I had an IV infusion (my second one) and it was bad. The first one I had was alright, I had visions, lots of greenery, the usual colourful stuff as well. I also felt like I didn't have a sense of self during the infusion. My second infusion, though, was terrible. This was partly because of the environment I was in. The first time I did it, there was a nurse with me the entire time and they dimmed the lights. I have issues with control and safety, so I could open my eyes at diff points throughout the treatment just to ... "Come back to reality", and then I'd close my eyes and let myself go back to the visions again. Anyway, this time, about 10-15 minutes into my infusion, they brought in another patient. I was already woozy/dissociated, and I was hearing a lot of noise even with ear plugs, seeing lot of light, a lot of movement as nurses were going in and out of the room and they were talking and asking the patient questions (they were setting him to start ketamine also). It became very upsetting because it felt like ... Chaos, and I didn't know what was happening. I also started getting unpleasant visions like my bed was being pulled back and back and back. Or I was falling deeper and deeper. When I would close my eyes, I would see monsters (red devil kind). The entire situation felt so unsafe. It felt like a panic attack the entire time. Anw, immediately after they stopped the infusion, I started crying and couldn't stop crying for an hour afterwards... And I'm not someone who ever cries. I'm not even sure why I was crying or what I was crying about.

It's been a few days after my infusion and I'm still on edge. Every time I think about the experience, I start crying again. I'm now afraid to do the infusion again.

My friend came across an aesthetic clinics recently where they used to do fillers but now they no longer do. Is this common? I thought all aesthetic clinics do fillers

In 2023, I did my first 10-day Vipassana course and I've continued the practice since then. For context, a Vipassana course is a silent meditation retreat where you sit for about 10 hours a day for 10 days. During this time, you're not allowed to talk, use your phone, or have any other distraction. The entire technique involves calming your mind and watching any physical sensations that arise in the body. That's it.

I finally sat down and wrote a reflection, partly as a way to track if and how my thoughts will change in the years to come. What follows isn't a guide to the technique, nor is it meant to be prescriptive or serve as advice. Everything I’m writing here will look different for everyone, at different stages of their own journeys. This reflection simply captures where I am in mine right now.

1. This too shall pass. But sometimes, it doesn't

We are taught that pain is just a sensation. If you sit with it long enough without reacting, you will notice it changes. It will move, increase or decrease in intensity, or even disappear entirely. What turns this physical sensation into suffering is the story we attach to it. Once you remove the story, all you are left with is the actual physical sensation.

The Buddha also talks about this in the parable of the two arrows. It says, an ordinary person hit by pain experiences two arrows: the physical pain itself, and then the mental anguish that follows. A wise person, the parable says, feels only the first arrow. The second arrow is what we can control.

During the course, this was exactly what I experienced. The burning in my back would peak and dissolve into something else within minutes, sometimes seconds. At other times, the pain in my back would stay there for 40 minutes, but the pain would change from moment to moment, from throbbing to burning to aching.

Every time a story came up, "why the hell did I even do this?", "this sucks", I would bring my mind back to the sensation. Over and over again. The key was to interrupt the story. Because the physical pain was there, but what was making it worse was the story I was telling myself about it.

And this was the gist of the entire practice. Just watching, without reacting, and interrupting the stories as they arose. As I practiced during the course and afterwards, what doing this helped me understand was that nothing is permanent. Every sensation passes. The good and the bad, they both pass. There are times when it feels like a feeling or an experience (like grief or disappointment) will never pass and you will feel this way for the rest of your life, but when you sit there and watch the sensations pass, hundreds of times, in your own body, you realize experientially, that the sensations will pass. So we tell ourselves, this too shall pass.

But here's the thing I didn't understand until much later. "This too shall pass" doesn't mean it always passes forever. It doesn't mean it won't come back. I think all my life, I'd quietly taken the phrase to mean something more like: I'm going through this right now, and then it will pass, and the pain will lessen for good if I just grit my teeth to get through it. I've realized that's not what it means. It just means the sensation in front of you right now will shift. It says nothing about tomorrow, or even the next moment.

I have chronic conditions that cause chronic pain, and chronic pain does not pass, not in the way I'd hoped. Yes, it can disappear for a while. But it comes back. Sometimes it's there for the rest of your life.

In Buddha's parable of the two arrows, he says we can get rid of the second arrow, which is the story we tell ourselves. But the first arrow remains. It does not say the second arrow will be gone.

