The vow of silence has been broken and I feel like I have a lot of things to say… But I’ll try and keep it short.

The whole 10 days of silence was actually the easy part.

I had heard about Vipassana before and that it was awesome and all these wonderful things and then I get there and start doing it and I think to myself “My God.. This is torture”. Sitting for 9 plus hours a day, at 1, 1.5 or 2 hour intervals (with most of the time only a five minute break in between). Also rest periods where you have literally nothing to do but either sit in your room and think or walk around in circles outside. It was painful, both physically (legs aren’t meant to sit crossed for that long) and mentally.

But I had made the commitment to stay so I stuck it out and tried to find pleasure wherever I could. My first saving grace was teeny tiny Thai bananas(they are smaller but have waaay more flavour than regular bananas!), with nutella, on toast. Fucking delicious. It helped me through the marathon 4 hours of meditation in the afternoon knowing that there was a teeny tiny banana or two.. Or three… With my name on them once it was over.

The second was Jasmine, on about day 3 I noticed a bunch of Jasmine plants had bloomed and the whole place had the scent of Jasmine in the air, it was beautiful and very relaxing.

Then on day 5 it happened, during a one hour sit, I was able to sit focused for the whole hour without feeling pain in my legs. This was a major breakthrough and once I did that I knew I could do the rest.

Its not that I got used to sitting crossed legged or anything, it’s that I literally changed the way my brain interpreted the sensations in my leg. This is the strategy of vipassana, you train your brain to observe the sensations in your body without reacting to them. In doing this you gain a much keener sense of all the things going on in your body. I felt muscles i had never felt before, I felt sensations I had never felt before, and I felt things strongly and specifically based on wherever I was focused.

That being said it is pretty preachy (the technique was invented by buddha) but not in a you must accept this as truth way but a you have to do it this way or you might as well not even do it. All in all though, I think anyone could get something out of doing a 10 day retreat. We all react so heavily to so much useless stuff so if we all just learned to let things go, and react only with compassion, the world would be a better place.

Over all, it was a great experience and I am really glad I did it. I really enjoyed the setting, tucked away in the mountains surrounded by nature, so many new sounds, scents and sights. The food was awesome! Having home cooked Thai meals twice a day was quite a treat even though there was no meat. Also the facilities were top notch, beautiful cement construction with lovely gardens and walkways everywhere. Complete with open air bathrooms where you have to check and see if there is a frog in the toilet before you sit down.

Some funny things…

So there was literally a hole in my bed. I didn’t know if this was on purpose or not but we were already silent when I realized and I didn’t want to be a pain in the ass so I dealt with it.

The class was mostly Thai people, not a lot of foreigners and not a lot of the Thai people spoke English. One day I saw out of the corner of my eye an older Thai lady with a t shirt with English on it, I stuck around so I could read what was on it, I nearly lost it when I was able to read (in big bold letters all across the front of the shirt) “face down ass up that’s the way I like to FUCK”.