Chronic Pain, Inner Child, and the Power of Commitment

Personal Reflections on Sitting Vipassana

This week, I'm going to be heading to Herefordshire to a very special place in the Welsh borders to sit a 10 day silent Vipassana retreat for the second time. My first was just over 2 years ago, in the spring of 2022. Like everybody going to Vipassana for the first time, I brought a lot of misconceptions with me. I am by no means an expert now, but I would like to reflect on that experience, and share some of the insights that have been coming up for me, as I prepare (hopefully with my eyes a little more open) to take the plunge again.

In Case You Don’t Know

Vipassana is a Buddhist meditation technique that is taught all over the world, mostly in the form of 10-day silent retreats. Remarkably, the courses are always free/donation based, and all the workers and teachers are volunteers. The technique itself is extremely simple, involving no mantras or visualisations. One simply learns to refine one’s attention, and then uses that attention to observe one’s breathing and bodily sensations more and more deeply. On the most basic level, the aim of the practice is to develop an equanimous disposition, so that one is able to experience a wider and wider palette of sensations and experiences, without forming attachments or aversions to them in the moment.

The First Time Around

It's easy to imagine that a meditation retreat will be a rather peaceful and relaxing experience, like sinking into a hot bath of spiritual calmness and letting the cares of the world melt away. It's also easy enough to imagine that not-speaking will be the hard part—that you will be just bursting at the seems with unsaid words. The reality, for me, was that there was very little about the experience that was relaxing—it was immensely difficult, especially the first four days. And it wasn't the not talking that was hard.

Prior to my first 10-day sit, I experienced near constant chronic back pain. It was only occasionally debilitating, but it was basically always present. It had flared up in the weeks leading up to the retreat, and I had asked if my place in the mediation hall might be located next to a chair, in case I was unable to sit on the floor for the extended periods of time that are required. I was told by the volunteers taking care of applications at that time that this would be possible, but when I arrived in the meditation hall for the first time, my place was right in the middle, not on the end of a row or near the back, no chair in sight. At first, I just accepted that I would have to talk to the teacher about it the following day, and tried to remain calm as I tried to begin learning the practice. But once I did speak to him, he brusquely responded to my request for a chair with a firm “No”, telling me that I shouldn’t “run away” from my pain. I felt that this was rather punitive, and in the following days, my emotional reaction would spiral drastically.

I realise now, that this is pretty much normal practice. Perhaps nobody should have reassured me that my request would be accommodated. Maybe they should have told me that I would have to ask the teacher about it once the course had started. They might even have informed me that the teacher would be reluctant to grant my request, and would probably push me to work with the pain, rather than try to avoid it. Maybe they just didn’t know to tell me those things. Maybe they are instructed to do just as they did, or, perhaps they were wiser than I give them credit for, and understood very well how this entire process would play out.

The first few days then, not only was I in a significant amount of pain, but I was also enraged. I was not remotely relaxed, and nor was the difficulty I experienced anything to do with observing the noble silence. Several times, I wanted to walk up to the front of the meditation hall, punch the teacher in face, scream “Fuck you and your fucking equanimity cult!” and storm out, but this was not out of a simple desire to speak, so much as a powerful urge to express my rage.

I refrained, and stayed the course, and my pain continued to intensify, and so did my sense of injustice and my inner fury. It seemed as though I was being punished for the mere act of showing up there. In reality, I was living in a world constructed almost entirely of my own projections. A self-made hall of smoke and mirrors. The teacher was only following the instructions laid out for him, as were the volunteers who I had spoken with previously. The funny thing is, I did much of my meditation in my sleeping quarters, where I did have a chair, and on reflection, I don’t think it actually made me any more comfortable or able to go deeper into the practice when I sat in it!

The Rising Up of My Inner Children

Vipassana centres are extremely structured and rule-based places. I often jokingly refer to them as Buddhist Prisons and though the one I went to was an extremely pleasant, well tended, spacious, beautiful and healthy environment, participating in a retreat there does require you to submit to a great deal of externally imposed structure. You are given a place to sleep, but you are told when to sleep and when get up; your meals are provided for you, and the food is good, but you are told what to eat (simple vegetarian fare) and when; you are instructed not to wear anything too revealing or eye-catching, and not to use any body-sprays, perfumes or strongly scented soap which might excite the senses of the other participants; you are not allowed to talk to or touch anybody, and you are even asked to try not to look at anybody too much or make eye contact; you are not allowed to smoke or consume any mind-altering substances of any kind. The list goes on. There is no aspect of your daily life which is not required to conform to the rules and principles on which the centre and the teaching are founded. I thought I was ready for this—another of my misconceptions!

Now, it is only natural that many of the patterns of thought and behaviour that we construct or adopt as children and adolescents stick around long into our adult years. Any adaptation to the world that feels successful to us in our youth tends to become a cornerstone or foundational element of all the subsequent coping mechanisms and complexes that get build around and on top of it. If, as adults, we then take up the call of deep self-exploration, we will inevitably discover that some of the foundations of what we have come to think of as our personality are actually rather shaky, constructed as they were, with the hapless haste of teenage anxiety. The work of shoring up these foundations or replacing them will generally require us to take a wiser and more mature approach to challenges that those complexes were originally constructed to overcome. In my case, one such complex had to do with authority.