Even mastery doesn't exempt you from this. There's a story about Ajahn Maha Bua, a Thai monk regarded by his own tradition as fully enlightened, letting out a loud scream after being bitten by a scorpion. He had decades of practice, yet the body still screamed.

So what do we do, then? Pema Chödrön, who has her own chronic back pain, offers something that's helped me quite a bit. Whenever she experiences pain, she simply says "I agree," and relaxes into it. This helps because when we experience pain, we often do the exact opposite. We physically clench and resist it. It often feels like getting caught in an ocean rip current where our primal instinct is to fight it and swim against it, yet we know that never works. The only way to survive is to stop fighting and let it carry you.

By saying "I agree" and simply allowing the pain to be there, you drop that muscular resistance. You stop fighting the current.

Yet in practice, this is extremely difficult to do. In the middle of a real flare, the last thing I want is equanimity. I simply want the pain gone. I've told myself, mid-flare, "use this as a chance to practice equanimity" and I couldn't, because the pain made it hard to even breathe, let alone observe anything.

But I suppose that's where daily practice comes in. We practice in peacetime for war. I remind myself that the sitting I do in calm conditions is the only reason any equanimity will be available to me at all when things get bad. We don't build capacity in the crisis. We build it beforehand, in times of peace.

Yet, despite all these things, the practice still falls short. Yes, we can stop the mental suffering, the second arrow by not adding a story. Yes, we can reduce the physical pain by not resisting it. But the fact remains, that pain is pain. It's there, it's OUCH. And this is where I'm at in my journey, where I've realized that Vipassana may not have the answers either and I may need to look into other Buddhist teachings.

2. You're allowed to use whatever gets you through

Some of the vipassana sits in the 10-day course felt impossible. Every part of me wanted to get up. There were times when I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack. Both my mind and body were screaming, and it took every fibre of my being to stay put.

What got me through wasn't discipline. It was Eeyore.

I have a stuffed Eeyore at home that I love dearly, and in my mind, he'd show up with a spray bottle labeled "oxygen" and spray it into my mouth. Other times it felt like there was a child-me crying and refusing to keep sitting, and in my head Eeyore would gently take her aside, sit with her, let her cry and complain and say how much she hated this, while adult-me kept meditating. He'd hold that part of me until it calmed down enough to come back. This would typically last for a few minutes before I'd be able to calm down enough to watch the breath or physical sensations.

I don't know if that's "correct" technique. What I do know is it worked, it got me through sits I wouldn't have finished otherwise.

What I learned was that when something is genuinely difficult, I'm allowed to use whatever my mind gives me, as long as it doesn't do damage and it's used as a temporary tool. It doesn't have to be permanent or even explainable. It just has to get you to the other side of the hard part. Use whatever, your imagination, a comfort object, a mental object, even if it may not be the "right" way of doing things.

I've also used some version of this outside meditation since. In moments of acute stress or anxiety, instead of asking "what's the correct way to handle this," I let myself reach for whatever actually calms me down, even if it looks ridiculous from the outside.

3. Vipassana Didn't Let Me Bypass the Feeling

One of the most insidious things about spirituality I've faced is that it can be used to bypass actual issues and feelings. This is something I've struggled with for years.

We reach for spiritual concepts and language as a way of bypassing something, as a shortcut from facing something hard. We choose "non-attachment" instead of grieving. "Acceptance" instead of sitting with disappointment. Detachment instead of the vulnerability that comes with being in a relationship. Buddhism does teach that suffering comes from craving and aversion. After all, if we weren't attached, we wouldn't feel that level of disappointment when something doesn't go the way we wanted. But I've realized there's a difference between accepting that we're attached and then accepting the feelings that come with that, versus using the idea of non-attachment to skip past the attachment, and bypassing the feelings altogether.

What I've found is that Vipassana, specifically, makes that shortcut harder to take. The instruction isn't "transcend the sensation" or "detach from it." The instruction is to simply observe it. Just sit there and feel the burning, the ache, exactly as it is, without naming it, fixing it, or reaching for a concept to stand between you and it. There's no room to bypass anything, because bypassing requires some abstraction to hide behind, and the technique strips those away. You don't get to skip to "I've accepted this" without actually going through the sensation first.

That's probably the most protective thing about the practice for me.

