In a 10 day Vipassana retreat, you start with 3 days of Anapana meditation, before starting 7 days of Vipassana meditation.
Anapana meditation is about training the mind to concentrate sufficiently to be sensitive enough to feel the touch of the breath on the tip of the top lip. This is a real physical sensation not a visualization. The physical sensation is quite subtle and requires a lot of concentration to feel.
Initially the mind resists efforts to concentrate it. Frustrating its desire to wander freely here and there by bringing it back, again and again, to a simple focus on the breath. The first 2 days are the most uncomfortable – the mind rebels and can generate a hundred thousand excuses to escape this mediation.
On one level what is happening is consciousness is being withdrawn from thoughts and thinking and being redirected to a simple physical sensation in the present moment. The mind becomes quiet because it is being starved of attention. There is a very real dimension in the dynamic between the thinking mind and the witnessing soul where the thinking mind is it’s own entity with its own interests. Its interesting to watch how to mind operates: how it tries to lure you into thinking or bait you with images – images it knows has an emotional hook – to get you to shift your attention away from the present and feed the mind again by moving your awareness from the present to its thinking.
On the third day you start Vipassana proper. You bring the focused concentration you have trained to bear on the tip of the head. Then slowly you move your attention down and start scanning for sensations by running your attention from the top of the head to the tip of the toes. Over the course of 10 days you slowly re-awaken the ability to feel sensations in your whole body – for example, to feel the weight and texture of clothes you might be wearing etc. And in that process your discover sensations in your body that do not have physical causes but rather are lingering psychosomatic constellations of emotional charge, psychic information, and will or desire.
These physical sensations that don’t have an immediate physical cause seem to arise as packets of emotional information. For example, one sensation may come with a feeling of anger, fear, or lust, and would be accompanied by mental images that reveal the original content behind that feeling. Altogether, the physical sensation, the emotional charge it holds, and the residual psychic information it stores or represents make up a single energetic whole.
To me, these “sensation packets” feel alive, flowing through the body like fish in a coral reef. Some even seem to have sentience, hiding in deeper areas of the body to evade attention, while others try to actively disrupt your concentration by overwhelming you. Like fish, they seem to feed on the energy they draw out of a reactive mind — either through aversion or attachment— by pulling your attention into them and moving your still and settled awareness into dynamic momentum. Thoughts need your attention to continue to exist. As soon as you ignore them they lose their power. Something like that.
I also realized that some sensations aren’t even my own. When dissolving unpleasant sensations, I sometimes discovered that their origin is linked to things like the residual sensations of meat I’ve eaten or the people I’ve been intimate with. Some sensations can even travel between bodies without physical contact. In the vast ocean of awareness, bodies are like coral reefs, and thoughts, feelings, are currents and eddies, while sensations – packets of information – are like fish.
The Buddha describes sensations as the meeting point of consciousness with one of the four physical elements—earth, air, water, or fire. The nature and intensity of a sensation depend on which element it’s connected to. Sensations require consciousness. And they arise and grow by “feeding” consciousness – attention – into physical form. The Buddha also seems to say sensations, as consciousness entangled with elements, persist on like quantum knots even after death. And so, lifetime after lifetime we accrue unresolved sensations.
The goal of vipassana is to train awareness to remain neutral, neither moving towards nor away from sensations. To comb out our lifetime’s of stored sensations by paying equanimous non-reactive attention to them and thereby removing the cord of clinging or aversion that continued to feed them with mental energy.
By cultivating awareness and equanimity towards both pleasant and unpleasant sensations, we can eliminate subconscious cravings and aversions, and purge linger sensation packets from this and previous lifetimes. This brings greater freedom from the influence of sensations and their pull on the body-mind, and purifies the mind.
This mechanism also explains the mental decay over time in the progression of the yugas. As the mind becomes more and more filled with countless unresolved and unfelt sensations the grosser the mind becomes until,: requiring stronger sensations to provoke reactions and feed the energy they need to sustain themselves. The collective minds of later and later generations become more and more gross as they pursue in word and deed events and activities that give them grosser and grosser sensations.
In conclusion, there is a lot more to sensations as the convergence of consciousness with physical elements. And though physical sensations seem mundane hardly worth noticing they are actually remarkable mysteries of how consciousness and matter work together.
While deep diving into my own body’s unresolved sensations I was able to purge a lot of intense and insane sensation packets – energy with a lot of potential to disrupt and unbalance my mind. I’ve become convinced Vipassana is one of the most powerful practices for dealing with trauma, and will pursue further and longer term retreats.
This is jumping ahead of myself a bit. But it seems that the sense of “I” is itself a sensation—just the conjunction of consciousness with the physical elements, creating the experience of being an individual. Moreover, the mind is an ecosystem, a collection of sensations, cravings, and aversions that bind together in the body-mind like a coral reef. The sheer variety of sensations creates a kind of white noise, dulling our perception of the individual sensations themselves, but the overall ecosystem of entangled energy creates the basic packet of an individual self – giving rise to a unique constellations of fears and desires that converge as a unique self-will and conscious personality.
In combing out grosser and heavier packets of sensations with the body, you effectively remove the fuel of self-will and give more room for the universal will of life itself to express through and in the absence of the idiosyncrasies of the particular individual’s life-form.