An Ethnography of the Vipassana Meditation Retreat: A Reflexive Evaluation of the...

[FIR 9.1 (2014) 68–86] Fieldwork in Religion (print) ISSN 1743–0615doi: 10.1558/fiel.v9i1.68 Fieldwork in Religion (online) ISSN 1743–0623

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015

Glenys Eddy

An EthnogrAphy of thE VipAssAnA MEditAtion rEtrEAt: A rEflExiVE EVAluAtion of thE pArticipAnt-obsErVEr’s MEditAtion ExpEriEncE As An intErprEtiVE tool

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Glenys Eddy is the author of Becoming Bud-dhist: Experience of Socialization and Self-Trans-formation at Two Australian Buddhist Centres (Continuum International Publishing, 2012), based on her doctoral thesis undertaken at the Department of Studies in Religion at the Univer-sity of Sydney..

Room 300, Level 3Peter Nicol Russell Building, J02University of SydneyNSW 2006Australia

[email protected]

AbstrAct

The practice of Vipassana meditation emphasizes the role of meditative experience in coming to understand the Buddhist worldview and in effecting personal transformation. Data obtained from fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2005 at the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre (BMIMC) in Medlow Bath, NSW Australia, illustrate the process by which aspects of doctrine come to be accepted through an experiential understanding of their import. Many respondents attrib-uted significance to their experiential understanding of dukkha, suffering, and anicca, imperma-nence, gained through Vipassana practice. My own significant instance of experiential learning involved that of the five hindrances, outlined in the Satipatthana Sutta as five mental states that hinder the meditator’s development of mindfulness. By reflecting upon the reasons for the dif-ference between my experience and that of my interview respondents, I demonstrate the limita-tions of the researcher’s own meditation experience used as an interpretive tool for ethnographic

1. This article combines the methodological discussion presented in two unpublished conference papers.

mailto:[email protected]

EDDY An EthnogrAphy of thE VipAssAnA MEditAtion rEtrEAt 69


data, and the need for the researcher to reflexively examine the way in which their own religious preferences and biases affect the significance they attribute to their own meditation experience.

Keywords: ethnography; religious conversion; religious experience and reflexivity; Vipassana meditation; Western Buddhism.

IntroductionScholars of Religion such as Sharf and Tweed hold religious experience to be an inappropriate subject for research due to the inaccessibility to researchers of the mental states and personal experiences of religious actors (Sharf, 1998: 111; Tweed, 2002: 256). However, the experiential emphasis of certain forms of Bud-dhism currently popular in the West, and the increasing number of meditation retreat centres around the world, should alert the scholar to the significance of the experiential within the contemporary religious context. These centres cater to the need for conducive environments where one can learn meditation and develop one’s practice, free from the distractions of everyday life. One such is the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre (BMIMC) in Medlow Bath, NSW, Australia, which teaches Vipassana meditation in the tradition of the late Mahasi Sayadaw. BMIMC’s activities have an experiential emphasis in that all activity concerns itself with the facilitation of meditators’ learning and practice of the technique. The centre runs meditation retreats of 2 to 30 days’ duration, occa-sional workshops, and infrequent sutta study weekends. Retreats are devoted to instruction and development in the practice, and to the impartation of Buddhist doctrine through dhamma talks.

Between 2003 and 2005, I conducted fieldwork at BMIMC in order to explore the relationship between meditators’ engagement with Buddhist doctrine and prac-tice, and their commitment to the Buddhist path. After a few months’ involve-ment with BMIMC, I noted that the experiences and religious biographies of my interview respondents bore a striking resemblance to Lofland and Skonovd’s experimental motif, one of six conversion motifs they conceive as “salient thematic elements and key experiences combined with objective situations.” They define a motif experience as “those aspects of a conversion which are most memorable and orienting to the person undergoing personal transformation.” The experimental motif consists of “a pragmatic, ‘show me’ attitude,” “learning to act like a convert, withholding judgment for a considerable length of time after taking up the life style of the fully-committed participant” (Lofland and Skonovd, 1981: 378). Cen-tres such as BMIMC allow the participant to take an experimental approach to the new group and its worldview, participating in its activities, and “trying out” its belief-system. Interview data illustrated how the experimental orientation taken

70 fiEldwork in rEligion


to the centre’s retreat-style activity facilitated the participant’s socialization into the Theravadin Buddhist worldview by a process of learning to comprehend it as an interpretive framework for lived experience, by testing its tenets against and relating them to their own experience. For the meditator, this process begins by attending to one’s own meditation experience.

