Meditation From The Ground Up

Mysteries are everywhere, but there is nothing more mysterious than leaving the earth unexpectedly.

It was late spring, a week or two before the May Vipassana meditation retreat at the Regina Cleri Center on East 22^nd St. in Tucson, Arizona. Regina Cleri, a Catholic facility built in the 1950’s as a prep school for aspiring priests, is now a high school but in the 1990s was used for a variety of religious and community gatherings, Buddhist among them. Probably it wasn’t intended for out of body experiences, but you never know.

Vipassana meditation is a part of the Buddhist tradition, but those attending the retreat came from a wide variety of backgrounds. All of them achieved instant anonymity: In a setting where the participants do not speak, conventional labels disappear. Many of them not only practice silence, they also avoid any eye contact. At mealtimes, with nobody to talk to or even look at, you develop an unusually intimate relationship with the food on your plate. But, not talking has its value. The man or woman across the table might be a surgeon, a pilot, or  someone just out of prison. They might be Jewish, Catholic, atheist or Baptist. At a Vipassana retreat, it doesn’t matter because the emphasis is on learning to appreciate what is happening at the present, at any given moment, without wasting time making judgements about religious or professional labels.

Vipassana is a word from the Pali language of India and means “to see distinctly.” Sometimes it’s translated as insight meditation because, when practiced over a long period of time, it leads to an extraordinary degree of mental clarity and perceptiveness. Never is the word translated as levitation, yet there I was on that Saturday morning, weightless on the patio. . .

The morning was warm and I was seated on a kitchen chair. It was early in the day and the sun had not yet reached the incineration stage. I closed my eyes and began paying attention to the triangle formed by my nostrils and my upper lip. Isn’t this what everybody does on a Saturday morning in Tucson? I was going to relax and observe my breathing, watching the gentle flow of air gliding up the nostrils and down into the lungs.

I smiled my best pre-senile dementia smile and tried to shut out my discursive thoughts. I watched my breath for about five minutes, growing more relaxed and settled. Then I moved my attention to my left hand. That was one of the first practices Mary McWhorter had taught me.  Mary, who has been practicing the Vipassana techniques taught by Shinzen Young for many years, converted her garage into the Tucson Community Meditation Center (2033 E. 2^nd St.). One day I drove over there and introduced myself. It wasn’t exactly like visiting a Salvation Army mission. I wasn’t looking for salvation and she wasn’t preaching any religious dogma. What I was looking for was a way to relax and cut through my many discursive thoughts, and I wanted a method that did not involve drugs, psychiatrists, money, God, or ethnic blackmail. Which is another way of saying I didn’t have any idea what I was looking for other than a way to cut through all the noise and find simple clarity.

A good way to start, Mary said, was to close your eyes, let your body settle, and then bring your attention to your left hand. Not just the hand, but each finger, each nail, the space between the fingers, the palm, the veins, the wrist. Sitting in the morning sunlight, I did just that. To tell the truth, my left hand wasn’t all that interesting, but studying it made me stop thinking about 14 other things.

From Mary, I heard a lot about Shinzen, a Vipassana teacher who leads retreats in Tucson once or twice a year. Shinzen is an American born meditation teacher who has established numerous meditation programs in North America. In 1967 he entered a Ph.D. program in Buddhist studies at the University of Wisconsin. Three years later, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk at Mt. Koya, Japan. His teachings emphasize applying the benefits of meditation in daily life, and he freely admits that some Buddhist purists are critical of the hybrid method he has adapted for Western sensibilities. Eventually I came to believe that if there is any clear testament to the value of meditation, Shinzen may be its personification. Both in his speech and his writings, there was a clarity and level-headedness that was emotionally and intellectually appealing.

While participants in the Vipassana retreats do not speak to each other, there are group question and answer periods with the teacher, and at one of these, I told Shinzen about the day I left the earth:

“I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground. I just felt weightless, like I was up in the air. It felt great, but then I thought, ‘This feels so good that maybe I’ll just keep going and never come down.’ A part of me knew, of course, that I was still just sitting in a chair, but still I wondered if somehow I might just go away.”

“There’s no need to worry about that,” Shinzen said. “Eventually your bladder will bring you back.”

It was an inglorious but accurate observation, and it was typical of his approach. Many westerners want to think of meditation as an esoteric or trendy practice that requires a predisposition toward mysticism. However, even though it is unusual and seemingly mysterious to those who have never experienced it, those who practice it on a regular basis see that its applications are plainly practical. Who would not see the benefits of  “a clear mind and an open heart?” as Eric Kolvig, another Vipassana teacher, put it during a retreat in Tucson last fall?

