A Ten-Day Meditation Retreat: One Woman's Account

This is the story of an adventure that tests the limits of body and mind. A reporter for ÉPOCA spent ten days at a meditation retreat in the interior of Rio de Janeiro. Ten days without speaking, reading, or writing; more than a hundred hours sitting motionless. The course aimed to change how the mind works in order to eliminate suffering. Of the 61 participants, five dropped out at different stages. What follows is an account of this long journey through inner geography.

To where I went, there was only a map to reach the starting point. It left me on a dirt road in the municipality of Miguel Pereira, in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro. At the gate, a sign read: "Vipassana Meditation." Like me, sixty other people arrived from different parts of the world to begin a journey that could change all our lives. Some were American, there were Latin Americans from various countries, but mostly Brazilians. For ten days, I would not be allowed to speak with my fellow travelers. Not even look at them, much less touch them. Only those who could forget that other people existed would make it to the end. When the crossing was over, five people, three men and two women, had dropped out along the way.

To be accepted on this ten-day excursion, each of us had signed a commitment: not to steal, not to kill any living being (including cockroaches and mosquitoes), not to lie, not to have sex (not even alone), not to use substances like alcohol, drugs, or medications.

Before beginning the expedition, we abandoned everything that connected us to the outside world. Instead of bringing luggage, we had to leave it behind. My belongings consisted of the following: the book I had started reading on the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro shuttle (The Common Man by Philip Roth), a notepad, two pens, a phone directory, a cell phone, family photos, money, checks and bank and credit cards, an ID.

And some objects of superstition that I, agnostic since age eleven, usually carry as a scientific precaution: my lucky rubber praying mantis, small medals of Saint Francis of Assisi and Our Lady of Fatima, a stone from the Sahara Desert, and a small Golem from Jewish mythology.

For ten days we would travel always far and inward, but without leaving the place. Through the window, the same calendar-page landscape: mountains, trees, wind, and silence. It seemed the world began and ended there. Confined to a space of about two hundred meters, the days would unfold in three settings: the dining hall, the dormitory, and the meditation room. Men and women would not cross paths anywhere. At invisible boundaries between the sexes, wooden signs warned: "limit."

For me, remaining silent for ten days was the most comfortable part of the schedule. I am shy. I look far more than I speak. I am grumpy enough to think there is too much noise in the world, too many people talking all the time, saying almost nothing, not even listening to themselves. What frightened me was the physical immobility the journey required. I knew I would have to sit for twelve hours a day, spine straight, head firm on my neck. In ten days that would be 120 hours in the same position; the equivalent of a basic English course.

My meditation record was fifteen minutes in yoga classes. I am not an athlete, but I have exercised regularly for years. Just a few months earlier I had finished treatment for lower back pain and was very satisfied to be able to sneeze without suffering. At forty-one, without pain, without baggage, and without words, I was ready to begin disconnecting from one world and entering another.

And then the bell rang. It was 4 a.m. on day one. I shared a small room with one bed and a bunk with two other women. Before sunrise, I found myself with twenty-eight other companions in the collective bathroom in silent bad humor. One day one of them stared at the mirror, pulled her hair up, and with a glazed look said aloud to herself: "You're going crazy." Later, in the dining hall, she looked at the banana she was eating and had a laughing fit.

At 4:30 a.m., we sat on the floor, each on a thin mat in our assigned place. The teacher entered the room and sat in lotus position on a platform. He was thin, tall, and bald. I spent considerable time thinking which cartoon character he resembled, but reached no conclusion. He stretched his arm and turned on a CD player. I heard, for the first time, the voice of the Indian teacher S.N. Goenka speaking in heavily accented English. Then his instructions were translated into Portuguese in another recording.

In the first instruction, Goenka told us to breathe.

Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

One minute. If the paragraph above were repeated 660 times, it would be possible to have an approximate idea of the first day of the vipassana meditation course. The debut would fill 134 magazine pages, an entire issue of ÉPOCA, filled only with observing "the air that enters, the air that exits; as it enters, as it exits."

The task was simply to observe the breath, eyes closed, without interfering. From the first day, we are taught to observe "reality as it is." My great discovery on that debut was realizing that air does not always enter through both nostrils and exit through both, but sometimes enters through the right and exits through the left. Or vice versa.

