Meditation

[Volcano Admim]

you guys, i get into meditative state when masturbating
dead serious

[Lee Chiang Po]

you guys, i get into meditative state when masturbating
dead serious

I know the thread is dead. It went from meditation to self and something else. None of it making any sense. Interesting though. I took time to read this and this post I am sure was meant to be silly and get a laugh, but in fact, it is the only post that actually lends itself to the facts.
In his meditative state you can just imagine what he is thinking. He is committing the act in his mind. This is what meditation is actually. It is defined as thinking or intending. When we think something out, doing it over in the mind until we get it right, it is called premeditated. We premeditate an act when we meditate. We can clear the mind to be able to focus, and in order to prioritize our thoughts. But that is not meditation. We do not really trip off into another realm, we just sit or stand and think of doing something. We can do a form in our mind, over and over again. Then we can get up and do the form physically. I have done this a time or two. I can not swear that it helps me with my precision or skill, but it feels like it does. This is the simple and easy definition of meditation. Simply using the imagination to it's greatest ability.

LCP

[Fa Xing]

I was once a Buddhist monk, and this is just too much for me to wrap my head around. My head hurts reading all this stuff

Or, it could have something to do with the Organic Chemistry I just stopped working on.

[Scott R. Brown]

I was once a Buddhist monk, and this is just too much for me to wrap my head around. My head hurts reading all this stuff

Or, it could have something to do with the Organic Chemistry I just stopped working on.

Does it need to make any sense?

I would guess it is the Organic Chemistry. Organic Chemistry is supposed to make sense, conversations aren't, necessarily. It is all a matter of context.

If we don't try to wrap our head around it from the start no dilemma arises!

Being a Buddhist monk or Organic Chemist doesn't necessarily prepare one for seemingly pointless conversations.

[backbreaker]

TaiChi Bob has broken the correct's neck with a punch. Excellent ideas. I practice a walking meditation where you breathe in for 4 or 6 steps , then hold for 2 steps , then out for 4 or 6 steps , hold for 2 , then breathe in again for 6 etc. When I concentrate on the meditation I am way more aware of all the sounds and what's going on around me , it's hard to explain. When I walk around regularly and conciously try to focus on things around me I miss most of what's around me and am unaware of alot.

[Nexus]

Originally posted by backbreaker
TaiChi Bob has broken the correct's neck with a punch. Excellent ideas. I practice a walking meditation where you breathe in for 4 or 6 steps , then hold for 2 steps , then out for 4 or 6 steps , hold for 2 , then breathe in again for 6 etc. When I concentrate on the meditation I am way more aware of all the sounds and what's going on around me , it's hard to explain. When I walk around regularly and conciously try to focus on things around me I miss most of what's around me and am unaware of alot.

This makes sense. If we're walking, and we try to focus on each thing specifically, we enter into dualistic thinking.. for example, we focus on a branch, and we see the branch, not the tree. Focus on the tree, and we see the tree, not the forest. Focus on the forest.. etc.

By relaxing and breathing, we experience all the senses in full bloom, and our awareness is heightened, which could be thought of as our sixth sense. Take care.

[Nexus]

This makes sense. If we're walking, and we try to focus on each thing specifically, we enter into dualistic thinking.. for example, we focus on a branch, and we see the branch, not the tree. Focus on the tree, and we see the tree, not the forest. Focus on the forest.. etc.

By relaxing and breathing, we experience all the senses in full bloom, and our awareness is heightened, which could be thought of as our sixth sense. Take care.

The "we" that is experiencing the senses is the mind. When the source of the "I" is sought, it is cut off at the root. Then there is in fact no mind by which to experience any senses. There is no sixth sense, since there is in fact no "doer" who experiences any senses.

The source of all things is the Self. The Self is all there is. To see the Self, Be the Self. Look for the source of where thoughts come from and where the notion of "I" arises. The mind, when sought after disperses since there cannot be both the "doer" and the one who observes the "doer."

[taai gihk yahn]

The mind, when sought after disperses since there cannot be both the "doer" and the one who observes the "doer."

then who is writing this?

[Nexus]

then who is writing this?

Nothing is being written, so how can there be a writer?

[Scott R. Brown]

The "we" that is experiencing the senses is the mind. When the source of the "I" is sought, it is cut off at the root. Then there is in fact no mind by which to experience any senses. There is no sixth sense, since there is in fact no "doer" who experiences any senses.

