Episode #199: Michael Stein
“I grew up in Long Beach, New York, and everything was great until my mother passed away at 14. After that is when I really started to need meditation. I was pretty angry, upset. And it was 1960s,” says Michael Stein. “After a lot of getting high, hanging around, I got in trouble here and there, and finally, one day, I decided to leave America and go travel a bit.” This “a bit” turned into years, culminating in a lifelong affiliation with the Goenka organization.
Michael’s father had escaped Austria in the 1930s as Hitler was coming to power, losing everything before coming to New York, where Michael grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community. Although he had little interest in college, he enrolled in classes to get a student deferment, the only way to avoid being drafted to go to Vietnam. When the danger of being drafted had passed in 1971, Michael dropped out, traveling to Israel to live on a kibbutz. Then met someone who asked him if he might want to travel to India. Michael agreed, and they flew to Istanbul; there he and his friend happened to meet two California surfers with a Volkswagen who were heading to India, and they hitched a ride with them. But after a car accident in eastern Turkey, Michael and his friend continued on their own by bus and train through Iran, and Afghanistan. From there, they took a bus across the Khyber Pass, arriving in India just a month before the 1971 war with Pakistan. “When I crossed the border into India, and I stepped into India, I had this feeling like I was home,” he says. “I'm finally here.”
Michael’s spiritual sojourn started with Ram Dass, who happened to be in Bombay when Michael arrived; he then went to Goa, where he first heard about a meditation course that an Indian businessman was teaching, but passed on the option to attend. The second time he heard about vipassana was in Benares, but again, he chose not to go. “It just wasn’t the right time,” he recalls of both instances. Instead, he continued along the “hippie trail” into Nepal, where he did some trekking.
Eventually, he ran out of money; and his grandmother sent him enough to buy a ticket stateside, where he worked for the summer in order to get enough money to go back to India. This time, he headed straight to Dalhousie, determined to finally sit a vipassana course with Goenka. Even though he arrived a day late, Goenka let him join, and not only that, personally ushered him one-on-one through the pre-meditation formalities. Pleased with the experience, Michael sat several more courses, and then sat for 30 days, as the rules were not as strict as they are now. After that course, he traveled to Bodhgaya for Goenka’s annual self-course there. The meditators who came for this split into two groups, some sitting with Goenka during his self-course, and the others sitting a course at the Gandhi Ashram where Anagakira Munindra was living. Michael managed the course there.
Looking back now, Michael recognizes how this journey was taking place within a wider context, during an era when Westerners were escaping the consumerism and capitalism of their home countries and flocking to India for its spiritual wisdom. Besides those coming to India just to get high or go trekking, there was a community of travelers from around the world who were drawn to the spiritual smorgasbord that India had to offer. They would meet each other in one place, go off to explore different spiritual teachers, such as Ram Das, the Dalai Lama, Sai Baba, or Neem Karoli Baba, or some other teacher, then fortuitously meet up again at some point and talk about their experiences. It was a close, open and friendly community. Michael especially remembers Krishnamutri’s disciple, Vimala Thakar, who was supporting the Bhoodan Movement, a voluntary land reform campaign launched by Gandhi’s followers. “I just had so many opportunities [that] I feel so very grateful for being able to have,” Michael recalls. “The biggest thing I'd say, is if I wasn't such an arrogant idiot at the time, I would have got a lot more out of it!”
Although there are hundreds of permanent vipassana centers around the world in the Goenka tradition today, back then there were none. Goenka simply conducted retreats wherever he got permission to set up a course, and the unpredictability of it all led to some wild ones; sometimes it was a struggle just to ensure that was enough food, among other basic details. Though very challenging, for Michael, it was also an adventure. “It was greatest period of my life! It was great, I mean, it was wonderful. It was like your teenage years, where everything was sort of fun.”
One year Goenka did not teach many courses, and so Michael spent time in Bodhgaya during the “off season,” when he was fortunate to spend a lot of time with Anagakira Munindra, who stayed nearby at the Burmese Vihara (an experience Grahame White also shared and referenced in a recent podcast discussion). Michael remembers Munindra with great fondness, as gentle and kind but possessing a sharp analytical mind. Michael chuckles relating how Munindra used to confound his Western students by bargaining fiercely for just pennies at the market, and when questioned about it, would say that they should learn to live life simply… but not be simpletons. “Goenka was your father, Munindra was your mother,” Michael says, describing the different personalities and approaches of these two, great, spiritual teachers and friends.
Another important figure who came on the scene around that time was Robert Hover, an American vipassana teacher appointed by Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Michael describes how he couldn’t have been more different than Goenka. “Hover was really uptight, an engineer type of guy. And Goenka was pretty loose in a lot of ways.” Yet gradually, Goenka became stricter with the organization administration and course discipline, in particular after Hover helped conduct courses in India, and Goenka saw the degree of self-discipline Hover demanded of his students, which Michael felt at times was perhaps a bit much.
