About a fortnight ago, I popped into the Awareness Place bookshop down in the Bras Basah complex, and found a copy of The Discourse Summaries. I’ve been wanting a copy of this for some time, so I bought it, and have been gradually working my way through it since. It was buying this book that kind of woke me up again out of the slump I’ve been in for the last month or so.
The book is a transcript of the recorded talks played every night of the 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats organised by S. N. Goenka’s Vipassana Research Institute. As I read it, I’m transported back to the Dhamma Hall in Thailand, where I’ve attended two retreats (so far), and I remember the benefits I experienced – of which, more below.
As I say, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend two of these retreats, and they truly have been life-changing. On the second, I was struggling with a badly hurt foot and ankle, which were a big distraction. The first was a tremendously powerful experience.
I went on that first course after I’d been in Singapore for a year, in the gap between the end of my contract and the start of my MBA. Following the course, I was heading off to China for the first time, to study Mandarin for a few months.
During that year, I’d been studying taiji gong with Nam Wah Pai, at Lorong 29 in Geylang. I’d completed the basic qigong set, followed by the 24-move basic taijiquan sequence. I’d begun the Xuan Xuan broadsword set – but it started three months before I was due to leave Singapore, and normally took six months to complete. So, I decided to accelerate my learning.
Now, so background is needed here. A lesson at Nam Wah Pai is three hours long: the first and third are spent studying whichever form your class is working on; the middle hour is spent with the entire school going through qigong exercises. In my personal experience, I found those exercises to be extremely effective and powerful – not immediately, but with practice. The qi awareness is then applied during the work on the forms. As a student, you attend class two nights a week, and learn the taijigong under the supervision of an instructor. You’re also welcome to attend the school on other evenings; in which case you practise solo, but can work with one of the instructors in the middle hour, while their class are doing the qigong.
So, with the broadsword form, to get it finished before I left Singapore, I started attending class four nights a week, for about two months, with some individual tuition sessions on weekends. I got to the point where I could do most of the form without needing to think about it, and instead was able to focus my attention on the flow of qi around my body.
In the last couple of weeks, strange things started happening. While I was going through the form, I started to get flashbacks, reliving memories of stressful experiences. It was very weird, a little disturbing, but I was focused on other things, and only mentioned it in passing to the instructor who was giving me private tuition.
In the end, it worked out very well for me: I discovered that the attention on the qi flow was very similar to the attention to physical sensations that is the focus of the vipassana technique. So, very shortly after I’d been getting these flashbacks in taiji class, I got the same thing on a much bigger scale on about the sixth day of the meditation retreat. By that time, though, I’d been trained, and prepared, and knew what to do and how to deal with it. In the theory of vipassana, this indicates that deeply-rooted karmic seeds, stored within the body and exerting a constant emotional influence, are being released and losing their power. It’s this that – in my limited understanding – helps vipassana practitioners to clear away their bad karma and avoid rebirth. When I was talking to a Buddhist nun in Bangkok earlier this year after studying vipassana with her, she mentioned that this was one of her goals.
So, buying that little book has been just the boost I needed. It’s reminded me that qigong works and is very powerful. It’s reminded me that vipassana works, and is very powerful. It’s also emphasised the need to have the right teacher. If I’d been working on those qigong techniques with no teacher, or with a teacher who didn’t understand the effects they could have, it could have been dangerous for me, I think. I’m very lucky that this all took place just as I was about to go on the retreat. It’s also why I either need to really boost my Mandarin, or find an English-speaking teacher, so that these issues can be discussed clearly.
Sorry, another rambling post, but there you are, it’s just a blog…
Added a bit later:
Let me just be clear, that Nam Wah Pai’s qigong techniques are powerful and effective, and that’s why they take their learners through a stuctured course under supervision. I deviated from that path, so the fact that I got these experiences unexpectedly shouldn’t reflect on them at all. I would confidently go back to them, and in fact hope to do so again (though this time to the school in Lorong 7; I know the instructors there better).
Wow, was that all really two decades ago???
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