#201 The Tunnel of Memory

How ten days of Vipassana Meditation Reopened the first twenty-three years of my life

In December I did a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation training course.

We meditated for eleven hours a day. We had no access to reading materials, writing materials, or communication devices.

I didn’t know what to expect going into this experience, and I’ve barely written anything about it since. Vipassana is one of those things that feels almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

But one thing happened that I absolutely wasn’t expecting.

Memories.

A huge amount of them.

I moved to Kuwait when I was twenty-three and spent the rest of my twenties in the Gulf region before eventually moving to Bali. When I think about my life story, it tends to begin there: my twenties in the Middle East. What has now become more than a decade spent in Asia.

But during Vipassana, something strange happened.

It was as if my life had been moving through a tunnel. When I moved to Kuwait, it was as if I closed the tunnel door behind me and locked it shut.

Inside the meditation course there was nothing to keep me busy. No work. No conversations. Nothing to read. Nothing to write.

And suddenly it felt like I stepped back into that tunnel.

Memories started arising.

Memories of strange things teachers said and did when I was a child.

Memories of choices I made as a teenager that are no longer aligned with my values. (I’ll write about that another time. It’s too big for this piece.)

Memories of things people said to me when I was young that I hadn’t thought about in years.

All of it had been locked away somewhere in a vault.

I always knew that vault existed, but I don’t think I was ever truly conscious of it. I thought those early years simply didn’t matter. I thought the things that shaped me happened later, in Kuwait.

So it wasn’t that I was avoiding earlier memories. I simply believed they weren’t relevant points on the timeline of my life.

Yoga philosophy actually has language for this.

In the Yoga Sutras, the deep storehouse of our past impressions is called karmashaya, literally the repository of karma. It’s like a storage field inside the psyche where the traces of every action, experience, and emotional imprint are held.