This was intriguing for the first five minutes. In the other 640, I had to overcome boredom and drowsiness, not always successfully. The schedule was rigid and unchangeable: wake at 4 a.m.; from 4:30 to 6:30 a.m., meditate; from 6:30 to 8 a.m., have breakfast; from 8 to 11 a.m., meditate with a ten-minute break; from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., have lunch; from 12 to 1 p.m., sign up if you wish to ask the teacher private questions; from 1 to 5 p.m., meditate with two ten-minute breaks; from 5 to 6 p.m., have a snack; from 6 to 7 p.m., meditate; from 7 to 8:15 p.m., listen to a lecture in the same meditation position; from 8:15 to 9 p.m., meditate following new instructions; from 9 to 9:30 p.m., ask the teacher public questions. From 9:30 to 10 p.m., prepare for sleep. At 10 p.m., the lights went out.

And everything began again at 4 a.m. the next day, with the bell. And with the bell everything ended, eighteen hours later; ten hours and forty-five minutes filled with meditation, one hour and fifteen minutes of lecture, and six hours for eating, bathing, and resting. The bell marked the start and end of meditations, the start and end of breaks, and also mealtimes. It was the sound of life in the retreat.

At 4 a.m., I contorted myself inside my sleeping bag. I literally let out the first of a series of silent screams. I felt like Edvard Munch's most famous painting. At night, I, a chronic insomniac, fell asleep the moment I lay down. I had never thought that observing the breath could be more exhausting than closing a magazine issue. Or a rave. But it was. Many think meditation is rest, relaxation. I discovered it was a marathon of the mind. I was motionless, but inside me it seemed I was running barefoot through the São Silvestre race.

In the last meditation of the evening, we received new instructions. On night one, I learned that on day two I would observe "the subtle touch of air as it enters the nostrils." Without interfering. It may seem incredible, but I longed for that moment: moving from observing air entering and exiting to the little touch on the nose was an instant of great dynamism.

I discovered I had no control over my mind. It seems obvious, but believing we control our lives is one of the great contemporary illusions. And I had always held it in high regard. Keeping the mind in the exact present moment is a challenge; generally, we are in the past (nostalgic or regretful) or in the future (anticipating catastrophes or postponing possibilities). Here, now, we are rarely present.

From the beginning, Goenka, the vipassana teacher, asked each student to give "a fair chance to the practice." His proposal was similar to the scientific method. Don't believe, doubt. Test. But do it with rigor so the results are reliable. It seemed to me an honest proposal. It was an unconventional investigation, but I devoted myself to it with the same rigor I would bring to a report on land fraud in the Amazon or internet crimes; two subjects more familiar to my life as a reporter.

On the second day, this meant forcing my mind back to the touch of air entering the nose each of the hundreds of times it decided to take an alternate route without consulting me. Concentration transformed my world into a kind of Zhang Yimou film, the Chinese filmmaker who shoots like an impressionist painter. In his images each leaf has nuance, texture, is part of a harmonious whole. I perceived the wind in slow motion, light filtered through clouds in the sky. I began an exploration without words, through the senses. I perceived the women around me without hearing them. For some, I felt instinctive aversion. Others awakened tenderness and a deep affinity in me.

On the third day, we were to pay attention to the triangle whose base is formed by the lower lip and whose vertex is the tip of the nose. Our mission was to notice each sensation in that area. Itching, heat, cold, numbness, pressure, pain. Without judgment. And without attachment. I observed an itch at the tip of my nose, then abandoned it for a numbness in my lower lip, and so on. At lunch, my nose bled. I didn't pay much attention because I was hungry.

In those first days, I was very devoted to food, hurrying to be first in line. We had two meals and a snack. All food was vegetarian. I, a convinced food lover, had said goodbye to the outside world with a feijoada. At midnight, I had devoured a box of chocolates. It was my strategy for facing Scarlett O'Hara times, the heroine of Gone with the Wind. At the retreat, I began eating everything offered to me, from unidentifiable porridge to eggplant.

On the third day, when I lay in the sun after a delicious brown rice with what seemed to be soy meat, I noticed an ant was trapped in my blanket. I tried to free it, but in my heroic effort to save it I must have overdone it, because the ant died. That corpse hurt me more than any crime from my past. Involuntary manslaughter, I decided. There was no intent, no malice. Should I file a police report?

