Vipassana Meditation and Yoga
The mind-body approaches class helped me understand the importance of alternative medicine. Two alternative medicine practices that are a part of my life are Vipassana (insight) meditation and yoga. Even though I practice both on some level, I have never taken the time to research either. This final will look at the history, affects and results of yoga and Vipassana meditation. It will also look at the similarity and differences between the two alternative healing practices.
Vipassana Meditation
Vipassana meditation is the oldest form of the Buddhist meditations. It is the meditation used by the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Theravada is the oldest surviving school of Buddhism and can be linked back to about 70 years after the Buddha’s death (~300 BCE). Vipassana meditation focuses on the breath and the true nature of reality. It differs from later Mahayana meditations that focus on bliss or emptiness. Vipassana meditation is practiced sitting with the eyes closed and many Mahayana meditations are practice with the eyes open. Similar to yoga, Vipassana focusing is used to calm the mind. When you pacify the mind, you can strengthen your ability to truly concentrate. When you are able to clearly concentrate, you gain the ability to have insight into the true nature of your own being. In the Theravada tradition, Vipassana meditation includes the teaching of the Buddha. Vipassana meditation, as it has grown in the West, has been somewhat separated from traditional Buddhist teachings. Many now teach Vipassana under the guise of mindful stress reduction, mindfulness meditation or present-time awareness. You can now walk into any Borders bookstore and walk out with a mindfulness meditation tape and be practicing Vipassana without ever knowing it. A week ago, I asked the director at my practicum location at if I could teach a group Vipassana meditation. She suggested that I incorporate mindfulness meditation techniques taught by Bob Stahl on his recent CD. I had to explain that both Bob Stahl and I had the same teachers and that mindful meditation was Vipassana meditation. A similar episode happened with my stepmother, when she bought a Dr. Wayne Dyer meditation CD and mentioned it to me over lunch as a good relaxation CD. Vipassana is morphing as it remains in American culture and becoming more consumer-friendly once it is stripped of its Buddhist roots.
Vipassana comes to America.
In the early 1970s, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein were some of the first teachers to introduce Vipassana meditation to Western culture. They learned this form of meditation in Thailand from a senior monk named Ajahn Chah. Jack Kornfield (1977) writes, “Ajahn Chah does not emphasize on special mediation techniques nor does he encourage crash courses to attain quick insight and enlightenment. In formal sittings, one may watch the breath until the mind is still, and then continue practice by observing the flow of the mind-body process” (p.35). Having teachers instead of monks is a relatively new and controversial concept to the Theravada tradition. Meditation teacher Stephen Levine was one of the first people to break Vipassana meditation away from the Theravada tradition. He used Vipassana meditation without the Buddhist teachings to help hospice patients control pain levels. Levine also used Vipassana with a variety of spiritual teachings from various religious traditions. According to Levine (1979), “The motivation for meditating is often quite different for each person. Many people come to meditation because of their love for the qualities of some teacher or their desire to know G-d. Others because of the desire to understand the mind. Some begin not even knowing what meditation is, but with great longing to be free from sadness, some pain, some incompleteness in their lives” (p.1). In a society that it is constantly becoming more stressful, it is becoming more important for people to find a way to deal with the elevated stress levels and meditation offers some relief.
Research on Vipassana.
Recent studies have shown that Vipassana meditation reduces Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder symptom severity. Tests done on incarcerated individuals found rates of PTSD to be high compared to the general population. Prisoners who participated in the study were checked for their baseline. Ages 19 to 60 were used in the research. No prisoners with violent histories were used in the research. Most prisoners used in the study suffered a history of substance abuse. According to T.L. Simpson et al. (2007), the procedure went as described:
The study used a quasi-experimental design that compared the outcomes of those who volunteered for the Vipassana meditation course with the TAU comparison group. The NRF residents could voluntarily attend informational meetings to ask questions about the meditation course. They were informed that they could participate in the 10-day meditation course whether or not they agreed to be in the study, or participate in the study in a TAU control condition. Additionally, residents were told they were free to withdraw from either the course or the study at any time and confidentiality was assured. (242)
The 10-day Vipassana meditation research showed lowered PTSD by 48% in women who participated compared to 27% in women who did treatment as usual (TAU). Another finding was that Vipassana meditation improved resistance to illicit drug use and drinking. The study also found that though women were more likely to volunteer for the Vipassana study, that men who participated benefited the same as women.