4. The Spiritual Status Game

This is one of the insights I am least resolved on, and probably one of the most important.

When you try to strip away worldly cravings (money, fame, success) , the ego simply swaps them out for spiritual cravings (longer sits, deeper focus, equanimity, more courses). It's the same story, dressed up as spirituality. Simply put, the ego will latch on to just about anything.

I’ve noticed this dynamic everywhere, in all spiritual traditions. We all do it to different extents. Often, the more loudly we broadcast our spiritual practice, the more esoteric language we hide behind, the less the practice itself is probably doing for us. Esoteric language, especially when used with people from other traditions who may not understand, frequently becomes a way to signal depth.

Vipassana circles are not immune to this either. There is almost a sense of competition in many of these circles about how many courses someone has done, whether they've kept up the recommended two hours of meditation a day. And even outside of Vipassana circles, people generally know the retreats are hard, and when we finish one, we wear that like a badge of honor, almost like completing a marathon. Because Vipassana frames itself as a "pure," rigorous, no-nonsense method, that sheer difficulty is exactly what our minds can quietly turn into a source of pride. When a practice is that demanding, it becomes very easy to use the hardship as a marker of spiritual achievement.

It isn't just an external issue either. It shows up inside the daily practice itself. Yuval Noah Harari, who has practiced Vipassana for two hours a day for decades and is also a Vipassana assistant teacher, has talked about exactly this. The moment you tell the mind to simply observe reality as it is, the ego finds a way to turn it into a competitive achievement instead.

Yuval observed that during adiṭṭhāna, something which is a part of all vipassana courses where you make a resolve to not move at all for the entire hour and is meant purely as an opportunity to observe sensation, the mind rarely stays with the instruction. Instead, it starts narrating, "Look at me, I can sit for an hour without moving. Next time, I'll do two". The ego doesn't go away, it just finds new material. Longer sits, more vipassana courses, and equanimity itself can become the new things to chase.

I have noticed similar things in myself. At some point, I noticed I had begun using Vipassana as an identity marker, something to file under my internal definition of "who I am," right next to things like "I am an avid reader." On some level, I understand why. When you realize nothing external makes you who you are, you still have to construct some framework to present to the world. So, we collect things. Hobbies, books read, countries visited, retreats completed. We assemble them into a cohesive identity so we have a story to tell others, and ourselves, and we get attached to the story.

There is a deep discomfort here though, partly because I don't think there's a clean way out of it. I can't "solve" this by trying harder, because trying to solve it is just one more thing to add to the collection. It will just turn into, "I'm the kind of person who's aware of her own spiritual ego," which is still yet another story.

The only thing that's actually available to me is noticing it as it happens. I'm not sure what good that will do in the long-term but I guess I'll find out.

It was a long read and it took me about 300 pages to even get into it. But boy, did I get into it. I laughed, I cried, I fell in love with the characters. This is a book that will stay with me. In the years to come, I will remember everything that was going in my life, the feelings I was feeling, as I read this book. It's the sort of book you remember. Gus, I miss you.

In 2023, I did my first 10-day Vipassana course and I've continued the practice since then. For context, a Vipassana course is a silent meditation retreat where you sit for about 10 hours a day for 10 days. During this time, you're not allowed to talk, use your phone, or have any other distraction. The entire technique involves calming your mind and watching any physical sensations that arise in the body. That's it.

I finally sat down and wrote a reflection, partly as a way to track if and how my thoughts will change in the years to come. What follows isn't a guide to the technique, nor is it meant to be prescriptive or serve as advice. Everything I’m writing here will look different for everyone, at different stages of their own journeys. This reflection simply captures where I am in mine right now.

1. This too shall pass. But sometimes, it doesn't

We are taught that pain is just a sensation. If you sit with it long enough without reacting, you will notice it changes. It will move, increase or decrease in intensity, or even disappear entirely. What turns this physical sensation into suffering is the story we attach to it. Once you remove the story, all you are left with is the actual physical sensation.

The Buddha also talks about this in the parable of the two arrows. It says, an ordinary person hit by pain experiences two arrows: the physical pain itself, and then the mental anguish that follows. A wise person, the parable says, feels only the first arrow. The second arrow is what we can control.

During the course, this was experimentally understood. The burning in my back would peak and dissolve into something else within minutes, sometimes seconds. At other times, the pain in my back would stay there for 40 minutes, but the pain would change from moment to moment, from throbbing to burning to aching.