I wrestled with that question for a few minutes. After all, I had signed the commitment not to kill any living being. The day before, I had captured a dangerous brown spider walking across the mattress. I took the risk to return it to the bushes safe, unharmed, and lethal. And now this fatality. I decided to refrain from a public confession. I would compensate for my crime when I left. I would give the ant immortality. I created a pitch for a film where it would be the main character. I would write a screenplay for a Pixar animation.

It would go like this. Insects born and raised in Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo are tired of burying corpses crushed by aerodynamic sneakers. They discover, then, that there exists a place where killing insects is against the law, a crime punished with atrocious suffering in the next twenty reincarnations. They set out in search of the promised land and, after a series of tribulations, reach the Buddhist temple. It was everything they had promised, but the place was infested with preachers who discovered a new demon in the ant's body every day and in their friends' bodies too. Unable to bear another exorcism without laughing, my ant would become the leader of a movement for the separation of church and state. I stopped at that point because the bell rang calling for meditation. At the time, it seemed a brilliant requiem for the ant. Now, with the healthy distance of days, I am beginning to accept the idea that Pixar might not perceive the brilliance of the pitch.

In the next break I remembered that at nine years old I had written my first novel after crushing a baby cockroach. I was not a first-time offender, then. I had a record. There was still blood on my hands when I began imagining the pain of the mother cockroach coming home from work with dinner and finding her son's body sprawled in the middle of the hallway at home. In the novel, I atoned for my guilt by portraying myself as a "cold and calculating" murderer because I didn't yet know the word "psychopath." I called the "work" "Autobiography of a Cockroach" and for having committed it, I deserved the electric chair. I was at that point in my memories when the bell rang for more meditation.

This was my situation on the third day.

On the fourth, memories emerged from my unconscious at each break, memories I didn't know I had. People I had forgotten, erased episodes. Some dramatic, others simple, a quite varied repertoire. I remembered, for example, Chico, a disabled boy who studied with me in first grade. He liked me because I was the only classmate who spoke with him. One day he came to play with me and, in a burst of affection, threw the swing at my head, causing a commotion at school.

These images emerged from me like a remastered film. I felt bad because I was ashamed when Chico said I was his girlfriend. At seven years old, I didn't want to be the girlfriend of a "different" boy. I remembered his sister, who studied in the same class and spent all her time alone. I was ashamed for not being as cool as Chico thought I was. Things like this surfaced all the time. There, I thought, the gates of hell have opened.

The stimulating task of this period was to observe the sensations occurring in the infinitesimal piece of skin between the end of the upper lip and the beginning of the nose. To "sharpen the mind," Goenka explained. It was Sunday. And it was only the first Sunday I would spend there. Another full week would come, and a holiday. And I would remain not only in the same place but in the same position.

At 4:30 a.m., sitting cross-legged in the meditation room, trying to observe what was happening in the space of one centimeter above my mouth, below my nose, by order of an Indian man giving me instructions in English through a CD player, I had a bad thought about my boss. But it passed.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, the preparatory period ended. We had learned a meditation technique called anapana, to tame a mind accustomed to going wherever it pleased, teach it to obey us, and make it capable of perceiving very subtle sensations in very small spaces of the body.

Until then, we were allowed to move a hand or stretch a leg, open our eyes for a moment if necessary, go to the bathroom. In vipassana, we were to try not to move our legs and arms during the instructions and, until the end of the retreat, spend one hour, three times a day, absolutely motionless. And in the rest, try to move as little as possible. According to Goenka, one hour without movement is the minimum necessary to reach deeper levels of the body.

Vipassana meditation consists of observing sensations in each millimeter of the body: we begin at the top of the head and move downward, spending at most one minute in each place, until we reach the feet. We repeat this internal itinerary hundreds of times, hour after hour, from top to bottom, from bottom to top.

At that moment I remembered another unusual journey, that of the Frenchman Xavier de Maistre in 1790. He was an explorer of dangerous geographies. But that spring, wearing pink and blue cotton pajamas, he undertook what he called a "Journey Around My Room." Later, he even made a second installment: "Nocturnal Expedition Through My Room." De Maistre spent considerable time admiring the elegance of his sofa's feet, just as I became entranced with the quantity of sensations in my left ear.

