Because we care, we choose to practice.
We yearn for peace, for genuine happiness. And so we come to the cushion and engage with the crux of our predicament: what does it mean to be here?
The feeling of being here is the gateway to all life’s vicissitudes, from the ever-shifting sensory landscape around us to our personal thoughts and emotions. It all arises right here.
We often neglect the fullness of presence in favour of a reliance on thought. But thought is only one small part of being here, and it tends to ride on the back of a lot of unconscious emotional conditioning that we pick up through parents, culture and complete accident.
I sat on a cushion in my bedroom, in darkness. I was 22 years old and like any normal kid my age I had resolved to meditate on an imaginary green triangle in my head for 45 minutes.
This was my third week of practising concentration meditation, a precursor to vipassana. The idea was to hold my focus on an object to quiet the mind. This had already resulted in tantalising bursts of rapture and bliss, but I wanted more, and felt curious about how much energy I could channel into this.
I’ve been back from Dhamma Dipa for two days now. Here is a report of how it worked out for me, for those interested.
The first 3 days were hell, and I don’t use the term lightly. Physical pain, mental judgements and overwhelming emotional attachments all quickly came to the surface thanks to prolonged meditation and the Noble Silence. The whole retreat experience is set-up so as to facilitate this kind of coming-to-terms: there’s no-one to speak to, nothing to distract yourself with. You just sit there in your own self-created misery, until you learn how to understand and work with it. All those fears, aversions, cravings, judgements, negativities are out in the open, and you can do little but sit back and watch them push and pull you around.