Each person will take away from a Vipassana course what they put into it. I put in everything into mine. My intention for what I hoped to gain from the course was simple, distilled down to one word: Clarity. I sought Clarity in making decisions, Clarity in action, Clarity in thought, etc. Despite having a moment of existential crisis on day 3, I never wavered from my commitment of completing the course. It helped that I removed the temptations and distractions of my phone (it’s required) and that I removed my tendency to perseverate by not journalling during the course (also required). For one of the few times thus far in my life, I was fully present. I was committed to learning everything I could while I was there.

Here is what I learned for myself and about myself on and off the cushion:

1. Accept the present reality as though I invited it. Welcome negative sensations. Negative sensations help us break the habituation of aversion. Stay with the feeling of unease, discomfort. That itch on my nose that I’m feeling? That running nose from the inconvenient cold I just developed? They will pass. Everything will change. Eventually. Relax. Let whatever it is that is bothering me right now to happen. It will pass on its own time. Don’t fight it. Because if we do, it’ll likely get worse.
   • Off the cushion: What is the present reality in: a) my relationships with past romantic parters, mom, sisters, and brothers, and friends? Accept it. Resisting or struggling with it only creates more unease. Don’t label it as bad or good. In labeling it bad, I might start having negative feelings about it. In labeling it good, I may start craving it, becoming more attached to it. Don’t be scared of it. It is what it is. Wishing something or someone to be what it/they are not in this present moment creates hope for the future, a future that may never be, but will indeed draw me away from what is available now.
2. Be equanimous with that present reality. Be scared. Be sad. Feel the feelings. Feel them but don’t identify with them. I am not my feelings. I am not my sensations. Allow them to move through my body.
3. Our thoughts are ephemeral. Sometimes, they pass through my mind and then they’re gone to never reappear. Some thoughts stay with us because they resonate somehow or they connect with our past. But our mind doesn’t really stick. It’s an illusion because thoughts follow thoughts and we connect them. Since we connect them, we can also consciously stop connecting thoughts that are negative.
4. Learn to not immediately react to what’s happening. When someone says something that I feel is hurtful, don’t react immediately. Be curious about it. Where do I feel pain? Why am I feeling it? Does it remind me of something else? Do something different from how I would have acted in the past. For most of us, our reactions are usually unconscious. We react automatically to find comfort and relief from that pain, or whatever negative emotions we are feeling without seeing how that only reinforces a pattern. A pattern that does not allow us to fully live. We protect ourselves only to cocoon ourselves from fully living, fully expressing ourselves. So one of the early steps to institute change, is to break the pattern by doing something different than your normal behavior.
5. Accept who I am. And accept who I am not. I’ve been accused of being a sociopath, which is frankly hurtful to say to anyone if you’re not a clinician diagnosing a patient. I’m not an overtly emotional person but that doesn’t make me a robot. I do recognize that I tend to rationalize before I allow myself to feel. It was a coping mechanism for me growing up with a dad who had left early in my life and a mom who was traumatized and codependent before I even understood what those terms even meant.
6. Be willing to speak and share my true thoughts and opinions with courage and not be stymied by fear of being judged. I get self conscious thinking that my thoughts and opinions are not going to be received well, wanting to be perceived as easy going, or good natured so that I would be liked. What a waste of time and energy! We just need to present ourselves as we are. We don’t have to be liked by everyone and that’s ok. Our energy is finite and not everyone deserves our attention.
7. Stop speculating. Being in the same space with the same people day after day during the 10 day course, I imagined stories about who the other students were, why they were there. On the 10th day after we broke noble silence and started talking with one another, we learned the real stories that were unlike anything we imagined. A majority of our interactions in our day to day lives are like that. We have no idea what other people are thinking, what they’re worried about, yet we make up stories to tell ourselves that may have no basis in reality. Our minds are so restless because we allow it to be.

On the 10th day after noble silence ended, I felt sadness in my heart. The silence had been healing for me, giving me a reprieve from worrying about how my words would be perceived, how my actions could be interpreted. The silence gave me an illusion of safety. When it ended and the students filed out of the meditation hall, I heard voices chirp in excitement, almost as though they were bursting out. I felt disconnected from that sense of joy, alone in my sadness. I chose to go into my pagoda cell for another hour rather than join the others, who apparently felt freed from their silence. Afterwards, I walked into the dining room with some trepidation and with near disbelief at all the energetic chatter. How could all these ladies be so happy? For about 10 minutes I felt loneliness in a room full of women, eating slowly and trying to capture the silence from before, before my neighbor came over and stood by me. “Hi”, she said. “I just wanted to tell you how much I admired your sitting”…and for that moment on, my defenses broke down. I started chatting with my other neighbors and even with the male students who were in the hallway.

On that last day, I understood that we may be alone but we don’t have to isolate ourselves. That is a choice we can make for ourselves. I came into the course feeling like an outsider and I had held on to that feeling until the every end not understanding that it was a barrier to being myself. When my neighbor approached me in that dining room, she broke my self erected barrier. With her act of friendship that was also very kind, I started to realize how we had all started at the same place of being strangers to one another, all us of searching for something. From that realization, I decided intentionally to be different than the day before. I would be who I was, as true to my nature as I knew how. If others chose not to like me then, that was ok. I had done my part.

8. Be the person that breaks the barrier to a connection. The person on the other side may just well thank you for doing what they wanted but could not do. Reach out to a friend or a family member that you don’t normally converse with to say hi. Smile at a stranger in line for coffee. It truly doesn’t require much to make a connection.

9. Our life long challenges are not going to simply disappear after a 10 day course, regardless of how powerful it is. At the end of the 10 days, I wasn’t transformed into a person of my dreams, free of social anxiety, courageous in speaking my thoughts, but I was more acutely aware of my intuition and also the need for action. It takes work and constant awareness of our thoughts which lead to different actions. It’s work but it’s a worthwhile life long endeavor.