Sunday, April 15, 2007

Silent Treatment

Closed for Vipassana
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh

Sorry for my lengthy absence. I have been away at a 12-day silent meditation retreat in Dharamkot. The Vipassana program is well-known. The program requires that you sit for 10-12 hours every day in a darkened room, meditating with about 75 other people.

Speaking or even eye contact with other students is not allowed. There was a beautiful bunch of dogs roaming the grounds that became my therapists for the 12 days.

I can just say it was very worthwhile, very effective and very, very difficult. I almost walked out several times during the first five days. It was really, really annoying that every Indian TV commercial I'd heard in the past month played continually in my head. On the last day, it was even worse - my mental DJ was playing "Living Next Door to Alice."


3 comments:

Linda-Sama said...

I went through 6 days of hell and on the 7th day a cat saved my sanity....

rolf.strohmann said...

okay, i looked through all your pictures on flickr, read your interesting and wise thoughts about indian and tibetan people, the dalai and the panchen lama and richard gere, but it took 'living next door to alice' to get up and make a comment. that's not right.
:)

Madhukar said...

Waiting for updates, where are you ?

Mk