On practice: before and after Vipassana
How I realized that S.N. Goenka's technique was not for me and what that means for my practice going forward—and looking back
On a recent Sunday in the middle of October, when I’d planned to be recovering from a late night spent with Tim Reaper and Dwarde at a DIY venue’s jungle night, I was instead seated on my meditation cushion in the upstairs sunroom in our home in Vermont for the first time in several weeks due to a cold that had swept through my body on Friday morning. I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to getting back in the mix after having slept normally for over a week. Still, the continued rest would do me no harm.
Despite its immense popularity, the S.N. Goenka lineage of Vipassana that I’d been practicing since June is known among meditators as one of the more intense traditions, and I now knew, based on my own experience, that it was too intense for me. This would be my first attempt at meditating since the Cheetah House crisis counselor I’d met with had warned me against resuming formal practice of any kind, lest it result in irreversible and permanent psychosis. I felt that this advice was well-intentioned but too absolutist to be useful because there were many gentler options I had yet to learn of, let alone try.
At the top of my list was the Theravada Buddhist lineage based on the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya. Tejaniya is a Burmese monk who spent his early life as a rowdy and rebellious teen and chronically depressed, drug-seeking textile merchant before ordaining as a monk at the age of 36 in 1996. He has an easy sense of humor and emphasizes that cultivating awareness and wholesome states of mind can occur on or off the cushion. I was on my cushion that day because I was about to attend a digital half-day retreat led by two of the lineage’s most prominent US-based teachers: Alexis Santos and Susa Talan.
After a short introduction, I participated in the first group sitting without incident. Santos led a simple guided meditation focusing on coming into gentle awareness of the present. Rather than feeling like I was inside of a snow globe that was being shaken with increasing intensity—as I had during my last few Vipassana sittings—I felt like this meditation was stopping the shaking so I could just observe the white microplastics fall into place at the bottom of the base. Towards the end, he mentioned that meditating in this way is more about allowing awareness to come as opposed to actively pushing for it. He added that when you arrive in a moment of stillness in this way, it can feel like coming home, which it did for me.
In the weeks since I’d stopped meditating, I felt more irritable than I had in months, could feel my lower back beginning to ache in familiar ways, and the tension in my jaw and fatigue in my teeth were also returning as a result of increased night-grinding. That such a short amount of time away could produce such perceptible effects on my body and mood was remarkable, given how new I was to the practice. But this break also helped me recognize the many ways in which other practices have helped me hone my awareness and presence prior to becoming a meditator.
Back in middle school, I had a sleepover routine with a friend of mine from elementary school: after dinner, we’d walk to Starbucks a few blocks away to order caramel macchiatos, then stop in at the movie rental place across the street, and finally swing by 7-eleven to pick up energy drinks to consume as we watched the film. After the movie was over, we would watch Saturday Night Live and play video games until sleep came, if it did at all. The point of this wasn’t for the love of movies, TV, or even video games—which I was never any good at. It was the gooey sensation of being fully awake yet unable to think a coherent thought. By the 20th hour of not sleeping, the only light left in the house was in the lizard brain’s room. All the negative self-talk and insecurity I was accustomed to suffering throughout the rest of the day would finally quiet down. In this state of semi-consciousness, I could only discern and attend to exactly what my body needed or wanted from moment to moment.
My first experience of intentional and consistent practice in pursuit of presence began when I started snowboarding more seriously in high school. This was when I first wandered off of groomed surfaces in search of tree runs, cliff jumps, and other double-black diamond features. I found that putting my entire existence in a position of physical peril gave the mind no choice but to surrender control to the body if it wanted to continue living. This kind of forced presence is often referred to as a “flow state,” where you can’t help but focus on the here and now and must trust your subconscious intuition and conditioning to carry you through what is an objectively dangerous situation—or else risk falling off the literal edge of a cliff or mountain face. The only problem was that the mountain was 3.5 hours away, and I had neither a car nor a license to drive myself to the ski bus, let alone Lake Tahoe. As such, these experiences were few and far between.