Vipassana meditation provides training in mindfulness, the English transla-tion of the Pali term sati (Nyanaponika Thera, 1965: 8). Mindfulness, defined by Mahasi Sayadaw as concentrated attention (Mahasi Sayadaw, 1971: 20), refers to “the nonjudgmental observation of our experience as it becomes manifest in the immediate present” (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 1999: v; Kornfield, 1979: 42), and to the “qual-ity of calling to mind,” “remembering” the object (Bikkhu Bodhi in Soma Thera, 1999: xiii–xv). A term often used by practitioners is Nyanaponika Thera’s notion of bare attention, “the singleminded awareness of what happens at the successive moments of perception as presented either through the five physical senses or through the mind” (Nyanaponika Thera, 1965: 30–56). As an aid to developing mindfulness, meditators are taught to recognize all unmindful mental states as one of the five hindrances, outlined in the Satipatthana Sutta as sensual desire, ill-will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse (often translated as worry), and doubt (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 2001: 151). According to Buddhist doctrine, these are men-tal states that dominate our awareness when we are not mindful, and hinder the meditator’s progress on the path (Analayo, 2003: 187).

Learning to employ the five hindrances for the observation and categorization of unmindful mental states was a significant learning experience for me as a par-ticipant-observer. Through it I understood both the effectiveness of Vipassana as a self-transformative technique, and the way in which Buddhist doctrine becomes a guide for meditation practice. However, this “significant experience” was not shared by my interview respondents, who instead considered the experiential understanding of dukkha, suffering, and anicca, impermanence, to be more sig-nificant in their engagement with the Buddhist path. Considering that the aim of my fieldwork was to understand how Vipassana meditators engage with the prac-tice and its supporting Theravada Buddhist worldview, it was essential that the data gathered reflected as much as possible the experiences of my respondents. Any potential shaping effect of personal bias on the data concerned, for instance, the tendency to privilege some experiential accounts above others because they agree with the researcher’s (my) own experience and perspective, needed to be acknowledged. Concern about the generalizability of ethnographic research has been expressed by Bruce (2009: 7–8) and Snow, Morill and Anderson (2003: 182). With especial respect to religious phenomena, Bruce warns against attempting inappropriate generalizations from a limited knowledge base (Bruce, 2009: 7–8).



By reflexively adopting the position of the experimental participant and treat-ing my own participant-experience as that of an interview respondent, I came to understand my own experiential preference in the light of my own religious needs. This exercise highlights both the utility and limitations of one’s own expe-rience as an interpretive tool, and demonstrates the researcher’s reflexive need to locate and interpret their own experience in the context of their fieldwork data.

ReflexivityIn the Social Sciences it is understood that the products of research are affected by the research process, including the people involved, in all aspects and phases of the process. This includes the effects on the construction of data of: the research-er’s methods, values, biases, decisions, and presence in the field, researcher-par-ticipant interactions (Hall and Callery, 2001: 257; Hill, Lee and Jennaway, 2010: 322), the personal characteristics of the researcher, for instance religious affil-iation, sex and nationality (Reinharz, 2011: 2), and changes undergone by the researcher in the field by virtue of their interaction with it (2011: 3, 8). The term reflexivity refers to the researcher’s process of becoming aware of the implica-tions of all of the above for the knowledge generated by their research (Bryman, 2008: 698; Davies, 1999: 4; Hall and Callery, 2001: 257; Guba and Lincoln, 2005: 210; Lewis and Russell, 2011: 401). Of relevance to the discipline of Religious Studies is McCutcheon’s reflexive position, which while aiming to bracket truth claims, acknowledges that the beliefs, experiences, meanings and intentions of reli-gious participants are always refracted through the researcher’s own (McCutch-eon, 1999). Elsewhere I have discussed my fieldwork findings, with reference to my own subject position limited to the examination of my own retreat medita-tion experiences that helped me interpret those of others (Eddy, 2012: 26–29). In response to Reinharz’s suggestion that the researcher’s reflexive “obligation” to report the process of change should not be limited to its discussion in the “brief preface, afterword or appendix” (Reinharz, 2011: 11), my aim in this article is to articulate more fully the role my own experience and personal change played in the interpretation of my fieldwork data.

On reflecting upon my relationship with BMIMC and its affiliates, I am in agreement with Trzebiatowska’s suggestion that researchers often decide to research people they feel at ease with (2010: 79). I had felt “at home” at BMIMC during the two short retreats I had participated in before approaching BMIMC’s Manager for permission to conduct research with the Centre’s participants. After I had conducted about four interviews, I realized I had much in common with my respondents, who were mostly educated Anglo-European, had been explorers of contemporary Western religion and spirituality, and were exploring Buddhist



meditation. I had also been a religious seeker with a personal interest in Bud-dhism for some time. Over the three years of my involvement, I developed affec-tion for many of the teachers and members of the management committee whom I had the opportunity to get to know. Despite this, upon following Reinharz’s sug-gestion, as a reflexive exercise, of “converting the self into an object of study by examining the references to oneself in one’s fieldnotes” (Reinharz, 2011: 4), I noticed that my self-references concerned my engagement with the Buddhist practices and teachings rather than with BMIMC’s teachers and retreatants. I attribute this personal preoccupation to the interrelated effects of my desire for meditation experience and the restriction of social interaction by the observance of noble silence—consisting of no exchange with others, whether in written or spo-ken form or through body language—on retreat.

