Food and Preparation for Vipassana

This picture was taken the day that Steven (my boyfriend) and I left for the Vipassana center on January 21st, 2010.

We prepared ourselves for the retreat by doing a 10 day cleanse beforehand. It looked a little something like this:

Day 1: Water Fast

Day 2: Juice Feast

Day 3: Juice Feast

Day 4: Juice Feast

Day 5: Juice Feast

Day 6: Juice Feast

Day 7: Juice Feast

Day 8: Hydro Colon Therapy session with our friend, Alec, at Chakra 17.

www.chakra17west.com

Master Cleanse

Day 9: Master Cleanse

NO phones, internet, talking, eye-contact, touching

Meditation 4x day

Day 10: Master Cleanse

NO phones, internet, talking, eye-contact, touching

Meditation 4x day

We were clear, clean, peaceful and happy, as you can probably gather by our picture. We broke the fast with bananas and kombucha day 11, which is when we headed to the center in Onalaska. They also served us a light dinner on the evening we arrived. It was vegetable soup, brown rice and salad.

This was the first cooked food I had eaten for a year and a half. Steven had joined me on the raw food path about 6 months prior. We decided ahead of time not to be picky when we went to Vipassana. It felt more natural to just practice gratitude for whatever was being served.

The food felt surprisingly good to me and would've been fine to digest had I eaten less of it. I definitely enjoyed eating again after the cleanse and they served such a wide variety of healthy, nourishing food prepared with such metta, (loving kindness) that I simply couldn't resist piling my plate high or going back for seconds. Next time, I think I will control myself a bit more in order to go deeper into the meditations.

First Day at Vipassana

This past January, I found myself 90 miles from my home of Portland, OR, at the Northwest Vipassana Center in Onalaska, WA.

This is a retreat center which offers 10 day courses in Vipassana, a meditation technique which translates to "seeing things as they really are".

I had heard of this experience from several friends in my Seattle yoga community. A former boyfriend of mine shared a photograph with me of he and two of his friends just after completing a 10 day course in Hawaii. It was compelling how their faces shined in pure bliss and ecstatic joy. They were all grinning from ear-to-ear with their faces crammed together in the frame of the camera lens.

This piqued my curiosity, definitely, but it wasn't until about 2 years later that I actually looked into going to a retreat center myself. My boyfriend of the time and I were not working and I mentioned to him that it may be a good time to go while we had the freedom to. We looked at their website, www.dhamma.org, and the available dates. The courses typically run from Wednesday through the 2nd Sunday.

He had 2 children which visited every other weekend, so he decided it would not be possible for him. Unfortunately, I followed suit, instead of just going on my own and it wasn't until a year later that I actually went.

I say this because the whole time I was there, my only regret was not coming sooner. I remember counting up the hours that we were meditating each day and adding up 10 total. The first bell rings at 4:00am and meditation begins at 4:30am. On the evening of the first day, just after our tea and fruit break, I looked at the schedule and realized I still had two more hours of meditation ahead of me, along with the evening video discourse. When the bell rang to meet in the hall, I begrudgingly drug my feet along the path, saying to myself, "Okay, let's do this!" with all the vigor I could muster.

We meditated for an hour and took a short break before the discourse. At first, I didn't really know what to make of it. The teacher in the videos, S.N. Goenka, who brought Vipassana to the West from Burma and India, looked like an overweight and unhealthy old man. He spoke slowly and seriously, saying that this technique will help you, but you must work. Every person must do their own work. My judgments and boredom were quickly transformed as Goenka began to explain just how this technique works on the subtle layers of the mind, slowly eradicating our impulses to react to pleasant or unpleasant sensations and thus breaking the chains of suffering. He also began introducing us, little by little, to his amazing gift for humorous storytelling and I found myself feeling more overjoyed than I had all day. He offers his students encouragement and compassion, but reminds us firmly how we must work and that it is only us who can work out our own liberation. No one else can do that for you.

At the end of my first day, as I was lying there in my small twin bed after all the lights were out, I thought upon what I had learned from the discourse. As a person who feels like they have accumulated some serious karmic baggage and knows the ins and outs of suffering like the back of their hand, I couldn't help but feel very hopeful that Goenka, was indeed right. That this technique would be able to help me, so long as I truly applied myself. I just imagined for a moment that that were true and felt this overwhelming surge of hopefulness well up inside me. As one who also cries very easily, I lay there and felt tears of gratitude that I had found this path, streaming down my cheeks.