See, I was a good kid. I was well suited to school. I was no genius, but I did well. The teachers liked me, and I pretty much liked them too. I played instruments, and I liked sports. I wasn’t always the most popular, but I had enough friends and I got invited to birthday parties. But at a certain point in my development, around the age of 14, it began to dawn on me that the whole school system was a farce. I realised that we weren’t being educated, we were being indoctrinated. We weren’t being equipped with useful skills, so much as being systematically imprinted with a set of values designed to engender an attitude of subservient cooperation. Our parents sent us to school, not for our benefit, but for the sake of convenience, and so that they could fulfil their own subservient obligations to the capitalist machine. The syllabus that we studied was constructed with a cynical, cold-hearted and pragmatic mindset that stubbornly refused to see the children it was supposed to serve as complex human beings. The tests we were regularly put through were not part of a plan to help us learn, but to measure the effectiveness of the under-resourced and beleaguered teachers. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I had been a model student, thoroughly and faithfully invested in this system, for all of my life that I could remember. When this wave of disillusionment swept over me in my adolescence, my whole paradigm fell to pieces, and I was forced to construct a new way of thinking and behaving which could accommodate all the new facts that kept coming in, wave after wave of betrayal and injustice. Now, I know this all sounds melodramatic, and it is melodramatic. But melodrama is the language of the adolescent psyche; its stock in trade. Nobody quite knows how to rage against the machine like a teenager. And it was this rage, in its pure, unrefined (yet fully concentrated) form that started to bubble up to the surface of my experience, at the moment when I sat on that cushion for the first time.

Thankfully, as more days passed, I began to be able to see my situation a little more clearly. I noticed that the retreat, the centre, the stubborn teacher and all the rules of the organisation were triggering something in me that seemed to want to be addressed. I realised that in those pivotal phases of my youth I had decided, without fully realising it, that no rule based structures were worth participating in, and no figures of authority were worthy of trust. This helped me to make sense of the way I had been deceived by the school system and the adult world at large, but since then, a whole complex had been allowed to form around these beliefs, and the part of me that it related to just didn’t have any way of reacting to the rules and structures of Vipassana except to recoil, in open rebellion, and seethe with contempt. The only strategy I had to hand was total rejection of the idea that any structured authority could be valid, benevolent, or worthy of my compliance.

In noticing this, it became clear to me that the reason I was experiencing this regression to my teenage emotional state was because actually, while this rejection/rebellion strategy had worked for me as a teenager, and had even managed to keep ploughing forwards throughout my 20s and early 30s, it had finally come up against a problem it really couldn’t solve. It seemed natural to me then, that in order to reappraise the value of that core belief, I was having to address some of the more tender and raw emotional material which the complex had been helping me to avoid.

In this realisation was also the implicit awareness and acknowledgement that there was now another part of me which was determined to finish the retreat, and to participate in it fully, and in good faith. I also noticed that this part of me was in some sense closer to the centre of my psyche—after all, it had booked me onto the retreat, organised the travel and the time off work. It had physically taken me there, and it was keeping me there, sitting on the cushion, even as this other part did everything in its power to sabotage all these efforts.

Eventually, I even realised that behind all this rage was the little pre-pubescent boy, the original sufferer of the betrayal, and, lying awake on the fifth night of the retreat, I was able to internally inquire with him, and ask what the matter was. He told me that he liked following rules and participating in structured activities. He explained, very tentatively, that when “we” had rejected structure and authority out of a sense of injustice and betrayal, we had thus abandoned him, and he himself had then become the carrier of the injustice and the betrayal; the inner scapegoat, sacrificed, in order that our new strategy for coping could be played out. This fragile little boy, left alone, ignored and in darkness, carrying the weight of life’s complexities, so that the rest of me could enjoy an uncomplicated life of righteous rebellion. Everything that he valued and took joy in, rejected, leaving him homeless and without a purpose in the psyche. It was clear what needed to happen. He needed to be welcomed back into the fold, treated with the respect, admiration and love that every 12-year old boy craves so desperately. Worthy. Valid. Useful. Important.

So, from that point on, I decided to follow every rule with the upmost precision, and you know what? I loved it. Even though I was supposed to be practicing a mindset of perfect equanimity (not reacting), I often found myself taking pleasure in the meticulousness and care that it took to follow every rule—it was an act of self love; and offering, given in the hopes of bringing about the inner reconciliation which, when I arrived, I had no idea was needed, but seemed so utterly pivotal by the morning of the 6th day.

Honestly, this work continues. Not least, because almost all structures of authority are worthy of contempt, and it can be hard to disentangle the arbitrary and malevolent authorities from the ones which are worth cooperating with. And, some of the authorities must be cooperated with to some degree, even if they are utterly corrupt and unworthy. This is still hard for me. What is getting easier though, is to at least follow the rules that I lay out for myself, which are rooted in my own desires, and the call of my own inner voice. I am at least learning not to waste my vital energy rebelling against my own plans.

