Vipassāna - A Deeply Personal Account

July 8 – July 19

Admittedly, there was a slight trepidation entering Vipassāna, knowing I had been holding onto so much. From my mum’s passing to the Patagonia tragedy that Jordan and Anja were at the epicentre of, to Angela’s passing, and the dulling boredom within my work life. Not to mention this quiet feeling of irrelevance I have faced over the past two months—a state I believe was triggered by that relentless chain of events.

I unpacked the car and entered Dhamma Bhummi Meditation Centre where I was quickly assigned to single room C3 as an "Old Female" (haha - a gentle reminder to leave the ego at the gate). The room itself was as simple as one would imagine for a ten-day intensive retreat taught in the tradition of the Buddha. Yet I was surprised to find a basic ensuite, a heater, and an electric blanket. Rolling in unexpected tiny luxuries I settled in.

After assembling my room, I walked back to the dining hall where women and men had already naturally segregated. I questioned why this split happened so effortlessly. After our evening soup, the heavy wooden doors would close, sealing off co-mingling for the next ten days. There were roughly ten percent more women than men.

Arrival dinner was a light soup, followed by our first entry into the Meditation Hall. It was Day Minus One. I held a soft lightness within me, knowing I had returned because I had been called back—happy to cut the Gordian knot tethering me to the hard reality I choose to live in day by day.

The quietude of shuffling feet and the rustle of sliding into winter jackets, shawls, and shoes replaced human voices as we exited the hall after our first dhamma talk and meditation. Silence was now to become my dearest companion for the next nine and a half days. Walking back to my room, the bright mountain stars shone their own quiet goodbyes of impermanence down upon me. Ah, yes… anicca, anicca, anicca.

Day One

I woke to the second call of the morning gong. Fresh in mind and body. I begin.

As one of the first on the cushion in the hall, it was hard not to tune into the hall door opening and closing repeatedly—soft footfalls making their way to nearby cushions, everyone taking time to establish comfort for the initial two-hour sit.

For the first three days, we bring our full attention to the breath (ānāpāna), focusing tightly on the triangle between the top of the nostrils and the upper lip. Old students are meant to hold a fingerprint-sized focal point somewhere in this small space. We maintain our concentration here with diligence and ardency. No wavering. If the mind wanders, you simply choose not to react and return gently to the breath.

No reaction. This is the beating heart of Vipassāna.

Walking alone during breaks on that first day, a vivid thought surfaced:

I have been wearing impermanence like a heavy wooden cloak and walking through the morning mist.

It was weighing me down, desperately trying to anchor me in place, straining with its own parasitic life force to seep into my body—much like Zombi Fungi hijacking its host.

At this stage, my mind was primed for battle; the poetics of life rushed in to rationalise away the cloak, trying to prevent it from settling permanently over my shoulders.

Day Two

I woke up wondering what on earth I had done to myself. Returning to Vipassāna meant subjecting the body and mind to punishments akin to a ten-day uphill trek for the body, coupled with what felt like a stint in solitary confinement with mind-torture thrown in for someone’s cruel amusement.

Time dripped through reality. I became obsessed with counting the hours from the moment of the first bell, meticulously dissecting the schedule. Every minute of free time became sacred, worshipped like gold.

I decided to make good use of the teacher interviews. Rightly or wrongly, I admitted to Kate that I felt drenched under this heavy cloak of impermanence. I must remember that most people don’t lean into poetic metaphors—it’s simply not how they receive information. Kate likely thought she had a woman sitting dutifully on the precipice of a breakdown right in front of her.

"I feel like impermanence is a heavy cloak weighing me down," I explained. How was Kate to know this feeling had been building for two heavy months? The mountains were Angela’s home; I was seeing her spirit in every cliff face.

Rather sternly, Kate instructed me to stick strictly to the technique. "Whatever you have been practicing outside, put it aside completely. Stick to the technique, otherwise your mind will get confused."

Leaving the interview hall, I knew there was so much more I could have said, asked, or explained. But the moment resisted it. The exchange was enough.