A study done on the difference between long- and short-term Vipassana practitioners found there was little difference in cognitive style, self-awareness, or acceptance. The biggest difference was the ability of long-time practitioners to identify when they were experiencing elevated levels of stress; these experienced meditation practitioners were more in touch with the amount of stress they were feeling. According to Barbra Easterlin et al. (1999), “Results show that though acceptance decreased as stress increased for both groups, advanced meditators were significantly less affected. An interpretation of this result is that greater acceptance becomes a trait-like phenomenon that does not change appreciably across situations once it has been established. There appears to be a threshold of meditation skill above which acceptance becomes more of a stable phenomenon” (p.77).
Interview with Noah Levine.
Author Noah Levine is a Marin Spirit Rock teacher who is a student of Jack Kornfield’s Theravada Vipassana training. He is son of author Stephen Levine and a personal childhood friend. I choose to interview him because of his unorthodox approach to Vipassana meditation and because he was the first person to teach me Vipassana meditation – an act that saved my life. I was an addict with an out-of-control life. I was one week sober when I began to learn Vipassana from Noah and it transformed my life.
When I first met Noah in 1985, he was a heroin addict hanging around downtown Santa Cruz. We thought that his dad’s spiritual and Vipassana practice was for hippies. When Noah got sober in 1988, I watched his life slowly transform. He began to practice the Vipassana meditation that his father taught him. He went on a spiritual journey through Thailand and India.
Eventually, I moved to San Francisco and saw less and less of Noah as he grew into a healthy human being and I continued to be an addict who was loosing his life force. By 1999, I had enough and went to my first twelve-step meeting. There, I was reacquainted with Noah, who acted as a mentor to me and taught me meditation to help me find my way. According to Noah (2003), “When I moved back to San Francisco, I ran into my old friend Mike from Santa Cruz, the guy who, in my youth, had mentored me in the ways of motorcycles and madness. I saw him at a twelve-step meeting and he asked me if I would be his sponsor, if I would help him work the steps. I agreed and it was really incredible to see what a full circle our relationship had come, from bikes and violence to sobriety and spiritual practice” (p.224).
Noah is a firm believer in the power of Vipassana meditation. He started the Mind Body Awareness Project to work with teens in juvenile halls. He admits that the only thing that is offered to addicts for long-term support is AA and that AA lacks certain dimensions. Vipassana meditation fills one of those voids that AA does not provide.
Noah’s guide to meditation.
Noah (Personal Interview, November 23, 2009) suggests, when meditating, it is best to find a comfortable place to sit. You can sit on the floor on soft mat or in a chair. He believes that many people feel they need to sit like the Buddha with crossed legs to meditate even if it is extremely painful to them. The object of meditation is not to endure pain, so find a place to sit that is comfortable.
Next gently close your eyes and then bring your attention to the sensation of sitting still. Slowly scan your body for place that might be tense, and relax that place. Then, allow your attention to flow to where your body has contact with the cushion or chair – allow your body to be supported by the seat you are sitting on. Bring your attention to the present-time experience. Thinking is happening in the moment. Hearing is happening in the moment. Do the same observations with all your sensations. Then, investigate where you feel the breathing rising and falling. Do you feel the breathing sensation in your nostrils, or in the rising of your abdomen?
Noah (2009) believes most people can keep track of breathing by feeling the nostril sensations. He says “breathing in know that your breathing in, breathing out know that your breathing out, breathe naturally without control, just being the witness” (n.p.). It will become obvious that your attention will not remain on the breath for long. The mind will wander again and again. Each time your concentration on the breath wanders, gently bring your focus back to the breath. Simply note where your thought has wandering to and then bring it back to the breathing sensation.
