Goenka / Vipassana Survivor's Story
with a little history …

Dennis was very convincing. He had served with the US Army in Vietnam during the war and had left the army, like so many men of his generation, cynical and depressed. He told me that when he first returned to his small home town in Kansas there was a banner across the street welcoming him back as a hero. But he didn't feel like a hero and shortly thereafter left to travel the world with no plans or a particular destination.

Eventually, Dennis joined the "overland to Asia" crowd and after many misadventures found himself on a ten-day meditation retreat taught by one of the students of U Ba Khin, S.N. Goenka. In those days, Mr. Goenka did not have any meditation centers — he would simply rent an entire hotel and have his 10-day meditation courses there.

Dennis quickly took to meditation and completed course after course. Unfortunately though, in Nepal, he contracted a severe case of amoebic dysentery that, like meditation, would forever change his life.

The first retreat I attended was lead by an American, John Coleman, who, along with S.N. Goenka, Robert Hover, Ruth Denison, Mother Sayama, and others, had been authorized to teach meditation by U Ba Khin shortly before he died in 1971.

Now, in 2022, Dhamma Giri is jammed with gardens, trees, and buildings, but in 1979 all of the meditators stayed in simple mud and leaf huts and the only concrete buildings were the dining hall, an administrative building, the toilet/shower complex, and the newly-completed meditation hall.

During the retreat, I realized that if I ever had wondered what it meant to "be in the presence of a saint" my question had been answered when Mr. Goenka entered the meditation hall. He had an overwhelming presence.

Most of the meditation sessions were done as a group in the huge meditation hall, but occasionally we would be sent, in groups of about five people, to meditation cells that lined the main hall. One day Mr. Goenka went from cell-to-cell asking people how they were doing.

As he opened the door of the meditation cell I was in, he seemed to tower above me as I sat on the floor beneath him. His question to me, which he asked in his deep resonant voice was, "Do you have any thoughts?"

With so much confidence, believing that I could handle almost any situation, I signed up to work as a supervisor of English teachers in one of the refugee camps that had been set up in Southeast Asia after the Viet Nam War. (I had taught English as a Second Language for a few years before that.) It was 1981 and about a million traumatized people were fleeing Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. My employer would be the US State Department who decided that I should be sent to a "camp" in the Philippines.

It turned out to be a very tough job.

Every six months twenty thousand refugees rotated into the camp from refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia and then out of the camp to the United States with a few going to Canada, Japan and a few European countries. During those six months, they were given some basic English instruction and "cultural orientation" that was designed to help them smoothly integrate into American society. In other words, my job was to help refugees get off welfare and get a job. The teachers I worked with were Filipinos. To them the housing and living conditions in the camp were the best they had ever experienced; to the Americans, all 21 of us, the housing and living conditions were the worst we had ever seen. In my dormitory 14 people lived in seven poorly built rooms, with two toilets, two showers, one two-burner stove, one kitchen sink, and one refrigerator.

The young Americans, like me, had also never worked in so much corruption, confusion, and in-fighting. After six months many of my American co-workers began to feel that we were soldiers on the losing side of a never-ending war. Nevertheless, I kept up my meditation practice even as I saw some of my colleagues fall into heavy drinking and promiscuity, I thought that I was doing okay. Here is a crude example of how bad things became for some of my colleagues: my direct boss, who was married with a wife and young child, one night went to a bar and as he sat at a table drinking with his friends, he paid a woman to crawl under the table and give him oral sex. His behavior seemed, at the time, strikingly normal. After about ten months, my boss's boss, the head of the entire multi-million dollar program, had to be hospitalized for problems related to alcohol abuse. After hospitalization, he resumed his work and his drinking.

My contract was for a year, but to finish a project I was working on, I stayed for an extra month. When I finally left the camp, even though I was never medically diagnosed, I now believe that I was suffering symptoms of a nervous breakdown. My symptoms included the feeling that I was living in a nightmare that I was never going to wake up from. I remember having what I called, "day-mares" which were nightmares but in the day time. From time-to-time every day my mind would seemingly fall into a very dark place filled with a lack of self-worth, hatred, anger, violence, and other forms of suffering. Naturally this affected every aspect of my daily life in a negative way.

At that time though I didn't understand what was going on and I was still convinced that if I did enough meditation I would be, like Dennis before me, healed of my wounds. Fortunately, I was able to travel straight from the Philippines to the nearby Buddhist country of Thailand where it was easy to find places to meditate. After a few days in the country, I was able to begin a two-week self-retreat where for the entire time I was completely frozen, internally locked up. I clearly remember one afternoon sitting in meditation for four hours without moving and without experiencing a single sensation in my entire body. I simply was totally numb from head to foot.

Later I did two more retreats and nothing happened. Meanwhile the feeling that I was living a waking nightmare continued.

In spite of all this, my faith in what the "vipassana" teachers had taught me was unwavering. In other words, I was completely and helplessly brainwashed into believing that Mr. Goenka's method was the ultimate solution to the problems that come with being human.

Then one day I went to another Buddhist monastery and asked the abbot for permission to stay for a week to do meditation.

I had nothing to lose, so I stayed.

I shortly learned a style of meditation that had been taught by another Burmese meditation master, Mahasi Sayadaw.

With that technique, one has an object of meditation and one simply tries to keep the mind on that object. When the mind wavers, one simply returns to the object. If thoughts or sensations persist one notes whatever is going on. If one gets many thoughts of anger, for example, one can just mindfully note, "anger." Or if pain arises one can note, "pain" and then study that pain as one would study, with a non-judgmental awareness, an Asian lizard moving on the wall. In that tradition, there is also a technique which Mr. Goenka had labeled as "madness," walking meditation. Much to my surprise, I instantly connected with the walking meditation and found that it helped my concentration for the sitting meditation where the main object of focus was watching the rising and falling of the abdomen.

After 10 days of practicing the Mahasi Sayadaw technique, I felt as if I had just gotten off a hot stove and walked into an air-conditioned room. What a relief. The incredibly negative thoughts did not totally disappear, but they had moved to the back of the room. I could smile again.

Nevertheless, there was still a part of me that wouldn't let go of Mr. Goenka's sweeping technique, which he mislabels "vipassana." Often I would think, "What if the sweeping technique really is the one and only meditation technique that works? Maybe I should be doing that." It would take me a few more years to totally let go of that attachment.

When I told one of the Western monks who was practicing at the monastery about my experience, he suggested that I go to India and study with his favorite meditation teacher, Christopher Titmuss.

So I went to India and did two ten-day back-to-back retreats with Christopher. As the twenty days ended, after the hurricane of negativity that had initially arisen, I was in an ocean of calm.

I have continued with that kind of mindfulness-based meditation virtually every day ever since, now going on 50 years.

Later I learned that my experience with Mr. Goenka's technique really wasn't so unique. Often the initial experiences at his meditation centers are so dramatic that people are convinced that what Mr. Goenka teaches is the "one-size-fits-all" solution to all of the problems that come with being human and donate their fortunes to the cause. Later, however, like my good friend Dennis Ferman, they continue the practice even though not much happens—for them, the meditation has become like pushing against a huge wall that will never move, nevertheless, they continue.

(Were we all duped by a cult? To me there are striking similarities between what happened to me and what happened to be a male super-model, Hoyt Richards, who was sucked into a cult that took him years to break away from. He told his story to the BBC.)