Later that afternoon, I received a small note from Kate:

Elizabeth, I have allocated you a cell, but for the moment I think it is best if you meditate in the hall or in your room.

Yup. I was clearly on Kate’s watch list now.

A new realisation dawned: mourning feels like an unnatural emotion because we treat it as an isolated event. But why? If we learned to mourn each arising and passing moment as it happens, we would build the mental equanimity needed to handle life’s catastrophic losses. Vipassāna teaches the nature of impermanence conceptually at first, and then forces you to experience it firsthand. We cannot control it. We must not hang on.

Day Three

I awoke with a spring in my step. Walking along the sandstone gravel, my mind offered up a redemptive song: "I can see clearly now, the rain has gone." The lightness brought a genuine smile; I almost skipped around the gravelly undulating walking track.

Three days of ardent, laser-focused concentration on the nostrils has a way of sweeping away the noise of mundane life. The assumed relevant softens, breaks apart, and drifts off. Yet the heavier truths remain. Angela, Mum, my family—still front and centre.

Around Day Three, I began noticing other women subtly connecting with nature, a sight both touching and amusing. So many women stopping to examine small flowers up close, intimate and focused. One woman, as I approached the hall for the afternoon sit, was gently stroking the succulents. Inwardly, I chuckled. Observing this, I realised:

I actually am the flower child my family believe me to be and that's okay.

Despite the morning’s lightness, it offered no escape from the relentless back pain brought on by ten hours of sitting each day. The thought of re-entering the hall to sit for ninety minutes without moving, twitching, or shifting positions brought my mood down a peg. The pain was solid, intense, searing, and block-like. In the quiet solitude of my room, my restorative yoga poses saved me, restoring a little alignment before the next sit.

Each day concluded with a video discourse by S.N. Goenka (the man who bought this strict Vipassāna course to the world) from 7:00 to 8:15 PM, followed by the final group meditation. By this time, my body and mind were thoroughly exhausted. I desperately wanted to lie on my stomach or stretch out during the lecture—ah, but no. Not allowed.

Sit up, Elizabeth. Sit up, one of the female managers urged.

The final meditation of the evening was always a chaotic weave of the day's insights, the pull of sleep, and flickering visuals traveling like light through fibre-optic cables—moving too fast to capture a single image.

Sleep came slowly during those early nights as I wrestled with staying warm yet cool in the frigid mountain air. Dreams were sharp, vivid, and pointed, my subconscious aggressively firing imagery at me:

• A commercial plane on a tarmac with torrential rain pouring through the roof. I felt oddly detached, yet a sharp thread of dread leaked from the cockpit.

• A wide, roofless plane piloted by one of my boys as a toddler, surrounded entirely by open water.

• My house perched on an ocean cliff face, its floor-to-ceiling windows cracked from a recent tsunami, with an even larger wave building on the horizon. How could a wave reach this high?

• An apocalyptic landscape—fire, explosions, dangerous figures, and an overwhelming sense of doom.

  
  

Day Four

I returned to see Kate.

"Hello Kate, I am feeling really great today." I was; it was no lie.

Kate looked at me with zero reaction—a true Vipassāna master at work. I asked a few technical questions about the method. True to form, she repeated: "Stick to the technique." Fair enough. I can play by the rules for ten days.

I left knowing that despite my current high, Kate knew this feeling, too, would pass. What lay directly ahead was to be a harrowing, rocky path to navigate.

Day Four is a monumental pivot. We transition from ānāpāna to the felt sensory experience of the entire body, learning to perceive subtle energy sweeping from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes. Over and over again.

This felt somewhat familiar, likely due to muscle memory from my previous Vipassāna sixteen years ago, combined with my daily morning practice.

Tapping into the nāda (the inner sound of silence) accelerated this transition. Once anchored in the physical body, shifting awareness to the nāda deepens the immersion.

Maintaining this continuous flow throughout the body over the next few days—and truly right through to the end—proved mentally exhausting. Moving awareness meticulously through every station:

• Top of the head.