The source of all things is the Self. The Self is all there is. To see the Self, Be the Self. Look for the source of where thoughts come from and where the notion of "I" arises. The mind, when sought after disperses since there cannot be both the "doer" and the one who observes the "doer."

Hi Nexus,

Welcome back!

If the "I" is cut off at the root, and there is no mind to experience the senses, then what is this "Self" of which you speak? If there is no "I" how can there be a "SELF"?

If there is no doer that experiences any senses, then why do I experience sensation and what is it that is experiencing them?

If there is no doer who observes the doer, then what is it that observes and what is it that acts and how are the two related?

[Nexus]

If the "I" is cut off at the root, and there is no mind to experience the senses, then what is this "Self" of which you speak? If there is no "I" how can there be a "SELF"?

Here is some elaboration:

The Self is happiness, bliss, peace. There is no doer of peace, the Self is peace. It is a disturbed mind that hinders one from realizing their true nature. This occurs from the delusion that the body is the self, and thus the five senses and memory are perceived as the "I". As one delves into the source of the "I" through self-inquiry, one will realize their true nature, and the mind that seems to constantly chatter will vanish, leaving one with clarity and true understanding of the self.


Experience the Self, do not seek to know it through knowledge of others, but through self-inquiry. By looking for the minds source, the mind will eventually vanish. This can be done by looking inward, introverted, for the source from where the notion of "I" arises and not deviating from this looking. This is not a process of analyzing where it came from, but rather directly focussing on the source inwardly from where the "I" arises. Look for when the notion of "I" arises, and find its source.

If there is no doer that experiences any senses, then why do I experience sensation and what is it that is experiencing them?

The answer is in the question. Look to where the source of the "I" that experiences sensation comes from.

[GeneChing]

The top 2019 fitness trends — and how to incorporate them into your workouts
Fitness professionals say these are the exercise trends to watch this year. Here's how to use them to your advantage.
Watch for sports with smartwatch. Jogging training for marathon.


Wearable technology is seeing a resurgence, taking the first place for 2019 fitness trends (after dropping to 3rd place in 2018).Lifemoment / Getty

Jan. 2, 2019 / 5:50 AM PST
By Stephanie Mansour

Each year, the worldwide survey of fitness trends is sent to over 30,000 fitness professionals to rank exercise trends for the next year. These trends aren't "trendy" or fads — almost all of the most popular fitness trends predicted for 2019 have earned a spot on the list in previous years.

The trends that have staying power (such as HIIT training and group workouts) are ones that are easily accessible in everyday life. and deliver results, fast. Wearable technology is seeing a resurgence, taking the first place for 2019 (after dropping to 3rd place in 2018). Here are some of the top 2019 fitness trends along with their health pitch or claim, plus a takeaway for how you can integrate them into your current fitness plan.

STREAMING WORKOUTS
The Trend: Streaming workouts allow you to have the convenience of an instructor-led workout accessible no matter where you are. If you travel a lot and are stuck in hotel rooms, or if you’re unmotivated to get to the gym and go to an in-person class, these streaming workouts are for you.

The Verdict: As with all exercise, consistency is key. I’d recommend trying a streaming workout for a month, and track how often you use it. Then take the amount you paid for the subscription for the streaming workouts, and divide it out into how many workouts you actually did. Then decide if it's financially worth it to you. Celebrity trainer Joey Thurman (creator of the Joey Thurman fit app) warns that with streaming workouts, you don’t have a professional checking your form and prescribing the right exercises for your body, so you could risk injuring yourself or enforcing bad habits. So it may be worth scheduling a session or two with a personal trainer in person first to get instruction on proper technique. “All in all,” he says, “If it’s a reputable source, trainer, coach and company, you should be fine.”

The Takeaway: If you have an erratic schedule or travel often, the convenience of having workouts ready to play wherever you are can help you stick with a routine. What’s the difference between buying a subscription to streaming workouts and searching for workouts on YouTube, you ask? Good question. If you’re financially invested in a workout program, you’re more likely to stick to it. So while the free workouts may be tempting, the financial commitment may help keep yourself accountable.

HIIT WORKOUTS
The Trend: Traditionally, the benefit of HIIT workouts (high intensity interval training) is that you can get a big bang for your exercise buck. By pushing yourself through interval training, and alternating between high intensity and lower intensity, you’re all in for a shorter workout that rarely provides breaks or time to catch your breath. HIIT is being incorporated into more and more workouts – from boutique gyms to bootcamps. They’re even starting to pop up in Pilates classes and yoga classes.

