I tried to perform meditation and ended up breathless
I went into my first 10 day Vipassana course, determined. Mostly because I couldn't bear the idea of me telling people that I dropped it mid way.
Ten days of silence. No phone, no laptop, no eye contact, no talking. Rules to follow. Honestly, all things I like. The only two things I was mildly worried about were sitting still for that many hours, and the food.
We heard Mr. Goenka's recorded instructions each evening and carried them out through the next day. Then he'd review what we might have run into and move us on to the next stage.
I started keeping score. Oh, I already had that one yesterday. That already happened to me. I'm doing great at this. I genuinely thought I had something special in me (halo), that I'd move faster than most people in the hall. I am ambitious, I run on willpower - and I brought all of it into the Vipassana course. The first two or three days, I was doing brilliant. I felt like an advanced user.
Then I started to feel breathless. In the middle of meditation, I caught myself yawning a lot. Not the sleepy yawn. The yawn where you feel like air is not reaching your lungs and you try real hard to take deep breaths. This wasn't entirely new. It had happened at work over the last few years, and I'd never paid it much attention. But now with not much else to do, I was noticing things about myself more closely. Palpitations came with it.
And then Mr Goenka's voice started to trigger me. Every instruction came in that voice, all day. I began dreading walking into the meditation hall, because I knew what would be waiting: the pressure in my chest, the feeling that I couldn't get air in.
I told myself... but you can't talk to anyone. You can't get up and leave. You're supposed to be still. These are the rules you must follow.
What else could I do. I asked myself: what calms me down?
People. My family. A few close friends.
I built a mental grid in my head of the meditation hall, laid out like a chessboard. I imagined my sister sitting on my right side. I put brothers on the left. My mother, my father, a close friend, each in a position. I needed all the pieces on the board around me to feel safe. When I could visualize them there, I could breathe.
But that night things got worse. The breathlessness came back and I couldn't sleep. The harder I worked at it, the tighter it got, and I ended up in the loop, which I now think was a panic attack. My first.
I was sharing a room with a very young girl in her early twenties. I didn't want to wake her, didn't want to scare her. I didn't want to trouble the assistant teachers or volunteers. So I lay there, terrified, thinking: I'm going to need a hospital tonight. This is how my first Vipassana is going to end. And what I remember most clearly is not wanting it to end that way. I wanted the full ten days. Not this. I got through it somehow. I slept.
The next morning I told the teacher I was feeling breathless. She said: Relax. Watch your breath. Don't force it. You actually have to do nothing. I was crying as I said "But I didn't know how to relax. I've always been stressed and I don't know how to not be." She said: try.
I don't know what that did, exactly. But something moved in that moment. What followed wasn't a breakthrough. It was the opposite. The instructions kept advancing every day and I couldn't keep up, because I was still stuck on the basics. All that progress I'd tallied up through days four and five were gone. I had to go back to the beginning, to the anapana stage.
But I knew that was fine. Goenkaji had said it plenty of times: the measure of our progress was not in being able to have blissful feelings, or sweeping sensations through the body, or the absence of gross sensations. You might get pain. You might get nothing. The only question is whether you can be equanimous with it.
So I built back up slowly from the basics and got wherever I got in those 10 days. Maybe that's how far I was meant to go this time. It won't be my last sit. What I took home wasn't a state or a sensation. It was that I had been performing meditation. And somewhere in there, I stopped.
That's when I actually started to meditate.