** Fear

A couple days later fear again started to build up in me.  

It was taking longer for me to revive my legs and walk normally after each hour of meditation.  It got to the point where I walked with a limp for a couple hours after sitting, and had pain walking all the time.  We would open our eyes during meditation breaks, and I would see everyone else leave as I recovered.  I was in the bottom couple percent in regaining the ability to walk.  Just one other person had as much trouble, and less often than I did, as far as I could  tell.  I worried that I was doing permanent damage to my legs.  

When walking I would ask myself if I was meditating "intelligently" and if it did anyone any good for me to screw up my knees.  The flipside of that thought process was no better, that I had a psychosomatic issue that no one else had.

I decided to stop being stupid the morning of day six, if I recall correctly.  I would stop meditating, sit against the wall in the back of the room, my back against the wall, my legs in front of me, shifting as necessary for comfort.  I was pretty fucking depressed.  It wasn't worth screwing up my knees.

So the by noon that day I was in Michaels office again, with a couple questions.  First, he listened to me whine about my legs.  

He told me that he had been in worse shape than I was many times, and that lots of people he knew had, and that every case he had ever heard of got better within a couple days of rest after a course.  Some people just get a lot of inflammation, and that's something you have to manage.  He also said  that when I told him I sat for two-plus hours, he was blown away - "I would *never* do that".  He always sits for one hour at at time.  

I asked about the ambiguity of treating all sensations "equanimously":

"So  equanimity seems an odd choice.  I mean, that leaves it open to treating all sensations with any emotion - anger, happiness, sadness, aggression, love.  Or no emotion.  What does Goenka mean and is it o.k. if I choose happiness?", I said.

"Yeah, sure.  Choose happiness."

"And I can't help but subvocalize from time to time, to get myself back on track, is that cheating?"

"Don't do that.  I mean, at this stage, it's expected that you struggle with that, and if you can't handle it any other way than it's o.k., but that's not the technique.  You'll need to find a way to stop doing that."

After that consultation, the fear of permanent knee damage was gone, and I could make it through an hour again.  It was a great challenge to maintain a calm mind and to focus, but it was getting easier.  

My walking didn't get any worse, and it actually improved a lot on days 9 and 10.  

I experimented with different types of equanimity.  I found the one that worked best for me and stuck with it.  It might be cheating, but it helped to react with some consistent thought to really deal with the pain calmly.  I reacted with love.  I tried a lot of other emotions.  But love is bottomless and inifinte in supply.

I treated each sensation, whether gross pain or an itch or a pleasant sensation, by loving it like it was a child.  I was thankful for it, and for it's help in building a strong mind.  Each sensation removed a different type of bad programming (sankara) and I was thankful for it.  

Subvocalization did help focus.  I tried to limit it a little more each time, but I was never able to completely get rid of it.  Subvocalization is a different technique from vipassana, and it interferes.

If you haven't tried to avoid imagery and subvocalization, you would be surprised how badly your mind wants to visualize and vocalize.  Trying to focus only on sensations on the surface of my body, my mind created all sorts of crazy visuals to distract me.  Very high resolution scenes I had never seen before.  Beautiful stuff would appear out of nowhere.  When that happened, I tried first to focus on a completely black field, then transition back to sensation.  Occasionally, as I changed focus from one part of the body to another, or when I needed to refocus in some way, I would subvocalize.  It was possible, but incredibly difficult, to repress.  The words would just appear.  I am convinced that sensory deprivation precipitates many misinterpreted mental images and sounds, and should be studied as a possible explanation for them.

Next: Dreams