This practice is about training the mind in present-time awareness. Once you are able to sustain attention, you can begin to investigate the feeling tone of each experience. Noah says each sensation has a feeling tone of pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality. Investigate what the mind does when your experience is unpleasant, neutral or unpleasant. When you become aware of attachment of pleasant feelings, try to let go. When you are aware of pushing away unpleasant feelings, investigate. The main objective of Vipassana is to bring awareness to the truth of the present moment.
The future of Vipassana.
The future of Vipassana meditation in the West seems to be separate from its Buddhist religious origins. No matter if you agree or disagree with excluding the Buddha from meditation, Theravada is already excluded from many people’s Vipassana practices. It seems that people still get the benefits of meditation without the Buddhist teachings. This is not to say that they would not benefit if they practiced Buddhist teachings along with the Vipassana meditation. I could not find any research on the comparison between Vipassana meditation alone and Vipassana used with Buddhist teachings. Most people such as Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and Wayne Dyer use Vipassana under the disguise of mindful-meditation, and in the spirit of senior teacher Stephen Levine, include an array of spiritual traditions. John Welwood (2009) calls Vipassana practice “mindful attention” or
“mindful witnessing” practice (109). He has incorporated Vipassana-style meditation into his transpersonal psychology theories. According to Welwood:
Most of us live caught up in prereflective identification most the time, imagining that our thoughts, feelings, attitudes and viewpoints are an accurate portrayal of reality. But when awareness is clouded by prereflective identification, we do not yet fully have our experience. Rather, it has us: we are swept along by crosscurrents of thought and feeling in which we are unconsciously immersed. (126)
I believe, in the near future, mindful meditation is what most people will be doing as part of their healthy exercises. Like yoga, most of the people will never know that there is a history and a spiritual side to what they are practicing at 24-hour Nautilus.
Yoga Comes to the West
Yoga has come to the United States in various forms over the last 100 years. Paramahansa Yogananda was the first to successfully bring yoga to the mass in America. He brought a style of yoga known as Kriya Yoga. Kriya Yoga is supposedly the yoga that Krishna gave to Arjuna in the Mahabharata. According to Yogananda (1998):
Kriya Yoga is a simple, psychophysiological method by which human blood is decarbonated and recharged with oxygen. The atoms of this extra oxygen are transmuted into life current to rejuvenate the brain and spinal centres. By stopping the accumulation of venous blood, the yogi is able to lessen or prevent the decay of tissues. The advanced yogi transmutes his cells into energy” (p.235).
Yogananda came to the United States from India in 1924 on a lecture tour. He ended up in Los Angeles in 1925 and started the Self-Realization Fellowship. Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship was a mixture of yoga, Hindu, Christianity, and other popular religious beliefs. Yogananda’s brand of religion caught on with wealthy Westerners and, in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge invited him to the White House.
Today, Yogananda is probably best known for his book Autobiography of a Yogi. Noah Levine modeled his own autobiography Dharma Punx after Yogananda’s writings. Though Yogananda and similar yogis had some success in the Untied States, Ram Dass and various other baby boomers brought in the main wave of yoga we see today during the 1960s. Popular bands like the Beatles and Beach Boys publicly traveled to India to study yoga under gurus. Several Western celebrities financed gurus so that they could travel to the United States to teach their style of yoga.
Ram Dass.
Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert and grew up in a wealthy East Coast Jewish family. His father was a very successful lawyer and president of the Hartford Railroad. Richard Alpert became a successful Harvard Psychologist. It was at Harvard that he was introduced to Dr. Timothy Leary. Leary was the first to give Alpert magic mushrooms and, later, LSD. In 1963, Albert was dismissed from Harvard for his use of psychedelics. He and Leary continued to be involved in unofficial LSD experiments until 1966, when Alpert spiritually began to grow apart from Leary.
