It is at the end of March that I find myself in a cold, bright mountain desert 3500m above sea level in the northernmost reaches of India, just before you cross over into Tibet to the east and China to the north. I am escorted in a World Health Organisation vehicle to my meditation inmate facility by four Indian health policy workers, one of whom has spent two days taking me around the city to ensure I find warm clothes. He works to help eradicate TB in India; up here in Ladakh TB is not a big problem because of the fresh mountain air and lower population levels. After twenty minutes we reach Saboo village where I will be locked for the next ten days, bouncing and jolting up the road. I am making nervous conversation with the health worker sitting to the left of me, who tells me casually oh I’ve done three vipassana retreats. yeah, they’re intense. My friend P- gets out of the jeep with me when we arrive at the centre, hesitantly dropping me off. There is no one around. We look at the empty concrete floored prison blocks of rooms. There’s one broken kettle on a plastic table and a fluorescent plastic bottle of mustard oil. A metal bowl half filled with condensed ghee, a bell, a water cooler. One wooden bed frame, one futon mattress, two quilts. Call me if you need anything. If you need to escape. I’ll be in the city until the seventeenth. I have an escape route up until day six of the ten days – then, I reason, I’ll be fine. If I can make six days I can make ten. And as I soon discover, if you can make ten days, you can make sixty.

dog and buddhist prayer wheel in Ladakh. the wheel must be walked around in a clockwise direction whilst repeating the mantra.

The only writing visible on the walls of the blocks of rooms are the rules and schedule pasted onto the wall: 4:00 am wake up. 4:30-6:30am meditation in the dhamma hall. 6:30am breakfast […] NO WRITING NO READING NO SPEAKING PLEASE MAINTAIN NOBLE SILENCE AT ALL TIMES. I am not fazed, I have my Tibetan prayer robe and my lucky Buddhist scarf. I landed in the military run airport the day before the course on the most auspicious day in the Buddhist calendar, March fifteenth. Buddhist New Year. On the fifteenth of March those faithful to the Buddha wear oilskin prayer aprons to protect their clothes and prostrate around the city for four hours. The reward is a holy white satin scarf, ten rupees and a cup of milky chai. I am given the three gifts even though I have not prostrated because all beings should be happy and free. The scarf becomes my lucky token on the retreat; I lay it to my left hand side as I meditate. Lucky tokens are not allowed in the Vipassana meditation retreat because they are too irrational, too superstitious and far too whimsical. You must declare prayer beads, rosaries and prayer rattles – anything that might possess obsessive or compulsive spiritual tendencies, along with your phone, books, keys, writing materials, money and the rationalising part of your brain at the start of the course. I come into the hall wearing my lucky token scarf tied tightly around the waist of my robe to hide my intention that the scarf is my lucky token, at first appeasing the Ladakhi nonna who meditates to my left but who begins to tsk tsk at me when I take the scarf off from around my waist . You see, unmarried women in Ladakh are not meant to wear the robe without a scarf. That is a style reserved for the men. At the end of the course my Ladakhi nonna friend is pleased to discover that I am unmarried, telling me that once I am married I can wear the thick pleated woollen dress robe that she wears. She is not pleased with A- italian management consultant, new yorker and self aware materialist on the course, who wears the robe even though she is unmarried too.

The course is ascetic, but not too ascetic. There is drinkable hot water on tap - for hot washing water there are two solar power water heaters. You slosh one bucket of freezing, iced water into the pipe at the top and boiling hot water is miraculously, instantly siphoned into the bucket at the other side. In the dining hall we are served endless, refillable, tooth aching, throat bitingly strong and sweet ginger tea, known as kadai tea. On some lucky mornings we enter the meal hall to find there is a small handful of fruit and nuts waiting for us at 6:30 am after the first chanting and meditation session - cold, hard crystallised dates and cashews that snap in your teeth from being left out in the minus temperatures overnight. Other than that it is hot dhal and chapati, rice and slimy yoghurty okra, curried cauliflower, tangy local curd and once or twice deliciously sharp, chewy Ladakhi apricots. Occasionally we are given something else - bright yellow dhal roti made with powdered dhal and curry leaves, or thick, hot and clumpy cabbage stew made with flat doughy squares of wholewheat flour and lumps of stringy, mild melted cheese. The food is plain, cleansing. Saltless, it creates lucidity. When I am bored of lucidity I eat whole pickled green chillies mixed into my curd. We are all starving, luckily there is plenty of food. Meditating is tiring for the brain, and so is the dry cold. On the last day we are given curried, oily fusilli made with ghee and chopped vegetables. I am the only one who likes it, everyone else pushes it around their plate. You eat what you are given - and for ten days you live on the charity of others to dissolve your ego. I enjoy the food so much that I am not sure I feel my ego dissolving; there is more of a sense of relief that I am given unlimited hot food twice a day.

