The Doors of Sensation

Hello-hello! Welcome to RethinkingEverything.

This piece traces a lived experience of a 10-day Vipassana meditation course in Nepal. Through the experience of breath, sitting, pain, sensation and stillness, this piece explores how separation between self and sensations dissolve and how the body becomes a doorway into deeper layers of experience and wisdom.

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Breath (Aliveness of Experience)

The times we live in can in some ways be characterised as the mechanistic view of the world as it has evolved and as we now live through.

The world reduced to bytes of information.

Living reduced to an endless list of consumptions and collection of information and experiences in fragments,

stored as computer memory,

projected onto the future,

looping into cycles.

We are the creators of these sentient machines.

And slowly,

we have become them.

Day 1 and 2 of the course involved practicing the Anapana (āṇāpāna):

the practice of observing the natural breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils.

Ten hours in a day and 1 hour in a continuous sitting.

The practice begins quietly.

And slowly, it reveals a delicate whisper between the breath and the body.

In noticing this delicate dialogue,

something opened.

A living, timeless space between the birth and death of every breath.

Sat in Anapana,

with agonising pain searing through my lower body,

unexpectedly,

a moment of elation emerged from within that pain.

What has become of the breath in our lives?

We were taught to understand breath as a function.

Air entering and leaving the lungs.

A biological necessity.

A process.

In knowing this and doing this,

we have eluded its being.

Breath has become passive.

Reduced and outsourced to physiology.

Ignored because it cannot be captured,

measured for meaning

or shared for validation.

But when you intentionally and intimately pause to notice the bare breath,

something more than air moves through you.

Something whole.

To breathe

is the most primordial form of experience.

Life begins with it.

Life ends with it.

And in between,

it holds the possibility of bringing aliveness to any moment it touches.

"Breathe life into" is used only as an idiom.

But it is a practice.

A way of restoring wholeness to fragmented experience.

Through Anapana,

The breath begins to illuminate sensations,

the ones that bridge mind and body into a single field of awareness.

And this aliveness of an experience is not only reserved for meditation halls.

It is available,

In all that arises and passes.

In the colours and shadows held in everything our eyes see.

In the quiet meeting of two foreheads where the breath intertwines in a slow dance.

In the stillness of dawn where the sun rises exactly between two mountains.

In the surrender of a dive where the ocean holds all your weight.

It is available,

in equanimity with the present.

Sitting (Facing Impermanence)

We tend to hide or run away from difficulties on the roads we take through life.

As did I.

I had not faced them fully.

Not intentionally.

I met them with a kind of perceptual absence.

And yet in the past few years,

there were moments, minutes, months

when I could no longer turn away.

Times where I was submerged in the deep dark ocean of pain, grief and suffering.

And I sat.

I sat in their dark depths.

What I found there

began to rewire my relationship with life's miseries,

yesterday,

today,

and tomorrow.

On Day 3,

Vipassana (Vipassanā) is introduced.

The practice of seeing things as they really are.

Of eroding mental impurities.

Of stepping out of the cycle of craving and aversion.

Not in a day.

Not quickly.

It has to take patience.

Persistence.

Intention.

Integrity.

On Day 4,

in the meditation hall one afternoon,

I sat.

And difficulties sat beside me.

They arrived as thoughts,

as sensations,

as emotions.

The room was full,

but I sat alone with them.

The mind has no locked doors.

Everything enters.

And yet, we often treat what enters as if it owns the mind's house.

Thoughts as intruders.

Emotions as colonisers.

Sensations as threats.

This is the old habit of the mind.

To resist,

to escape,

to rearrange discomfort without meeting it.

But Vipassana teaches you to create a new habit of the mind.

To sit.

To sit is to break from hiding.

To break from running.

To meet with intention and attention.

When mental formations arise in our mind's house,

pleasant or unpleasant,

this is the moment

to sit.

To treat them as guests,

not owners.

But this sitting as their presence is felt is not gentle work.

Sitting with them often intensifies them.