In 1967, Alpert traveled to India where he met his guru Baba Neem Karoli—Maharajji. Neem Karoli gave Alpert the name Ram Dass meaning servant of G-d. While staying at the ashram, Ram Dass was trained in Raja and Bhakti Yoga. Raja yoga is very similar to Vipassana meditation and focused on training the mind. Bhakti yoga is a devotional practice focused on ritual and gods or goddesses. Ram Dass’ Bhakti practice was focused on the G-d Hanuman. Most Westerners today still would not have practiced either Bhakti or Raja yoga. In the United States, the major yoga practices are Bikram or Hatha. Ram Dass and other devotees were interested in practicing Hatha but their guru, Baba Neem Karoli, cautioned about practicing Hatha without the right teachings. Ram Dass (1971) writes the following about the devotees and Neem Karoli:
When some devotees questioned him about Hatha yoga (physical method of attaining union with God) Maharajji told them: ‘Hatha yoga is okay if you are strictly brahmacharya. Otherwise it is dangerous. It is the difficult way to raise kundalini. You can raise kundalini by devotion and by feeding people. Kundalini does not necessarily manifest as outer symptoms; it can be awakened quietly.’ To anther one he said, ‘If you are going to stand on your head, take butter. If you eat impure food, don’t do the headstand. Impure food goes to the mind and affects it.’ (327)
Ram Dass returned to the United States in 1969 to teach others about his guru and yoga. It was around this time that he published Remember Be Here Now and started the Hanuman Foundation. Remember Be Here Now was a book that contained insightful information on Indian Hindu spirituality, yoga, meditation, pranayama, and cooking. The book also contains a short biography explaining how Richard Alpert transformed into Ram Dass. The book influenced many baby boomers to seek Hindu spirituality and today still delivers a message that helps individuals find a spiritual yoga path. In 1971, Ram Dass wrote the following about yoga:
Asanas are positions. Once you have gotten into the position and made the statement connected with that position you are there. You become a statue in each asana. The statue image is a useful one. No matter how unusual the position of the asana may seem to you, once you are in the position then you become totally centered in that position. It — your body — comes to be a position of rest…as if you were always in that position, as a statue. Your state of mind is of paramount importance in asanas. Don’t identify with the ego who is doing the asanas. Merely watch the body move into the appropriate position. Stay inside yourself where nothing is happening at all. (p.24).
The way Ram Dass described yoga movements in 1971 is much different then the polished instruction you would receive at a modern yoga facility today. His simple yoga instructions in Remember Be Here Now symbolize the passing of the yoga tradition from Indians to Westerners. Ram Dass teaching yoga in the United States in 1969 may have been the first time an American-born citizen taught traditional yoga. The 1960s hippie movement mothered the birth of Western yoga and is the reason why it is so widely accepted as a healthy alternative preventive medicine in today’s society.
Nana Montgomery interview.
Nana Montgomery is a Santa Cruz California resident who provides the community with social work and yoga. Nana and I worked together, counseling people with schizophrenia. We taught a group together that focused on addiction and Nana would use yoga standing posture stretch movements to reawaken clients during the hour-long group. Nana started practicing yoga fifteen years ago in a gym. She tried it out of curiosity and was instantly hooked. Her first teacher was personable and encouraging, which helped her to keep coming back to class. In 2004, she began to teach yoga because she wanted to share the positive affects that yoga had given her with others. Her classes use the philosophy of yoga but not the spiritual elements because she teaches in a gym. The yoga she teaches is a mixture of Iyengar, Ashtanga and Hatha yoga.
Ashtanga yoga comes from the teacher Krishnamahary who was taught it by his guru at Mount Kailash. Krishnamahary used Ashtanga yoga in a less structured way than other yoga styles that were taught. He was able to adapt his teachings to the concerns of the person he was working with. Ashtanga yoga creates a flow between six different yoga poses that are always practiced in the same order. Iyengar yoga uses props such as wood blocks and straps. Iyengar focuses on alignment of the body. It does this by using asanas that Ram Dass wrote about in Remember Be Here Now. Hatha is a combination of postures and breathing practices. To purify and train the body for long meditations, yogis originally used Hatha yoga. Today, Hatha is the most popular yoga being used in the United States. Its use in the West has removed most of its spiritual connotations. Hatha has become a victim of Western gentrification and has been tailored to fit the gym masses.
