Vipassana Meditation: Day 5 - Morning Discourse

Vipassana is the most powerful ancient technique for attaining mastery of the mind. Taught by the Buddha, Vipassana meditation is arguably the most famous & effective form of meditation. Retreats are held in cities and towns all over the world & have been instrumental in the transformation & healing of countless millions of people.

During the retreat, you will be guided to practice the foundational techniques of Vipassana, and follow the core principles of the philosophy.

Transcript

Today,

We're going to talk about trauma and freedom.

Trauma,

We've touched on a little bit throughout this course,

But we haven't gone deeply into it,

Mainly because we didn't have the complete set of tools to be able to deal with it appropriately.

Now we do,

And so we're ready to talk about it and talk about exactly how to address it with this technique,

How to use this technique appropriately to be able to access our trauma and actually turn it into a benefit,

Not just neutralize it,

Turn it into a net positive afterwards.

Trauma is produced by intensity that the mind and the body cannot handle,

Intense sensation that the mind and the body cannot handle.

When we experience something like that and we're not ready for it,

Then we react to it strongly and it gets stored as trauma,

And then we have that trapped within us as a cycle of unconscious activity.

And what the Buddha gave us here is a tool to be able to approach that trauma and transmute it.

Vipassana is a liberation technique within the Buddhist world.

That's what it would be known as,

A liberation technique.

But within the broader scheme of techniques,

It's a form of internal alchemy.

The Chinese would call it a form of Nei Gong,

Internal work.

And that's what we're doing here.

We're learning to turn lead into gold,

To turn trauma into power,

Into something wonderful that we can use and we can take with us.

The problem is that if we only see a cycle halfway through,

Then it looks like a tragedy.

Trauma becomes tragedy,

And that's the story that we continually tell ourselves.

Because if we see the cycle the whole way through,

Then it goes through transmutation to transcendence,

The alchemical cycle.

It goes through the whole thing.

An example of how trauma can get stored in my life.

When I was much younger,

My cousin was 13.

I was just over a year younger than him.

He committed suicide.

So he died at a very young age,

A very promising,

Bright,

Intelligent,

Handsome young man,

But just gone from this world like that.

And it hit me pretty hard.

He was the closest cousin to me,

Not just in age,

But also in relationship.

And it was a difficult thing to face,

Especially when I went to the funeral,

And it was an open coffin.

And I was already torn apart by it.

But then seeing him there,

And seeing his slightly blue lips,

And then kissing his forehead,

And feeling the coldness of his dead body,

Just ripped me up.

I think I cried for three days straight.

That was too intense for me to handle at the time.

And so that stored trauma within me.

That was intensity that at the time I wasn't ready to face.

So you could say that's the first part of the cycle,

Trauma.

The second,

Tragedy.

Making a tragic story out of it.

I made the story that within my family,

There was this pattern of suffering,

And we were surrounded by it.

And we'd continue to repeat this cycle.

Other members of my family living it out too,

Us experiencing all of this collective sadness together.

And if we left it there,

It would just be a tragedy.

And that's the problem,

That often we have stories that don't get completed,

Don't get finished.

But like the Buddha said,

Any phenomenon understood completely becomes emptiness.

Any phenomenon understood from the beginning to the end becomes emptiness.

I was talking about this earlier this week with a friend,

About how we often store stories incorrectly in our culture and pass them on incorrectly so we don't fully understand them.

A good example of this is the Oedipus myth.

Does everyone know the Oedipus myth?

Oedipus had a father who got a prophecy read to him that his son would kill him,

Take over his kingdom,

And marry his wife.

So Oedipus as a child was born as a prince,

Son of a king,

Son of a queen.

And he was prophesied to murder his father and marry his mother.

So his father was like,

What am I going to do about this?

So he didn't want to kill his son,

It's his son,

He loves him.

So he took his son and he got him sent away to a faraway kingdom.

So if I send him to this faraway kingdom,

He doesn't know his true identity,

We can avoid this whole tragic mess that we're destined to play out.

But then Oedipus gets the itch to travel when he's a grown man,

Travels around,

He ends up meeting his father on the road and they get into some kind of road rage dispute.

The ancient Greek version of a road rage dispute involving chariots instead of cars,

There they are.

And he ends up killing his father.

And then he walks into the city and it's discovered he's the man who murdered the king,

So he becomes the king.

He takes over the kingdom.