The observance of noble silence poses a significant methodological problem for the participant-observer, as Pagis notes (Pagis, 2010: 310). However, her obser-vation, that “in the silent world of meditation, meditators’ subjective experiences are not translated into the symbolic realm and remain outside of verbal expres-sion” (2010: 311), is applicable only to the silent meditation periods on retreat. Opportunities for the discussion of meditative experience are provided during teacher-student interviews, and during some workshops and beginners’ retreats where the teacher facilitates group discussion. This article is not concerned with the “sociology of silence,” except to note that the observance of noble silence is for the purpose of minimizing distraction so that the meditator can best focus on the practice. Rather, it is concerned with the way in which the experiential is given a voice, with the nature of the concepts employed to express it, and with developing a methodology appropriate to the task of understanding these.

Reflexivity is associated with the constructivist approach to qualitative inquiry, which maintains that knowledge production is really a process of knowledge con-struction involving the interpretation of informants’ accounts, as opposed to the positivist approach, which treats ethnographic data as a mirror of informants’ realities. Constructivists hold that constructions of knowledge “are not more or less true but are more or less informed or sophisticated” (Hall and Callery, 2001: 257–58). In a religious setting, the constructivist-interpretive approach treats the religious actor as a participant in the process of making sense of the world (Pres-ton, 1988: 3–4; Rambo, 1993: 18–19; Snow et al, 2003: 183). In order to produce an informed acount of the participant’s way of making meaning from their own expe-rience, I assumed the meditator’s position. This was easy to accomplish, given that several of the Vipassana teachers advised me that the best way to learn about the practice was to try it out for myself. While on retreat, I underwent the same expe-riences as any other retreatant. I received the same instruction in the practice,



attended the same dhamma talks, adhered to the same schedule which included meditation, rest, daily chores such as cleaning, and teacher-student interview periods. I was directed to observe my experience in the same way as all retreatants (described below), and in interviews, I underwent the same process of reporting my noting technique and the experience produced. This was verified, as much as is possible, during my attendance at group interviews, and by the congruence between my own and my respondents’ accounts of teacher-student interviews.

Ideally, participant observation requires both involvement in and detachment from the group being studied. Some scholars of Religious Studies emphasize the need to maintain a distance from personal bias in order to understand the reli-gious participant’s perspective (McCutcheon, 1999; Rambo, 1993: 18–19). Davies’ description of the ethnographer’s role of “stepping in and out of society” reso-nates with Tweed’s interpretive principle of self-conscious positioning, the scholar’s movement between insider and outsider positions, for making knowledge claims without “pretenses to universality or detachment” (Davies, 1999: 5; Tweed, 2002: 253–57). Trzebiatowska (2010: 84) maintains that familiarity with the research context allows the researcher to function as an empathetic participant-observer, whilst one’s role as researcher serves to maintain distance from the studied group. In the context of the silent retreat, the task is to extend this balanced posi-tion between involvement and detachment to include the researcher’s relation-ship with their own subjective experience. In considering how to best attain this self-conscious positioning, I am reminded of Gwynn’s description of “the ambig-uous zone between autobiographical writing and reflexive ethnography” (2003: 210). Hall and Callery suggest minimizing the intrusion of the researcher’s sub-jectivity by attempting to account for its effects (2001: 258), which at their worst, may “lead to a form of self-absorption in which boundaries between subject and object disappear” (Davies, 1999: 5).

During practice, I frequently found myself alternating between the Therava-din Buddhist perspective of the insider, and the social-scientific, constructivist stance of the researcher. This shifting of perspectives would occur often dur-ing my meditation practice on retreat, when I would try to plan how I was going to write about the very experience I had been absorbed in the moment before. Whilst it seems that experiential reports derived from those moments of total absorption in the practice, such as those I describe below, are the jewel of partic-ipant observation in contemplative settings, the researcher’s capacity to objec-tify these experiences is necessary in order to interpret the experience of others. One cannot be sure of how one’s personal bias is implicated in the interpretive process until one can objectify one’s own experience. The real opportunity for a detached perspective comes when one has the opportunity to compare one’s own



experience with that of others, which in the context of a religious setting devoted to meditation instruction and practice, occurs during interview. My description of this process begins with a description of the Vipassana practice of Mahasi Say-adaw, as it is taught at BMIMC.

The Vipassana Meditation Method of Mahasi SayadawThe Vipassana meditation technique of Mahasi Sayadaw consists of sitting and walking practice, both of which take bodily phenomena as their primary objects. In sitting meditation, the breath is used as the primary object. The mind is placed on the rising and falling of the abdomen, and this rising and falling movement is noted as “rising, falling.” The technique is to use the noting or labelling to keep the mind on the process of movement. Similarly, with walking meditation, the movement of each step is contemplated. At first the movements of the steps are noted as “lifting, placing,” but as the walking slows and the mind becomes more focused, the movement is broken down and noted as “lifting, moving, placing, shifting.” When the mind wanders onto any other object, called the secondary object, it should be noted accordingly, for example, “thinking,” “hearing,” “see-ing.” After the noting, the attention is placed back onto the primary object. The purpose of the noting is to keep the awareness on an object or succession of objects rather than becoming absorbed in one’s reactions to, or reflections about them, a point of technique that is strongly emphasized in practical instruction. In this way, the practice serves to train the mind to maintain “a detached obser-vational vantage point” (Analayo, 2003: 193). When mindfulness has developed to the degree that the meditator can maintain awareness on an object without con-stantly slipping into reactivity or reflection about the object, the practice may be used to investigate the experiential qualities of an object or series of objects. For instance, according to Mahasi Sayadaw, one can observe impermanence by first observing the successive occurrences of phenomena such as seeing and hearing, which while seeming to occur simultaneously, actually occur one at a time. Then, on every occasion of noting, the meditator perceives that “each process arises and vanishes at the very moment” (Mahasi Sayadaw, 1958).

