Rihanna Saved Me at a 10 Day Silent Retreat - part 2
Rihanna + Madonna + ya momma = nirvana. Enlightenment, baby! **jazz hands**
Check out part one of this blog, about my experience with Vipassana meditation at the Ontario Vipassana Centre. Keep reading on for part 2. The first portion may be a little dry and factual, but then after that it gets really cosmic and the metaphysical juju really starts boiling.
“YO WHAT’S THAT ALL ABOUT?” - MC Lyte -
So before sharing my kindergarten level interpretation of Vipassana, it should be noted that there are many types of meditation that we can access; some were developed before the time of Buddha, some during, some after. There are practices with similar properties, yet aren’t called meditation, because they originated in a different part of the world. Each of them has a place in someone’s path of development, and it’s my personal bias that none of them supersede the others. You need what you need when you need it, and your needs have the freedom to change as you grow. I’ve personally learned, practiced, and benefitted from many types of meditations, and it took me seven years of thinking about it before I finally dived into Vipassana. I’m grateful for what came before and what will come after.
Alright. Vipassana. Where do I even start?
The meditations I practiced prior to Vipassana have this unifying element: mind over matter. There was a primary focus on the mental, theoretical, and intangible aspects of this work. Vipassana’s primary focus is physical and experiential. It’s not mind over matter; it’s mind and matter. Through a sharp, laser like focus on everything that happens within the physical body in real-time, one gets a sense of what’s happening in the spirit and mind. When you train yourself to experience something like “letting go of what no longer serves you” within your own physical body, you are developing the skills to be able to do it mentally and spiritually . This is transferable to other concepts such as compassion, impermanence, and love.
LET ME TELL YOU, SABRINA! This was some game changing shit for me. No one has ever showed me this, and it granted so much clarity! But before that, there was an abundance of patience, physical pain, destructive thoughts, and other “wax-on-wax-off” Mr. Miyagi kinds of shit. In fact, on Day 4 I stormed out of the Hall, stomped into my room, opened up my suitcase, and nearly left.
“YOU SHOWED ME LOVE, GLORY FROM ABOVE” - F. Ocean -
Heads up: some of you may want to skip this next part and move on to the ones below it.
It gets really metaphysical so check in with your threshold to see if you have the capacity for it.
Part of the reason I had such a great experience is because I walked into this knowing as little as possible. So if there’s a tiny Vipassana shaped seed in your head and you’d rather enter this practice blindly, this portion may not be for you.
I’m not certain that the following anecdote is a universal experience. It was a culmination of my personal mental and physical state, coupled with the meditation and metaphysical practices that preceded it. You also need to factor in any personal lived experiences I had undergone to this point.
Okay. Spoilers below.
5
.
.
.
4
.
.
.
3
.
Dan is Gossip Girl!
.
2
.
.
.
1
.
.
.
Hi there!
Okay, so here we are at Day 4. At this point, we had practiced an average of 32 (non-consecutive) hours of meditation, and no one ever talks about it, but meditation fucking hurts. Physically. Sitting in silence and stillness (though we were able to move around and shift depending on our level of experience) for an hour is taxing, let alone 32. Legs go numb, your back is breaking and your bra is too tight.
Also, at this point, for the past 3 and a half days, we were granted two instructions:
Breathe.
Focus on the small triangular area between your nostrils and upper lip.
Try it for 10 minutes. Hell, 5 minutes. Then think about doing it for 32 hours and see how that tests your mental faculties and tap dances on your last nerve. It’s excruciating!
Anyway, halfway through day 4, and after 5 hours of meditation on that day, the teacher says, “Take a ten minute break. And then everyone must come back to the Hall where we will do 90 minutes of meditation together. It is important that you stay completely still that entire time. You will experience your first Vipassana meditation”
What. The. Fuck.
Our first? FIRST? First Vipassana meditation? What the hell have we been doing this entire time? What have we been learning? Oh, the rage. The rage! My ego was so heated and it didn’t care about the karma I was developing at that moment. I was a cobra; coiled up with anger and tightness, venom from my fangs, flowing like the tears of an entitled white woman when she feels slightly uncomfortable. Sabrina, I was ready to lean back and pounce on that teacher to rip his disgusting face off.
Our FIRST Vipassana? Are you kidding me?
I shot up from my cushion, and stormed into my room. Tears welled up, and I mentally smacked myself: “No, TJ! Do not let them see you cry!” I threw my suitcase on the bed, and sis, I was about to go! You must not know ‘bout me, you must not know ‘bout me.
The emotional exhaustion overcame me and I took a seat. The tears came out.
And then… a voice: “Bay-bee…. This is what you came for…” SHUT YOUR FACE, RIHANNA!
But just like her launch of Fenty Beauty and Cosmetics, she was correct. I came here to learn Vipassana, so I should do at least one Vipassana meditation. Up until this point, I had been telling myself, “one more breath”. So I got up. Let’s do it. One more breath.
Returning to the Hall as one of the late-comers, I sat on my cushion, energetically throwing a middle finger at the entire room. The agitation made it difficult to sink into the practice, but there was something about the teacher’s cadence and his words spoken in an unfamiliar tongue that eventually soothed me. By the time the instructions were given (in English), I was in a more receptive place so I followed each one with a little bit of gentleness and peace.
And then the pain hit me, and kept on coming. Legs had gone so numb that they began to feel frozen. Shoulder blades were throbbing and painful sensations shot all the way to my lower back. It felt like scorpions were crawling all over my face and neck. And the legs? Even more numb, so the freezing sensation turned into a searing heat that blasted its way up to my knees. For some damn reason, I kept holding on, kept staying still. I was about to give up and stretch my legs when all of a sudden, an echo reverberated through: “Bay-bee… This is what you came for…” Dammit.