And then the queen is still alive,

So he marries the queen,

His mother,

They have children together,

And they live happily for a few years.

But then as they start to compare stories and tell each other about each other's lives and the prophecy comes to light,

They realize that they are mother and son and they're committing incest,

Their children are the result of that.

It's too much for the mother to take,

Too much for the queen to take,

So she kills herself.

Oedipus overcome with grief about the whole situation,

Pokes his eyes out,

Gives up the kingdom and goes wandering.

And that's the Oedipus myth as it's usually told within our culture.

Terrible right?

Tragic story,

Impending unavoidable doom.

Bad for everyone involved.

But little did I know that that's only half of the story.

When you actually look into the ancient Greek traditions and you look into the whole story of Oedipus,

Not just that thing where the Oedipus complex idea comes from,

Oedipus becomes a wandering sage.

He has removed his external sights and through wandering and giving up worldly possessions he becomes something like a Sadu,

A Greek version of a Sadu,

And he accesses internal sights.

If anyone knows the Frank Herbert stories about Muad'Dib,

Dune and the sequels,

That's where the idea of what Muad'Dib does after the first book comes from.

He becomes a traveling blind man with internal vision.

Then he becomes a sage,

Where he can go and talk to people,

Predict things for them,

To the point where he's so in tune with reality that even the gods and the deities come to him to receive predictions.

And he starts to see that his whole journey is just part of this cycle of transmutation that he's been through and eventually transcendence,

Because at the end of it the gods come down and decide to deify him,

To take him up and imprint him in the stars and make him a god.

So that's the whole Oedipus story.

He went through this tragedy,

He went through a tragic cycle to transmute it and eventually transcend it.

Any phenomenon perceived from the beginning to the end becomes empty,

Becomes light and not heavy.

And we can see how there's no weight behind it.

Same thing with my cousin and my family.

It allowed us all collectively as a family and it allowed me to engage with the idea of death and take it seriously and to realize that I really deeply did care about the people around me suffering.

And I needed to find a solution to this,

To my own suffering,

To the suffering of my family,

To the fact that we were in a situation where multiple members of my family were considering checking out.

The pain,

The suffering was too much for them.

So they were considering not playing this game anymore.

And so that made me take this question very seriously.

What can we do to make life bearable for people who are in positions of pain?

And so that's when I started that journey of discovery,

Looking for things like this,

Figuring this out and going through it all that eventually did help to heal this for me,

Helped to heal it for my family,

Helped to make things better.

Murakami says something in his book,

What I talk about when I talk about running.

Pain is inevitable,

Suffering is optional.

Pain is inevitable because it's a sensation,

It's a condition of life.

But how we react to it is what produces suffering.

We can be in any condition and it's our internal state and how we choose to react to it that produces what we experience it as,

Whether we label it as pleasure or suffering.

And that's exactly what the Buddha gave us.

He gave us a tool to be able to access our internal state and to be able to choose to respond to it how we wish,

Not to mindlessly react.

And that's what we're doing.

We're going through this cycle from trauma to tragedy to transmutation to transcendence.

And we can go through this with each of the pieces of us.

Everything that we encounter is an opportunity for us to take it through this cycle.

We talk about all of these sensations as parasites and about things that we've been counteracting and pushing against.

But actually they're just pieces of us that want to communicate with us.

So as we start to go through the body,

Go through the mind,

We can reframe this in a slightly friendlier way now that we have the whole skill.

We can start to experience everything that we've got programmed within us as a conversation waiting to happen.

This sensation has information for me that if I listen to it,

I can start to transmute into something beneficial and eventually transcend being affected by it.

Every single piece of information we have within us,

Every bit of trauma we have within us is an opportunity for us to come to terms with an aspect of the world,

An aspect of ourselves,

And to be able to turn it into something powerful,

Into something beneficial.

So actually the more trauma we've experienced,

The more we have access to all of these states,

To all of these positions of awareness that we can turn into positions of power.

Because we've already cataloged it inside.

We've already received the intensity unwillingly,

And so it's imprinted within us.

And now we can go and meet it willingly and start to unpack it and start to access what's there.

Nassim Taleb,

He's a financial philosophical writer,

Wrote something wonderful on this subject,

But to do with systems in general,

Not just humans.

He said that any system is one of three things.

Any system,

Any thing is one of three things.

It is either fragile,

Robust,

Or anti-fragile.

