At the edge of the sidewalk, beer in hand on a Sunday night, bum shaking back and forth, “pé na areia caipirinha gua de coco cervejinha“, on a mission to catch a guy’s eye two tables away while my friend talked something about Zappa… life is too good.

Even though I’m from the dry team, almost zero alcohol, doing this full cosplay of Brazilian happiness makes me feel very good. Warm and light days, my brother from Floripa was here, he is also a programmer, we spent long hours each in front of our laptops between functions, laughs, commits, confessions…

Various little strolls, 24-hour company, good connection. I like being happy, but it’s unsustainable to be happy all the time. There are things that can only be done with intense solitude, a certain sobriety of emotions, a dash of pessimism and maybe a bit of despair. It’s natural in life to be unhappy from time to time.

Remember when I went on a 10-day meditation retreat? So, as it is totally silent in the place, there are several signs indicating the rules and schedules so we don’t have to ask, and on all of them, there’s a little message at the end: “be happy” – this bothers me a lot.

Yes 🥁 we’ve arrived at the edition where I return to the subject of the first edition, as I promised in the second edition.

Yesterday, I explained why I chose to submit myself to experience this retreat called Vipassana, a meditation method/system that has existed for decades and can be done in almost any country, for free, always following the same standard.

Despite being very fond of this institution, today I am going to make some criticisms in a kind of “end young mystic” vibe. If you leave before the end, I want you to take away one message: despite everything, go to a Vipassana retreat, it’s very good for the mind, really.

I’m going to criticize and those who are over 30 will understand well, we can even really like something, but always notice a detail here and there. Aging is to become very critical or not give a damn, regardless of the position, we learn to deal with the coexistence of paradoxical ideas.

For example, I like the quiet and organized space of Vipassana to retreat, I think it clears the mind and I admire the institution’s capacity for expansion and maintenance.

On the other hand, I find the dissemination of concepts in the retreat somewhat alienating, mainly because Mr. Goenka says that his technique is universal and desires all people to be happy. Of course, compared to other talks that happen at retreats, this is the least problematic, but this neutrality talk bothers me.

Today I’m going to question whether being happy is a universal desire, whether desiring peace among religions is a universal desire, whether wanting to be detached is a universal desire, and whether feeling samkaras for our karmas is universal.

Criticism 1: Be happy

At the end of the retreat, when we could talk to each other, a gray-haired, skinny guy, turtle glasses, professor’s face, told me this (imagine with a Rio accent):

• The last day was the best for me, when he tells us to imagine the vibe of meditation expanding to all beings, wishing Metta for all people, I felt a lot of love…

There, he was caught by the discourse.

We spend 10 days there experiencing a complexity of emotions, and on the last day, they teach us to wish good vibes to the world?! Ok, it’s beautiful, I participate, but I don’t totally accept it.

If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know: sometimes it’s agonizing, boring, it’s not a vibe – precisely, meditating is important because it teaches you to live with these nuances of reality and it doesn’t always make you happy in the end.

And if it doesn’t feel good, did I meditate wrong? No. Mr. Goenka says there’s nothing wrong. Just observe: if you’re in good vibes at the end of meditation, wish that to the world, if you’re not, don’t vibrate your energy to anyone. In my case, sometimes a narrator in my mind would say:

“While people are being bombed between the Gaza Strip, Rocinha and Ukraine, about 50 people in the middle of the Atlantic forest meditate in love, wishing freedom and happiness to all human beings – super effective.”

Would only a very unbearable person argue that “being happy” is not a universal wish? Maybe. I’ve been softening you up, since the first edition I showed myself a pain I said I don’t believe in full happiness, nor in world peace: they are utopias, fictions, political training speeches.

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Alex Castro

Why do so many companies want you to want to be happy?

I know you want to be happy. But think with me: The biggest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars so that some of the best minds on the planet convince you to put your own individual happiness as the ultimate goal of your life…

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Even the most miserable people have moments of happiness. Why tie a meditation technique to such a generic desire?

Thousands of years ago it was believed that we live this life over and over again in a wheel of samsara, the final desire of meditation was, therefore, not to reincarnate anymore (I won’t jump into that hole now, but if you want, you can take a breath here to reflect on the caste system).

Why is the purpose of meditation not enlightenment, but happiness today? If before the scheme was to get out of the wheel, why do we want to be happy spinning here today?

