The first time that I truly felt the pounding of my heart, a rhythm so alarming because of the silence into which its loudness fell, I was convinced I was on the verge of dying.
It was the final hour of the 90-minute group sit that had started at 4.30am on day eight of my first ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat.
We had reached the point in the practice where the teacher SN Goenka’s instruction was to rotate your awareness around your body, observing sensation while attuning to respiration and watching, without reacting, to anything and everything observed in granular detail within the landscape of the body.
Up until that point, every time I had reached the left side of my back and torso, I couldn’t detect a thing. The whole of my physiological and felt experience in that vicinity was a sensory blank, whereas my right upper back and my right hip would often yell at me for more attention than they truly merited.
The body as burden and portal
“Our body has wisdom and we need to give ourselves a chance to hear it.” Thich Nhat Hanh
By day eight, I had worked through the habitual response to fidget and flee, and had tapped into my innate stubborn nature to remain. I was, like most of the 120 people in the Dharma Hall nestled in the woodlands of Herefordshire, resolute in my vow of Adhittana – strong determination, one of the ten prerequisite virtues that assist a spiritual aspirant in the process and practice of awakening.
I was not going to move no matter what the mind tried to fool me into thinking my body needed. I had spent far too many years imprisoned by the mixed messages relayed between my mind and body. I was here to uproot those mind weeds and set myself free. That meant checking the habitual impulse that would ordinarily have me move away from a strong sensation and instead, sit still and face it.
As the left side of my body suddenly found its proverbial voice, signalling for attention with a thumping so hard that my brain took it as a fight for survival, I went into a silent battle to remain steady while in the grip of rising heat, increasing perspiration and a tirade of thoughts that were telling me, “you are dying, this is it, you are going to die here quietly and nobody, because you cannot contact anyone, will know until it is too late.”
The dis-ease of disembodiment
“Nothing fragmented can ever be freed.” Lama Rod Owens
My mind and body have lived at a discordant distance since I was around 13, when I absorbed the invidious societal and cultural messages that made me feel and think my body was an unruly and bothersome extension of a choiceless existence that had to be managed someway that I was struggling to figure out. The split was riven, and for more years than I wish were the case, it remained that way. At odds within a tangled state of being.
Years later, when I started practicing yoga, I’d impatiently check through the list of body parts in my mind during savasana. I’d often turn the video off or stop my self-practice before the end (yes, this was the 1990s and before the proliferation of yoga studios or You Tube performers, which were a whole other experience of mind-body self-other discombobulation).
I much preferred the land of thought and imagination, I wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, as exemplified by my literary heroes of the time, the likes of Henry Miller and Sylvia Plath. I wanted to transcend the confines of this three-dimensional bag of too much flesh, and reach the elevated states espoused by Miller, Plath, Aldous Huxley and Jean Paul Sartre and all the other seemingly complex poetic souls I was being introduced to in the libraries I’d started to take refuge in. And yet, I was missing the vital factor – a deep connection with physical existence, the place from which those same writers were coming and which in myself, I hadn’t yet learned to live.
I happily, hungrily (and with hindsight, realise distractedly) fed my mind with every morsel of information and inspiration, banquets and delicacies of all the hues of poetic, lyrical and prosaic composition. All the while, I started to starve my body more. The body didn’t deserve nourishment, it was a cumbersome nuisance that I resented tending to.
It saddens me to think how much time and energy I invested in ridding myself of as much form as I could, so that I could return to the solace of my mind, the peace of which got interrupted in the process. I dealt with my body because I had to, not because I wanted to. It was the subject of excessive self-consciousness rather than kindly awareness. And thus it had me bound, unable to get free.
Shut up and listen
“Rather than being a boat for crossing the shore, the body can become more like an anchor that sinks our boat in the depths of samsara." Dzigar Kongrtul
Back to the spring of 2022 and the Dharma Hall where my heart is knocking at the wall of my chest. My skin is moist with so much sweat but I cannot bring myself to even wipe it away, because I have taken a vow, to not make a drama, to stay, to override the mind’s instinct to panic and flee. Everyone around me is draped in shawls and jumpers, meanwhile I am desperate to shuffle my shoulders out of the thin scarf that weighs heavily on a body that is feeling increasingly and sickeningly claustrophobic.
The sweat starts trickling down in rivulets into the creases of my sports bra. I can feel my right armpit chest getting clammy. I fear I may vomit from the nausea that is creeping from my stomach into my throat. I am focusing on my exhales and trying to root my awareness in my abdomen, telling myself, as SN Goenka teaches, “this is just a sensation, it will pass, let it pass, let it fade out, impermanence, impermanence anicca, anicca,”. But my body is disobeying me, it is not listening to my mind, something is going wrong in here and I can’t control it.
