Vipassana is the form of meditation Buddha used to attain enlightenment.
It is a simple but profound practice of focusing on the breath and the sensations of the body.
The practice was lost for hundreds of years,
Eventually reintroduced on a global scale by a man from Burma named Goenka.
He began 10-day Vipassana meditation courses for sentient beings to learn the practice.
The amazing thing is that these courses are all run by a donation.
When you arrive,
You are treated exactly the same way as every other person there.
You are given a simple bed and three meals a day.
Without the thought,
I paid for this,
Therefore everything should be a certain way,
We dampen the ego and use the time on retreat as if we were a monk.
With all of our food and lodging provided,
Everything has been given to us.
I sat my Vipassana course in Dharamkhat,
India,
A village just north of the Dalai Lama's temple a few years ago.
The first few days of the retreat we solely focused on the breath.
The breath is considered the vehicle to better understand the voluntary and involuntary functions of the body.
By tuning into the breath we come in closer connection to all the functions of the involuntary body,
Our heartbeat and the other organs that continue to work without our mind consciously telling them to.
After focusing the mind through the breath to a single pointed focus,
Awareness is then brought to the sensations.
The idea is as humans we experience craving to pleasurable sensations and aversion to painful sensations.
However,
There is no way around experiencing both.
Our job through the practice is to become a witness to both of them and simply walk.
Whether a painful or pleasurable sensation arises,
We learn through the body it eventually passes away.
By having a direct experience of this impermanence on a physical and cellular level,
We can have a greater understanding of the nature of life.
All is impermanent,
All will rise and pass away.
When I sat my course,
I had a lot of pain arise in my body,
A lot of these sensations that were difficult that I wanted to push away.
And in the practice,
I believe we call them our sankharas,
And these difficult sensations that come up are really there,
They're past karmas,
There's things coming up to really help us move through and release.
And when we are able to come into a place of being a witness,
To just notice them and not be attached to those sensations,
They eventually pass.
And we realize that we are something so much more than our body,
Our physical sensations,
We can transcend them,
We can release them.
And only in our unattachment is when they begin to dissipate.
Everything is impermanent,
Especially the body.
The body is continually dying and renewing itself on a cellular level.
When we understand impermanence within ourselves,
We let go of our strong attachments to the things and people around us,
And eventually to the strongest attachment of all,
Life itself.