The Hindrances in PracticeIn interview, a number of meditators of several years’ experience described the experience of the “impermanence” of phenomena during Vipassana meditation. Experiences such as the coming and going of pain, and one’s constantly changing mental state, formed the basis for an experiential understanding of the imperma-nent nature of Samsara, the phenomenal world. The capacity to keep observing or



“sitting with” the pain without getting caught up in one’s reactivity to it is attrib-uted to the development of mindfulness, to note both the pain and one’s aversion to it with mindful awareness. However, for many, much of the time in medita-tion practice is spent lost in this reactive and aversive state. Mental states such as these which “hinder” one’s practice are known as the nirvaranas (Pali), the hin-drances to mindfulness. The Vipassana method of Mahasi Sayadaw takes the Sati-patthana Sutta from the Majjhima-Nikaya as its doctrinal foundation. Satipatthana is conventionally translated as the four foundations of mindfulness: the body, feelings, mind, and dhammas, often translated as mental objects, or left untrans-lated (Mahasi Sayadaw, 1971: 2). In the Satipatthana Sutta the hindrances are dis-cussed under mind and dhammas. Under the contemplation of mind, it is the mind as affected and unaffected by certain mental states (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 2001: 150). According to Analayo (2003: 191) and Soma Thera (1999: 135), wholesome and unwholesome states cannot co-exist; at the moment of observing a hindrance it is gone (Silananda maintains that it lasts for a fraction of a second), because it can-not co-exist with mindfulness. Discussion of the relationship of the hindrances to the fourth Satipatthana, dhammas, is reserved for the description of the role of my objectified experience in the interpretive process, further down.

The hindrances are listed in the Satipatthana Sutta as sensual desire, ill-will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse (often translated as worry), and doubt (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 2001: 151). Variants of these terms exist, for instance Soma Thera lists them as sensuality, anger, sloth and torpor, agitation and worry, and doubt (Soma Thera, 1999: 133–46), and Silananda, defining sense-desire as the desire for sensual objects, gives a list of associated terms to convey the meaning: attach-ment, craving, longing, lust (Silananda, 1990: 96–97). According to Analayo, the five hindrances are in fact seven distinct mental qualities subsumed under a five-fold presentation. He attributes this to the similarities in effect and character between sloth and torpor, and between restlessness and worry (Analayo, 2003: 187–88). Despite variance in translation, the terms in the Satipatthana Sutta are those most commonly used at BMIMC, and Venerable Pannyavaro’s descriptions of the hindrances closely reflect the way in which the terms are understood and applied by meditators. Sense-desire is the yearning after sense objects or preoc-cupation with the sensory world; ill-will ranges from resentment to outright hos-tility; mental inertia is the lack of mental and/or physical energy; restlessness and worry refers to agitation in the mind and body as well as tracing back to the past or remorse; skeptical doubt is the persistent uncertainty either about one’s own ability, the teacher or the technique.2

2. Venerable Pannyavaro leads meditation retreats at BMIMC and is the webmaster of



My Experience of the HindrancesBeyond the basic instruction outlined above, teachers may introduce practice exercises or devote a retreat related to specific aspects of Buddhist doctrine supporting the practice. During a nine-day retreat held in April–May 2004, we learned to explore the five hindrances as meditation objects and as a labelling sys-tem for the mental states experienced during practice. In this way a more devel-oped framework—a typology for noting, identifying and discriminating between mental states—was introduced. In brief, the method was to note and label the state through selection of the hindrance that best described it, and to explore its quality without “buying into any surrounding story” that may be associated with the experience of the mental state. For instance, we may remember an incident that made us angry, but instead of mentally replaying the details of the incident, the technique was to note our mental state. The teachers explained that one may find that the story has already begun to unfold as the mental state is noted. This was held to be more likely with sense-desire and aversion, because “they are more object-directed than sleepiness or restlessness.” The following excerpt from my retreat notes describes a momentary experience of lasting impact for me:

At one point during the retreat I was having considerable trouble with drowsi-ness, as I often do. I found that by labelling the mental state “sleepiness”. and further, by sitting with and focussing on the feel of it (as opposed to discuss-ing it internally and getting annoyed with myself for being distracted), I was able to maintain a mindful focus on the state, even as I experienced it. After a short time, the drowsiness subsided and the state of mindfulness remained (Eddy, 2012: 59).