The Verdict: According to Thurman, “This is a trend that never should go away.” He says that the point of HIIT is to, “Go hard or go home!” He has his clients do these workouts on their own one to three times a week and incorporates HIIT into his training sessions. Research shows that high intensity interval training is one of the best ways to burn fat quickly. By pushing your body full force for a shorter amount of time, you’re getting a strength training workout, cardio workout and a full-body workout all at once.

The Takeaway: You don’t need a fancy HIIT class to incorporate this trend into your workout. You can apply the HIIT training principles to any workout that you’re already doing. If you’re the queen of cardio, you can make your cardio workout more effective by changing your speed or changing the difficulty every few minutes. Or you could add 30 second sprints every few minutes. If you’re doing a strength training workout, you can cut out breaks in between sets and add in some cardio bursts to get your heart rate up. If you’re looking to spice up your yoga or Pilates routine, move through some parts of the sequence faster and go slower through other parts.

GROUP TRAINING CLASSES
The Trend: If you’re motivated by a competitive spirit or can't afford one-on-one training but would like direction from a fitness instructor, group training classes are a popular trend that allows participants to use the energy of a group to push through a workout.

The Verdict: Group training classes can serve as a good motivator to push yourself harder or faster compared to the people around you. One study found that 95 percent of those who started a weight-loss program with friends completed the program, compared to a 76 percent completion rate for those who tackled the program alone. Other studies confirm that working out with a partner significantly increases time spent exercising. Plus, with an instructor-led workout, you can bank on a good, hard workout, that doesn't take much forethought or planning on your part. However, Thurman warns, “Beware that everyone is doing the same workout, and one instructor has to watch 20 or 30 of you. Be sure to keep strict form and always speak up if something doesn’t feel right!”

The Takeaway: Enlisting a group mentality can help when your motivation starts to wane. Consider working out with a group of friends in your living room, joining a run club for weekly jogs in the park or signing up for a group training class to help hold yourself accountable and push yourself harder.

The Trend: Wearable trackers are definitely here to stay. They’re helping everyday people track their health on many different levels. From encouraging you during a tough workout to giving you feedback on your sleep, there’s a tracker to suit your needs.

The Verdict: Many of my clients use trackers in addition to their other health and fitness goals. For example, one of my clients has a tracker and tries to close her “rings” everyday. She has a step goal (10,000), a water goal (she has to manually enter this), and a sleep goal (a minimum of 6 hours) to meet. This is in addition to her other goals that help with weight loss. But when she closes her rings, it gives her an extra confidence boost. So while trackers are great, I’d recommend using them as a supplement to other goals. Thurman echoes this, “Wearing a smart watch is great … if you use it correctly. It’s nice that you hit your 10,000 steps a day, but how many steps were you taking before you got the watch?”

The Takeaway: Take the wearable technology with a grain of salt. Thurman even says, “Sometimes technology gives you a reason to slack off. They can also give you a false sense of accomplishment by overestimating your calorie burn or how hard you worked.” So use this tool to help keep you on track, but don’t rely on them fully.

The Trend: When you’re working with a personal trainer, all you have to do is show up and let him/her do the coaching. A personal trainer not only provides a well-rounded and educated workout for you, but also ensures accountability with the appointments. Thurman (who, as a personal trainer, admits he's biased) says, “For the most part, I would say this is the best way to get you the most efficient workout and results the fastest.”

The Verdict: As a certified personal trainer myself, I know the kind of results we can deliver. But sometimes I cringe when I see trainers in the gym staring off or checking their phones instead of checking the form of their clients. Make sure you have an attentive trainer who pushes you, but never makes you feel like it’s “all pain and no gain.” Ideally you want to feel like you’re working together with the trainer.

The Takeaway: “Make sure the trainer knows what they’re doing, will push you safely, is certified, and will give you 95 percent of what you want and 5 percent of what you need,” says Thurman. Communicate with your trainer so that you’re both on the same page, and if one isn’t working out for you, shop around for someone with a coaching style that fits your needs. If expenses are an issue, go to one personal training session a week and ask for a written out workout routine that you can follow for a few other days during the week. It is also important to know that trainers realize it won't be a life long partnership! The goal is to help you reach your goals and equip you with the tools you need to succeed on your own. So be honest about how many sessions you can afford and what you hope to accomplish in that time.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

NOT ON THE LIST BUT SHOULD BE: MEDITATION BECOMES MAINSTREAM IN FITNESS
The Trend: Working out the mind is becoming almost as popular as working out the body. By practicing meditation and mindfulness, you’re able to be more in tune with your body and how you’re feeling. Whether you flow through a moving meditation (like in a yoga class) or set aside time each day to sit in a traditional pose and meditate, it’s becoming more and more common for people to have their own personal meditation practice.