De Maistre proposed a new way of looking at the supposedly tedious landscape of everyday life: the gaze of the traveler, the sense of the extraordinary. I remembered him as I began my long journey into my body. In my first hour, beyond detecting the body's sensations, I felt the great torments that accompany me through life: the fear of not being able to do something (at that moment, feel sensations), claustrophobia (in my case, panic at being trapped in the darkness of my body), fear of dying (I had tachycardia and thought my heart would stop beating). All of this went through my head in less than five minutes, in that order.

I perceived sensations in almost my entire body, I was terrified by the darkness in the first minutes, but I did not get trapped inside my entrails, nor did I die. We go through life without noticing in the body anything beyond the obvious sensations of pleasure or pain. On the Cartesian path ("I think, therefore I am"), we made a split between body and mind. In our time, that rupture reached its peak: the body was reduced to little more than an object of intervention, worked out or modified for the gaze of others; a stranger to ourselves.

Suddenly, I discovered that a complex universe inhabited me, with manifestations so unknown that I couldn't even name them. All things considered, it's like spending your life looking at the ocean from the beach and one day diving in. I felt a certain euphoria with this new world discovered in the most obvious and improbable place. Like the Russian Yuri Gagarin, I wanted to shout: "My body is blue!"

Vipassana means "insight," "inner vision." According to its teachers, it is the meditation used by Buddha himself 2,500 years ago in his search for enlightenment. Goenka is today the most well-known vipassana teacher and the main promoter of the technique worldwide. In Brazil, vipassana appeared in 1994, and the first center in 2003. In the courses, all work is voluntary, including that of the teachers, to "avoid commercial exploitation." At the end, students can donate any amount or work. Or give nothing.

The basic idea is present in different lines of Buddhism: what makes us suffer is attachment. In life, attachment manifests as a reaction of craving or aversion. We want to continue feeling what gives us pleasure and we don't accept feeling what causes us some kind of pain. If we learn the art of non-attachment, that is, neither crave pleasure nor feel aversion to pain, the source of suffering stops. For this, we need to understand that life is impermanence. That nothing lasts, neither pleasure nor pain. It is necessary to truly understand that everything is fleeting and therefore only ignorance leads us to any kind of attachment, and to suffering.

Vipassana is a practice. Without practice, the teachers believe that philosophy becomes empty, an intellectual exercise of no importance. In the course, it is taught that Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, perceived that each reaction of aversion or craving causes a kind of knot in our body. And only by removing these knots physically, and not creating others, could we stop suffering. As a technique, vipassana can be used by followers of any religion or none.

A mundane example. I love buying shoes. Buddha might say it's not the shoe I buy; Karl Marx would agree. What I seek is to repeat the sensation I feel when buying a shoe. I don't perceive that no matter how much I spend trying to make a pleasurable sensation permanent, it will pass and I will have to spend more money to repeat it. It's craving, it's attachment. It's illusion.

If Buddha had known this world of consumption, he probably would have seen it as a permanent source of suffering caused by craving. We become slaves to sensations, with all the implications slavery represents in life. A person can spend a lifetime in a bad job but with good pay, just to have the fleeting sensation caused by the act of consumption. Or by the power that a leadership position supposedly gives them. Or by the opposite sensation, but equally attached, which is aversion to the idea that they don't know what will happen if they try something new in life.

This idea, most of us have heard somewhere or read in a self-help book. But understanding something intellectually is easy. Changing is much harder. People who spend years in therapy sometimes despair because they already understand the reasons that lead them to a type of destructive behavior. But understanding is not enough. Changing is the most difficult process in life, especially changing how the mind has functioned since we were born. That's where the vipassana meditation technique comes in.

On the fifth day, I was enchanted by the sensations newly discovered in my body. To the point of forgetting the main and most difficult part of the practice: being equanimous. Observing, without reacting, both subtle and gross sensations. In vipassana, these are the only two categories for classifying sensations. They don't call gross sensations pain or say that a shiver of pleasure is good because that would imply a judgment of reality, the beginning of attachment.