Critique 2: Peace among religions

On this same last day of the retreat where we learn to expand happiness, we are guided to a room with a television. The first screen we see in days, they play a video of Mr. Goenka talking about universal peace and acceptance of all religions at a UN conference:

“Wow. This retreat is serious, this teacher is recognized worldwide”. Showing this kind of video at the end of the course is a very strong social proof technique.

Perhaps with a bit of critical sense, one might find strange this strong emphasis on the West-East dichotomy, the “East”, India, as a great bearer of the pacifying discourse. For those not very versed in the history of Indian gurus in the “West”, it may all seem unique when, in fact, this talk is quite old:

Over 100 years ago, Vivekananda also spoke of peace in a very similar speech: “We believe not only in universal tolerance, but accept all religions as true.” (You can listen to the original here.)

This speech is not so famous outside the yoga universe, perhaps you thought more of others such as Ghandi or Dalai Lama, it’s along those lines. I will talk more about peace and non-violence in other editions, so if you are enjoying it, give a like, send it to someone and stay:

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Anyway, there are several other materials that they could show on the last day, for example the documentary about vipassana applied in prisons, which is great.

But no, the choice went another way, as everything in the retreat is meticulously organized, this end marketing technique is too:

Showing this speech removes any doubt you had about having thrown yourself into a difficult 10-day experience and puts you in a place – you were part of something bigger, come back, call other people, come volunteer at the retreat, let’s expand and achieve world peace.

Well, I don’t agree that these things about being happy and peace among all religions are universal, but they are, perhaps, secondary concepts of the retreat. The central idea is to sit and pay attention to the sensations of the body without feeling attachment or aversion, it is to detach.

Difficult, even more so for so many days and hours: the body hurts, the head starts to freak out in a thousand things – come back, come back here! Pay attention to the right shoulder, what’s there? Nothing? Ok, let’s go to the elbow…

Critique 3: Being detached

It takes self-control not to get up in the middle of the fifth day of meditation and shout “guys, we’re self-flagellating here!! let’s go for a hike!! there’s a waterfall nearby, let’s go!!”.

10 days is a lot. Besides being on a thin line between being elitist or anti-capitalist, doing nothing for so long is also boring as hell.

On the other hand, there is a common imagination that believes in “doing boring things leads to good results“, that “consistency and discipline take you further“. People look at you a bit differently because you can meditate.

It is only a superpower to meditate for so long because we live the exact opposite of this: under an economy based on melting our minds and bodies with pleasure.

Everyone is afraid of losing control, of spending too much and not being able to pay the rent, of eating too much and dying of a heart attack, of sleeping around and dying alone… Therefore, each person has their own fetishization of discipline for some area of life.

Vipassana meditation messes with this imagination, it is a hard exercise, a shock treatment for you to learn not to feel attachment or aversion, it makes you a more resilient person and able to apply this skill in other areas of life.

Beautiful, but it is not “natural” for all cultures to admire a disciplined person, with total control of the body and mind, who does not have excessive desires. Self-control is not natural, not universal, and not a higher moral value.

I don’t want to know about elevation, it’s at sea level, at ground level that my worldly love exists and insists / attachment and freedom (even if partial and temporary), do not need to be a contradiction.

In some indigenous communities, for example, the acceptance and integration of desires is an intrinsic part of the human experience and not something to be purged or dominated.

Why did we invent to eradicate desires? One of the reasons is, for sure, because they distract us from social and financial obligations, which with each passing year of capitalism can only be minimally fulfilled if we maintain a stoic lifestyle, with the consistency of an atomic clock.

Of course, it’s not all capitalism’s fault, other cultures embrace this ideal – I would venture to say that always the most hierarchical ones – for example, another strong reference to discipline that we have is from martial arts or from the time of Japanese shogunate.

But speaking about the now and capitalism itself, it bothers me that the obsession for emotional, rational and financial self-control exists at the same intensity as we put botox in our forehead. It’s against nature this thing of trying to avoid at most the movements of the mind and body.

“And therefore I do not regret my attachments, the times I felt the desire to remain, to be, to be in all the linking verbs with other beings.”

Is it really necessary to strive and suffer to achieve a stability of difficult maintenance? Being detached at all costs does not seem to me a universal concept.

Critique 4: Introduction to catechizing concepts – karma, samkaras…

Finally, I want to talk about the philosophical explanations that Goenka gives to such physical sensations that we feel when we sit for so many hours.

Everyone who goes feels them to some extent and it’s not just about back pain, there are also good sensations, butterflies in the stomach, an open chest… it’s a long time to feel a lot.