The Verdict: Thurman says, “Meditation has been around for thousands of years for a reason … it works! The mind is a powerful thing, and I suggest getting to know yourself.” He also says that we can utilize our own energy for good or bad, and I’ve noticed this with my clients as well. When we go through positive body-image meditations, their outlook on themselves slowly (but positively) changes. What’s more, along with the mental effects of meditation, research shows that there are also physiological effects from meditation. Pain reduction, improvement in immune system, increasing blood flow to the heart, and decreasing cortisol are just a few of the effects that are similar to the effects of exercise.

The Takeaway: You can integrate meditation into your everyday life by using meditation apps. There are also some boutique studios that specialize in meditation, and even some mainstream gyms now offer meditation classes. The practice of mindfulness can also be brought into any workout — not just traditional meditation. Bring your awareness to a certain body part during a bootcamp session or pay attention to your breathing pattern as you run on a treadmill. Not only will you quiet your mind, but focusing specifically on certain aspects of your body may also push you to work harder and better target muscle groups.

Meditation as a Fitness Trend. We've been saying that for centuries.

[GeneChing]

This isn't quite a Buddhists behaving badly or a Meditation post, but we don't have a Vipassana thread... yet.

The Other Side Of Paradise: How I Left A Buddhist Retreat In Handcuffs
Michael Holden went to a Buddhist retreat to find himself. Now he's off his meditation
BY MICHAEL HOLDEN, ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNA BU KLIEWER
26/12/2018


Anna Bu Kliewer

‘ALL OF HUMANITY’S PROBLEMS STEM FROM MAN’S INABILITY TO SIT QUIETLY IN A ROOM ALONE’ – BLAISE PASCAL, 1662

The police stayed calm and the Buddhists were calmer, but by then there wasn’t much anyone could do. In the hours previously, I had come to believe, simultaneously and sequentially, that I was: dead, alive, omniscient, immortal, non-existent, gay, straight, telepathic, a flower, a pulse of pure energy and a nuclear bomb. And that was the good part, relatively speaking. By the time I was handcuffed and led to an ambulance, my troubles, or at least this episode among them, were just underway.

It is not the conclusion one pictures to a meditation retreat: a shackled, ranting, middle-aged man being taken to hospital under police supervision. Ideas like mindfulness and meditation are sold largely by images of good-looking people and unfurrowed brows. Yet it wasn’t upbeat marketing that led me to a 10-day, silent sanctuary on the Welsh borders, but a man on fire.

Forty years before flunking out of Buddhism in chains, I chanced upon Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photograph of Thich Quang Duc, a monk, sat, burning to death by his own hand in an act of protest at a crossroads in Saigon, South Vietnam. “As he burned he never moved a muscle,” said The New York Times journalist David Halberstam, a witness to it, “never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”

I was young when I found the horrific image but I saw in it, also, proof that there was another way to be beyond than the swirling, self-sustaining system of hopes and regrets already established in my restless brain.

Decades later, a collision of life crises (marital, professional, medical and familial) and a kind of emotional insurgency — a relentless sense that there was something beyond or beneath all this — propelled me first into meditation, and then to the retreat where, if enlightenment were not forthcoming, at least I would have spent some time without my phone. What could go wrong?

A simple, contemporary definition of meditation is “a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control.” Written references date back to 600BC. Techniques and traditions vary, but the most prominent associations are with Buddhist philosophy, and there are few spiritual schools of thought or religions which do not accommodate some practice which might be described as meditative.

Meditation’s modern offspring, “mindfulness”, has its roots (as a phrase) in the 20th century. Where one begins and the other ends is the subject of much debate. Suffice to say whether you’re sitting silently in a monastery or staring at a smartphone in your sister’s spare room, if you are taking time out to observe your thought patterns and breathe in a conscious manner, one or both terms have you covered.

What began in antiquity abided and bloomed into a billion-dollar industry in the US alone. Be it through ashrams or apps — there are over 1,300 now, and the Headspace app has been downloaded close to 35m times — meditation has been touted as a panacea for everything from childhood trauma to palliative care. There is plenty of evidence, empirical and anecdotal, that in many of these areas it does have positive results. So, I read some books, looked online, sat, and watched what my mind did.