This was my first experience of being able to direct my own mental state in med-itation, and an example of the way in which the noting and labelling technique could effect self-transformation. It was also my first experience, as a researcher, of the direct application of a doctrinal framework to the interpretation of the con-tents of immediate experience. Excerpts from my personal notes of my experi-ences at the weekly Friday night meditation in Glebe, Sydney, in September 2009 (long after my fieldwork had finished), demonstrate that working with the hin-drances had become an ongoing project:

Friday 4 September 2009I have a history of succumbing to drowsiness while meditating. On this night I had the same experience of drowsiness turning into mindfulness that I’d expe-rienced during the retreat in 2004, where noting the drowsiness helped the mind to remain focussed on it as an object instead of identifying with it, and

Buddhanet. This description of the hindrances can be found at http://www.buddhanet.net/imol/retreat/retreat09.htm (date accessed 29/01/2012).

http://www.buddhanet.net/imol/retreat/retreat09.htm

http://www.buddhanet.net/imol/retreat/retreat09.htm



“giving in to it”. While feeling drowsy, I applied the noting technique, not the labelling as “drowsy, drowsy, drowsy”, but simply sitting with the feeling inside my headspace. After a short while, I noticed that my mind seemed split, into the observer and the observed, being mindful and drowsy respectively. After another short while, mindfulness dominated, and became the sole state; the drowsiness had disappeared altogether.

My Response as ParticipantOn later reflection upon the mental states that I had labelled during the session as “distraction, dullness, sometimes the two together, agitation,” it seemed that they were all expressions of either desire or aversion, because on that night, the sleepiness or dullness seemed to be a desire for sleep or for no awareness, and the agitation seemed to be a reaction to the effort it took to stay focused. As a seeker-participant, my employing the five hindrances as a categorization system helped me to both observe and interpret my experience in its immediacy. I was also struck by the efficacy of the labelling technique for maintaining mindful-ness in the face of the natural tendency of mind to drift everywhere. It seemed as though recognition and immediate labelling of objects as the mind “fell on them” checked the mind’s tendency to “get lost in” the state. Learning to identify and label all unmindful mental states as one of the hindrances somehow made this process easier. As Analayo (2003: 187) states, “learning to withstand their impact is a good skill for progress on the path.” For me as a practitioner, this experi-ence was significant because it demonstrated the efficacy of the technique, pay-ing close attention to one’s immediate experience, for disciplining the mind, and transforming its habitual state. The experiential everyday quality of these states was a surprise to me, because previous to my fieldwork experience, I had thought that all meditation should consist of altered, rarified meditative states. Another noteworthy aspect of my hindrance experience was the discovery that all mental states, excluding mindfulness and jhanic experience, could be categorized as one of the hindrances. This led to my acceptance of “the hindrances” as an interpre-tive framework for these mental states, and gave me an understanding of the way in which immediate somatic and mental experience can be related to Buddhist doctrine as a guide for lived experience.

My Interpretation as ResearcherFor myself as researcher, the demonstration of the way in which the employment of the five hindrances as a categorization system helps the meditator to both observe and interpret their experience in its immediacy, had implications for the understanding of how meditators derive meaning from such experiences. This



demonstrated the process by means of which concept and experience become meaningfully related within the framework of Buddhist doctrine during the socialization process; in short, how one comes to understand its meaning as a Bud-dhist. Engelsrud (2005: 268) says that in order to be reflexive the researcher must have access to one’s own experiences, and in the context of Vipassana meditation, the specific experiences involved are the somatic and mental phenomena that are taken as meditation objects, and our responses to these. All experiences produced during meditation, both my own and those reported by my interview respon-dents, are experiences largely common in everyday life. What is not common to our contemporary Western everyday life is the Buddhist framework within which these experiences are attributed meaning by the Buddhist meditators.

The following is an account of the experiential development of meditators through Vipassana practice as it is taught at BMIMC, the product of the com-parison and synthesis of experiential descriptions gained by way of conversa-tions with participants, group interview attendance, and formal semi-structured interviews. When individuals first begin to meditate, they find the inability to focus dominates their meditation. Remaining mindful for even a few moments may elude some for a long time, maybe months or longer. It is hard to keep the mind on the object. The mind habitually gets lost in sensations, thoughts, feel-ings, memories. Most people report extended periods of being drowsy, or dis-tracted by obsessive thoughts (for instance, about food or some desired object), the experiential stuff of everyday life, the intensity of which may be obscured by the constantly shifting of attention demanded by our lifestyle. The meditator will suddenly “come back to the present moment,” realizing that they have been “mindlessly” “carried away” by these internal states and their mental content. The mediator then typically experiences an almost constant stream of annoyance and self-judgement for one’s lack of ability. This reactivity extends into feeling annoyed with objects external to oneself.