So I held on. Shaking! Sweating! Gripping my knees! My whole body in unbearable pain!
And then it stopped.
In one breath, all of the pain stopped. Impermanence.
All I could sense was a soothing white light coursing through my body. I tried to ground myself so I focused on my cushion, but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything around me. Only the sensation of that white light. So I sat. And breathed.
After a few breaths, a white crystal appeared by my head, with smaller crystals floating around it.
“Is that my crown chakra?” I thought.
And then a purple one appeared, before my brow.
“Third eye!”
Before I could continue to check for the others, a massive blue and black sphere appeared by my neck. Sis, I ain’t a size queen but it was huge – and encased in a glass cube. At this point, I was getting excited: “Throat chakra! And it’s huge cause I talk so damn much!”
This took me out of the moment because as I searched for my heart chakra, all I could sense was a seafoam green light around my chest. And there was no indication of the other chakras. It’s so true that the more you try to seek something out, the more it eludes you (just ask all the dudes who tried to date me).
So I just sat there to bask in what was being shown. There was a sense of other cosmic things happening around me, but I don’t have the capacity to understand and articulate exactly what. So I just stayed still, grateful for this moment. The universe was telling me: “Here you go, you little punk. You still wanna be a brat? Pack your bags, son. To the left, to the left. I can have another you in a minute”.
At this point, I will say that my meditations from Day 5 through 10 unveiled a variety of things – some grounded, some ethereal - but nothing compared to this. I think I was being shown what was possible, as long as I kept working ardently and continuously. Patiently and persistently.
The Vipassana ended. And I hunched over onto the floor. What was that? Looking around the room, there were others who seemed to also have visceral reactions.
“You may now take rest until this evening” said the teacher.
Somehow, I made my way into the woods, and eventually sat down and started sobbing – I don’t know why. What was that? What did that man show me? And then the dinner bell rang, and I started laughing hysterically. Laughing and crying. Laughing and crying. Because I had just touched the tip of the universe, and now I gotta go and eat some fucking apples? Is that how this works? I think that the answer is yes. Because we have to nurture ourselves physically as well as metaphysically. It’s about mind and matter.
“YOU MY HOMIE FOR LIFE, LET’S GET IT” - K. Lamar -
This paragraph is dedicated to the brothers who were in community with me during this time. Brothers: I love you. I love you. I love you. We were in Noble silence for 9 and a half days, and only allowed to speak for half a day near the end. But each conversation, verbal and non-verbal, will live so clearly in my mind. There’s a comfort in knowing that this particular experience and all it encompassed, is shared. Regardless of distance and time, there are others who hold an immediate and unspoken understanding of what’s contained within your soul. I hope you feel that comfort too. And to think, none of us even asked each other what our jobs were.
Metta, my brothers. May we be so lucky to have our feet kick up the same dust again. I love you.
And to the brothers who weren’t able to last 10 days, the ones who left. You were spoken of with so much love and held with so much compassion. We know how difficult this was, and the toll it takes on your body and spirit. The path still unfolds, and we are all walking beside you. We love you.
“THERE’S A WHOLE LOT MORE FOR ME WAITING ON THE OTHER SIDE” - M. Miller -
One last thing to share: one of the last meditations I experienced at the Centre.
It was day 9, in the Meditation Hall, during mid-day. Sitting on my cushion with significantly less pain, and observing the gentle vibrations coursing through my body that was part of our training, everything felt much easier at this point. All of a sudden everything went black, but it wasn’t frightening. It was peaceful. Expansive. As if the molecules inside my body were exactly the same as the ones floating outside in the unknown space. No pain in the body. No heaviness in the head or the heart. Everything was in its right place.
Out of nowhere, I felt sunlight on my head and face. Blue skies and white clouds appeared around my chest. And at my base, there was a field full of lavender – endless, without a discernible horizon. I was leaning against the fence post of eternity with an unbound happiness, yet there was also a deep sadness because I knew that I couldn’t stay there forever. So just as we were taught: I breathed, paying some extra attention to the triangular space between the nostrils and the upper lip. And I sat – within the lavender and the loneliness. Just as I felt the last few breaths approaching to lead me temporarily away from this place, a most welcome voice appeared: “Bay-bee… This is what you came for..” Go off, Rihanna. You know just what to say.
“IS SHE DONE? IS THIS BITCH DONE?” - Awkwafina -
Epilogue.
I walked into this experience with as much of a beginner’s mind as I could. But there were still some questions that I subconsciously wanted to be answered: What can I do about my work? How can I stop operating from a place of scarcity? Should I do amateur porn? None of those answers revealed themselves because frankly, those were the wrong questions to ask. They don’t really matter.
We’re all conditioned to strive for greatness, one that’s usually measured in status, awards, wealth, and all of that external stuff. Take a glance at the folks around you and you’ll notice this kind of conditioning has created a detrimental path for all of us.
In this world that we are all creating, it’s a damn near miracle to pull yourself out of your own misery. Even more miraculous is the desire and ability to help pull others out of theirs. So imagine a world where people are taught to nurture and shine their light from within, and then in turn helping everyone around them shine theirs. Tell me, Sabrina: What could possibly be greater than that?
Thank you for reading. Check out the Ontario Vipassana Centre if this is sparking something within your waters. Be well.
TJ Borile is a freelance writer, small business owner, and areola model. He has a certification in Disregarding Patriarchal Bullshit, a PhD in the 1994 Miss Universe Pageant, and once, he fell down the stairs and accidentally got certified in Zumba. In his spare time, he likes to sit, breathe, and be a referee for a pillow fighting wrestling league.