From 15 minutes of sitting a day I felt subtly but tangibly changed. “Mental processes” were definitely “under greater voluntarily control”. I was no Buddha, but I was demonstrably less volatile. I had a taste for it and was soon seeking ways to do more. Much more. I booked the retreat. The perceptive among you will note this is precisely the kind of desirous behaviour pattern that meditation is often deployed to break, but Nirvana wasn’t built in a day.

Deep in the Herefordshire countryside at the tail end of June, the retreat I attended felt and looked like the apex of serenity. The discipline chosen by me and around 150 other attendees — an idealistic mix of ages, races and gender — is known as Vipassanā which, they will tell you, means “seeing things as they really are”. We decamped cheerfully from coaches and cars, gave up our phones, agreed not to speak for a week-and-a-half and wandered off to billets on the sprawling former farm. The atmosphere prior to the commencement of silence (you can talk with the retreat leaders at allotted times, if need be) was one of warm, collective anticipation, somewhere between a school trip and a festival.

At 4am the next day, we were awoken by a gong. And so began an 11-hour daily programme of meditation, punctuated occasionally by vegetarian food (until midday, after which it was fruit only). In the evenings, we gathered to hear the teachings of the course’s founder, Satya Narayan Goenka, an avuncular but deceased Burmese/Indian businessman and Buddhist scholar whose posthumous addresses were screened nightly. They came to provide a kind of group release; we laughed, and not just as counterpoint to the silence. Like other spiritual teachers, and some stand-ups, Goenka walked a fine line between practical philosophical insight and observational comedy.

After several days of silence, sermons, slender rations and pre-dawn starts, something significant shifted inside me. The inner dialogue ceased, replaced by an outbreak of peace so fundamental as to transcend what I could or can still share with language. And I could see and sense, even if I couldn’t speak to the others, that this was happening among them too.

The power of such a revelation, that everything you might have hitherto insisted you consisted of was instead an illusory construct which can, through self-examination, vanish and be replaced by something best described as love… that can take some getting used to. The implications for your “self” (by this point a minority shareholder in that which you perceive yourself to be) and society (all conflict, and thus much of history, being by these terms an avoidable mistake) are considerable. But before I could assimilate this, or perhaps because I couldn’t, the limitless love became a gruelling fear, mutating into the conviction that I, personally, could bring about the end of everything, since the macrocosm of our universe seemed so clearly and precariously contained within the microcosm of my being. Say this like you mean it, act stubbornly on your pronouncements, and they will come for you with handcuffs too.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

I HAD COME TO BELIEVE, SIMULTANEOUSLY AND SEQUENTIALLY, THAT I WAS: DEAD, ALIVE, OMNISCIENT, IMMORTAL, NON-EXISTENT, GAY, STRAIGHT, TELEPATHIC, A FLOWER, A PULSE OF PURE ENERGY AND A NUCLEAR BOMB. AND THAT WAS THE GOOD PART, RELATIVELY SPEAKING

Psychosis is, I suspect, a little like falling in or out of love: something on the cusp of the personal and the universal that each of us experiences differently. Between the ambulance ride and the oblivion of sedation, I was held in a room with two police officers at the local A&E. They looked on reasonably benignly as I did my best to convey what I was feeling which, among other stark hallucinations and a roiling, primal fear, was that I was dying and being reborn every 90 seconds or so. I can’t really describe what that is “like” since the one comparable event is largely unremembered and the other unknowable, but it felt real and it was gruelling, and, in the end, I was begging them to knock me out.

All this was much to reflect on as I recovered (to some extent) in a psychiatric hospital over the next 48 hours. How had I fallen so hard and wide of the mark of meditation, of something so seemingly benign? Others on the retreat had become emotional, openly weeping (as I had done) but no one else had begged to stop, only to refuse to leave and then been forcibly removed.

What I did know, was that I had been “here” before. And not in a past life. In the mid-Nineties, in my mid-twenties when I was working as a journalist in London, I took enough recreational drugs to keep me awake for nine days, at the end of which I was psychotic, sectioned, sedated and held in hospital for four months. That might sound dramatic, but I did it to myself and for all I know the treatment (including drugs since withdrawn from use) and the incarceration saved my life. Certainly, it shaped it.

The advantage of this, insofar as it had one, was that when my mind disintegrated for the second time, I had some sense of what I was in for, and I knew I could get back. Maybe. Even naked terror takes the occasional break, and the sense in those moments that there is a way out, is in some ways all you need to carry on.