I can chart my progression over the last four years or whatever, and it took probably two years of nothing much happening, not much of a shift or any-thing, just going and listening and stuff. You’re told a thousand times, you know, “Just be in the moment, and whatever’s happening, just observe it and don’t buy into it,” and all this sort of stuff. But when you’re there and experienc-ing it emotionally... I was beating myself up about it, and so the more I tried to do it properly, the more I wasn’t because I was just getting into this vicious cir-cle of “Oh no. It’s not working,” and because it wasn’t going to work while I was thinking like that, so like I’ve had very few meditation sessions where it is just calm and blissful. You know my mind is usually racing at a thousand miles an hour, but I just learned to accept that. I mean gradually, just by doing the medi-tation I’ve got better at it (interview date 17 November 2004; Eddy, 2012: 50-51).



With persistent effort, and after some time of practice with applying the noting and labelling, one’s noting becomes more consistent, and one’s reactivity begins to subside. Practitioners notice that they are mindful for longer periods with fewer breaks of attention, and they more readily, easily, and frequently, catch the ten-dency to drift and bring the mind back to the object and its noting. In the interview excerpt below, one of the Centre’s Vipassana teachers reflects on the way progress is made once the meditator’s reactivity to distraction begins to subside.

The hard thing is this thing of beating up on yourself, this “I’m no good, I can’t do this,” or whatever… So that’s the next thing “ah, I’m judging myself,” so it’s kind of like working through all these different strategies we have, that the hindrances essentially block us from observing what’s really happening, and they’re just different mental processes, different values or interpretations we put on the experience (interview date 30 November 2004; Eddy, 2012: 58–59).

Although the frequency and intensity of this reactivity begins to subside with practice, for most meditators, even those of 10 or 20 years’ experience, Silananda’s description of the habitual state of mind in meditation is a common experience,

when you keep your mind on your breath, for example, and mentally note in-out, even before you have steady concentration, you will have moments of con-centration, then you will have distractions and then concentration again, and then distractions and so on; at one moment the defilements are removed, and in the next they are present again in the mind.

Silananda calls this experience the mind alternating between moments of dis-traction and mindfulness, “momentary removal” of the hindrances (Silananda, 1990: 23–24). This occurs irrespective of the meditator’s recognition and label-ling of unmindful mental states as “the hindrances.” My interview data indicates that even if a meditator does not employ the hindrances as a categorization method for secondary objects, but remains with the basic Vipassana technique of noting the quality of all mental states, then mindfulness will still develop. At some point he or she will begin to be more acutely aware of their reactions to pleasant or unpleasant sensations, thoughts, or feelings, related to contemplation of feeling, and will begin to note and label the response that arises in connection with the pleasant or unpleasant sensation, as desire (sense-desire) or aversion. One’s prog-ress in the development of mindfulness is dependent upon consistently applying the noting technique.

Some interview respondents had learned to work with the hindrances as an interpretive framework in the manner I have outlined above. One reported that she reached a point in her meditation practice where she realized that all of the distractions she experienced could be sorted into the five hindrances. In her expe-rience, behind them all was either desire or aversion (interview date 1 July 2003).



Another described her experience of “sloth and torpor” when I asked her about general experiences in meditation.

When I was meditating I’d notice sloth and torpor was arising… Sloth and tor-por would often follow getting lost in a daydream…yeah…noting to me is the big thing…like I’d catch it earlier in my daily life… It’s just logical. The five hin-drances they’re not just logical but they are comprehensive… (interview date 13 November 2003).

This respondent explained that she finds the identifying function of the hin-drances very useful for both developing mindfulness and for reflecting upon daily life experience. Her comments illustrate the nature of the meaning-making processes I had hoped to uncover in the course of my research. The recognition that self-transformation had taken place as a result of exploring the new mean-ing-system and experimenting with, “trying out,” its practices and ideas, was a strong theme to emerge from the data. As discussed above, I was aware that as both seeker-participant and participant-observer, I was part of the very process I was researching. My own experiences, reactions, responses, evaluations, prob-lems with understanding and accepting doctrine were the stuff of the experimental motif. However, my experience with the hindrances was a significant “experimen-tal moment” for me alone, and must be seen as related to my own subject position of seeker/participant. Despite showing appreciation for the technique and its doc-trinal framework, none of my respondents identified learning to recognize and work with the hindrances as a turning-point in their relationship with Buddhism.

It was in attempting to understand why experience of the hindrances was of significance to me and not, seemingly, to my respondents, that the importance of objectifying one’s own experience and examining it as part of the data gathered, became clear. Because of my personal religious and academic history, I had devel-oped an interest in the transformative capacity of meditation. As an Arts under-graduate in the 1990s, I became interested in the essentialist-contextualist debate around the nature of mystical experience. Upon reflection, I realized that under-pinning this was a desire to find ontological validation for individual religious experience. In common with almost everyone of my interview respondents from both centres, I was exposed to Christianity as a child. In my late teens through to my early thirties, I explored the Society for Psychical Research, spiritualist churches, western esoteric and Rosicrucian groups such as the Ancient and Mys-tical Order of the Rosy Cross (AMORC), and Tai Chi practice. I was interested in the transformative potential of Western alternative spiritual/esoteric practices such as astrology and alchemy. However, throughout my exploration of these meaning-systems and practices, with the exception of Tai Chi, which provided a heightened awareness of the mind-body connection that I had not experienced in daily life,



my hunger for meditation techniques that could be applied to the understanding and transformation of everyday experience, had gone unsatisfied.