The Mysteries of Pain and Relief

At the same time, my relationship with my pain was changing. It had not magically disappeared, but I was finding out, first-hand, that what the teaching said about suffering was true. Namely, that while some suffering is inevitable, and while physical pain most often does relate to a physical problem of some kind, the vast majority of the suffering that we experience is a result of our attachments and aversions, which we constantly reaffirm through habitual patterns of the mind. The pain I was feeling in the first few days was not only the actual pain that was traceable to various muscle strains in the body, but also all the pain that I knew I would have to feel in the coming days, and all the memories of the pain I had already felt. The fear, doubt, resentment and rage that I had been pouring on the fire of that pain was blowing it up to ridiculous proportions, giving it a power over me that I could do nothing about. But, as I processed all the emotional material and found ways to unburden myself of its weight, my pain gradually became simply pain, and I was able to become simply curious about it.

It also helped, that eventually the teacher suggested I use a simple wooden bench-stool, which allowed me to sit in kneeling posture without having to sit on my own feet and ankles—not an act of the malevolent sociopath I had first made him out to be. He even asked me if I still wanted to move to a place where I could have access to a chair. Hilariously, I declined. I wanted to see it out. It is probably also true that several days of sitting with a straight back, eating healthily, walking circles around the small patch of woodland in the grounds, cold showers and yoga (which I was fortunate to be able to do in my bedroom, having been assigned my own room rather than a shared dorm), I’m sure that my physical situation was improving in tandem with the spiritual work I was doing.

With those caveats stated, I will say that my chronic pain more or less completely disappeared after the retreat. I still get injured, and since recently taking up playing basketball several times a week, I am often in pain. But I do feel as though my entire relationship to pain, my understanding of what it is, and my experience of it have been permanently transformed by my experience at that first Vipassana, and I do wonder how I will feel when I come out the other side of the next one.

To begin with, I really did not want to believe that any part of my pain was a mental phenomenon which I could do anything about by working with it in the meditation hall. I was deeply resistant to the idea. I wanted nothing more than to continue believing that my suffering was objectively real, not a choice that I was making on any level. I am pleased to tell you that this is an absolutely stupid position, and one which I no longer hold. I do not deny the reality of the physical world, or the constraints of my physical body, but I know that it is my own reactions to the world, my own reactions to my body, that create almost all my suffering in this life. And I know that only I can take responsibility for those reactions, and that it is only by doing so that I can be liberated, whether that be in an immanent, here and now, kind of liberation, or that of a much more metaphysically speculative and mysterious kind.

Looking Ahead

I got a place on this retreat via a waiting list, which changes the feeling one has in the lead-up to it considerably, seeing as I’ve only known for 2 weeks that I will be going. This has compressed my time considerably, as I just effectively kissed goodbye to at least 12 potential workdays in the month of July, and everything that I needed to get done in this month has thus been squashed into the first half of it.

In particular I’ve been working hard to get the word out about my (shameless plug incoming) new Soul-Work course, which will be launching in September. If you appreciate my perspective, it may be a really cool idea to check out this new offering 😘😜

But more importantly (for the purposes of this piece), the sudden arrival of Vipassana round 2 has brought something else into focus for me which feels worth sharing, and it is about commitment. There is an immense value in committing to something, especially something that you are doing for the right reasons, and especially if that something demands that you raise your standards for your own patterns of thought and behaviour.

This insight has also been crystallising for me around my basketball habit, which has required me to eat and sleep better, to invest in my health more in all kinds of ways, to research nutrition and supplements and try things out, to take up running and return to my yoga practice in the most committed and meaningful way I ever have, even to wash myself more often, get a tan in the park, and feel a lot better about my appearance. One commitment breeds several others, and before you know it, even your secondary commitments have their own tertiary commitments. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have signed up for the waiting list for this retreat if I weren’t always on the lookout for ways to improve my physical health and my relationship to my ageing body, all of which is brought about simply because I like playing basketball.

Then, once I was committed to attending Vipassana, I knew I needed to start getting up earlier (they wake you up at 4am on the retreats!), fully erase my lingering trace of nicotine dependence, cut out caffeine altogether, and, of course, start to spend more and more time each day meditating, and placing even more importance on my yoga practice and other physical health routines.

Now, I know that I’m in a cycle, and that it is hard to maintain habits, especially the ones that are really good for me. So I’m not saying “hey, I’ve got it all worked out” so much as “hey, I’m currently in a good spot and this is how things look from here”. But even as my enthusiasm wains, I think it will remain true that commitment is a magical thing, and that one deep commitment spawns many smaller ones, and that this is fundamentally a path that leads to a deeper and more nourishing engagement with life:

If you find you want to really do a thing
any one thing
and if that urge arises
from some soulful place inside you
and if you follow that
as far as you can go
and then find out what you must do
to then go further
and then you start to do those things as well
and really do them
maybe this is one way
to feel that you have justified the gift
that is a lifetime
in the human body you were given

Thank you for reading,

Wish me luck 🙏

I’ll see you on the other side.