Preface
I wrote this article about three years ago, when I was planning on attending another retreat. I didn’t end up going as I still had concerns about my mental health and the possibility of slipping into psychosis again, so I didn’t post this either. But I just found it again and thought it was a good summary of my first experience.
Here it is…
I’ve recently booked in for another 10-day silent retreat through the S. N. Goenka school of vipassana, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on and write about my first experience at one of these retreats, dating back about 6 years now.
I’ve spoken about this in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, but I had first heard about these type of retreats through a favourite writer of mine, Robert Wright, who writes a lot on science and religion. He said he had a profound experience at one he attended and came home with a radically changed outlook and appreciation for life. When I read the article he wrote on this, it was as if something hit a switch in my head, and I immediately thought, “that’s what I have to do” (meaning I have to meditate, and I have to get enlightened).
At the time of attending, I thought I had found my true path. I was a 100% dedicated meditator, and I was going to go at it gung-ho until I got enlightened. Everything else in my life took a back seat – career, relationships, everything. I just knew that my path was one where I had to get enlightened, and that I’d do whatever it took to get there.
So I went in pretty seriously. Not the ideal way to go into a meditation retreat, but it was where I was at at the time.
The retreat was held in the beautiful Blue Mountains of New South Wales in Australia, with views over the treed canyons below.
I knew it was going to be difficult, but I was prepared. I meditated in the days and months leading up to the retreat in order to get myself ready for it, and attended every session without fail from 4:30 in the morning until 6pm at supper time.
At this point, I had so much faith in meditation being the true way to enlightenment that even though it was tough, I pushed on through the pain and mental anguish I experienced at times.
Sometimes this pain and mental anguish was almost unbearable. Now I know why they’ve done studies and people have reported preferring to be given electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for 10 minutes.
The first few days were tough. Trying to focus your attention solely on the breath is a very difficult challenge, and one everyone is bound to fail at to a large degree.
Not only that, I had someone next to me who was constantly cracking his knuckles, and someone on the other side of me with a very bad cold who was sniffling non-stop through almost the entire retreat.
“Great,” I thought. “I’ve put in so much effort into making this a good meditation retreat and they stuck me next to Tweedledum and Tweedledee!!!”
I started to feel intense amounts of anger about this. I felt this was my one good shot to really make some progress, and I couldn’t concentrate because of these people beside me.
The anger welled up inside of me like a hot furnace, ready to boil over.
Then suddenly, it did. A massive explosion happened within me. It felt like the whole top of my body was ripped open and all the pent up anger and rage surged upwards out of my body. My heart was beating a million times per second, I was breathing very heavily, my body was losing control of itself – or I was losing control of it. I saw with my mind’s eye a coloured spiral of emotion which began flowing out the top half of my body. I saw this. It obviously wasn’t in physical reality, but it wasn’t just imagination either. It was somewhere in-between.
And then it died down. I was completely relaxed, albeit a bit shaken. Then a bit of embarrassment crept in. “Far out, how much noise was I making? I hope I didn’t disturb the other people around me.”
Over the next two days I began to experience states of intense euphoria. But it still didn’t feel quite right. It felt like, yes, there’s a lot of euphoria here, but I still felt like I was grasping at it, hoping it will last, wondering if I could make it even more euphoric. And this grasping led to unpleasant feelings in the body. I knew there was more to this than just euphoria.
I kept trying to re-induce these euphoric states for a while, because it was what I felt was the most profound thing that had happened so far, but the harder I pushed, the further it eluded me. It got to the point where I was actually trying to cause pain to my body by overstretching my legs, because I felt somehow the pain had been a catalyst for the euphoria in the first place. I still have pain in my hip sometimes from doing that 6 years later.
I was devastated that I couldn’t make these experiences last. It seemed like they were there just to tease me.
This led to me one night walking off by myself into the bush and sitting there, crying, totally dejected and totally despairing. I saw what Buddhists call the “wheel of samsara” or the wheel of illusion.
I thought, “What the hell is the point of all this? What’s the point of trying to get to a happy state if it’s just going to be followed by an unhappy state sooner or later? For 15 minutes, I sat in total and utter despair, as though there was nothing I could do to change this. It was the most hopeless I had ever felt.
Then a realization came to me: Enlightenment is not about states of consciousness, enlightenment is about getting off the wheel of samsara and seeing it for what it is – ultimately a play of illusion, of duality. This was met with great relief – I didn’t need to spend the rest of my life on this pointless rollercoaster ride if I didn’t choose to. I could just get off. So that’s what I did at that retreat. I got off. Not entirely, I later found out, but to a degree. I had at least unbuckled my seatbelt.
This led to the rest of the retreat being one of great calm and peace. Peace, I found, was the biggest surprise. Most people would think they’d prefer to experience euphoria rather than peace, but the ironic thing is that the peace actually felt better than the euphoria. With the euphoria there was grasping and “wanting more”. With peace, there was utter contentment, no pulling, no pushing, just a total and deep relaxation into the moment without desiring anything to change. No desire = pure bliss.
To this day, I describe the happiest moment of my life as being when I was doing my laundry there, washing my clothes by hand in a bucket outside. Not something someone usually equates to ultimate joy, but that’s what I experienced.
I’m now going on my second one of these retreats, a full 6 years later, and I’m not sure what to expect. The only thing I’m expecting is that it probably won’t be like what I expect.
Time will tell…
In love and light!
Will
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!