Do the sensations come along with the thoughts? Oops, but I thought I wasn’t thinking about anything, just scanning the sensations of the body…

Mr. Goenka has an explanation for all of this. He calls the sensations Samkaras, says they are related to karmas.

He tells several Buddhist stories throughout the course, emphasizes that it doesn’t matter how badly you messed up in the past or in other lives. You can, from now on, meditate and change your conduct, stop accumulating more samkaras, achieve freedom from the ties of the mind and body, spread peace around.

That is, the past has consequences, but there is no direct punishment, as in Christianity. The pains do not come as punishment because you have committed sins, but they do have some relation to your past life.

Anyway, Mr. Goenka says that in this technique it doesn’t matter if the person feels good or bad things, the important thing is your ability to maintain equanimity, to stay firm sitting, still, meditating, without judging the Samkaras, getting rid of them by letting them pass through you without reacting.

Very beautiful and compassionate, but it’s a fic. We have no explanation for the origin of the variation of sensations in the body and we don’t need to believe in Samkaras, nor in Sins, nor in Synapses to want to meditate or think about changing old life patterns. (I’m not anti-current science, I believe in synapses, but in the future we might call it something else, who knows.)

There are things that can only be experienced, you can’t touch them, you can’t put them into words – and you don’t need to. You can see that, the more we sit there meditating using the Vipassana technique, the more we expand our perception of the body and, in a way, we master the mind’s desire to do other things.

This can be said in many ways, but they are not universal concepts, as Mr. Goenka puts it. Proust, a guy who we know was not very happy, said “We only heal from a suffering after we have endured it to the end.”

I hope you go to Vipassana

Despite Mr. Goenka’s end-of-day recordings telling his Buddhist stories and trying to catechize us to rid ourselves of supposed samkaras, all the other hours of the day are in silence, you with yourself, without having to worry about basic survival things like cooking or paying for accommodation.

Where else can you find this?

Sitting for 10 days in Vipassana will not solve “all the problems of humanity”, nor yours, but it is very beautiful to think and act as if it would.

Leaving the retreat, I asked the people who were returning our phones if they worked there permanently or were volunteers. Both told me they had been volunteers for years, but unfortunately had other obligations and couldn’t stay there permanently.

Of course, they wanted to stay there all the time, in the masturbation of cleansing their sins, exercising self-discipline, and radiating happiness to the world. What a noble life mission, guys. Catechism successfully completed.

Ironies aside, there is no place where we are not subjected to some ideology, whether in the shopping center, in the company, or in the meditation center… as David Foster Wallace said, some are so present that they seem like air around us, just as water is obvious to a fish in a tank.

It is up to each one to develop a deeper consciousness of how to better interpret the social constructs in which we are trapped inserted. With Vipassana it’s no different, you go on a retreat and Mr. Goenka says all the time that it is a universal technique, like a journalist saying that their opinion is impartial.

The retreat exists within a larger political and cultural context, it is up to each participant to look deeper into where this applies to their life. Vipassana is not apolitical or secular, for example, in England there is a retreat that is only for executives.

It’s natural that this happens, it’s a lot of time and money to maintain this global structure. It’s not an a-cultural environment nor a universal technique. Quite the contrary, it’s a retreat towards a very specific belief: with practice we can be happy. Happy for what?

“Perhaps clinging to detachment is one of the less healthy attachments”

The highlighted excerpts are all from this beautiful text “Detachment is not the only path to freedom” by Geni, a Guarani psychologist. Go check it out.

Without the slightest basis in reality, I’m excited for 2024. I’m of the team who loves the fiction new year, new life. Rethinking the whole existence, as if it were possible to start from a blank sheet – when in fact you can see the mark of the pen on the back, there was (a lot of) stuff before.

You can’t reset life, but when the year turns, I have some rituals to mark a knot symbolising that time has passed – we are in a new cycle. There are two activities that shape the turn, each has its own time and intensity: they cannot be accelerated, they are narrative processes that unite past and future in a present.

I know that the New Year’s celebration would already be a rite to mark this turn and it’s not that I have any distaste for New Year’s Eve, I’m not like Tati Bernardi, who has an aversion to celebrating on crowded beaches, but these are more introspective rituals, precisely because I don’t have a preference for this date.

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In some years I spend the night dancing crazy with MD – in others I go to bed early, alone, before midnight, in peace, happy with life. Since my disposition can vary, I created two little rituals that can be maintained in any situation: doing 108 sun salutations and writing some plans in the planner.

