Wat Rampoeng (11 day Temple Retreat)

Right, so I get back to the retreat and all the rules are still the same as last time, so only white clothes, no talking, no eating after twelve, no more sleep than 6 hours, basically no nothing! So I change into white clothes and get setttled into my room (which may have been the exact same one as 10 years ago; it at least looked exactly like it). I agree with the intern that I'll try to do 7 hours of meditation and that I'll see the abbot the day after and join in on the opening ceremony another day later. And just like that I'm back to meditating at the retreat that had made such an impact on me ten years ago, which was a strange feeling.

The temple itself have changed a lot and I only recognized a couple of things. The abbot was still the same person though.

HARDSHIP
So I knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park, but I'm a more experienced meditator now so I hoped it would be a bit easier; wrong! All Wrong! And I'll tell why: you see I was supposed to do 7 hours on the first day, but because I'm awesome meditator now I wanted to show them so I do 10 hours, which does slightly impress people once, but then just raises my bar for the rest of the retreat; crap.. That by the way is just something about this retreat; it will never leave you in your comfort zone for more than a day; never. The exhaustion and needing to ultimately accept it, is however, just a way to force insights to reveal themselves.

Meditation burn outs
When I started I meditated, I did it like I do at home, which apparently expends a lot of energy, as after 3 hours, my brain was turned to absolute mush! I couldn't focus or think a single coherent thought. This would happen three more times when I would get too excited or after the abbot would tell me "more awareness..... more concentration" (by which he meant more hours, not forcing more concentration). 

Sleep
A side effect of meditating is that your imagination gets freed up, which resulted in (extremely clear) images popping up in my mind (things like mountains, huge wooden figures, but also monster-like creatures). This would also result in me being woken by extremely vivid nightmares basically the second I would go to sleep. Like it literally was like turning on Netflix and starting to watch something terrible, it was that consistent. Also the bed was just made out of wood, which made my rib cage feel like it was being crushed, which didn't help. So the majority of nights I only got between 1 and 3 hours of sleep, which left me feeling like zombie.

Itchiness
So I don't know, my blood must have some pretty good reviews on Mosquito Google, because they were all after me for some reason. I meditated underneath the Boddhi tree a couples of times which was great, but it was often cut short due to too many mosquito stings. Also our bodies at certain times just generate random itches, which we were taught to ignore, so at certain times I'd have up to around 10 itchy hotspots going on at the sae time.   

Hunger
I decided beforehand that I would stick to the regular two meals and not buy extra snacks, or grant myself huge potions. So that'd be noodle soup in the morning plus a small banana, then for lunch; rice with two curries and another piece of fruit and at five I'd sometimes would have some warm rice milk. Now you don't need much calories there, but this would still leave me pretty hungry in the evening. 

Pain
The longer I meditated, the more pains started to develop; so I had sore knees when sitting and backaches when walking and pain in my fingers, neck and feet just in general.

Conclusion (about all the suckiness)
Meditation retreats suck j/k :P I had times where I was sleep deprived, hungry, sore in multiple places, itchy, and depressed. And I just felt like my whole body was just conspiring against me. I thought about quiting a couple of times, especially not being able to sleep was killing, but fortunately I pressed on!

REWARDS
Eye of exhaustion
Much like last time I managed at some point to give thought a rest, which would result in very clear vision of the current moment, where everything looked very clear. It took me quite a while though, but at some point I had become so exhausted that there just was no other options. In this state you can rest your mind while being awake.

My body, is not my body
The moments where my body would feel itchy, painful, hungry and tired really helped me see that my body for the largest part is outside of my control and that while there was discomfort it functioned fine. After a while of this, all these individual source of discomfort would blend into one big tingly feeling and it would become much easier to accept it. It felt really good to not need to constantly respond to every ache and pain and definitely builds equinimity. So just this feeling that it doesn't matter what happens.

The physical vs mental
At some point it became very clear that when you notice a body part, that there is on one hand the thought 'leg' in the head and on the other hand the actual feeling of the leg. I extended this to seeing that the thought of 'thinking' was also a physical feeling in my head. After this a part of my normal reality just dropped away and it was like there was only the tingly feeling of my body without the thoughts. It felt realy good and calm. This lasted through the night and was still there when I woke up. I used it to investigate further phenomena.

Pleasure
I had multiple moments every day in the last view days where my entire body seemed to be made of pure pleasure, usually after accepting a bad memory or emotion.

Blackness
At ome point after havng some insight into thought just being like a fountain rather than me thinking the thoughts my mind seemed to justt go black and I couldn't hear my own thoughts anymore. Like I knew what I was thinkiing, but couldn't hear the voice anymore. 

(false) Enlightenment experiences
I have to admit that I had several moments where it felt like the whole structure of thought seemed to be coming to an end and it would feel like everything would be dropping away. This would usually be followed by the thought "is this it, has all suffering come to and end?". After a while I would realise that that thought probably meant that it hadn't. After having had this happen a couple of times I have now started to feel that the classic idea of enlightenment is a fairytale and if there is indeed something like this at all, that it is almost indistinguishable from normal existence. 

MEETIING WITH THE ABBOT
It was nice to see the same abbot again, he did look a little older, but not much. He is a very well respected man as he has trained with some of the absolutely legends, has trained thousands of students, runs an important monastery and is an important person in the local community. So you'd expect a very serious person, but in reality there's not one conversation where he doesn't at least giggle uncontrollably once :P Like during our opening ceremony he noticed there were four Maria's and thought it was funny he has four mother's of Jezus in his Buddhist monastery. A part of the practice is to take note of touch points around the body, which he would call "making selfies of yourself" HIHIHIHIHII :P  My meetings weren't as eventful as last time though. I asked a bunch of questions and he would usually just quote the Buddha. 

GENERAL
In general I feel like a lot of bad emotions and general karma have dropped away. I was very happy in general during the retreat and it definitely has made my future more clear for me. So despite all the hardship, I'm very happy I did it again and I felt it was even more of profound experience than last time.