The goal is to learn to look at pleasure and pain with the serenity of someone who knows that both will change, pass. This doesn't mean we will become a lettuce, only that it's not necessary to go crazy with joy or despair when something goes wrong. True happiness, according to vipassana, is the inner peace achieved by the awareness that we cannot control either the world or others, but we can control how we will deal with the world and with others. Without aversion or craving, it is possible to live the present without anxiety about future suffering or nostalgia for the past.

I heard all of this repeatedly in the course, and I understood it. But until the fifth day, I only understood it in the usual way: intellectually. In the evening, I experienced what the teacher would later call "flow." There were sensations throughout my body. A current of energy moved up and down through it. When I left the meditation room, I had a perception of the starry sky similar to a trip with hallucinogens. I got into my sleeping bag very pleased with myself and, for the first time, eager for the 4 a.m. bell.

I thought I already knew everything, but in fact I had made a basic mistake: I had attached myself to a pleasurable sensation and believed I could control reality to repeat it. Craving.

The bell rang and, for the first time, I got up eagerly. It was the sixth day. In the first hour without moving, I began to have severe pain in my back, just below my right shoulder. At first, I thought I had strained it when I stretched upon waking. By late morning, the pain increased whenever I sat and disappeared after a few minutes lying down.

Again, I was doing the opposite of what I had been taught: I had attached myself to a painful sensation and tried to control reality to make it disappear. Aversion.

Finally I understood: I hadn't strained it, this pain was caused by remaining seated. And if that was the reason, I calculated, I would have four and a half more days of suffering, 54 hours of horrible pain. And if it was bad at that moment, by logic it would get much worse because I would continue in the same position.

I swore a perfect silent curse. And I cried for the first time. I realized how arrogant I had been in imagining I had reached a kind of enlightenment and for thinking myself so important because of it. It's hard to explain, but I cried for perceiving myself as too human.

For the first time, I signed up to speak with the teacher after lunch. At that moment, he sits on the platform and each student, individually, sits on the floor before him. Like disciples, we are one level below the teacher. I said: "Teacher, I usually tolerate pain well, but I'm feeling very severe pain in my back and I know it won't improve because I will continue sitting in the same position." He looked at me, opened a wide smile, stretched those enormous arms, and said: "Accept the pain." And he sent me off.

I swear. I left there thinking he had said the most intelligent thing I had ever heard. The man is very charismatic, I thought. Or I am developing Stockholm syndrome, the affection a victim feels for a kidnapper as a mechanism to endure the pressure of being in the hands of a stranger.

In the next hour, I continued to feel the pain in my back, but it became small compared to the involuntary tremor in my right arm. It seemed to have its own painful life. Break, snack, and yes, I no longer worried about either the back pain or the right arm, because my left leg throbbed for an entire hour.

I was learning that even pain is impermanent, it disappears, it changes location. There's no way to predict what will happen in the next meditation. And when I thought it was possible to predict at least that I would feel pain, I had a meditation full of delicious sensations.

Vipassana teaches, in the harshest way (and unforgettably), that there is an internal reality to which we never look because we were taught to believe that everything happens in the external world. Second, that we control neither external nor internal reality. But this is a very difficult lesson to learn in practice. My last thought before sleep was: I think I've gotten used to the position and it won't hurt anymore.

As usual, I was wrong. In the first hour of meditation on the seventh day, I had more horrible pain in my back and right arm. While trying to concentrate on each part of the body, I imagined various ways to escape the pain and blamed myself for it; if I had at least brought an anti-inflammatory, everything would be resolved. Then a series of screams echoed inside my motionless figure; these people are crazy, these people are nothing but torturers, this is insanity, it makes no sense, I need to escape this place right now, now.

During the break, I understood. I only had two options: either I left, or I would have to win this war fought on the territory of the body. Packing my bags and returning to a world that now seemed very comfortable was what a considerable part of me desired. But there was another part that had always been stronger. I don't like giving up and I have never left a report unfinished. The rigidity of the meditation course fit perfectly with how I function. And I very much wanted to know how it all ended.

I felt pleasure imagining the sequence of scenes: retrieving my luggage, the driver arriving to pick me up, and in two hours, a beer by the beach in Rio. The life I knew. I could almost feel the beer going down my throat. But that option was excluded. By me.