Every time a story came up, "why the hell did I even do this?", "this sucks", I would bring my mind back to the sensation. Over and over again. The key was to interrupt the story. Because the physical pain was there, but what was making it worse was the story I was telling myself about it.

And this was the gist of the entire practice. Just watching, without reacting, and interrupting the stories as they arose. As I practiced during the course and afterwards, what doing this helped me understand was that nothing is permanent. Every sensation passes. The good and the bad, they both pass. There are times when it feels like a feeling or an experience (like grief or disappointment) will never pass and you will feel this way for the rest of your life, but when you sit there and watch the sensations pass, hundreds of times, in your own body, you realize experimentally, that the sensations will pass. So we tell ourselves, this too shall pass.

But here's the thing I didn't understand until much later. "This too shall pass" doesn't mean it always passes forever. It doesn't mean it won't come back. I think all my life, I'd quietly taken the phrase to mean something more like: I'm going through this right now, and then it will pass, and the pain will lessen for good if I just grit my teeth to get through it. I've realized that's not what it means. It just means the sensation in front of you right now will shift. It says nothing about tomorrow, or even the next moment.

I have chronic conditions that cause chronic pain, and chronic pain does not pass, not in the way I'd hoped. Yes, it can disappear for a while. But it comes back. Sometimes it's there for the rest of your life.

In Buddha's parable of the two arrows, he says we can get rid of the second arrow, which is the story we tell ourselves. But the first arrow remains. It does not say the second arrow will be gone.

Even mastery doesn't exempt you from this. There's a story about Ajahn Maha Bua, a Thai monk regarded by his own tradition as fully enlightened, letting out a loud scream after being bitten by a scorpion. He had decades of practice, yet the body still screamed.

So what do we do, then? Pema Chödrön, who has her own chronic back pain, offers something that's helped me quite a bit. Whenever she experiences pain, she simply says "I agree," and relaxes into it. This helps because when we experience pain, we often do the exact opposite. We physically clench and resist it. It often feels like getting caught in an ocean rip current where our primal instinct is to fight it and swim against it, yet we know that never works. The only way to survive is to stop fighting and let it carry you.

By saying "I agree" and simply allowing the pain to be there, you drop that muscular resistance. You stop fighting the current.

Yet in practice, this is extremely difficult to do. In the middle of a real flare, the last thing I want is equanimity. I simply want the pain gone. I've told myself, mid-flare, "use this as a chance to practice equanimity" and I couldn't, because the pain made it hard to even breathe, let alone observe anything.

But I suppose that's where daily practice comes in. We practice in peacetime for war. I remind myself that the sitting I do in calm conditions is the only reason any equanimity will be available to me at all when things get bad. We don't build capacity in the crisis. We build it beforehand, in times of peace.

Yet, despite all these things, the practice still falls short. Yes, we can stop the mental suffering, the second arrow by not adding a story. Yes, we can reduce the physical pain by not resisting it. But the fact remains, that pain is pain. It's there, it's OUCH. And this is where I'm at in my journey, where I've realized that Vipassana may not have the answers either.

2. You're allowed to use whatever gets you through

Some of the vipassana sits in the 10-day course felt impossible. Every part of me wanted to get up. There were times when I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack. Both my mind and body were screaming, and it took every fibre of my being to stay put.

What got me through wasn't discipline. It was Eeyore.

I have a stuffed Eeyore at home that I love dearly, and in my mind, he'd show up with a spray bottle labeled "oxygen" and spray it into my mouth. Other times it felt like there was a child-me crying and refusing to keep sitting, and in my head Eeyore would gently take her aside, sit with her, let her cry and complain and say how much she hated this, while adult-me kept meditating. He'd hold that part of me until it calmed down enough to come back. This would typically last for a few minutes before I'd be able to calm down enough to watch the breath or physical sensations.

I don't know if that's "correct" technique. I genuinely don't know what a teacher would say about it. What I do know is it worked, it got me through sits I wouldn't have finished otherwise.

What I learned was that when something is genuinely difficult, I'm allowed to use whatever my mind gives me, as long as it doesn't do damage and it's used as a temporary tool. It doesn't have to be permanent or even explainable. It just has to get you to the other side of the hard part. Use whatever, your imagination, a comfort object, a mental object, even if it may not be the "right" way of doing things.

