The moment you arrive, you have to deposit into a box whatever you may have brought that isn't allowed: books, notebooks, pencils, pens, anything to write with. And of course the sacred cell phones we all carry everywhere. This is where I made my last call to Juan, so he'd know I hadn't been kidnapped and wasn't doing forced labor in some strange place (at my age I don't think anyone would choose me for sexual trafficking, though my beloved mother did briefly consider that possibility, on account of living in Mexico and being convinced that our children are forever young, beautiful, and desirable).

My first impression of the place was: "wow, the Vietnam War, a hospital in the middle of the jungle with a highway out front." Everything so austere and old, though well-maintained, especially the meditation facilities, which lacked nothing except air conditioning. I was received by a woman with the bearing of a Nazi concentration camp warden, so my mental film reel jumped straight to World War II.

Then they showed us to our rooms, which obviously measured no more than two by two-and-a-half meters. A bed of decent size, hard as a rock (which I happen to like), a tiny table with a stool, and a rod for hanging my clothes. Ventilation up top with mosquito screens, and a single window that looked out onto nothing in particular, at least mine didn't. The sleeping cubicles were connected along the top, so you could hear every sound the women on either side made.

The bathrooms were simple but had what was necessary, though not all had hot water (which I luckily don't need). Since everything was shared, this was already getting difficult for me, someone entirely unaccustomed to communal living, and the business of carrying my own toilet paper and other toiletry items meant I kept losing things. Fortunately there was a way to buy them right there on the premises.

They gave us dinner, which would normally be served every day at 5 p.m., but since this was the last proper meal before the course began, it was a full dinner. After that, we would only eat a real meal at 11 a.m., and at five there would only be teas, instant coffee, crackers, bread, jam, fruit, and, thankfully for me, cocoa. Without milk, of course, since only vegetarian food is served. There was Nestlé milk and water.

That part wasn't hard for me, except for what happened the first night: after we'd been woken up as would become routine for ten days at 4 a.m. to begin meditating at 4:30 a.m., between the dazed confusion of not being used to so many rules and my decision to shower between six and seven in the morning (which is also, supposedly, breakfast time), I missed my super breakfast.

That was my first confrontation with a personality that does not take kindly to being controlled. The anger I felt when I realized I'd missed that meal, even without being particularly hungry, was something else entirely. I cursed everything internally. I was this close to marching over and announcing I was leaving, because I never once heard the damn bell that supposedly rang so loudly it was impossible to miss.

I held my temper and began to notice my first personality flaw. Once I got hold of myself I ate like a maniac at eleven, just to be safe. Even so, I lost weight again, because after six days of eating things you can't identify and that all taste roughly the same, my appetite slowly dwindled. The cocoa ran out and they took two days to bring out another Dutch cocoa, instead of some brownish powder that tasted like absolutely nothing.

In my first session listening to master Goenka, who via video recording was, in effect, the one giving us instructions every evening (and alongside those instructions he tells many stories and metaphors), he quoted phrases that Siddhartha Gautama, "The Buddha," had spoken, repeating them in the language the Buddha actually used, which is Pali or Sanskrit.

This teacher has a way of speaking that captivates you entirely, with that very pronounced Indian accent that makes of the English language something almost melodic. He does all of this with an enormous sense of humor that sets off waves of continuous laughter. He repeats constantly: "be happy," and his own happiness is plainly visible in his expression, which leaves you with a feeling of peace.

The first thing he tells us is that if we have religious beliefs (which didn't interfere with anything for me), we should set them aside for ten days and try to clear our minds of all kinds of images, since this meditation requires leaving behind what isn't reality and seeing reality as it is, so that if you want to keep believing in God afterward, you may, but you come to understand that God should have no image. Dhamma (reality, the way things actually are) is "reality without fantasies." Dhamma is pure science, the scientific management of the mind, something the great ancient masters of India discovered long ago and that contemporary science now supports with its own theories.

Dhamma is what the mind contains in this very moment. It means observing reality as it is, not as we wish it were. We must not color it with religious or philosophical beliefs. We only observe. This is the foundation of Vipassana meditation: observing without reacting, with complete calm.

Other forms of meditation are also good, and what the master criticized, with reasoning that genuinely convinces, is this: if you meditate and your meditation is anchored to an image, as religious people often do, or to a sound like mantras, you are simply replacing one crutch with another. It may help you control emotions and keep them from surfacing outwardly, which is part of the goal, but you aren't releasing them. You're pushing them down to the depths of your unconscious (which turns out to be not so unconscious once you begin to understand it).

In Vipassana meditation, the first thing you're asked to do is observe how air enters your nostrils, whether through one side, the other, or both. You should not try to alter your natural breathing, regardless of whether it's fast, loud, slow, or silent. With this, you begin to concentrate without any sound or image as an anchor. So starting from the simple act of breathing, they give you instructions to advance in the control and observation of what will happen to you, physically and mentally. Believe me, many things happen that, without this method that isolates you from noise, from the world, from everything, we would never appreciate with the magnitude they deserve.

Starting on the second day, you begin to observe bodily sensations that may be pleasant or not, but which you must not try to avoid. This is because it immediately puts you in contact with a reality that, most of the time, we can neither avoid nor change.

The point is not to kill the anger, or any destructive or negative thought or sensation you experience. On the contrary, the point is to face it and let it pass gently, the way nature would. Because that is another of the things you gradually become conscious of: that we are only part of nature, and that like nature itself, every moment we live is new and unrepeatable.

And so when you find yourself trying to concentrate on what's being asked of you, you realize just how little concentration most of us actually have.

In my case, all manner of things kept coming to mind. Things that had happened, people I love, people I haven't seen, people I miss, along with the usual problems of how and what you'll do with your future, losing so much of what is the present.

But then, doing this day after day, without knowing quite how, you begin to have greater sensitivity in your body and in your whole being, even during the hours when we weren't meditating. In the free moments, my entire life passed in front of me. It is not easy at all to spend time with yourself while so acutely aware of it, and without being able to discuss it with anyone. So I began to observe nature and everything around me with great scrutiny, letting everything flow.

The place is surrounded by vegetation and seems very large, but once you start walking it, you quickly realize it's small, though that doesn't mean there's any shortage of things to observe. Clean channels run through the grounds, full of animal life, and even in sandals I worked up the courage to wade into the grass, though I was bitten multiple times by fire ants. The wretched things wouldn't let go of my skin with a simple brush, so I had to peel them off with my fingers and, of course, try not to kill them. That was another one of the commitments: do not kill any living being, and this includes ants (which appeared everywhere) and mosquitoes, which bit everyone, though I'm fortunate enough not to be their first preference when other people are around.

In those channels, with so many days to observe what is supposedly the same scene (when in reality nothing is ever truly the same), I was able to watch the enormous buds of lotus flowers floating on the water and then bloom days later. Immense pink flowers that were an absolute delight to the eyes. Frogs leaping and making the most charming sounds, which mingled with so many others made by other creatures, all of it varying considerably depending on the hour of the day.

To be continued....