When asked how yoga practice improves mind and body Nana (Personal Interview, November 20, 2009) replied, “My yoga practice helps me bring body and mind together so that I feel more present and centered. Doing yoga every day helps keep my body flexible and more resistant to the usual aches and pains that come from inactivity. When practicing yoga, it’s almost impossible not to become more connected and attuned to what’s going on with mind and body” (n.p.).
Nana feels it is important to work with one or several teachers to establish a yoga practice. Each teacher will have something different to offer and every student has their own idea of what works best for them. Once students understand the basic philosophical principles of yoga and know the postures to practice safely, Nana encourages individuals to practice on his or her own. She believes that even if you are practicing on your own, it is still important to keep in contact with a teacher. It is her belief that yoga in the West has been removed from its spiritual essentials; but she feels that it is impossible to do yoga for a long period of time without getting in touch with the spirituality. According to Nana (2009), “Yoga isn’t just a physical practice and I don’t think that there isn’t any way around feeling a connection to the spiritual as a person continues to practice, although that may take time” (n.p.). She feels that yoga is for everyone and not limited by age or physical limitations. It is her belief that yoga is a life-long practice that benefits the body and mind. Yoga helps us age with more flexibility, which keeps us more resistant to injury. She believes that yoga also brings a greater awareness and expansion of the mind that helps us look at the world in different ways. Nana’s (2009) final words on yoga were, “I have noticed that as yoga helps to expand the body, it also works to open the mind” (n.p.).
Conclusion
Vipassana meditation and yoga are different in many ways yet share the common belief that it is important to control the rambling mind. Some yoga traditions offer meditation that is similar to Vipassana. This makes since because the Buddha grew up in India as a Hindu. Yoga was a major part of the Buddha’s first teachings, when he began his spiritual path. The difference that stands out is that the Theravada tradition and Vipassana mediation focus very little on physical body’s health. The Buddha believed that the body was impermanent and this is why he might have focused on the mind. Both Vipassana meditation and yoga have been widely accepted in the United States in the last ten years. This acceptance is due, in part, to the baby boomer generation’s need to find something outside the American Christian norm of the early 1960s.
Today, both yoga and Vipassana meditation have been gentrified to appeal to the Western masses. The Eastern religious elements have been removed to allow the Christian majority to buy into the health benefits of mindful-meditation and yoga postures. There is also a capitalist element to the gentrification that allows people and corporate chains to charge money for these Eastern sacred philosophies. You can learn any of these spiritual traditions without the spiritual element by purchasing a CD, a DVD, or by going to a gym chain such as 24-Hour Nautilus. It is hard to say if Western culture will begin to look at the spiritual philosophy behind Vipassana meditation and yoga as they practice these traditions over a long period of time. It will be interesting to see if the benefits that these traditions bring to the West continue or if they become so watered down that they become useless. Are yoga and Vipassana just another Western exercise fad such as Jazzercise, Tybo, or Aerobicise? In ten years from now will Western people still be practicing yoga and mindful-meditation on the same scale they are now? I doubt that Vipassana or yoga will survive the Western world’s inability to focus on one thing for extended periods of time before moving on to the next big fad.
Works Cited
Dass, R. (1971). Remember be here now. San Cristobal, New Mexico: Lama Foundation.
Dass, R. (1979). Miracle of love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba. New York, NY: E.P. Dutton.
Easterlin, B. & Cardena, E. (1999). Cognitive and emotional differences between short- and long-term vipassana meditators. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 18 (1), 69-81.
Kornfield, J. (1977). Living Buddhist masters. Santa Cruz, CA: Unity Press.
Levine, N. (2003). Dharma punx: a memoir. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.
Levine, S. (1979). A gradual awakening. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
Simpson, T.L., Kayson, D., Bowen, S. & MacPherson, L.M. (2007). PTSD symptoms, substance abuse, and Vipassana meditation among incarcerated individuals. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 20 (3), 239-249.
Welwood, J. (2002). Toward a psychology of awakening: Buddhism, psychotherapy, and the path of personal and spiritual transformation. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Yogananda, P. (1998). Autobiography of a yogi. Dakshineswar, India: Yogoda Satsanga Society of India.