“HOW HAS VIPASSANA changed your life?”
This is a standard question on the student intake form for a Vipassana course in the S. N. Goenka tradition. For years, after taking my first ten-day retreat in 2003, I used to write a paragraph-long answer describing all the positive ways Vipassana had affected me. Over time, something shifted and now I simply state, “I’m more sensitive.” And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way.
Vipassana is the systematic scanning of the sensations of the body, part by part, and the observation of the rapid arising and passing away of those sensations. Essentially, one pays attention to how external stimuli come into contact with the six sense doors and the sensations that arise from the contact between the two. As a result, I’ve found that I’ve become very sensitive to noise. Hammering and sawing noise from construction, for example, agitates me much more than it does others. People I’m with usually don’t even register such noise—or, if they do, they don’t mind it. But I often have to generate equanimity, compassion, or patience to calm my irritation. And it’s not only noise. Someone’s synthetic cologne can ruin a meal in a restaurant. Moreover, I’m strongly affected by unsettling energies from malicious, severely intoxicated, or mentally disturbed people. In other words, my susceptibility to dukkha—to stress—seems to have increased due to my meditation practice, not decreased.
That’s why I was so intrigued by David Kortawa’s article on the psychological risks of meditation, “Lost in Thought,” in the April 2021 issue of magazine. I was struck by one section in particular: a 2014 study from Carnegie Mellon in which two groups of participants were subjected to deliberately hostile interviews. One group was coached in meditation for three days prior to the study, and the other group wasn’t. Interestingly, the participants who had meditated reported less stress during the
