I’m back!  Let me tell you, it was quite an experience!  I remember before I left, I had some guesses as to what it would be like.  I thought it might feel like traveling to an exotic place.   Well, I was right on!  I travelled to a sensory deprivation chamber for five days and then spent another five in a mental hospital.  It was pretty silly of me to think that I was going to spend a peaceful, calm, albeit physically challenging ten days contemplating my life.  It turned out to be anything but peaceful.  The best way to describe the experience is intense Eastern psychotherapy.  What do I mean by that?  Well, we will have to start from the very beginning.

I arrived at the center in the afternoon.  There were around 140 of us in total, half men and half women.  The majority of the people there were in their mid twenties to mid thirties.  I chatted with a few women right after I arrived (they keep the men and the women completely separate, later I saw that this is indeed wise).  I got into a good conversation with a woman who restored antique art.  This is actually her second time.  She said that she got a lot out of it the first time around.  That’s a good sign, I thought to myself.   After a brief orientation, silence was instituted.  So, that was day zero.

For the next three days, we were trained to observe our breath while sitting still without moving.  Yup, that’s right!  That’s what we did from 4:30 in the morning to 8:00 at night.  My back was killing me at the end of the first day.  As the days worn on, the physical aspect got easier and easier but the psychological intensity got cranked up higher and higher.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  When you are sitting there for the entire day with your eyes closed, your mind is starved for stimulation.  At first, it’s the daily thoughts and feelings.  But after four or five days, you run out of the normal stock of things to think about.  More and more, you find that your subconscious mind starts to manifest itself.

By day six, I got seriously paranoid.  They are telling us that in order to be truly happy, you have to get rid of all your cravings and aversions.  The aversions part is easy to understand.  But I definitely don’t want to get rid of all my cravings.  I thought, what am I getting myself into?  I don’t want to turn into a Buddhist monk!  Maybe they are trying to perform some kind of mass hypnosis on us!  While we are mentally susceptible, they tell us messages that will turn us into obedient and peace-loving drones.  Who are these people?  The atmosphere definitely had some cult-like qualities to it.  Then there is the no talking part, maybe it is aimed to create an aura of obedience and conformity — if you see others silently obey it makes it harder for you to question things.  On that same day, I noticed that the girl that used to sit in front of me was gone.  Her mat removed.  I wondered what happened…

During lunch, I looked around and realized what a strange scene this made.  You see seventy women milling about a cafeteria, moving slowly but methodically.  Some chose to sit facing the wall.  Ones that are sitting at the same table would either stare at their food or off into the space.  No one makes eye contact with anyone else.  No one is laughing or even smiling.  Everything in my body was telling me to get out of there.  It just didn’t feel right.  I wanted to return to my normal life and forget that this had ever happened.  In the end though, my curiosity got the better of me.  I figured whatever parts of the practice I don’t feel comfortable with, I will just resist.  I will only practice the parts that are acceptable to me.  I remembered reading somewhere that even hypnosis won’t work on someone who doesn’t want it.

From day seven on, everyday I had to deal with some serious cravings and anxieties during meditation.  The nature of most are too personal to reveal.  Sorry guys.  But just imagine whatever fantasies, nagging doubts about your life goals and relationships, regrets and fears, they will surface one by one.  Personally, I would say that my experience was 2/3 cravings and 1/3 aversions.  During one of my long meditation sessions, I dreamed up my next obby: making an anime porn flick for women.

Up to this point, I haven’t really talked much about the practice itself.  I thought we were going to learn all kinds of breathing and visualization techniques.  But the actual technique is deceptively simple: you sit and observe your breath and the sensations in your body and try to remain detached and nonjudgmental of the sensations no matter what comes up.  How do you observe the sensations in your body?  That’s what they train you to do in all the days you are there.  You start with observing your breath coming in and out.  Then, you move your attention to the area near your nostrils and feel the sensations there.  After that, you systematically move through every part of your body from head to toe.

Just to illustrate what I mean, now close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, then focus your attention on your right palm (left if you are left handed), give it ten seconds or so and see what kind of sensations you feel.  Chances are you will feel SOMETHING. It might be heat, tingling, pausing, etc.  We get trained over the course of ten days to become more and more sensitive to the sensations so that in the end, you just feel an even vibrating flow going through your entire body.  There will be no more blind spots.

When you methodically go through every inch of your body, you may feel a wide range of sensations, some pleasant and others quite irritating.  But you are to remain detached and nonjudgmental to every sensation and not react to it.   You can’t react to the sensations physically because you sit there for an hour at a time without moving or opening your eyes.  When your nose itches or when a drop of sweat rolls down your neck, you just observe it and try to not to react to it emotionally either.  You tell yourself that this sensation, like any other, arises and passes away.  It is impermanent.

So far, this sounds like sick torture, an attempt to develop your discipline at best.  What’s the point of all this?  The theory is also quite simple.  It basically says that when you are addicted to something, you are not really craving that object.  You are craving the sensations that the object induces in your body.  By observing that sensation and not reacting to it, you cut off the feedback loop and eases the escalation of that sensation.  Addictions and intense aversions such as fear all have the tendency to get more riled up when you start to think about them.  Say someone just insulted your mother, you immediately get angry and experience unpleasant sensations.  Then, you react more to that unpleasant sensation and get even more agitated.  This technique makes you aware of your sensations as soon as they occur and to make some conscious choice about how you’d like to react.

On a psychological level, the technique effectively makes you your own psychotherapist.  One reason why confessing to a priest or talking to a therapist helps is because you get to air everything out in the open.  The fact that they accept you and react toward you in a nonjudgmental manner allows you to face your own situation with more objectivity.  But of course, it’s hard to observe your own thoughts objectively.  When you start thinking “why does my boss always pick me for overtime?” the next thought is likely to be “He must think I’m a push over.  He is such an asshole…”  The ingenious part of the technique is in recognizing that we can remain objective about our bodily sensations much more easily than our own thoughts.

Gotama the Buddha invented this technique 2500 years ago.  This guy must have been a genius.  I just ordered a biography of him on Amazon.   In the end analysis, I’m glad I went.  Do I recommend it to others?  Well, I think it can be a beneficial practice for overcoming any kind of obsession or destructive patterns.  So, if you have addictions, serious depression, want to have much less ups and downs, or you find yourself hitting rock bottom at some point in your life, I’d say give it a try.  For others, I will have to let things sink in some more before I give any enthusiastic recommendations.  Although, if you enjoy having experiences in life that are kind of out there, then go for it!  It may give you some perspective on various issues in your life. But don’t expect it to make you feel in touch with the universe or anything like that. So far as I can tell, it’s an actual practice and not some kind of initiation into a cult.  At least they won’t turn you into a cult member in a ten day course.

One thing I can tell you is that boy am I glad it’s over!  On the day I got back, Dan and I went out for some Korean food for lunch and Thai food for dinner and then saw Clerks II in the theaters.  Life is good!