent ones, mind you, but the ones before that, before he realized how much of a jerk he had been and tried to make things right... it was a long story. In the light of those mornings, my heart was slowly expanding again, and I could understand him – understand him even more. That part came easy to me, being a psychologist, but the real challenge was that I could almost never understand myself in the process, nor my own ghosts, the ones I kept replaying without the courage to sit down and really face them.

I felt the urge to run out of the retreat, grab my phone, and call him right then and there to tell him about the hurried conclusion I had just reached. Clearly, the medication was working; I had more energy. But luckily, everything I wanted to do was strictly forbidden.Maybe that’s one of the reasons these retreats have such strict rules , to teach you to manage those sudden, impulsive bursts of love, clarity, regret, and self-forgiveness. Of course, that didn’t stop me from doing it a week later, with the same overflowing love but a bit more caution, restraint, and dignity.

I was walking through an ashram in India, but I was picturing myself baking a cake with Joan in Bali. Visiting Bali had been my only real desire in a long time. I imagined us there, suspended in time, with no need to rush, just sitting together on a couch doing nothing – and in that, doing everything. Enjoying a slow Sunday and the warm aroma of a freshly baked cake. What a beautiful, tempting image to escape the hell I was living in. That simple act: cooking something with love, felt like a big deal to me. In the past few months, I hadn’t even been able to cook for myself, except out of the basic obligation to nourish my body. Every time I sat down in a restaurant, I would order a beer, as if the hops and barley could somehow smooth the path ahead – which, of course, they never did. Nothing could clear the way for me except myself, but "I" was completely broken. So, who was in control? Good question.

When and how had I forgotten all the joy I once found in cooking? Those days when I would argue with my mother just to get my hands dirty in the kitchen. All those cakes, desserts, homemade pasta, gourmet sauces...All of that had vanished from my life, as if I had become someone else, someone who had lost not only her appetite for food but sometimes for life itself. My mind was so overwhelmed with future questions to solve that my days were slipping through my fingers, and in recent years, the only thing that had truly made me happy was Joan. But instead of making me happy, he had become my worst nightmare, one I had no idea how to escape.

And that’s when I realized that my own happiness wasn’t actually tied to me at all, I had placed it in someone else: in “love,” in my longing, in the story I was telling myself, in static things I felt I needed to reach. But, as you know, everything changes, and that had become a huge problem.

When that hit me, the best idea I had was to fly to India, because I really needed an electroshock. It was like a revelation, in a moment of clarity, I understood everything, and I knew it was complicated. My entire view of life had been fundamentally flawed, and I could see it in hindsight, in each of my past quests.I realized that I had been framing my problems incorrectly, and not just recently, but from way back, probably since I was 6 or 7 years old.I started to see that the bridge I had built as a kind of “shortcut,” this supposed answer to the enormous question of happiness, was just an excuse to avoid confronting the real, terrifying question, as Lacan would put it:

What is it that actually makes me happy?

That shortcut-bridge was a lie, because it essentially condemned me to place my happiness outside myself, and that was a massive problem. And the worst part was that the problem was no longer just Joan, now, it was fundamentally me. And facing yourself is the hardest thing.

Something in my mind was deeply misplaced, and I needed to find the escape point, because whatever it was, "it" had been consuming me for years.

That’s why I came to India the way I did: to confront my ghosts face to face, to figure it out or die trying.

There’s no need to say that none of this felt like a game to me. It was without a doubt the most serious decision I had ever made in my life.

Yes, that dramatic.