Ritual 1: Dance according to the music

Putting “plan the year” as a personal little ritual is almost a cruel joke. As Marília Morchovich speaks very well in this text, having to plan is a symptom of the accumulation of functions that capitalism dumps on our shoulders and makes self-organization almost a question of survival – every man for himself.

It is no coincidence that productivity methods and resources like bullet journals, planners, and pomodoro become increasingly popular. With precarious working conditions, more tasks are required from workers than it is humanly possible to accomplish. Thus, working time not only needs to be extended, but also optimized.

Despite understanding that the overload is systemic and unfair, it does not help to keep struggling against it.

No one is going to break the system by distributing anticap leaflets on the train, nor are they going to win the system if they have a stroke before 50 in exchange for making 6 digits a year.

Time management and monthly-annual budgeting are some of the best rituals that have been built for us in these times and it’s not worth throwing the carpe diem only to stuff myself hidden with rivotril later.

The middle way is Cicero’s planner.

Wednesday: day that the manager goes face-to-face, stays 12 hours in the office to make an average.

Friday: home office day, go to Republic Square at the act against the privatization of corner beds

Reminder: wash the MST cap.

Some people may not like to plan, they think it is paving the way for anxiety or plastering day to day.

Planners, calendars, lists, and scapulars

If the focus of the planning is to answer “Exactly where do I want to go”, “Exactly how much do I want to earn”, it really becomes heavier, these metric mental masturbations are an easy path to frustration, especially if you are prone to believe in fictions and expect everything to come out 100% as expected.

I am a devotee of Thais Godinho, she was an outperformer, one of those we suspect live a 30-hour day, so she created the organized life blog (a bible). At some point, Thais stumbled upon Buddhism and tried to hold the paradoxes of old and new beliefs with the rebranding compassionate productivity.

Fortunately, she didn’t stop there, she would age very badly, life was generous and pulled her into a deeper hole: today the cat is doing a PhD in the area work sufferings – I confess, it was when I thought she was going to throw in the towel, but she holds firm, because it’s what we can do.

I say this to illustrate that “productivity” is a complex and paradoxical subject, not always synonymous with alienated corporate bitches. I also tell you to go there on her blog, it has everything.

My mini contribution to the subject is: “How do I want to feel” and “Who do I want to be with” are good question-exercises to guide the steps when planning, as well as planning from 12 to 12 weeks instead of the whole year, and using the notion app (along with the planner, yes) – everything for me.

I shared in the last edition some of the cool things to do at the beginning of 2024 and I have already prioritized this, if it is not precisely the fun that is left for the second plan, buried by the accumulation of functions and maintenance of everyday life: training, taxes, food, work, courses, professional events, doctors…

The scheme is to think that planning is more of a compass than a map.

It’s an instrument that guides you in some direction, for example, I like to think of a larger goal as the theme of the whole year, but I don’t specify from January to December how to get there. Another thing, I keep a list of trips-rides I would like to do and choose on average 2 to do each trimester.

I have a very experimental personality, I want to acquire many skills or at least humble myself trying – it’s stronger than me. I usually try about 5 habits-hobbies per year. By the way, we are here, now, directly, live, in habit number 1 of 2024, writing and publishing weekly. Stay tuned for more:

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So that I can do this without losing track of the activities-to-survive, planning is essential, it helps me fit work in between fun, I mean.. the opposite.

Ritual 2: Connect the body to the present moment

Besides this ritual-planner, on day one, I also usually do 108 sun salutations. In some yoga studios, on special dates, people do exactly that, so I just borrowed the little ritual for myself too – this magical Indian number and this random sequence.

The idea is to have a moment during the day to make a knot in time, connect breath, thought, body, everything in one place – we are here, we are this, we are together, we have passed another year.

Of course, I would rather ground mind-body-breath to the present moment with my tribe, in a ritualistic dance, singing, playing instruments, and perhaps with a touch of medicinal herb, but I didn’t get to be born in that context.

I grew up with a sun salutation poster on the blue wall of the home office, it was something I used to do since childhood with my mother, it’s a good memory. As an adult, I wanted to know what is the tradition of this sequence, in which text is it? Why does everyone do it? Why is it a little different in each yoga lineage?

If you are also curious to know the origin of Surya Namaskar, the so-called sun salutation sequence, come with me, I will tell here briefly, but I warn you: it is not carved in any ancient sculpture, nor described in medieval scriptures. It’s just a set of movements that a rich Indian invented 100 years ago.