• Right eyeball.

• Left eyeball.

• Upper lip.

• Tooth by tooth.

• Throat.

• Chin.

• Fingertips (easy).

• Nipples.

• Belly button (took patience).

• Back and stomach (demanded deeper focus).

• Spine.

• Each individual toe.

  
  

At one point, I visualised using a pizza dough scraper to slice through the dense mass of my body. This helped execute the "dissection" Goenkaji spoke of—slicing, penetrating, creating an uninterrupted current of awareness.

Remarkably, the chronic aches and pains began to evaporate once I observed them strictly as passing sensations. The back, neck, and knee pain that had tortured me earlier simply dissolved when met with non-reaction. They packed up and left. My body suddenly felt supple, lubricated, and light.

Days Five to Seven

Goenkaji’s discourses unpacked the fundamental physical elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—and the framework of the technique crystallised for me:

We pinpoint our concentration, allowing superficial thoughts to drop away as the mind settles for deeper investigation. If we cling to pleasant experiences, we reinforce craving (rāga); if we push away discomfort, we reinforce aversion (dosha). Landing in equanimity (upekkhā) is the only path through.

By observing physical sensations over and over without reacting, the mind settles into stillness.

You bring awareness to the body, dissecting its solidity. The flow gradually shifts from chunky and coarse to fine, high-frequency vibrations. Stay there. Observe. But do not attach to the pleasantness of this state, for this too is impermanent.

The coarse physical boundaries dissolve entirely into a luminous, silken field of vibration extending outward in every direction.

During these middle days, I experienced what meditative traditions term "rapture"—an electric, tingling joy shimmering through flesh, bone, and subtle space. My entire being felt ablaze with delight. I held onto it for as long as I could (a clear violation of the rule against attachment, but it was extraordinary).

By Day Seven, during an afternoon sit, I felt this rapture building again at the threshold. A subtle inner dialogue whispered: Should I? Shouldn't I?

The sensation felt strangely analogous to an intoxicating, soft-spent state of orgasmic bliss—tempting me to sink back in for just one more wave, even though I knew I should remain objective the delighful temptation is too easy to take.

Using the nāda as my bridge, I deepened the entry. Sweep the body, shift to the sound of silence, drop deeper into the current. The solid structure crumbled entirely into fine, granular vibrations. Then;

Bhanga!

The state of bhanga—total dissolution—is deeply blissful. You lose all sense of physical solidity. The body no longer feels like a solid block of matter, but rather a field of subatomic particles (kalāpas) constantly arising and passing away every microsecond. As you sweep through, a continuous, subtle electric current flows effortlessly from head to toe. The boundaries between self and space blur into weightlessness.

Yet, bhanga is a subtle trap. The sheer bliss of it drew me in. I rested there for what seemed a limitless eternity quietly pleased with myself for reaching such depths. It was hard not to linger in that weightless state.

Throughout the retreat, I felt as though my process was running a day ahead of the curriculum. I hit bhanga early without fully anticipating or remembering the psychological aftermath. Had I known what was coming, would I have stayed in that blissful state as long? To be honest, I would have —the lightness was delicious.

The true purpose of bhanga is not relaxation; it is to grant a direct, experiential understanding of anicca (impermanence) at the atomic level. You see firsthand that your body is not a permanent entity, but a dynamic swirl of particles vanishing every instant.

Because bhanga feels so divine, it easily breeds subtle craving. But craving only perpetuates the cycle. I diciplined myself to observe the dissolution with bare, equanimous awareness.

Bhanga is not the final destination. When the mind penetrates these deeper subconscious strata, deeply rooted mental constructs (saṅkhāras) surface into the physical body. As they emerge from the subtle field, they manifest as extremely coarse, heavy, and painful physical or mental states. Time to be dragged over the burning coals of hell.

Days Eight & Nine

The dissolution allows these deeply buried patterns to unlock. The hours following my deep bhanga states brought intense emotional eruptions to the surface.

I returned to see Kate, noticeably unsettled.