Unpleasantness deepens

Pain becomes sharper.

The house becomes more haunted.

And still,

the only way out without harming the foundations of your house,

is through.

This is the cost

of true calm.

What the practice of sitting is not:

It is not shutting the door on mental formations.

Not escaping to your happy place.

Not outsourcing the work to distraction,

to your therapist,

to psychoanalysis of your childhood or your parents,

to relief,

to pills swallowed.

Not a night-out,

Not facing screens, social media or stories of someone's past.

Not the blessings of the divine.

These are ways of moving discomfort around the house,

Not meeting it.

Sitting is unlike anything.

It is staying.

Alone.

Present.

With whatever takes form

within the mind's house.

And in that staying

something begins to change.

In that staying,

impermanence is embodied and enacted.

Pain (Holding Determination)

Day 5 revealed another layer.

In the course you uphold periods of Adhitthana (Adhiṭṭhāna):

To sit for one hour, 3 times a day, without moving a limb.

Adhitthana is translated to ‘having a firm resolve or determination to attaining goals’.

At first this appears as a discipline.

But it holds more.

A quiet resistance

against the reflexive forces of the mind.

A space

between stillness and suffering.

In earlier days,

I had sat through pain.

But I had not fully received its presence.

I noticed its grossness,

grew averse to its sensation,

waited for it to leave.

This is the old habit of the mind:

Moment of unpleasantness brings aversion.

Pleasure brings craving.

A choreography so automatic

it feels natural.

So preprogrammed,

it feels protective.

So repeated

it feels true.

But during one Adhitthana sitting in Vipassana,

something progressed through the pain.

Initially the pain returned.

Heavy.

Restless.

Expansive.

But this time,

there was a pause.

The entanglement with the pain did not have to be reflexive.

So I sat.

Holding the pain in a still cradle.

Without suppressing.

Without escaping.

Without romanticising it.

Without overcoming it.

But allowing it.

Quietly echoing words: Anicca... anicca...

within the walls of my mind.

Repeating them as an observation only.

Giving way to the pain,

without giving up the sensation.

And slowly, the structure of pain began to transform.

To truly reveal itself.

Its edges, textures and movement.

I don’t think this was "going beyond" the pain.

It was going into it.

And with that

you see its hollow core, naked meaning and its boundaries.

Sitting there long enough,

without craving,

without aversion.

It no longer felt like pain.

This was only a sensation.

Bare.

Changing.

Impersonal.

Floating in consciousness.

When the bell rang and I opened my eyes,

pain had not fully left,

but my old relationship to it had.

To reflexively caste away pain from the realities we face is a misstep.

It is to reject part of reality.

The objective holding of pain is necessary to really live in reality.

It is a path that does not end at “feeling good”

and goes further to reach the experience of truth.

I am still lacking the ontology and epistemology of this experience of pain.

But this necessary holding is not a form of masochism.

Not endurance for its own sake.

Not intellectual acceptance.

It does not mean to sit in it only until it’s bearable.

It does not mean to sit in it while attention is scattered to another experience or sensation.

Holding the physical pain in Adhitthana

or holding the mental anguish in a heartbreak,

without craving or aversion,

is entirely singular.

A kind of intimacy with what is.

With meeting pain through the ashes of reflexivity.

And perhaps this is where love of reality begins.

Sensations (Dance of Dissolution)

On Day 7,

I glanced at the calendar for the first time.

It felt disorienting to feel both:

Much time had passed.

But no time had been experienced.

The awareness of conventional time,

But the experience of timelessness.

A paradox of time was lived.

Vipassana is the experiential wisdom about the law of nature:

the changing flux of physical and mental energies that are impersonal,

yet capable of enslaving the mind to make it personal, attached and grow suffering.

This practice had deepened.

Had sat me face-to-face with the mental and physical defilements.

Sat in Adhitthana that day,

Attention moved across the body.

Inside, outside, through.

Patiently and peacefully tracing the sensations,

I entered an uneven rhythm at first.