Antifragile means that it is broken,

Destroyed,

Damaged by stress,

Time,

Pressure.

Robust means it survives stress,

Time,

Pressure.

Antifragile means that it benefits from stress,

Time,

Pressure.

An anti-fragile system is one that comes in contact with stress and gets better because of it.

It can transmute the stress into something powerful,

Into something beneficial.

And that's what the Buddha did for us.

He gave us a skill that allows us to become anti-fragile.

Because now we can encounter anything.

From this point forward,

We can encounter anything,

Any situation,

Whatever happens,

And we can meet it with consciousness and we cannot take it on as tragedy.

And when we've got that down,

When we can carry that awareness through our life,

Then we can start to bring up all the other trauma,

All the other tragedy we've got stored inside and do the same thing.

Clean the record and then we become anti-fragile.

The potential to experience trauma after that drastically reduces because anything that we meet,

We're going to frame as a positive.

Even a negative is a positive waiting to happen after that point.

So then whatever we encounter is just an opportunity for us to go through another experience that we know eventually is going to widen our perspective and our ability.

No matter how bad it seems in the moment,

Later it is something that we can completely benefit from.

That idea is expressed in the book,

Anti-Fragile,

If anyone's interested in it.

It's a wonderful book.

In my life,

How this came to fruition is when I twisted my spine when I was 14.

That's the trauma.

I twisted my spine.

I was in chronic pain.

I used to play a lot of sports back then and I wanted to go professional when I was young and the twisted spine stopped me training as much as I needed to to be able to do that.

So then the tragedy is that I felt I was going to walk around and I had to give up this dream of what I wanted to do,

This dream of who I wanted to be.

I went to physiotherapists.

I went to doctors,

Tried to do everything I could to straighten the spine out.

They told me,

Stop training.

You can't train anymore.

Don't do it.

And then it got so bad that I had chronic pain day to day.

It wasn't just that I couldn't perform elite level athlete activities.

Basic things,

Just moving my arm would produce pain.

Just walking around,

I would just have this dull ache with me.

Then it got to the point where even breathing would hurt.

I could feel the fact that my lung,

Not my lung,

My rib wasn't moving correctly with my spine anymore,

Slightly detached.

So even when I lay down to sleep,

I could feel the pain of breathing.

It was constant through my life.

And then that got transmuted when I found Vipassana.

Because this is a technique that helps us to access and work with our pain.

So when I got to sit there and feel the pain in Vipassana,

And it was taught as a school that could transmute pain,

A skill that could transmute pain,

I realized that this is exactly the technique for me.

Because as you've all experienced by now,

We're going to sit there and we're going to get deep pains inside of us and we're going to have to face them.

And even if we continue to change posture,

They're still there.

And eventually you're going to have to face it.

So I was sitting there one time,

Facing my pain,

Trying to avoid it like everyone else.

And then it just clicked to me that there was no avoiding this pain for me.

Because even if I got up and stopped practicing,

I was in chronic pain anyway.

Even if I got up and went down and laid down to go to bed,

I was still going to have to feel the pain of breathing.

And that was like a light bulb moment that I might as well use this for what it's meant for to go into the pain and not away from it.

And eventually that's when we can transform all of this with Vipassana.

When we choose to stop running away from pain and we choose to move towards it.

And if we can do that,

Then we can transmute anything.

It's just that we might have some very intense pain stored inside that at first might be too intense to touch.

It might be like picking up a hot coal.

At first you just need to touch it,

Just to test to see how hot it is.

So you might have a pain trapped within you that at first you can just do this with.

And that's it,

That's enough to know now that that's too hot for me right now.

But then every time you come back to it,

You can tch,

Tch,

Tch,

Until eventually you're ready to hold that pain instead of just touch it.

And when you can hold it,

You can start to dissect it like we've been doing.

And then in a literal sense,

What we realize as we go into the pain,

We realize that it's not pain.

Pain is just what we categorize something as.

What it literally is is heightened activity in an area of our body.

Intense heightened activity in an area of our body.

That when we don't go into detail with,

It's registered as pain.

When I decided to sit there and face it,

Where it came up the most was in my knee.

And I was sitting there only a few minutes into a sit,

And my knee was completely aching.

It was agonizing.

And instead of moving away from the position,

I set deeper into the position,

And I said to myself at the beginning of that sit,

I'm just going to sit through this and not move.

I'd heard that thing about the Buddha and his bones starting to dust,

And I thought,

That's great,

I'm going to do that thing.