"Honestly, yesterday afternoon’s meditation took me to a terrifying place. Psychotic, erratic qualities... I felt like I lost complete control of my mind. Chaos ruled every moment. A heavy, suffocating darkness blanketed me, and I wondered what the point of anything was. My heart was racing, my breath ragged from the fear of losing my mind. I felt like I would never be able to re-enter normal society."

Kate remained her ever unflinching self. "When you are in that state, back out. Don't stay trapped in it when it becomes too intense. Step back."

"Oh God, I feel like I'm losing my mind," I admitted.

"This is the practice," she said calmly. "Let it arise, and let it pass away. This is the deep work of the technique."

"So... it will pass away? This is normal?" I asked, feeling completely unraveled.

"Allow it to rise and pass away. The key is not to attach or react to anything as it moves through."

Phew. A narrow escape.

Side note: During that turbulent sit in my room, I actually checked my vitals using my smart watch: my heart rate was resting at 51 bpm, and my respiration was down to 6 breaths per minute. The terrifying chaos was occurring entirely within the mind; the physical body was completely calm. This was Vipassāna in its purest form—unearthing latent mental conditioning without physical reaction.

Still, the emotional lag of processing these saṅkhāras was heavy. Thoughts of Angela, Mum, and my family brought sudden, quiet tears. Even though I understood the mechanics of the release intellectually, my body still had to process the emotional purging.

By the afternoon of Day Eight, I hit a deep emotional low, struggling with how to integrate this internal upheaval. In daily life, I am adept at masking emotions. Here, stripped of distractions, I was forced to confront them face-to-face.

I realised that the emotional waves surfacing in our reality are generated by our own habitual responses. We can feed them through craving, or resist them through aversion... or we can plant the seeds of equanimity.

How? By actively being equanimous. By allowing these internal storms to collapse into space, free from attachment or resistance.

With diligent practice, I can work toward cultivating a steady, unshakeable mind. We humans hold so tightly to the good, the bad, and the ugly—only to end up nourishing the very patterns that cause us pain. Vipassāna relentlessly demands: let go, let go, let go. Observe anicca. Respect the continuous arising and passing of all things. We will never possess absolute control over reality—so why cling so fiercely?

Day Ten & Departure

After the morning sit on Day Ten, Noble Silence was lifted. We were finally allowed to speak.

Initially, I had no words. I felt like a fragile glass vase holding delicate seeds, terrified that speaking would shatter me into a million pieces.

I exited the hall into the crisp, biting mountain air, keeping to myself. Behind me, the sound of nervous, giggling relief broke out among the group.

"I can talk to you!" a voice laughed. "Ah, what a relief!"

Gradually, we gathered in small circles across the grounds. What a gift it was to hear everyone’s stories. Most of the women around my age had navigated similarly harrowing internal journeys—testing the outer limits of their minds and diving into their own personal shadows, all while bound together in this quiet bubble.

Sharing this space created a deep bond. During the silence, we had only known each other through body language, posture, clothing choices, and the serious, unsmiling expressions worn through ten tough days. Now, hearing their voices revealed the incredible strength, humour, and resilience of these women. All stayed on our cushions while being dragged across the sharp edges of our own realities.

During the final mettā (loving-kindness) meditation, guided by Goenkaji, I felt a genuine lightness begin to filter back in—soft rays of warm light piercing through the fog.

In that quiet final hour, visions of my mum and Angela drifted softly through my mind. They weren’t heavy burdens anymore; they were gentle presences, letting me know that they are okay—and that if I allow myself to let go, I will be okay, too.

Love you both so much. Thank you.

Returning to the outside world felt surreal. My mind inhabited a vast, unfamiliar spaciousness that left me slightly disoriented. My initial conversations with my family felt somewhat fragmented, as if speaking required deliberate physical effort.

That first evening back, I knew the best medicine was simple rest. I crawled into my own bed and slept deeply—no chaotic dreams, just pure, uninterrupted rest. The quiet familiarity of home cradled me, gently anchoring me back into the world.