The search for a clear mind (if not perfection) led me to a minimalist world, a chair, a cushion and silence in an unadorned room at Regina Cleri. The Vipassana retreat started on a Wednesday and ended on Sunday. We slept in dormitories, woke at 5 a.m., and could attend as many “sits,” or scheduled meditation sessions, as we wanted from sunrise to 9 p.m. Some of these sessions were guided meditations which were particularly useful to those who hadn’t spent much time thinking about meditation or trying to distinguish it from other experiences like thinking or praying or smoking marijuana.

Shinzen, in a paper entitled “Stray Thoughts on Meditation,” says of the Buddhist tradition, “Meditation consists of two aspects or components. The first, called samatha in Sanskrit, is the step by step development of mental and physical calmness. The second, vipasyana [vipassana], is the step by step heightening of awareness, sensitivity and clarity.

So, how does one get to this place where the mind is still? For starters, you break down any experience to its components and sub-components. For example, when meditating, a thought can be regarded as a tangle of the mind and a body sensation, Shinzen explained. If you can keep track of how much is thought and how much is feeling, you can diminish suffering. Letting go, or simply accepting what you experience without judging it, is a major aspect of meditation.

“Conscious thought is some combination of words and pictures,” he said. “As things pop into your head, note each component: Is it talk, is it image, is it some combination of the two? In meditation, you can think of experience as a melting and a freezing –meaning that a thought or feeling comes up in some loose form, you freeze or stop it and see if it’s ‘talk’ (telling yourself a story) or image (a picture that comes to mind). If you keep track of which part of a thought is words and which part is images or pictures, you are beginning to break down the sub-components of thought.”

The same thing can be done with feelings. Most of us experience body sensations every minute of every day, and in meditation those  sensations –an itch here, a ping there– are simply acknowledged and accepted. As he or she is sitting quietly, a meditator may be tracking subtle sensations that surface all over the body and simply acknowledging their presence. Most of the time, the itch just goes away. Often, the same process can eliminate pain.

I hadn’t thought about pain when I started investigating meditation. It hadn’t occurred to me that sitting still could be painful, but, next to taming one’s discursive thoughts, the discipline of sitting still for any length of time was initially excruciating. At first, ten minutes seemed like a long sit, but by the end of the retreat I found I was meditating in sessions that lasted between 45 and 90 minutes without having to be carried off on a stretcher.

How did it happen? By paying attention and letting go. At some point, I was sitting in a chair with my eyes closed, listening to Shinzen’s voice. This is a paraphrase of what he said:

When you perceive a sensation, try to locate it in the body. Identify its center and focus your awareness on the center. Then look at the imaginary lines leading away from the center (up, down, right, left). Then look at how the sensation feels a centimeter away from the center. In other words, if you feel a pain in the back of your neck, try to locate the center of it or where it is most intense, and then move your attention to the right or left of that point. Think of it this way: if you throw a rock into a pond, the point where it hits the water creates the most turbulence. That’s were your pain would be greatest (its center). But, the stone that hits the water sends out ripples here and there and the turbulence is less intense the farther away you look from the point where the stone landed. Usually, it’s the same with pain: It will send out ripples throughout your body, so you may notice that you feel it a little less an inch away from where it is most intense, and less two inches away, etc.

“Once you’ve explored the entire sensation, do nothing. The foundation of Vipassana meditation is noninterference. You do nothing. Often –some would say always—suffering comes from resistance to pain; it’s the resistance that makes you hurt for longer periods. Take away the resistance and the pain dissipates.”

Mindfulness meditation, or Vipassana, Shinzen says, is similar to using a microscope. “The microscope is an awareness-extending tool that allows us to see something that is always there but not evident to the naked eye. The mindfulness practice, the concentration practice that you will be developing here, is to the exploration of your internal world what the microscope is to the exploration of the external world.”

In other words, meditation is a movement from the macrocosm to the microcosm, or, as the late Joseph Campbell put it (in a positive sense), a movement toward the infantile unconscious. Campbell wrote,  in The Hero With a Thousand Faces:

“It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of our self, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.”

That is as good a summary as any to describe the residual effects of Vipassana meditation.

For more information about Vipassana classes and sits, or to receive the Tucson Community Meditation Center newsletter,  send email to tcmcsangha@aol.com.

This story originally appeared in the Tucson Weekly in May, 1999.