So what awaited me was a challenge. I would have to truly understand vipassana, understand it in practice, to stop suffering. That was the complete teaching. I would have to feel the pain, or gross emotion, and look at it with "equanimity." Without craving, and without aversion. Without attachment. With the awareness that I cannot control reality, but I can control how I will deal with reality.

In this war on the territory of the body, the enemy was me. Stopping suffering depended only on me. And I had just discovered that, contrary to what I had believed until then, I was not pain-resistant. I had always been too proud to admit I felt pain, because I always confused fragility with failure. I cried again. This time, because I realized this was the most difficult struggle.

I have always had enormous difficulty accepting reality. On one hand, that's good, because it makes you move, create, transform. On the other, there are moments when it's not possible to change reality, only to accept it. But for that, you must accept something even more difficult: our limitations. Mine, in this case. I have always struggled hard against what I couldn't change. My omnipotence went so far as to think that if I couldn't change something, it was because I hadn't done enough. I knew a lot about fighting to change something, but little about accepting what I couldn't change.

This time, I could not change reality. And if I continued with my omnipotence, trying to find a magical way to remain twelve hours a day in the same position without feeling pain, I would only increase my suffering. I decided then to learn to look at pain, or pleasure (it seems easier, but it's not), with the serenity of someone who knows it is fleeting. That day, I was the last to eat. I had lost my appetite.

On the eighth day, when it was my turn to ask the teacher questions, he said: "Accept who you are." I went to cry in the middle of the woods. It was hard to look at myself without any mask. What he said might be obvious, but it sounded like redemption, because I understood not just intellectually but in practice. I had been isolated inside myself for eight days, in the last three I had felt terrible pain, I had lost three kilos and was facing all my demons eye to eye. It was a limit situation.

In the afternoon of the eighth day, I managed to practice vipassana. In my journey through each centimeter of the body or simply following the flow of sensations, I found the "hard" regions, the painful ones. I felt, I investigated for a minute, as if I were a scientist examining neutral territory, and I moved on without despair.

Gradually, I felt the pain in my back and right arm more during the meditation breaks. When I remained inside myself, scanning the body and learning to observe reality with equanimity, I stayed calm. The pain became diffuse, because I felt an infinity of sensations at the same time.

I began to have many dreams and nightmares. I wasn't the only one, I discovered later. There were people who screamed in their sleep, involuntarily breaking the "noble silence," as the rule of not speaking for ten days was called.

On the night of the eighth day, I woke startled because my entire body was meditating against my consciousness. According to the teacher, it is the unconscious that is always awake, registering all sensations. It is the most conscious part of our mind, not what we call consciousness, which operates only on the surface. That night, my entire body was a very strong flow of energy, with so many different sensations that I could have sworn I was moving.

There was so much internal movement that I woke up; an experience both extraordinary and frightening. This continued into the early morning. And then, for many other nights, even after returning home. I was submerged in myself.

But again, not as much as I imagined. The girl sitting next to me had spoken aloud, almost shouting. It was the time for public questions. Anyone who wanted to speak could sit before the teacher, one at a time. The teacher shone in these moments, always with excellent British humor. When one of the students described at length her drama because of the pillow that kept slipping, in flagrant opposition to her immobility, expecting a philosophical answer, he simply said, impassive: "Perhaps you could change pillows."

That night, my neighbor heard another student's question about "love, passion, and attachment," and wanted to add her own from the back. She was silenced and the next day she left. Next to me sat a woman who dealt with the anguish of the situation in the most basic way: trying to talk with roommates, moving a lot, making as much noise as possible. In short, trying to break all the rules. I thought: but why doesn't she just leave? Probably because, like me, it wasn't simple for her to leave.

On one side of the room were the men, on the other the women. I sat exactly at the boundary of the women's space. To my left was a man, to my right a woman. Between me and my colleague was a curtain that he opened and I closed, day after day. My new neighbor welcomed the looks of the retreat's heartthrob.

The scene was as follows: me in the middle, eyes closed, motionless, trying to learn to look at pain with serenity, and the two of them talking with mouth movements, blowing kisses, her pulling her skirts up to her thighs. Now, as I write, I find it funny. But at the time, I very much wanted to be able to speak and, let's say, touch.