It wasn’t until I started running regularly after joining the track team during the second semester of my junior year of high school that I discovered a regularly accessible way to cultivate this condition. Unlike my teammates—who’d had a three-year head start on training, an elevated baseline of fitness from playing competitive club soccer in middle school, or both—I had never run consistently in the past and had no ambitions of becoming fast. I was there to practice, not to compete.
Although I never recorded anything approaching a competitive mile or half-mile time during competition, I was able to quickly build my stamina to the point of enjoying the daily, three-mile training runs at the same steady pace as the rest of the team. Not long after that, I began attending the group’s weekend trail runs where we’d meet up at a local nature preserve on Saturday mornings to go on runs exceeding 6 miles in length, ideally closer to 10. At some point past the fourth mile, I would notice the wandering and pleading would quiet down as the mind began accepting the body’s primacy, and we would settle into a light-footed tempo that we could sustain indefinitely. Or at least until the last car back to town was ready to leave the parking lot.
Once in college, I had more free time than ever to run, but it was difficult to stay in the habit when there were so many alternative activities to pursue. In order to make room for exploring a new city, meeting new friends, joining various clubs, recreational drinking, and pool tournaments, my daily runs became weekly, eventually giving way to nothing at all. That this marked the beginning of a period of utter misery strikes me as no coincidence. However, it was also the period when I began putting the pieces together for the practice that would come to define my later 20s and 30s. Among them, experimenting with psychedelics, abusing study drugs to pull all-nighters (for both business and pleasure), and discovering that dancing could actually be fun when the dances were thrown by other students and featured music that we actually enjoyed.
This all came together for the first time during the first weekend of May at the college’s notorious end-of-year festival. It was 60 hours of continuous revelry beginning with a Friday afternoon bonfire in front of the library where graduating seniors—marked by the gilded-plastic laurel wreaths atop their heads—burned their paper thesis drafts, dowsing each other in showers of cheap sparkling wine, as everyone sought sloppy, consensual make-outs with all the crushes and nemeses acquired through the course of an academic year. For most students, the rest of the weekend would be filled with drug experimentation, bottomless craft beer, art installations, live music, and DJ sets into the wee hours. But the highlight of the weekend, for most people, was the Sunday morning sunrise screening of Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert movie masterpiece, “Stop Making Sense,” featuring The Talking Heads at the height of their powers. The vast majority of bleary-eyed attendees filling the historic Student Union building at 5 AM were still on the tail end of whatever drug journey they had begun earlier that night (or even the day prior), in varying states of unraveling.
When David Byrne walks onto the screen and announces that he has a little tape to play for us, we’re already clapping and stomping to the beat of “Psycho Killer.” At some point, the sun rises as we sing along to “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” Tops come off, tits come out, and the scent of sweat and musk fills the steamy room, rendered visible by the window coverings having been thrown open all at once at the first signs of daybreak. As the last “Still waiting” of “Crosseyed and Painless” rings out over the PA, everyone in the room is totally present and wrapped up in the moment. Then the credits roll as the audio source switches to the CDJs, and the first bass note of “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem bursts out of the woofers. Whatever fumes are left in the tank get burned on the spot, and then it’s time to hug it out, kiss whomever you need to, enjoy some morning sun if the Oregonian spring allows for it, and then off to bed until the same time next year. But what if I didn’t have to wait all year?
I’d already started seeking out more electronic music towards the end of my time in Portland, where some friends of friends had become somewhat prominent DJs in the scene. But it wasn’t until I moved to New York and traveled to Primavera Sound in 2016 that I realized raving was the practice I’d been working towards all along. And now that I lived in a city with an ascendant scene, it was something that I could access anytime I needed to, which turned out to be not that often in those halcyon days.