The hindrances, those mental states that dominate meditation when one is not mindful, and are part of everyday experience, can be viewed as part of our everyday mental flux, our perception of which is most often obscured by a busy lifestyle. By comparison, the practices belonging to the strands of esoteric dis-course I had explored seemed disconnected from “this-world” experience. West-ern Esoteric thought and practice which employs highly symbolically constructed pictures of reality conveyed through allegory, metaphor, and tables of symbolic correspondences between levels or spheres of reality, did not appear to offer practices akin to the Buddhist analytical meditative techniques which focus on the observation and understanding of experience in its immediacy. Through this experience I recognized my own hunger for technical knowledge by means of which I could understand and transform my lived experience. In interview, my respondents revealed that the appeal of Buddhism was in its capacity to explain and transform their everyday experience.

The soteriological goal of religious practice is liberation from some undesired condition. In the case of Buddhism, one achieves liberation from Samsara through practice of the Noble Eightfold Path and its three aspects: ethics, concentration and wisdom. Vipassana is held by Mahasi Sayadaw to develop wisdom. Wisdom, from the Buddhist perspective, is insight into the nature of all phenomena as con-ditioned; without independent existence, existing only in relation to other phe-nomena. They are said to bear the three marks of existence: dukkha, suffering, anicca, impermanence, and anatta, no essentially existing self (Soma Thera, 1999: 134). The efficacy of the Vipassana meditation technique is in its capacity to develop mindfulness in the meditator, who by noting the qualities of the phenom-ena experienced, the meditation objects, begins to see Samsara as bearing the three marks of existence. Whilst practitioners differed in their capacity to recall significant learning experiences in the development of their practice, many gave examples of the way in which the nature of suffering and impermanence could be understood through Vipassana meditation. Many meditators gained an under-standing of impermanence by noting the changeability of their mental state from one moment to the next. The experience of physical pain during sitting medita-tion is common (see Johnson, 2009: 135), and some meditators choose to “sit with” the pain in order to contemplate that nature of suffering. I had experienced both: instances of leg and back pain in sitting meditation which forced me to observe both my desire to move every few minutes and the changeability of my own men-tal state, including the arising of the impulse to move a leg in walking meditation in one instance, only to be replaced by thoughts about breakfast in the next. The



following practitioner’s experience on his first retreat indicates how the notion of dukkha can be grasped conceptually and experientially, and how it may lead to an acceptance of the Four Noble Truths: the fact of suffering, the cause of suffer-ing, the fact of the end of suffering, and the way to end suffering. His description refers to his experience of the first two Noble Truths: the existence and cause of suffering.

RESPONDENT: So the notion of suffering is the First Truth. I think the first retreat (I did) was mainly around that, but the other Noble Truths are quite…it takes you a while to really get them, so the notion that the cause of this is crav-ing. So it’s like…to get that, I think you often need a really good sense of suf-fering—dukkha just arising—because then you can watch out for the next bit underneath it, which is the craving. So you can’t just go straight to craving. I think it does go one-two-three-four. You’ve gotta get the picture of dukkha in yourself.

RESEARCHER: In retreats, was that just reflecting on life experience, like watch-ing thoughts and things come up, or was it more to do with physical pain?’

RESPONDENT: It was more to do with physical, actual experience. So I think in the first retreat, the general notion of dukkha. To get that, I need to have a lot of detail, specifics of dukkha, to get a general sense of dukkha. So I think that Gold-stein and Salzburg were very good, the way they were running their retreats, because it’s about working at a minute level with pain. So “Just keep sitting. Just keep watching what the mind does with that pain. Just stay with it a little bit lon-ger. Another ten seconds. Just watch that.” So this notion of working moment-to-moment with what’s going on, and seeing moment-to-moment how dukkha arises—and it arises everywhere, in your body, in your mind—and it was a sense of being pointed like a scientist would be to the data. Keep looking at it. And don’t just understand it theoretically. Find it in the next moment. You’ll find it five seconds later, five seconds later, five seconds later, so it’s “keep bringing it back to what’s going on now.” This is the sensation. (Eddy, 2012: 66–67)

A Reflexive Realization: My Resistance to Buddhist DoctrineWhile interviewing this meditator, I found that I could empathize with his expe-rience of physical pain during meditation. I was also familiar with fundamen-tal Buddhist doctrinal notions. Interestingly, the hindrances and the Four Noble Truths belong to the categories of experience belonging to the fourth Satipat-thana, dhammas, the contemplation of which according to Analayo, is particularly concerned with recognizing the conditioned nature of the phenomena under observation (Analayo, 2003: 186). The hindrances are first in the sequence of dhammas: the hindrances, the five aggregates, the six bases, the seven enlighten-ment factors, the Four Noble Truths (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 2001: 151). The hindrances



lead to the contemplation of dhammas because their removal, their making way for more wholesome states as described above (Silananda, 1990: 22–24), serves as a basis for developing the contemplations in the fourth satipatthana, where the sequence is removal, mental stability, analysis of the subjective personality: the five aggregates, the six sense spheres (Analayo, 2003: 184). For me, the goal of practice had been unwittingly limited to working with the hindrances as a tech-nique for developing mindfulness per se, whereas because of their interest in the Buddhist view of existence, my respondents had gone beyond this to consider the role of the hindrances within the broader framework of the Satipatthana Sutta. Upon reflection at a point toward the end of my fieldwork, I realized that I was caught in a “clash of worldviews” to do with the understanding of the nature of the self: my own religious adherence to the Western Esoteric view of the self, and my simultaneous resistance to accepting the Buddhist doctrine of anatta.