This time I was in and out of hospital in one weekend. With a month’s worth of anti-psychotic medication, I had some decisions to make. It seemed clear to me that if I could reach such an altered state through intoxication and insomnia once, and then do it again 20 years later through silence and concentration, then that state was “real” and not a figment of my imagination or the symptom of an illness per se.

I didn’t want to stay medicated (my previous stint had lasted a decade), and I understood that the rules of the retreat meant that as I had left before the end, I could not go back. Vipassanā makes it clear in its literature regarding “serious mental disorders” that: “Our capacity as a non-professional volunteer organisation makes it impossible to properly care for people with these backgrounds.”

I had been screened out at the initial application because of my history and then, after going into detail, accepted, as my prior issues were so long ago. I was thrilled to be admitted and delusional when I left, but barring some emails and a follow-up phone call, early exits from Vipassanā are final. Tossed from what had seemed briefly to be heaven, I went back to my elderly folks, weaned myself off the meds, and got thoroughly depressed.

In the weeks that followed, I began to google “meditation”, “mental illness”, “mania” (as my ex-wife pointed out, I ought really to have done this beforehand). But it was then I found that far from being alone in this, I was one of many who had learned the hard way that at a certain level, for some practitioners, something like psychosis is part of the meditative programme. And that not everyone who goes through that survives.


Anna Bu Kliewer

Dr Daniel Ingram is a recently retired, frontline ER physician who worked in one of America’s largest trauma centres in Huntsville, Alabama. He left trauma medicine in his late forties, he says, since, “you see some extremely bad stuff in high quantities, it starts to take its toll… it is in some ways a younger person’s game.” Ingram is also the author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, a seminal and substantial text which, alongside a busy online forum which he moderates, has become a resource for those for whom the vogue for meditation revealed the void. One of his contentions is that despite millennia of existing wisdom about what can and will happen when you close your eyes and follow your breath for long enough, modern versions of these practices are often mis-sold.

“This dream of peace and wellbeing, happiness and contentment, mental health and emotional clarity,” says Ingram, “[doesn’t recognise] that some reasonable proportion of people will also be catapulted into full-on, deep-end spiritual development by crossing what the Buddhist tradition I come from calls the ‘Arising and Passing Away’ stage. And then they’re off and running in this whole different end of development, which, as you now know, is quite a different thing than what most people signed up for.”

An irony of finding Ingram’s work was that my own “madness”, the singularity of which I was both scared and perversely proud of, was made familiar, if not quite mundane. In a broad sense, he has heard it all before.

“You crossed the ‘Arising and Passing’ and hit the standard ‘Dark Night’ stages, just as one would predict,” he explains. When I tell him about the birth-and-death cycling, which I had taken to be particularly troubling and profound, he just says, “Nice”. These challenging but navigable “stages of insight”, he explains, are as old as meditation itself. They have, however, been largely omitted from the modern conversation.

The Vipassanā retreat I visited is part of a global, free-to-attend franchise run on the guidelines established by Goenka. The regime there, says Ingram, is, “absolutely perfect for getting people across the ‘Arising and Passing Away’, [but] not normalising the next stages.” These stages are often traumatic, known colloquially and historically as the “Dark Night”, and bear little or no phenomenological difference to the medical classification of mental illnesses, particularly bipolar disorder. According to Ingram, with the right expectations and support, the stages are temporary. Without it, “people crash out into the world a total wreck. I’ve had a hundred of these calls, more, I couldn’t possibly count them,” he says. “If you go online, the number of reports of this happening is thousands. So many I’ve lost track of them all.”

Three months before I entered Vipassanā, Megan Vogt, a 25-year-old American woman left a near-identical centre in the US “incoherent, suicidal and in psychosis,” according to reports in the local news. Ten weeks after she left the retreat she took her own life. Unlike me, Vogt had no history of mental illness or drug use. She would not have presented any issue at the application stage or known what hit her on the retreat. Nor did her family, or, it seems, the medical professionals to whom she was referred.

A spokesman for the Vipassanā Trust, which manages the network of retreats in the Goenka tradition, acknowledged that Vogt’s case was “horrendous, tragic and traumatic” but that such outcomes were “exceptionally rare”. He told me 1.2m new students have used their retreats since 2001, and they have accepted more than 200,000 since 2016. He also said that this case, and any other “serious incident”, was subject to an “incident review”, and that the Vipassanā Trust’s objective in these matters was to “check ourselves that everything is being done, and if not then make some changes and tighten it up”. He added that any student, regardless of how they exit or whether they finish the programme, is welcome to contact them for support or even to reapply.

Meditation can be rigorous, especially Vipassanā.