The sun salutation

During World War I and II, showing health and strength was a way to demonstrate national sovereignty. For example, the Germans used their gym exercises not only to develop healthy bodies, but also to promote certain morality and create “new Germans”.

Throughout Europe, texts on sports such as rowing, horse riding, boxing, and swimming, as well as manuals on how to walk, climb, and jump were published. In this context, health and fitness magazines emerged, such as L’Athlète, in 1896, the year the first modern Olympics took place. Before that, in 1893, the first international bodybuilding exhibition took place!

In India, various Western gymnastics, such as Ling, Sandow and YMCA, had a great impact, were incorporated into the local culture of fights and we can find this mix in the Indian Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding (1950), a book that was translated into English and sold in other countries, and also included a description of Surya Namaskar as an exercise, along with a detailed history of a supposed tradition.

However, according to the book The path of modern yoga, in extensive bibliographic research, it was discovered that there is no millennial tradition for Surya Namaskar.

In reality, it was Raja Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi (1868–1951) who invented and disseminated the sequence. He tested various foreign & Indian exercise manuals, but saw no result in any of them – like us, who test a thousand workout apps and the belly remains there.

So, he took a sequence that his father used to do to pray, made modifications, called it surya namaskar (sun salutation) and, with the help of the businessman and guru Paramahansa Yogananda, adapted it to the popular form of the time, a step-by-step manual: “Number 1: stand in tadasana, mountain posture… Number 2: bend in uttanasana, etc.”

Bhavanaro systematized his practice as the science of Namaskaras, and incorporated it into the curriculum of his yoga and gymnastics school in Satara. He claimed that the practice had benefits such as muscle development, disease cure, and pain relief.

His booklet included illustrations and recommended practices in cycles, varying from 25 to 50 cycles for children from eight to twelve years old, 50 to 150 cycles for boys and girls from twelve to sixteen years old, and 300 cycles for everyone over sixteen years old.

Since then, millions of people have been doing these prostrations, across India and then around the world, with the help of illustrated manuals translated into English, but also with the little push from gurus seeking ways to disseminate their knowledge in a homogeneous and memorable way.

All of this is very different from the older yoga books, in Sanskrit, medieval, secret, that had little or nothing to do with a sequence of rhythmic movements – of which I will inevitably end up talking in other editions. If you’re interested, stay:

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Hatha yoga is a modern creation and the sun salutation was incorporated into it. It has a base, but everyone does it their own way, Bhavanaro himself mixed the movements with the chanting of Vedic and Bija Mantras.

In fact, it is likely that Bhavanaro named his sequence surya namaskar due to its resemblance to the sun worship ritual, in which Brahmin priests kneel and prostrate – a characteristic of the syncretism that permeates the entire Indian imagination to this day.

Another example that I love, in the akharas, Indian bodybuilding gyms at the time, in addition to weight training, there was the Surya Namaskar and a mix of other techniques that practitioners brought from different places.

K.V. Iyer, combined bodybuilding with yoga postures. 1930. Otley Coulter Collection.

In these places there were also strong anti-colonialist movements, which caused a paradox between accepting European and foreign techniques in general, but at the same time strengthening the nationalist movement, so sometimes everything was appropriated, adapted and renamed as a “purely Indian” practice. Who knows if a bit of what is now said to be yoga and purely Indian is not from another place?

Final Thoughts

You can’t control the future using a planner. There’s a sick productivity p0rn on the internet and I won’t corroborate with that: sometimes I organize myself and don’t deliver anything, it happens.

You also can’t transcend reality by practicing a sequence of movements invented between wars. I won’t embrace alienation and pretend there isn’t a lot of academic research that debunks the magical discourses of gurus out there.

It may sound a bit square, but I like doing these things – and I can handle being cheesy in a good way, I don’t need to justify that I plan because it’s more effective or do yoga because it’s ancient and mystical.

When I laid my head on the pillow, thirty minutes after the turn of the year, I was very happy to be going to bed early, sober, with my alive and clean brother crashed out on the couch and still hearing the sound of my mother washing the dinner dishes.

For this past year, this calm was everything, everything I needed most – I almost cried from how much I needed it. However, I strongly wished that the next turn would be in a short white dress, very nice, bathed in champagne, perhaps even in the midst of some commotion.

Regardless of the situation, I know I will write in my planner and do the sun salutations. As the philosopher Byung-Chul-Han would say in “The disappearance of rituals: A topology of the present“, the ritual is to time, as the house is to space. I like to decorate this knot of time, just as I embellish my house.