How a profoundly simple spiritual practice could lead to severe consequences if not done under the right conditions.
I was nearing the end of my Yoga Teacher Training in Rishikesh, India, when during lunch one day the conversation turned to Vipassana. I had never heard of it, but many of the other students either knew about it, or had already done it themselves. I quickly learned that this ten day silent retreat was supposed to be a kind of cleansing from past emotional scars, also known as ‘sankharas’.
By removing all external distractions, you allow your mind to turn inwards and do some tidying up. It always makes me think of fasting: when you stop eating the whole time and give your body a break from the digestive processes, after 16-18 hours it enters a process called ‘autophagy’ during which the body eliminates or repurposes damaged cells. It’s a form of cleaning and regeneration. I’ve come to see Vipassana in a similar way. When you can no longer use your phone, talk to people, watch tv, exercise, read, write, or do anything else that isn’t sleeping or some form of meditation, your mind starts sifting through these old memories, ideas, experiences, that are most likely also damaged or no longer serving you in some way.
As you sit and meditate, you’ll suddenly find yourself thinking about some obscure memory that you realise you haven’t thought about for a very long time. I interpreted this as my mind sifting through all my old memory drawers and attempting to reorganise things. Just like looking through an old photo album, some pictures are going to trigger happy memories, or maybe nostalgia, sadness, or even fear. By never looking through the photos, you spare yourself from these potentially uncomfortable feelings, but you also keep them inside you. If you want to throw some stuff out, you’ve got to sift through it first. If you want to hold on to it, you also have to keep the uncomfortable feeling in the back of your mind. When these memories and feelings inevitably come up, sometimes as thoughts, sometimes as physical sensations and sometimes as emotions, it’s important to keep some distance. If you get too involved with them, identify with them, you’re not letting yourself process them. You need to keep a distance, and try to be an observer. Notice the feelings, and maybe they’re quite uncomfortable, and try to imagine that you’re simply letting them pass through you. You’re not re-engaging with them, you’re just observing them and letting them evaporate. As you keep doing this, you work through your accumulation of sankharas, or past unresolved traumas, and eventually get to a place of peace, where you’re simply in the present.
One of my mistakes was a lack of self-compassion. Going into the vipassana experience, having suffered from quite severe anxiety for a large portion of my life, I was scared of what may come up. I was also excited by the prospect of being able to finally rid myself of this unpleasant affliction. I felt that ‘if I can just brute force my way through these ten days, I’ll come out the other side renewed, cleansed and ‘fixed”. I failed to recognise that this kind of harsh approach would simply create more internal resistance. Those parts of me that were stuck in the past, scared and anxious, had served a useful purpose at some point, and would simply become more defensive at the prospect of me wanting to tear them out. I was so set on forcing myself to finish the ten days, that I had already set an internal rule of ‘we’re not quitting early, no matter what’. This is not a very self-compassionate approach. It’s good to challenge ourselves, but we need to respect the fact that the experience is still an unknown, and it may simply be too much for us at this time, it could well be counterproductive, as I later found out.
When I came out I was in a bit of a daze, and still wasn’t really sure what to think about the experience I’d just been through. In some ways it was one of the best things I’d ever done! I was proud of myself for completing the challenge, but had also genuinely come to enjoy the peace, and felt that I had been able to reach some very meaningful revelations. I still think back to those 4am wake ups, stumbling outside barefoot without a worry in the world. No notifications, no commitments for the day, no wallet, no keys, nothing. I would gaze up at the stars, always noticing Orion’s belt, a constellation that I would always look up at from home. Those fresh mornings were so peaceful. After slowly walking around the grounds for a while I would really enjoy observing the natural world wake up. The first hints of the sunrise would gently start to awaken the monkeys and peacocks that lived there. I found myself wondering why I almost never witnessed the sunrise at home. What was I busy doing?
The period immediately after was undoubtedly the worst time of my life. I initially went to Pushkar with a couple of friends, but I quickly started to sense that something wasn’t quite right. I was having very intense and strange dreams about my parents and my therapist – I remember waking up quite distressed. The main feeling that started to emerge was one of apathy, a complete lack of motivation and loss of direction. I had previously travelled with enthusiasm and had been looking forward to the loosely planned next leg of my travels: going to Bali and learning to surf. That had all disappeared though. Everything fell flat. I struggled so much to choose my next stop. I ended up going to Goa for a few days, but things were gradually getting worse. My Dad’s birthday was just around the corner, so I convinced myself I would go back to surprise him. I think it was hard for me to admit to myself that I needed to go home because I wasn’t feeling well. After all, I had started travelling exactly to get away from those same feelings. Had I come full circle?
Once I got home things quickly got a lot worse. I’d known anxiety my whole life, but this was different. I was in so much pain, I was desperate. Not only had the lack of direction and purpose got worse, but for the first time ever I started to have suicidal thoughts. If you’ve never experienced this, it’s very hard to explain. You don’t want to die, but the fact that your mind seems to be nudging you in that direction is terrifying. I would wake up early almost every morning in a freezing cold sweat, almost always dreaming of killing myself. I was desperate. I started listening to some targeted meditations, I started seeing my therapist again and I reached out to my yoga teachers and the vipassana teacher. The yoga teachers recommended I practice Surya Namaskar daily, whereas the vipassana teacher had a different take: he told me what I was experiencing was good and normal. That ‘bad things’ were flowing through me and that I needed to just let them out. My job was to not get sucked into them again, but to just observe them and to let this cleansing process take place. He warned me that there was no alternative, that wester medicine would simply push the emotions back down, and that they’d still be there. Just a temporary band aid. To my surprise he also recommended I read a book which was not part of any Indian tradition, but written by a wester spiritual teacher: ‘A New Earth’ by Eckhart Tolle. It was a hard book to read, especially the initial chapters, as it begins with the author contemplating suicide and also telling the story of how his university professor killed himself. Not exactly what you want to hear when you’re feeling depressed, but you then understand how that suffering was actually the catalyst for his spiritual awakening. The remainder of the book, along with a very caring friend who checked in with my regularly, were the two things that got me through this tough time.
I explored both east and west. Things felt so bad, that I willing to try anything, and to go with whatever helped. It didn’t feel like the time to be picky – I felt that my life was at risk. So I ended up seeing my old therapist on a weekly basis and also consulting
Set and setting
Self compassion
Integration