Breakdowns and breakthroughs: Coming back to my body

The first time that I truly felt the pounding of my heart, a rhythm so alarming because of the silence into which its loudness fell, I was convinced I was on the verge of dying.

It was the final hour of the 90-minute group sit that had started at 4.30am on day eight of my first ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat.

We had reached the point in the practice where the teacher SN Goenka’s instruction was to rotate your awareness around your body, observing sensation while attuning to respiration and watching, without reacting, to anything and everything observed in granular detail within the landscape of the body.

Up until that point, every time I had reached the left side of my back and torso, I couldn’t detect a thing. The whole of my physiological and felt experience in that vicinity was a sensory blank, whereas my right upper back and my right hip would often yell at me for more attention than they truly merited.

The body as burden and portal

“Our body has wisdom and we need to give ourselves a chance to hear it.” Thich Nhat Hanh

By day eight, I had worked through the habitual response to fidget and flee, and had tapped into my innate stubborn nature to remain. I was, like most of the 120 people in the Dharma Hall nestled in the woodlands of Herefordshire, resolute in my vow of Adhittana – strong determination, one of the ten prerequisite virtues that assist a spiritual aspirant in the process and practice of awakening.

I was not going to move no matter what the mind tried to fool me into thinking my body needed. I had spent far too many years imprisoned by the mixed messages relayed between my mind and body. I was here to uproot those mind weeds and set myself free. That meant checking the habitual impulse that would ordinarily have me move away from a strong sensation and instead, sit still and face it.

As the left side of my body suddenly found its proverbial voice, signalling for attention with a thumping so hard that my brain took it as a fight for survival, I went into a silent battle to remain steady while in the grip of rising heat, increasing perspiration and a tirade of thoughts that were telling me, “you are dying, this is it, you are going to die here quietly and nobody, because you cannot contact anyone, will know until it is too late.”