People sometimes ask: Are yoga and meditation religious practices?

The physical aspect of yoga (asana) is a celebration of the human body and its potential. In this respect, the practice is almost incompatible with religions, which are traditionally body-phobic.

Meditation, however, can be seen as being closer to religion and is in fact often likened to prayer. Of course, there are similarities, as certain meditation systems involve mantra repetition; which is the same as reciting a prayer. But there is one technique, Vipassana, which offers a totally secular approach. It invites us to focus on the breath and on physical sensations: from more obvious ones, like hot and cold, to subtler ones, such as vibration.

Vipassana means ‘to see things as they really are’. It is a pre-Buddhist meditation technique. Mindfulness meditation, popular in the West as a stress-reduction method, stems from this ancient practice.

When I first attended the 10-day residential course, I experienced what I had known intellectually for a long time: that the mind can be our worst enemy and that, if left untamed, it can slowly destroy us. If this sounds extreme, think of emotions such as anger, resentment and hatred, which are generated by thoughts in the mind, and how destructive they can be to oneself and to interpersonal as well as collective relationships (for example, between rival nations or religious groups).

One of the advantages of the enforced silence on the course is that it makes you take the meditation practice seriously — if you don’t, you go crazy!

When you can’t speak or send a text message to anyone for 10 days (the use of electronic devices is not permitted and you can’t even read a book), you realise just how wild the mind is. So long as we engage in conversation with someone else, we tend to follow a more or less logical path; but when the dialogue is only in our mind, it tends to branch out all over the place, with no logical sequence whatsoever — the so-called ‘drunken monkey’ or ‘monkey mind’.

Another striking feature of the relentless mind chatter is that it’s very self-centred. During the first couple of days of the retreat, I was ashamed with myself at how self-centred my thoughts had been. But at the end of day 2, in one of the video lectures that are shown in the evenings, the witty late teacher, S.N. Goenka, points out that this is the very nature of the mind; it’s just how it works. I finally understood what the concept of the mind and the ego being one and the same really meant — and I felt a big relief that it wasn’t just me!

After 10 days of meticulous practice, you learn to feel the entire body vibrate, as the ‘illusion of solidity’ dissolves.
Everything in the universe is made of vibrating energy; even our body is vibration, as it’s made of atoms, which are made of electromagnetic particles literally spinning in orbit.

The human brain can identify a limited range of colours, sounds and smells that interact with our physical sense organs through energetic vibrations; therefore our reality is based on our ability to perceive — and we definitely cannot perceive all that exists, infrared light being a good case in point.

The illusion of solidity is created by the limits of our senses. Modern physics teaches us that atoms have no definite boundaries: when our hand touches the wall, for example, there’s a point at which it’s impossible to say whether a particular atom belongs to our hand or to the wall.

Once the Vipassana technique has been continually improved throughout the ten days, on the last day of the course the ‘loving kindness’ element is added to the vibration. This makes it all the more special, as you literally radiate love and kindness.

On my first meditation retreat, in the Austrian Alps, I had achieved a similar result almost instantly through the loving-kindness meditation that was taught there: I felt my body float in and above the mountains. It was amazing. But feeling loving kindness on command isn’t always easy. Some people can’t feel it at all — which is why the Vipassana technique is a very useful tool that ought to be taught in schools and prisons alike.

Every mental state has a coexisting sensation in the body, so by observing physical sensations, we also observe the mind — and with the help of conscious breathing, we can learn not to act on cravings or negative emotions.

Psychologists have estimated that on any given day a staggering percentage of our thoughts are exactly the same as the day before. In other words, the mind has a tendency to go round in circles. No wonder we’re plagued by anxiety, depression and all sorts of addictions, as most of these thoughts are driven by worry and fear.

Luckily, practices such as meditation can help us rewire the brain and choose different thoughts and actions, transforming our life and the lives of those around us.

 

Author: Nico De Napoli

Image: Xomiele/Flickr

Editor: Emily Bartran; Travis May