Seeking strength through silence

Vipassana felt like a kind of cosmic secret that only those who had experienced could understand.

by Kate Cameron

Two years ago I sat in my first Vipassana. After a nomadic 12 months working in Australia, I had booked myself a ticket to Bali where I spent three weeks at a yoga retreat in the surf town of Canggu. I was a new yoga teacher hoping to deepen my practice and become stronger in every way that I could. It was during my time in Bali that I reserved my place at the upcoming silent meditation on the nearby island of Java.

Vipassana was something I had heard of and had been curious about for a while. It felt like a kind of cosmic secret that only those who had experienced could understand. The people who spoke about it used words that were expansive and vague, descriptions that unveiled little but still left me reeling. There was this feeling that they had experienced some higher realm of consciousness or maybe even ‘seen’ God.

I wanted to know what they had experienced; I wanted to experience it for myself.

Vipassana, I knew, was a very serious style of meditation and centres often booked up well in advance. There was a limited smattering of them around the globe that offered the traditionally recognised 10 day Vipassana, and one of them had happened to be close to where I was in Indonesia. I took the proximity as a sign and booked myself into the upcoming sit.

Unfortunately, a few days before I was scheduled to leave for Java, I had issues with my visa and the immigration office told me that my passport would be withheld for a week while the necessary documents were processed. It became clear that I wouldn’t have it back before I left for Java. I emailed the centre and received a swift response: ‘You need your passport and visa in order to participate. Otherwise we cannot allow you to come to our centre.’ I tried again. ‘Is there any other way? I can provide a copy as proof?’ Again, the response was swift: ‘No. We cannot accept you without your passport. We are sorry.’

A few days later, I boarded the plane to Java without much of a plan. I had reached out to a few volunteering organisations thinking I could spend my ten days doing something there instead. But as the plane rolled out onto the runway, I felt a sinking disappointment. I had been travelling for a long time and at this point in my life, the whole contents of my world felt much like a box of crayons that could and would be flipped upside down at any given moment. The wheres and the whos and the whats and the hows were always subject to change, and my spiritual practice was the only thing in life I had been able to commit wholeheartedly to. In some ways, it was this kind of freedom that I craved as much as the air I breathed in. In other ways though, it was incredibly lonely, stressful and disconcerting.

If fate had had it any other way, I would have sat on the plane next to anyone else. I would have not bothered to speak to the German man sitting next to me and he would not have bothered to speak to me. He never would have told me that he too was heading to the same Vipassana that I had been hoping to attend, or that he had in the course of his middle-aged lifetime sat through—brace yourself—thirty Vipassana meditations of ten days each in length (which adds up to nearly a year of life in silent meditation). If fate had had it any other way, he would not have convinced me to just come along, to make the two hour trek outside of the city and into the less populated hills of Java, and to try to get in anyway. ‘When the ten days are over,’ he said, looking far away, ‘You feel so different. So… clean.’

And so I went. And so they accepted me with my paper passport copy.

We renounced our electronics. We were divided into groups based on gender and advised to dress in ways that covered our knees and shoulders. The volunteers sat us down one by one before the meditation and asked us questions.

Were we prepared to commit to the full ten days, promising not to leave before they were through? Were we of stable mental health? Were we committed to giving Vipassana the full chance to do its work? Were we willing to give up all other practices for the duration of the ten days—speaking, journaling, and spiritual practices like reiki—and even the physical practice of yoga?

At this point in my life I had been practicing yoga every day—sometimes twice a day—and as a yoga teacher, I felt this pressure to be better and stronger than my students. Otherwise, why would they want to come to me to learn?

I knew I was flexible, but I didn't always have strength—and it sometimes seemed that the more I wanted it, the farther I felt I had to go before I reached the place I felt would make me enough.

One pose in particular I had been working on was a tripod headstand, and I had been making my way towards this slowly but was still unable to practice it without a wall as support. So after arriving in Java to sit for meditation and learning there would be no opportunity to practice—even alone in my room—I was disappointed. I worried I would lose the progress I had worked so hard for. But I surrendered. For some reason the universe had led me here. For some reason the airline had seated the German man on the plane next to me. And for some reason, despite my passport issues, I had agreed to come along anyway. So I sat in the silent company of more than fifty strangers and our ten days began.

Every 24 hours was filled with both the mental chaos of a hurricane and the calm of a still lake. My moods swung back and forth like a pendulum, rhythmically, from one extreme to the other. There were moments of deep peace and connectedness and excruciating moments of the opposite.

By the fifth day, everyone looked exhausted. Some people were teary eyed. A few others, despite our verbal commitments, had left the centre.

The meaning of the word Vipassana is ‘to see things as they really are’. In large part, this means the realisation that all things in life—from the most insignificant to our most precious—are impermanent. The incoming breath. The outgoing breath. A continuous expansion and collapse in our tiny universe that moves us seamlessly from one changing moment to the next.

I experienced moments of slipping into the space of something inexplicable—a forgetting of who you were and becoming, for a tiny moment, one small part in the web of something infinitely greater. I felt periods of suffocating sadness and disconnection, a resistance to the idea that everything I now saw as reality would one day come to pass. In some ways, it was the intensity of my experience here that led me to become a hypnotherapist—that led me in search of a way to untangle the coils of thoughts that had restricted me in my own life.

A surprising thing happened when Vipassana finally ended.

For the first time, on my very first yoga practice post silence, I made my way towards the pose I had struggled with so much. And on this day—after ten days of silent peace and turmoil—I created a triangle with my head at the top and the palms of my hands as the base. My knees lifted to the shelf I created with my elbows and I paused there before lifting my legs up into the air. This time, my body supported the weight. I could feel it—there was strength in me that hadn't been there ten days ago. But how was that possible?

All I'd done was sit on the floor with my eyes closed.

In the midst of surrender, an inner strength appeared. ■

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