At the time, I was still happily employed at the only salaried job I’d ever held, which was at the same start-up that I’d dropped out of college to help run as its first employee in 2013. I felt a deep sense of purpose in the work that I was waking up each morning to do and growing satisfaction with my social life, which was expanding with each passing month as more of my college friends made the move eastward to the city, often crashing for a few weeks at a time in our guest room while they looked for their own place. Building this plucky publication by day and sustaining my community by night assured me that my life had a purpose.
That sense of purpose was long gone by the time I’d become employed and subsequently burnt out by two separate multi-thousand-employee corporations—separated by a satisfying, albeit exhausting, and insufficiently remunerative stint in the service and retail industry during a global pandemic. By 2023, I was going to parties on at least a monthly basis and had come to realize through a combination of talk therapy, raving, and ketamine-assisted therapy that the corporate job and its concomitant trappings were the true delusion and that losing myself on the dancefloor was the only consistent opportunity I had to become present to reality as it actually was. However, accepting this knowledge still wasn’t enough to get me to do anything about it. It took getting laid off, a fruitless job search spanning several months, and watching a loved one die before I made any significant changes to my conception of how I ought to be living my life.
I landed in my first Vipassana retreat with no expectations for what awaited me, open to whatever might happen. It was nonetheless shocking when I ended up going as deep as I did in such a short period of time. Speaking to longtime practicioners confirmed that it wasn’t all just an illusion. Even so, I remained skeptical. How could someone who had never meditated prior to their first retreat deserve to achieve such depths of insight with so little prior experience?
By the time I’d left the retreat, established a daily formal practice, and began reaping the benefits of doing so, I’d all but forgotten my initial doubts. Then, after my latest experience with hypomania and subsequent break from meditating, I found the answer to my original question in the response to another. Prior to the retreat, I’d filled out the teachers’ Google form asking them how I ought to proceed with meditation, if at all, given the crisis counselor’s stern warning against doing so. Santos’s response came after the first group sitting, and the truth of it reverberated through my bones like I was an antique gong being rung for the first time in centuries:
What do we mean by practice? What the dhamma, and the broader range of these teachings, is really pointing us to is: “What is the most skillful and meaningful way to be in the present moment?” And anything that we decide to do, that generates the skillfulness, the wholesome, the wise, we can say that is dhamma. That is what is worthy of doing.
Up to now, I’d thought of myself as a novice practitioner because I’d been meditating for such a short amount of time. But this expansive definition of practice helped me understand that I’d been walking the path long before I knew of its existence. By the time I took my self-imposed break from meditating, I’d begun to think of formal meditation as the only practice that I would need going forward in order to continue down this path, but that’s just not the case for me—or anyone for that matter. Although becoming a meditator had made me more aware of the benefits I was gaining from all the other practices I’d maintained throughout my life, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t benefiting from them before I started meditating. The overall goal of walking the dhamma, continued Santos, is to bring the mind and body into balance through skillful action, which can mean choosing not to meditate. After all, the eight-fold path is so-named because there are eight elements to it, of which meditation is just one.
After the event, I booked an individual follow-up in order to get more clarity on how to approach my meditation practice as my neurochemistry continues to normalize. I was advised that I could meditate if I am comfortable doing so, but ideally while lying down or walking rather than sitting formally. So, I’ve been doing that from time to time, using the recordings from the retreat to guide me. But mostly, I am trying to become more comfortable with just relaxing and taking care of myself: taking baths, cooking meals, and reintroducing exercise back into my life—which I’d all but given up during my summer of twice-daily meditation.
As I write this, four and a half months after my first successful attempt at meditation, my formal practice looks a lot like it did back in May: almost non-existent. I am at peace with that because I now know that I am a lot further along than I ever realized—not that there’s a destination to aim for. Only through stopping my formal practice was I able to realize that walking the path is not about progressing toward any particular conclusion. It’s about the awareness that the journey itself is worth taking, regardless of the outcome.
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