Day 7
Goenka’s Vipassana method is delivered identically throughout the world. Whether you do a Vipassana retreat in Paris or Peru, you’ll get the same set up and teaching schedule.
As the days grind on, Goenka talks, via his videos (and not without humour) about the collective torment we’re all enduring. In some videos, his wife sits silently and solidly at his side moving from time to time to adjust her sari or scratch an itch under her chin.
Goenka also explains, with almost scientific accuracy, how your resistance to sitting will begin to wane by around Day 4, how your ability to observe the breath will becomes sharpened and refined around Day 5 and how, by Day 6 or so, you’ll begin to experience moments of bliss. Yes! Bliss! Who knew?
For something as unchartable as mental states, his predictions were surprisingly accurate. By Day 6, I’d stopped resisting the routines and the privation, the 4 a.m. wake-up bell and the tofu, and had settled into a kind of mindless/mindful monastic groove. I’d even started to look forward to his pithy evening Dhamma talks.
By Day 7, I was coasting and at 7pm, settled down for Goenka’s Dhamma talk, knowing that the end was in sight and that it was pure, unhibited purification of toxic mental states from here on in. I’d nailed this one.
A sense of community had developed amongst us men and, although we weren’t able to speak or make eye contact, we sensed each others’ presence and were reassured by the pure, insane, stinking ardour of our collective endeavour. We also were quietly and silently bonded against the authority of the fleece-coated quantity surveyor. He knew better than to mess with us now.
I’m a bit of blanket/shawl fiend and loved the evening ritual of wrapping myself up in layers of the stuff whilst the TV was wheeled into place. It also made me feel a bit Himalayan, like an urban guru, not a working-class boy from the suburbs of Birmingham.
But no amount of outer apparel could protect me from what was about to surface right in the middle of Goenka’s 7th Dhamma talk…
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