My Experience on a Vipassana Meditation Retreat (1/4)

It was all going swimmingly until Day 7.

When I say swimmingly, it was hardly a luxury spa escape. 10 days of silence, 4 a.m. starts, over 10 hours of sitting meditation every day and, by day 3 at least, the most excruciating pain throbbing for your hip and knee joints and scarring up and down your spine. Oh, yes. And we were holed up in a draughty hall in the wilds of Haywards Heath with 15-odd other blokes, 3 to a room and a job-lot of tofu.

“I did SAS training,” a fellow retreatant whispered illegally to me after a particularly gruelling sit on Day 3. “That was child’s play compared to this.”

We were told before the retreat started that it was forbidden to leave before the end of the 10 days. That this retreat was deep psychological work examining the very nature of mind and of reality. Leaving early before the work was completed could have serious implications to our well-being.

In those days, I was a pretty solid meditator. I’d been at it daily for 5 years and had a few retreats under my belt. The silence, lack of stimulus (no books allowed, no writing or journalling, no pictures on the wall) and the early starts were well within my comfort zone.

What was about to happen was not…