I have always been intolerant of people who, in my opinion, make the world worse. Sartre's famous phrase, "hell is other people," has always been a kind of mantra for me. Beyond being bothered by being in the middle of a not-so-silent crossfire, I found it unacceptable for someone to disrespect the rules of the place where they were a guest. Again, I had two options: speak with the teacher or overcome my aversion. I cried again as I felt the size of my intolerance.

I decided it was time to learn to deal better with the hardships of external reality. If I succeeded, I would have a good chance of not losing any more sleep whenever someone did or said something unpleasant, or simply existed against my will.

I spent the entire ninth day in this internal struggle. In the morning, I ground my teeth whenever the two exchanged messages. All I got was jaw pain. By evening, I had become almost a nun. I stopped hearing them and sank into myself.

In any case, someone else was bothered, because on the tenth day the curtain was taped to the wall with duct tape. By that point, the situation that hours before had become a torment contaminating all my thoughts seemed quite funny. And it was: two adults, at a meditation retreat, trying to flirt without being able to speak or touch. That was desperation.

On the morning of the tenth day, I had pain in my back, in my right arm, and could barely sit. But that no longer disturbed me. The teacher taught the final part, called metta. In it, we emerge from our interior to, in the final minutes, give the world and people our best vibrations of peace.

I was not able to transmit much peace to the world. My mind was taken over by very painful memories that I had avoided even in years of psychoanalysis sessions. I decided not to run from them. I felt sickness in my body, I thought I would have a very strong flu. When it ended, everything in me hurt; I was ravaged territory. The teacher said we had done a "surgery on the mind," to change a deeply ingrained way of functioning. I felt exactly like that, waking up after surgery. But one without anesthesia.

I didn't want to start speaking again. At that moment, silence was a protection. But it ended. We would have an afternoon of adjustment to the outside world, and the course would end with meditation in the early morning of day eleven. To my surprise, many women wanted to speak so they could complain about the behavior of others, those who talked, snored, sneezed, sniffled. We barely opened our mouths before a stream of gossip was already circulating through the retreat.

Over the course, I realized how not speaking was good not only for inner life but for community life. If each of us could speak, there certainly would have been divisions, hurt feelings, alliances, discord. And for reasons that weren't so important, reasons that were lost over the days. That's what happens in our everyday life. We are generally confined to the space of work or home, and most of what seems very important, definitive, is just a moment that passes. When we speak, we materialize, we start a chain reaction.

As soon as the bell rang announcing the liberation of all tongues, I wanted to escape those speaking women: at that moment there were twenty-seven, counting me, most talking a lot and at the same time. I would flee that in any circumstance. But I began to like many of them, to like listening to them.

I tried to approach all of them to discover what changed in my first impression now that I heard their voices. Nothing. I had affinity for those I had already felt drawn to and preferred to stay away from those I avoided. I spent the rest of the day drinking water every ten minutes, because my throat dried up; I could only speak very slowly.

At the exact moment I am writing this, it has been two weeks since I returned from that inner journey. It seems much longer. At first, I couldn't write a single line. As soon as I recovered my little notebook, still at the retreat, I tried to note what had happened, but I couldn't. The only word I wrote was this: "word."

It was hard to make anything permanent after understanding, so radically, the impermanence of reality. I, who became a journalist in the desire to capture the real, found myself in this impasse. Writing was making permanent the moment, the fleeting event, it was preventing something from going away. It seemed impossible to go back to doing that. On the return shuttle, I picked up the newspaper and no news seemed to make sense, to matter.

I also had difficulty with memories. At the beginning of the retreat, I noticed it became increasingly hard to remember what I had thought or felt the day before. Later, it became complicated to fix my thoughts on the hours before. Similarly, I also couldn't make plans for the days ahead. I was being trained to, for the first time, not live in the past or the future, but in the present.

On my first night home, I had a nightmare, one of those where you know you're sleeping. I scratched my leg with my nails trying to wake up. Then, in the dream, my spine broke, and a kind of double emerged from my entrails. I woke with the flow of sensations moving up and down my body.

In the days that followed, the pain didn't go away. I sought help. I had an MRI. My spine is not very nice to look at. I had scoliosis that had not been diagnosed because it had never bothered me. I could spend the rest of my life without any symptoms, because the body finds its ways of compensating; or I could have problems in ten or twenty years.

