FEATURE
merits of meditation Last summer, I took a ten-day Vipassana course, meditating ten hours per day. Vipassana is all about observing reality as objectively as possible. It brought me countless benefits. Imagine you could buy a pill at your local pharmacy which would increase your mental well-being and attention span, reduce your stress levels and anxiety, and improve your sleep quantity and quality. Meditation turns out to be that imaginary pill, though getting to all those benefits requires hard work and some discipline. by Jorn Rigter | illustrations by Vinodha Suresh
WHAT IS MEDITATION? In its essence, meditation is about achieving what is called enlightenment: the state of nonduality where the concepts of ‘you’ and ‘ the rest of the world’ cease to exist and you’re fully aware of the objective reality as it is in ever y moment in time. In the West, however, people have been using the positive effects of meditation in their daily lives, without the goal of achieving a state of enlightenment, often referred to as mindfulness. By focusing the mind on a specific task, like the focus on the incoming and outgoing breath, you train the mind to become
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sharper and less distracted by the constant thoughts that arise in your consciousness. There is a plurality of different meditation techniques out there. The meditation tech-nique that was discovered by the first Buddha (which literally means ‘Enlightened one’) is called Vipassana. THE VIPASSANA TECHNIQUE In Vipassana, the goal is to obser ve reality as it is. You do this by doing a so-called ‘body scan’, where you scan the skin of your body, inch by inch. You get your conscious mind to speak to the unconscious
mind and become equanimous (balanced and calm) with any thing that happens to you. While we call it the ‘unconscious mind’, it is actually constantly conscious of ever y thing that happens to us: it communicates through the bodily senses. For example, when you get angr y, your hear tbeat rises, your palms star t to sweat and your body gets warmer. We only star t to notice these sensor y experiences when they’ve already happened. That’s when the conscious mind becomes aware of the unconscious mind. It turns out we can communicate back as well.
April 2020 | turn the page