Faivre outlines four distinct usages of the term esotericism: the generalist view of the occult, paranormal, and exotic wisdom traditions; the attainment to a “cen-tre of being” by certain procedures; the creation of an esoteric/exoteric dichot-omy; and the ensemble of spiritual currents that is the subject matter of formal research (Faivre, 1998: 2). Of these, the attainment to a centre of being is the usage that seems to express the theme of AMORC ritual and the purpose of much con-temporary Western Esotericism. The AMORC teachings emphasize the goal of the mystical path as attunement with the cosmic mind or soul. It is held that there is but one soul in the universe, the living vital consciousness of god; within each living being, there is this universal soul. The soul personality or self is an expres-sion of the soul within the body of humanity, the objective manifestation of one’s response to the Universal Soul (Spencer Lewis, 1978: 161, 171, 192). AMORC teach-ings and ritual portrait the soul, the centre of being, as eternal and essentially unchanging. This is in direct contrast to the doctrine of anatta, which sees the self as non-essential and constantly changing. My resistance to the doctrine of Anatta initially weakened my desire to empathize with practitioners’ accounts of their experience of impermanence, of which anatta is a specific instance. Despite this, through the course of my involvement with BMIMC, I had become a Vipas-sana meditator (I meditate, although not as often as I would like), and a Bud-dhist sympathizer (I incorporate Buddhist thought into my approach to daily life), one of Queen’s three categories of religious researcher: the participant observer, sympathizer, and adherent, distinguished by the position assumed toward a tra-dition’s belief system (Queen, 1998: 217–20). I respect the Buddhist worldview and its practices, but do not have the degree of conviction necessary to become a Bud-dhist adherent.



ConclusionEthnographic data illustrated the way in which the experimental orientation taken to BMIMC’s retreat-style activity by meditators allowed them to “try out” the Vipassana practice and its Theravadin Buddhist belief-system. This allowed partic-ipants to explore the experiential effects of Vipassana and the knowledge claims of Buddhist doctrine. My own investigative process was also described by this exper-imental orientation, and my dual position of seeker and participant observer gave me insight into the exploration and meaning-making processes of the practitio-ners. From my perspective as researcher, the methodological utility of assuming the position of the meditator and immersing myself in the technique and the expe-rience it produced, was to give me a direct sense of the way in which a Buddhist concept becomes experientially understood. My learning to observe and to dis-tinguish the five hindrances as five different mental states in terms of their expe-riential quality also helped me to comparatively identify the experiential quality of mindfulness. My experience also demonstrated the way in which concept and experience become meaningfully related within the framework of Buddhist doc-trine during the socialization process. For me, all mental states experienced during Vipassana practice could be categorized as mindfulness or as one of the hin-drances. This led to my acceptance of the five hindrances as an interpretive frame-work for these mental states, and gave me an understanding of the way in which immediate somatic and mental experience can be related to Buddhist doctrine as a guide for lived experience. This also demonstrated how experiential validation of an aspect of doctrine can facilitate a receptivity to the belief system as a whole.

This article has also demonstrated the way in which one’s own experience can guide one’s interpretation of participant observation and interview data, provided one can account for one’s own biases and preconditioning. For me, my preconditioning became clear when I compared my responses to those of my interview respondents. The fact that I was able to reflexively examine my own meditation experience, and its contribution to the interpetation of my data, was dependent upon two characteristics of BMIMC as the research environment. First, the support of the Centre’s teachers and management committee made it easy for me to assume the meditator’s position on retreat. During retreat I was directed to observe my experience in the same way as all retreatants, and attended the same dhamma talks and teacher-student interviews, where I underwent the same process of reporting my noting technique and the experience produced. Second, because the research was concerned with the way in which the experiential is given a voice and with the nature of the concepts employed to express it, the research setting, the meditation centre, must provide opportunities to study ver-bal interchange. These opportunities were provided on some retreats through



group interviews and discussion, and Buddhist doctrine was introduced as a guide for practice through dhamma talks and meditation instruction. This ability of the participant observer to assume the meditator’s position has broader applicability than the ethnographic setting. Both Queen and Williams acknowledge the grow-ing sympathy in the academic community for self-conscious positionings that combine that of the scholar with the sympathizer (Queen, 1998: 217–20), and the scholar with the practitioner (Williams, 2008: 159–60) where sympathy for a tra-dition enhances understanding and authority as a scholar.

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