My Meditation Experience

World Meditation Day 2021

My Meditation Experience

by Rebekah Shaman

I started dabbling in meditation when I was a teenager, but it wasn’t until I was living in India, and staying in various ashrams in 1992/3 that I started meditating seriously. However, it was a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat that completely changed and transformed my life. 

While I was staying in the ashrams in India, I began meditating three hours a day using a variety of western visualisation techniques; concentrating on a candle flame, reciting mantras, concentrating on my third eye etc. At the tender age of twenty-one, in a meditation centre in Gujarat, I went into an isolation cell for seven days.  

From then, I was able to reach deep states of meditation, called Samadhi. I could sit for two hours or more in deep concentration, and in a bliss state. But suddenly, after about two months, and with no warning, I hit an emotional wall. 

Every time I sat to meditate a deep violent anger would come bubbling up and overwhelm me. I couldn’t even sit for ten minutes, and no-one I knew could help me, or explain what was happening. Eventually, I had to stop meditating completely. I felt lost but it was just too painful, and a little dangerous, to sit and be consumed by such destructive emotions. 

A year later, in 1994, I returned to India and came across a ten-day silent Vipassana Meditation Retreat with S.N Goenka, in Ladakh. I hadn’t sat in meditation for almost a year and I was very fearful of what would happen. But knowing there was a safe container of ten days, and a teacher that was overseeing the students made me feel safer and more protected. I also missed meditating and was desperate to get back into it. I had to trust the technique of Vipassana was strong enough to get me out of the anger.

The first few days the anger didn’t come up at all, and I thought I had got rid of it. But on day six the most intense sensation started in my big toe, and the anger began to erupt. By day seven the pain in my toe was getting unbearable, and yet under the protection of the teacher I felt safe to go into the sensation, and explore the anger that was coming up, without reacting.

In the retreat container, I was able to fully process the flow of emotions in a safe, secure place. I also learnt that what I was going through, was what Buddha termed a ‘sleeping volcano.’ As one goes deeper into meditation and removes the layers, they can reach hidden volcanos that awaken through the meditation. Buddha called them ‘Sankaras’, actions of the past that create vibrations in the body. These sensations can only be dissolved by observing them without reacting. 

The more layers a meditator removes, the deeper they go into their subconscious, until they reach Sankaras that come from past lives, or ancestors. Because I was so young, and had done so much meditation, I had already worked through my surface Sankaras and was now diving deep into my subconscious, where I had awakened this sleeping volcano of anger.

Using the Vipassana breathing and meditation techniques, I was able to silence my mind that wanted to react to the pain in my big toe, and the anger that was erupting. In the silence, I was able to observe the emotions being released from deep within, more objectively. As the pain reached its intensity, and I didn’t react, I suddenly saw myself in my last past life. 

I was a young Jewish boy in Germany during the Holocaust, and had been sent to Dachau concentration camp with my younger brother. As we were separated from my mother, she made me promise I would look after him, but he got a fever soon after being at the camp, and died. I felt so helpless, broken and disappointed that I hadn’t kept my promise to my mother that I gave up and died soon after, full of loneliness, anger and bitterness. As I observed this scene playing before my eyes without reacting, the pain and anger dissolved, never to return, and left me transformed.

But the change wasn’t just spiritual and mental. Throughout my teenage years I had been afflicted by warts. I had twelve of them all over my fingers and hands, and nothing I did could shift them. According to Louise Hay, from her book, You Can Heal Your Life, they represented a deep unhappiness in me, and an ugliness with the world. I did see the world as ugly and out of balance, and I had a deep self-loathing that depressed me. I had even tried to commit suicide when I was thirteen. I hated being alive.

Within a week of finishing the ten-day retreat every single wart had dissolved naturally, and I have never had another wart again. I also found myself so much calmer and more peaceful. By getting in touch with that deep anger and releasing it, I also released deep subconscious, yet destructive emotions that were making me see the world in a warped way, and holding me back from being in control of my power.  

Once a year, or whenever I feel I am losing touch with my core self, I get the kick from within that it’s time to do another meditation retreat. It puts me back in touch with what really matters, clears my mind, and keeps me in balance.

In 2018, I did the ultimate immersion and went into a dark retreat for fourteen nights and thirteen days. I was in deep blackness and isolation, and my food was delivered once a day through a hatch. This transformational experience has been life-changing, as I was able to go into the very depths of me, until I transcended the boundaries of physicality, dissolved and became one with the darkness.

I recommend a meditation retreat to anyone who wants to be consciously fast tracked, and has the discipline and courage to go deep within and really explore who you are. 

With Love & Gratitude,