And ten minutes sitting into this,

I was like,

Dave,

You're an idiot.

You're not the Buddha,

What are you doing?

And my knee felt like it was going to break,

And I was like,

I've got 50 minutes left of this sit,

What am I going to do?

And that was where before that,

I would have given up,

I would have backed out of the sit.

But that sit,

I was just like,

No,

I made a promise to myself,

I'm going to do this.

If I get up and I don't face this,

I'm going to be in pain anyway.

So let me just face this down.

Even if it means my leg's going to break,

Let me just sit here and actually feel this.

And so I did.

First I did by just sitting in the position,

And then I did by choosing to move towards the position and feel with it,

To communicate with the pain and perceive the pain instead of just reacting to it.

So as I moved deeply towards it,

And I moved closer and closer towards it,

I realized there was a center to the pain that resonated outwards.

And actually all this area that resonated outwards was more like shock waves.

It wasn't unbearable.

It was pain,

But it was bearable pain.

I could still,

I still had my full faculties as I was moving through it.

I could still remain equanimous.

But then as I approached the core pain,

It was too much to handle.

Until slowly I started to dissect it and break it down.

And then I realized that it wasn't pain,

It was pain,

Space.

Pain,

Space.

Pain,

Space.

It was a whole chain of sensations,

A series of sensations.

And the deeper I went into it,

The more space there was and the less pain there was.

Till it started to look something like an atomic structure.

Lots of space,

Very little pain,

But just very powerful so it becomes noticeable.

And then moving deeper and deeper into it,

I found the center of that particular atom.

I found this little hot core of something burning inside my knee.

And as I went deeper into that,

It exploded.

It changed.

Just like the Buddha said it would.

Everything is impermanent.

Everything is empty.

Perceived fully to the depths of it,

Everything is going to go through a process of change that eventually shows us it's empty if we understand the total cycle.

And this was no different.

Up until then,

I thought my pain was a fixed thing,

Something I was carrying with me that I was going to learn to have to manage.

Even then,

I thought I was just going through a process of pain management,

Learning to be able to deal with this.

But then digging into it,

Perceiving it on a very fine level,

And being able to sit there for just a few minutes with real equanimity whilst feeling it,

Allowed it to dissolve.

And my knee,

My leg,

No longer felt like it was going to break.

It felt wonderful.

Pleasant sensations exploding through the rest of my body.

It's beautiful to be able to let go of that one piece of pain.

When I went into that sit,

I went into it very heavy,

Carrying a lot of weight with a lot of expectations.

If you haven't noticed,

I tend towards being quite serious.

And I went into that very seriously.

I felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders,

And my pain was weighing me down.

After that exploded,

It wasn't just the pain in my knee that was gone.

It was this chronic pain that was throughout my whole body.

My spine was still misaligned.

I still didn't have the perfect body that I wanted to have to be able to perform.

But I wasn't walking around with chronic pain anymore.

I just had basic pain.

Like every other regular human,

It wasn't extreme suffering anymore.

So that was one thing that changed.

But I came out,

And I still felt my regular serious self,

Despite this reduced pain.

But something else had changed.

Is that the way the world responded to me had changed.

When I'd gone in there,

I'd gone in there feeling like the world was against me.

Nothing could go right for me.

There was this shadow hanging over me from everything in my childhood,

Whatever else,

From my idea of what life was like.

And then when I came out,

There was this feeling of levity and grace and acceptance in my life,

Where good things just started to come towards me.

So as I made an internal change,

I experienced an external change.

And it was noticeable how the whole cycle of my life had become different,

Through dissolving that one piece of pain inside of me.

Because all these things,

All these complexes that we've got,

Can be seen as filters.

Our consciousness is like a camera lens.

Left alone,

It perceives reality as it is.

So all of these complexes we have,

All of this unconscious conditioning,

Is a filter that we place in front of it.

And what we've done is we've placed a million filters in front of our consciousness.

And that's why we don't perceive reality as it is.

And we don't need to remove a million of them to be able to start seeing more clearly.

Every single one we move,

We remove,

Helps us to perceive reality more clearly.

So every single complex,

No matter how small it seems,

No matter how innocuous,

When we take it away,

We're one step closer towards reality.

And every step is better and better and better.

And so as we go through our bodies,

And as we feel all of these sensations,

We shouldn't frame them as antagonistic to us anymore.