Finally, Goenkaji starts to sing the closing chant and I mentally break the moral precept of Right Speech and curse him in my mind, wanting this to be over, annoyed that he is taking so long (in reality, it takes the same amount of time every day, it’s just that today, in this moment, my mind has gotten the better of me). The bell rings and thankfully, from my position at the back of the hall just four seats away from the exit, I can deftly quickstep out into the lobby and through the open door into the fresh air.
I compose myself just enough to walk in measured steps with my gaze to the ground as I slowly hurry to my cell (dorm room) a couple of hundred feet from the Dharma Hall and lie down on my bed with the window open, simultaneously sweating and shivering, trying to force my nerves and my heart to calm down, taking in lung-falls of air and trying not to break down. Still, the narrative is spinning: “I am dying, I am having a heart attack, what should I do?”
The longest journey is from the head to the heart – Tibetan saying
I used to think I could think my way out of self-consciousness, that by sitting with my mind and ignoring the needs of the body, I could move beyond the confines of physical form, a dark place into which God placed the soul with the promise of releasing it one day, as my Mum says.
I was seduced by the idea of transcendence, of release, of elevation, of escape, from an early age. I wanted to get out of my skin and place a distance between my mind and body, imagining somehow that I could literally and figuratively rise above it. The ultimate delusion.
Of course, I was bypassing the very vehicle through which I might have any chance of finding a way out of the suffering I was manifesting. I was seeking the impossible. Vipassana felt like the culmination of years of trying to untangle from the mind-body split and reunite with a deeper sense of self. And it worked, with transformative alarm. It landed me right back where I needed to start over, in my body, in close, inescapable proximity with my feelings, listening to and fully feeling the weight of my existence.
Start again
“I know that living with you baby was sometimes hard, but I’m willing to give it another try.” Prince
One of the most simple and profound invitations and realisations of the 10-day silent sit is the fact that after some initial and basic guidance, you are left to sit with yourself. For a time, certainly for the first three days, that is the only control you have over what is happening. You are taken care of in every other respect – food, lodgings, etc – so you are relieved of that botheration and left to focus on observing what arises in the landscape, in the volcano, in the tornado and all other hazardous weather metaphors, of your mind. And that, you soon see if you haven’t before, is wildly out of control.
You want to get up, run away, leave, stop it. You could. But you don’t. And really, you can’t. Ultimately, the practice, as with most spiritual practices that I've worked with over the years and which fully came to life in my body on that day, is one of learning to stay with yourself and give up the delusion of a battle to be in control or rationally understand everything. In short, let it go, it doesn’t have to be as hard as we often make it – as I’d made it for much of my life, even, paradoxically but not surprisingly, with regards to my practices of wanting to “get there already", when there is really only here - the place we struggle and the only place we can ever get free.
Of all the thoughts and feelings that came to me, the ones that activated the felt sense of life that I’d buried underneath layers and layers of intellectualising, the ones that hurt were the sensations that taught me that I could handle it, if I eased off the thinking, running away and panicking. I found that I could sit, observe, unpack and not go down the rabbit hole – of memory, or of the intense sensations that I experienced melodramatically as an indication of the uncertainty of my existence.
It was an exercise in cultivating trust - trust in my experience, trust in my fundamental sanity. I didn’t need to control the tidal wave of thoughts, which ultimately calmed down over the course of the 10 days, but I could change my relationship to them. It was that simple. And that hard to do.
The gateway to ease in my mind and body was to relax, to stop trying to make the experience, my form, my mind, better, or other than it was, than it is. Again, both easy and difficult.
Just stay
On day ten, metta day, the day of loving kindness, which as Goenka says, is taught to allow us to apply a balm to the frayed nerves and hopefully, the soothed mind, a fellow meditator asked about my experience. He tenderly reassured me that I’d had a hormonal surge, a block had released and I’d experienced a flood of sensation. That was all. Simultaneously a big deal and no big deal. It happens. It happened. Now move on, keep going.
I felt intensely aware, alert, open and connected for many days after. Regular life returned and in the wake of it all, I realised, or perhaps remembered what had just got covered over - the greatest insights come from a depth of heart, of opening up to feeling it all, relinquishing the conditioned impulse to figure it out and instead, dropping into the basic sense of things.
As I drove away from the Vipassana Centre, through the valleys of Herefordshire back to Bristol, with a smile on my face and a lightness in my being like never before, I breathed in and felt Sylvia Plath’s words land in my heart:
"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery - air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, this is what it is to be happy."
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