Sunday, February 7, 2016

Vipassana

I just got back to Battambang, Cambodia from the Dhamma Lattika meditation center outside the city, where I completed my first 10 Day Vipassana Silent Meditation Course! I'm not really prepared to write a post about it yet and I think I need a few more weeks to really process it before I do - I tried writing in my journal as soon as we were allowed to have our writing materials back and even that was so jumbled - but I made a video. It's kind of long and the sound is bad but I wanted to document it right after it happened.

Vipassana means to "see things as they really are" and you can find out more about it at https://www.dhamma.org/en/about/vipassana. It was 10 days, 10 hours meditation a day, in silence with no reading or writing or electronics. It seriously felt like prison - complete with bars on the window of my little cell and a barbed wire fence around the small area we lived in. There were about 14 foreign female students and the rest were Khmer.


I'll leave you with two songs that were stuck in my head probably more than any others, especially the first 6 or so days.