Vipassa-Run Day 1 August 22nd 2018
My love for Buddhism seems to be in-born in me. Ever since the first trip to the magnificent city of Bodh Gaya in 1995, I have felt an unexplained connection with the Buddha, and his practical teachings. I am by no means an expert in scriptural Buddhism but have dabbled deeply in the holy sutras, in meditation, in books on Buddhism written by others, in book on Buddhism written by the venerables, and what not. The blunt truth is in 2016, my life was falling apart and unraveling into a new state I myself knew, or did i really know (?), no one would truly know. What i would know is it just simply imploded and i found myself separated, estranged from family, kids, and having to restart life from scratch.
Around or before this time, in search of solace, I decided to take a 10 day course at Kelseyville, California, in the meditation technique called Vipassana.
Vipassana in a nut shell and without going into a long theory, is the Buddha`s technique of meditative observation of 'sensation scanning'. In the great truth of the cause of suffering, the connection of suffering starts with the desire to ‘become’(bhava). We see with our eye consciousness, our mind consciousness, we get attached to things, body, concepts, our mental creations themselves, and we suffer, we fail in a way to disengage from our ingrained belief systems. The 10 day course was to teach us how to meditate correctly, how to observe our thoughts and sensations, with the ultimate aim of being able to toughen our resolve to break away from suffering. To slowly move towards a feeling of sunyata, and enlightenment, and release the natural state of happiness, that all beings deserve. Of course, this was not to be a magic pill to be taken for a 10 day period and be forgotten right after, this was to be a life long sila (discipline) to slowly and diligently put into practice, the right attitude to living. The right speech, the right view, right intent and so on and so forth. Again in truth, i can say my practice of meditation was sketchy to say the least. if it had been potent i would not be in this place today.
These days, I can sit for a 30 mins period (day and night times) without moving, without whining, and after 45 mins the body aches and revolts. In Vipassana we are strictly asked to sit solidly for 1 hr, observing the battle between the mind and body, who constantly wants to move, and play, and figet. I can at times feel the benefit of meditation day and night, there has been slight painful progress, in my energy, in my recovery from depression (it has improved), in my interaction with others, and degree of fear and anxiety that i would normally have felt in the past without knowing how and why. There is a desire in me to keep progressing, attain this elusive state of happiness, and bliss, despite the fact that phenomena will not go, my life problems (work pressure, family pressure) will not go, but it will may be be seen through a different light if my perception changes, or is modified. This is my ultimate aim in life. There are no other goals.
There are days in meditation when the mind is swayed very easily, when it is constantly in tatters, and then the sitting becomes an ego trip when one thinks one meditates but one is just playing the game of meditation, one is just ticking a box saying, 'i meditated today'. This is not meditation.
I want to escape this spiral nightmare pseudo meditative state, because one will not reach the state of dyana (calmness) ever in this cyclical context, it is a life of 'meditation pretense' without really achieving the goal. Should there even be a goal? Should there even be an objective in meditation ?
At a ultra-marathon rally recently, i meditated on the plight of the runners, and asked them why do they put themselves through this ordeal, only to have the answer answered by myself. Running is in fact another form of meditation, and just like i give up when swayed by the mind`s gesticulations, which we know is always addressed and mediated by sila (discipline), the runners suffer from the same very travails as meditators.
They often stop and give up because they cannot challenge the unknown, they have set themselves a task which their mental perceptions tell them is much too difficult to surpass. This is a hard core meditation problem in essence. The achievers we could say (those that complete the run, without injury, without drama), are always very well prepared for it, and shrewdly armed for the journey.
I decided to jump into running to compare these two practices, and see if one influences the other. On my first day of my run walk i started trotting, and at a simple elevation, i immediately stopped, the heart, the breath felt out of accord and what does the runner do, he brakes stops and gives up. Herein lies the problem with me, I have habituated myself to swim in shallow waters, never venturing in spaces unknown, and if one does not wonder in this unknown domain of the breath, how can one feel 'dyana'.
In this notebook i will document my experience day by day with running and meditation, side by side, like sisters, cousins to see if they talk to each other. If they influence one another