More than a hundred hours in the same position in ten days triggered a severe crisis in my cervical spine. I began to feel loss of strength and mobility in my right arm. Mundane things like tying my shoelaces, writing by hand, typing on my phone became complicated. My handwriting got so bad that I couldn't read it myself. A week after my return, I couldn't sit to eat or write without feeling very strong pain. It was hard to bring the fork to my mouth, to type on the computer keyboard. This text was written slowly, with pain.

The doctor and physical therapist who treated me, both exceptional professionals, are emphatic in advising against a ten-day course with that many hours in the same position. In their opinion, something like this should be done progressively, over a long time, to prepare the body. Everything in excess would lack harmony. They are right. It's like running a marathon without any training.

I may change my mind later, but today I don't regret making it to the end. The effect vipassana had on my life outweighs the spine problems it triggered. I believe, however, that people need to know they can have problems. It has to be an assumed risk, a choice. In the case of someone with an absolutely healthy spine, of course, the chance of lasting effects is lower.

From the beginning, I was impressed by the rigor of the vipassana course in a world of so many relativisms, where you can always find a way, bend a rule or two. In those ten days, the rules were maintained, enforced, monitored closely. It was enough for someone to try to slip a little for the woman in charge of the women to tell them to sit up straight. You had to be serious or leave. It was not a space for negotiation.

I was surprised that only five people dropped out. Less than 10%. I am used to limit situations, I have great resistance to pressure, but I seriously considered quitting. It was hard to stay. And most remained, made it to the end. This might mean that there is a search for rigor, and for limits, in this world of permissiveness that permeates everything from politics to personal relationships. There is a search for something that is real, not just an easy self-help promise.

And there is also a need to feel. Our time believes it is possible to live without feeling any kind of pain, physical or psychological. Not having pain has become almost a right. A slight headache and we already run to take a pill. A real sadness and we are immediately offered an antidepressant. We don't want to menstruate or have labor pain, any disagreement with the boss ruins our day, we give up on a love at the first setback, believing we deserve eternal happiness. We can't even feel heat or cold; for that there is air conditioning. It seems what we don't want is to live. I discovered at the retreat that many people sense that there are too many false promises in their lives.

Perhaps there was an alternative path for me. Probably the most sensible thing would have been to quit when the pain increased; to accept something harder than pain, my limits. If my spine symbolically "broke," perhaps it was because of my rigidity, my difficulty being more flexible. Perhaps there was a lesson for me in giving up something important, accepting that I needed to stop. Today, I need to use what I learned in vipassana to face constant pain, twenty-four hours a day, with serenity.

At this moment, I feel my life is wider. Each day is long. I have difficulty concentrating on what happened yesterday, and next week is far away. I immediately notice when I'm experiencing something special, very simple things I wouldn't have noticed before. And I discard unpleasant events the next minute. When I feel fear or anxiety, I know it will pass. Just that certainty already cuts the monsters in half.

Life has stopped racing. It's as if the year, which flew by, suddenly hit the brakes hard. Everything is almost in slow motion. I discovered yesterday that I've been writing checks with the date from the previous month. I have no idea what will happen. And I think it's great not to know. I always thought so, but before I was more afraid.

This is my adventure, my experience, with my way of looking. It is personal, unique, untransferable. I tried to be as honest as possible with who I am, what I felt and lived. Everything written here is my interpretation; I have no endorsement from any vipassana teacher. This account is simply the report of a radical experience somewhat different from what we are used to understanding as radical. It is not an encouragement for readers to take a course like this, nor an encouragement not to.

This is simply the account of a journey to a very exotic place; my body. You could be reading about a circumnavigation of Antarctica or climbing the south face of Aconcagua. But this is a ten-day expedition, more than a hundred hours with eyes closed, without leaving the place and always inward. The opposite of any other adventure; the farther I went, the closer I was to myself. In this world where all geographies have already been explored, and most of them devastated, perhaps this is a more real challenge.

Text by Eliane Brum originally published in issue 503 of Revista Época.

Vipassana retreats are offered free of charge throughout Brazil and the world. More information and registration at Dhamma.org.