The emphasis of Vipassana meditation is experientialism. Aka, you have to feel it to believe it. S.N Goenka, the most recent Vipassana teacher in the technique’s lineage’s main message is: if you do not experience it, do not believe it. It being the benefit of Vipassana, which is principally a deep and lasting sense of peace. I can attest positively to this, though there are clear and compromisingly aggressive sacrifices to the permanence of this state. Goenkaji attempts to convince you of nothing, and assures you he is not trying to convert you to a doctrine or sect. By day three the conversion starts, subtly at first, fed through in the nightly lectures. Religious or mystical belief is, apparently, irrational, a fact which Goenka likes to emphasise in order to convince you of the superior, deeply scientific and rational nature of Vipassana as the only proven, productive and logical path to enlightenment. The man is not wholly wrong; by day five I have no thoughts in my brain, I care about nothing, and I am not only aware of this fact but also aware of my reaction to this fact, which is one of accepting submission. A thought creeps into my brain… is enlightenment meant to be this….boring…?

I come to understand that the whole course is designed as one large meta-test of your ability to remain equanimous, because ten days of ten sessions of meditation a day in the same hall is not possible unless you surrender to the philosophy of equanimity and radical acceptance. If you possess even a glimmer of unwillingness, if you let even a shred of I’m out, I’m done with this – you will be. Thus by reaching the end of the course you end up proving the very point that Goenka is slowly impressing into your brain throughout the nightly videotalks, that it is by experiencing that we train our soma, and thus the subconscious patterns of our mind. It is science without the science, non-science that, ironically, becomes irrational belief, coaxed into your subconscious by Goenka’s assured purring that ‘oh it is the moste rational, the moste scientific, the wonderful dhamma… the wonderful dhamma, oh yes it is moste wonderful….’ And then follows chanting, done with such precision day after day that it makes you want to cry with a detached, sleep deprived weep. There are no actual tears to cry, because you are a Buddhist monk in training and have not had enough sleep to do anything other than submit. The deep reverence of Goenka’s repetition of the Buddhist blessing that all beings should be happy and free – Bbhavatuuuu Sabbuuuu Maaaauuungalam is such that by at least day six you are beginning to feel stronger than merely subtle flickers of indoctrination. Bowing at the end of the meditation is optional but by day eight almost everyone is nodding their heads at the end of the chanting, and you are certainly in no doubt that the dhamma is, at least most wonderful. By the time that day ten rolls around, and you are finally allowed to practice metta bhavana - or, lovingkindness meditation, you are so elated, so joyful, so grateful - for being treated like a prisoner, for being held against your bendable will, for having twelve hours of silent cross legged sitting imposed upon you, for all the cruciferous vegetables, for the pain, the glory and the will of God, yourself and every being that has walked the earth before you in the history of mankind that you leave feeling nothing but warmth and love, the memories of cold, sleep deprived, boring indifference fading into the backdrop of your now painfully vivid, sensory, beautiful, plentiful life.

this is the intro narrative to my buddhist newsletter series. stay tuned for Pouring Water on the Flames of Passion part two in which I talk about buddhism, jellyfish and psychotherapy.

and stay tuned for why this post took me so long to write…..

p.s here’s a picture of my roommate practising vipassana meditation for the first time. I have been relentlessly, mercilessly torn apart for mentioning my vipassana too many times. apparently after you do a vipassana retreat it becomes a personality trait, which is ironic considering the whole premise is also based on egolessness and non identity.

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