I've also used some version of this outside meditation since. In moments of acute stress or anxiety, instead of asking "what's the correct way to handle this," I let myself reach for whatever actually calms me down, even if it looks ridiculous from the outside.

3. Vipassana Didn't Let Me Bypass the Feeling

One of the most insidious things about spirituality I've faced is that it can be used to bypass actual issues and feelings. This is something I've struggled with for years.

We reach for spiritual concepts and language as a way of bypassing something, as a shortcut from facing something hard. We choose "non-attachment" instead of grieving. "Acceptance" instead of sitting with disappointment. Detachment instead of the vulnerability that comes with being in a relationship. Buddhism does teach that suffering comes from craving and aversion. After all, if we weren't attached, we wouldn't feel that level of disappointment when something doesn't go the way we wanted. But I've realized there's a difference between accepting that we're attached and then accepting the feelings that come with that, and using the idea of non-attachment to skip past the attachment, and bypassing the feelings altogether.

What I've found is that Vipassana, specifically, makes that shortcut harder to take. The instruction isn't "transcend the sensation" or "detach from it." The instruction is to simply observe it. Just sit there and feel the burning, the ache, exactly as it is, without naming it, fixing it, or reaching for a concept to stand between you and it. There's no room to bypass anything, because bypassing requires some abstraction to hide behind, and the technique strips those away. You don't get to skip to "I've accepted this" without actually going through the sensation first.

That's probably the most protective thing about the practice for me. It's much harder to spiritually bypass your way through ten hours a day of just watching what's actually there.

4. The Spiritual Status Game

This is one of the insights I am least resolved on, and probably one of the most important.

When you try to strip away worldly cravings (money, fame, success) , the ego simply swaps them out for spiritual cravings (longer sits, deeper focus, equanimity, more courses). It's the same story, dressed up as spirituality. Simply put, the ego will latch on to just about anything.

I’ve noticed this dynamic everywhere, in all spiritual traditions. We all do it to different extents. Often, the more loudly we broadcast our spiritual practice, the more esoteric language we hide behind, the less the practice itself is probably doing for us. Esoteric language, especially when used with people from other traditions who may not understand, frequently becomes a way to signal depth.

Vipassana circles are not immune to this either. There is almost a sense of competition in many of these circles, how many courses someone has done, whether they've kept up the recommended two hours of meditation a day. And even outside of Vipassana circles, people generally know the retreats are hard, and when we finish one, we wear that like a badge of honor, almost like completing a marathon. Because Vipassana frames itself as a "pure," rigorous, no-nonsense method, that sheer difficulty is exactly what our minds can quietly turn into a source of pride. When a practice is that demanding, it becomes very easy to use the hardship as a marker of spiritual achievement.

It isn't just an external issue either. It shows up inside the daily practice itself. Yuval Noah Harari, who has practiced Vipassana for two hours a day for decades and is also a Vipassana assistant teacher, has talked about exactly this. The moment you tell the mind to simply observe reality as it is, the ego finds a way to turn it into a competitive achievement instead.

Yuval observed that during adiṭṭhāna, something which is a part of all vipassana courses where you make a resolve to not move at all for the entire hour and is meant purely as an opportunity to observe sensation, the mind rarely stays with the instruction. Instead, it starts narrating, "Look at me, I can sit for an hour without moving. Next time, I'll do two". The ego doesn't go away, it just finds new material. Longer sits, more vipassana courses, and equanimity itself can become the new things to chase.

I have noticed similar things in myself. At some point, I noticed I had begun using Vipassana as an identity marker, something to file under my internal definition of "who I am," right next to things like "I am an avid reader." On some level, I understand why. When you realize nothing external makes you who you are, you still have to construct some framework to present to the world. So, we collect things. Hobbies, books read, countries visited, retreats completed. We assemble them into a cohesive identity so we have a story to tell others, and ourselves, and we get attached to the story.

There is a deep discomfort here though, partly because I don't think there's a clean way out of it. I can't "solve" this by trying harder, because trying to solve it is just one more thing to add to the collection. It will just turn into, "I'm the kind of person who's aware of her own spiritual ego," which is still yet another story.

The only thing that's actually available to me is noticing it as it happens. I'm not sure what good that will do in the long-term but I guess I'll find out.

(AI used in some paragraphs to tighten the language)