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I went to New Zealand to break my brain and put it back together, without ever having meditated before. I had no idea what I was in for. I signed up for a Vipassana course in a moment of quiet desperation.
I was coming up on close to a year of insomnia. I found myself exhausted by the anxiety of not sleeping, yet unable to find any meaningful rest. For the first time in my life I was having panic attacks. Nightly, they were triggered by the dawning realization that sleep would elude me yet again. I was also dealing with chronic pain. A bad accident as a kid followed by a series of rib fractures and back injuries over the years generated a state of permanent hurt made worse with the lack of sleep and an excess of cortisol.
I chose this specific course, which took place in New Zealand, because despite the trendiness of meditation classes and apps , Vipassana seemed to be about equanimity, discipline and hard work β right up my alley. I am not the most woo woo of humans, and the idea of a giant drum circle of positive thinkers made me want to run away screaming. Vipassana is different from mindfulness meditation, which focuses on awareness, or to transcendental meditation, which uses a mantra.
Instead, it dictates a blanket command of non-reaction. No matter the pain as you sit, or the fact that your hands and legs fall asleep and that your brain is crying for release. You are instructed to refocus attention on the objective sensations in your body, arising and falling, as you do a scan of your limbs in a specific order. By doing so, over 10 days, you train yourself to stop reacting to the vicissitudes of life. While descended from Buddhism, the modern-day courses are secular in nature.
The father of these retreats is the late SN Goenka , who was raised in Myanmar and learned Vipassana from monks there. When a friend asked me why I was willingly heading into solitary confinement, especially since I had never meditated before, I told her I wanted to break my brain and put it back together again. Jodi what are you doing to yourself? On the first day, a bell rang outside my door at 4am, reminding me that despite the darkness, it was time to wake up. I was not, nor will I ever be, a morning person.