Like a child finding its first footsteps.

Unsteady.

Searching.

But following sensations wherever it led.

The body revealed itself in fragments:

Tingling.

Pressure.

Pulsation.

Heaviness.

And other subtler movements

without names.

Some sensations arose like ghosts of the body.

They appeared,

wandered,

vanished as if they had been inhabiting my body long before my body had a life.

Others were intense.

The lower body burning,

pulsing,

unforgiving.

They carried loud cries of someone being burnt alive in a quiet cemetery.

The frosty air contacting the skin created goosebumps within the deepest layer of the skin.

This synchronous movement 

between the changing sensations and awareness

became an enchanted, meditative dance.

Not controlled

or directed.

Simply moving.

Oftentimes, the old habits of the mind would hijack the dance:

Itch, scratch.

Pain, soothe.

Thought, think.

Emotion, attach.

This automaticity of sensations is even more powerful than the automaticity of thought.

The reflex to identify,

to react,

to personalise

what was simply arising.

But there were periods,

where I was not inside the reaction.

I was sat in the seats of the audience,

watching this drama interrupting the dance.

And then,

what felt like a timeless eternity later,

this dance opened the doors of sensation.

The distinction between observation and practice began to dissolve.

I was,

the performer and the audience, at once.

Slowly, this dissolution took scale and rhythm.

The subtlest sensations within.

The surface of lower body unto the cushion.

The air drawn and released in breath.

All gave up their felt presence.

Colours and shadows behind my eyelids

gave way to the screening of moving darkness.

Momentarily,

I found myself short of breath

and took a gulp of air inside my mouth.

In this, I registered my straight neck and back fallen into a fold like a shrivelled leaf.

These changes

were like the entire stage and set had dissolved into nothingness.

Only outlines of the experience remaining.

Uniform.

Bare.

Shining faintly in darkness of what had collapsed.

Although sensational (quite literally),

this too passed.

And distinctions faded further.

Mind and matter.

Conscious and unconscious.

Awareness and sensations of this experience wholly dissolved too.

The faint outlines of the dance

now radiated the brightest darkness.

The mind's biased filtration of time collapsed.

Was this a few moments, minutes or most of the hour?

The passage of time was absent.

No memory of the past

or hope of future.

Only the present,

which was eternity itself.

It was a dissolution

of the separation between self and sensations.

A kind of emptiness.

"I" was not experiencing it.

Rather there was only experience.

Timeless.

Formless.

Unheld.

My lack of breath forced another gulp of air inside my mouth.

And in this moment,

as suddenly,

it shifted again.

Breath returned sharply.

Body reassembled.

Sensation and awareness localised.

There was a trace of something,

emotion,

release,

perhaps wetness behind my eyelids.

The bell rang.

The doors of the hall opened

and the doors of sensation closed.

My body walked out of the hall,

and my mind stood

at what was experienced.

Not trying to name or make meaning.

Only this was clear:

I had walked into the doors of sensation.

I had sat.

I had come out

changing.

What Remains

Coming out of this experience,

the relationship

between mind and body,

between conscious and unconscious,

feels less separate now.

More… continuous

like there are always layers to experience.

and these layers, reached through Vipassana,

had not been realised before.

Aldous Huxley once wrote

about the “Doors of Perception.”

This felt similar yet different.

Not perception,

but sensation.

A kind of doorway through the body.

There are sensations we know.

There are sensations we do not.

And in between

there are the doors of sensation.

The teachings suggest

that everything in the mind

flows along with sensations in the body.

That thoughts, emotions, reactions

are accompanied by physical expression.

And if this is so,

then perhaps

to observe sensation

is also to observe the mind.

And maybe,

to not react is to interrupt the pattern.

To not continue the cycle of conditioning.

For now,

I sit with this.

For someone still learning,

still human.

Perhaps progress is simply this:

To continue practicing with care.

To live with more mindfulness.

More equanimity.

More integrity.

Not finished.

Not liberated.

But not regressing into unconsciousness.

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