We shouldn't frame a pain that we feel that feels constant as something that's against us.

It's actually a message waiting for us.

It is potential power waiting to be accessed.

If we can approach it the right way,

If we can approach it in the anti-fragile way that the Buddha wants us to approach it.

Simply feel it.

Simply feel sensation as sensation,

Body as body,

Mind as mind.

Separate them.

And as we do that,

Everything we encounter in life,

Everything we encounter in our body is basically just potential power.

That's all it is.

It's a long,

Ongoing conversation with ourselves and the world and every phenomenon that we can potentially experience to see how can I fully understand this and turn it into power.

Whatever thing we're doing,

We only ever need to be doing one type of thing now,

Which is completely feeling,

Completely accepting,

And not reacting.

And that takes us a step closer towards accessing the totality of ourselves,

Which I'm sure is what we all want,

Right?

I was speaking about flavor a few days ago.

Life as flavor and accessing all the different flavors of life.

The Buddha said something about flavor.

He called his teaching the Dharma,

The way.

He said the Dharma has one flavor.

The Dharma has one taste,

The taste of freedom.

And when we can approach life with this attitude,

Where we know that everything is just an opportunity for us to feel another aspect of reality and turn it into potential power,

Then we're free.

Then everything tastes like freedom,

Even if it is a pain in our knees.

It's just there waiting for us to be turned into power.

Let's continue this practice.

Let's intensify what we're doing today in a very specific way.

Trauma is intensity that we were not ready to feel,

That our mind and our body were not prepped for.

So then our answer is contained within the problem.

What do we do to access that trauma and sweat it out of our bones?

We have to up the intensity.

And that's what this is.

This is a controlled process of upping the intensity,

Of creating a self-generated pressure cooker so that we know we are approaching trauma at will,

Not because of some outside force or chance occurrence.

Nobody but us is going to push us into this trauma.

If we can up the intensity that we feel in our regular sits in our body,

And we can approach excruciating pain with equanimity,

Then the things that we experience that caused excruciating pain in our lives start to get sweated out of us.

So the depth of where we're willing to go with our practice dictates the depth of what we bring up.

It's an entirely self-controlled practice.

You can turn the intensity up and down whenever you wish.

Sit there in full lotus for two hours.

You want to turn it down?

Get up and go for a walk.

Pretty simple.

We can meditate,

Carrying mindfulness through our day,

Walking,

Without ever approaching serious trauma or anything that's going to unbalance us.

And it's still a useful practice because it still helps to take our consciousness everywhere we go.

And then when we feel ready to slay another demon,

To slay another dragon,

To save another village,

Then we can sit down and we can sit deeply and sweat it out.

And that's what we're doing.

So let's do that today.

Let's use this as an opportunity to up the intensity a little bit,

Go deeper into the body,

Turn the pressure cooker on.

But everybody remember that this practice teaches us to be emotionally responsible for ourselves.

We're,

Each of us,

Responsible for what it is that we're willing and ready to face.

Do not be pushed into intensity by me.

Do not be pushed into intensity by anyone else.

You choose what level of intensity you're ready for and turn up the pressure cooker to that level.

And then when you want to ease off,

Ease off.

But know that everything we're going to face is something that's already inside of us.

It's just there waiting for us.

So it's just a matter of when are we ready to face it.

When is the day when we're going to sit down and make this happen?

When do we want to taste that freedom instead of that restriction?

So let's do it today.

Let's use the practice for what it's intended for and let's get deeper into this.

Let's start the next practice with a bit of standing meditation so we can generate a bit of energy and heat and then we can take it to our sit.

Reviews

Amazing 😍 such an empowering way to explain the benefits of Vipassana 🙏🥰💪✨

🙏🙏

You articulated a perspective I’ve needed to hear. Thank you so much for this. I’ve heard others speak about trauma and meditation practice but this is the clearest and most inspiring explanation I’ve heard. This felt like hope.

SOOOOOO excellent to hear the trauma-aware explanation of Vipassana

This is my favorite teaching of the series: how to use the practice to transcend trauma. Especially helpful were the concept of antifragility and how to build a practice that not only transcends trauma but levereges it for growth while retaining softness and empathy, rather than other practices that idadvertently advocate repressing trauma and perpetuating self-judgement and more emotional violence (the "suck it up, buttercup" method of coping). Many, many thanks for the insight.

An excellent talk