But while India was full of spiritual richness and boasted a plethora of great teachers, for Michael, Goenka was the one who truly stood out. “He was the one who figured out a way to do this, a way that would work! And he kept fine tuning it as time went on. Without him, there wouldn’t be much of a [vipassana meditation] movement.” And Michael notes that even though Goenka struggled at times to understand Western hippies and their counter-culture approach, he was always very accepting of whoever showed up for a course. “All he cared about was, you came, and you wanted to learn meditation, and you worked hard. We learned meditation, and we kept coming. But it wasn't this strict thing that you have now. Goenka-ji just wanted to teach you. He wanted to share, and he wanted to give what he had to all of us. So he was willing to put up with a lot… He was a remarkable person that way. His whole part of life was to share the Dhamma with people. And as times went on, things obviously changed. But in the very beginning, he was very tolerant of all of us.” In those early days, although increasing numbers of Westerners came to his courses, the majority of Goenka’s students were still Indian, and courses were usually segregated by language. Goenka used to praise the Westerners for their good work ethic, while he believed that the Indians had better sīla (morality).
As rich as those years were, nothing lasts forever. Michael explains that extended years in India in those days took a toll on the body, plus many wanted to find a way to bring the teachings back to their homelands. The conditions that give rise to them changed; that tight group of adventurous, spiritual friends began to drift apart, and go in different directions. “Everybody should do what they feel the best with, nothing is better or worse than the other thing,” Michael explains. “If you want to practice in a certain way, then you should practice. But you should practice that, and there's no condemning or anything, there's no one particular technique that does everything for everybody, it just doesn't work that way.”
For Michael, that path was clearly Goenka’s teachings. And this went beyond a dedication to the technique and the practice, extending to the teacher, himself. Michael describes an all-night sitting that took place in Bodhgaya involving Goenka and fifteen meditators, and in the morning, Goenka approached the group. “He says you can do a vow if you would want to, and the vow would be to serve him and the Dhamma for the rest of your life.” All fifteen took the vow, but Michael recalls that besides himself, only one other person, Barry Lapping, the Senior Teacher now overseeing Dhamma Dhara, continues to fulfill it.
And while Michael feels personally indebted to this particular practice, he also recognizes that it might not be for everyone. “I feel this is a technique that can take me to as far as I can go, but I don't feel that it's the one-and-only. I think that [message] somewhat gets confused, and I think some of the ways things got passed on makes some people think that way.” Michael attributes this partly to Goenka’s own conditioning as a staunch Hindu, and partly to a decades-long game of telephone spanning the globe in which stories and instructions from previous eras get retold and re-interpreted as the tradition moves on. “[Goenka was] trying to keep things pure in his mind, and sometimes, maybe he was a little stricter than was necessary,” he admits.
Michael eventually left India and returned to the US. He recalls a cross-country hitchhiking trip soon after that landed him in Boulder, where Joseph Goldstein happened to be teaching at Naropa University. Michael ended up staying with him for a while, and even managed some of his courses; he admired how skillfully Goldstein was able to impart the Dhamma. Indeed, Goldstein’s courses at Naropa grew very popular: as Boulder’s spiritual community has long been influenced by Tibetan practices, many were now curious to hear what Goldstein’s Theravada perspective had to offer. Word of his courses quickly spread, and requests starting coming in from across the country for him to teach. Michael notes that while Goldstein had learned from both Goenka as well as Munindra, Goenka was not pleased that one of his students would decide to begin teaching on his own.
In the mid-1970s, besides Goldstein’s emergence as a well-known teacher, vipassana practice was taking root here and there throughout the Western world. Robert Hover began to teach in the US, and Michael managed for him as well. Hover and Goldstein also started fielding calls from Europe and Australia. John Coleman, also appointed by Sayagyi U Ba Khin, began to offer courses around that time. So did other Western teachers who had practiced with Goenka to a greater or lesser degree back in India, such as Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzburg, and Daniel Goleman. These were all people who Michael was personally close to. As for Goenka, during these years he was putting most of his attention on building up his flagship center outside Bombay, Dhamma Giri, and so was not in America or other countries as this activity was taking off.
At one point, Michael took a trip to visit Eric Lerner, who had written Journey of Insight Meditation, one of the first accounts penned by those first hippie meditators (which was reviewed in an earlier podcast episode, The Discovery of Mindfulness). Lerner was living in the western Massachusetts countryside, in a place he called “Anicca Farm.” Along with Sharon Salzberg, they discussed the stresses of managing intensive meditation courses that were now in growing demand around the world, and began to think about establishing a site that could permanently host ongoing retreats. “In the very beginning, it was meant to be like the Burmese Vihara, a place where teachers could come and go, come and go. It was never meant to be [any particular teacher’s] Center. It was a Center for all different traditions.” They settled on acquiring a piece of land in Barre, in central Massachusetts, and called their new Center the International Meditation Society (IMS). In addition to Eric and Michael, Richard Cohen and Stephen Schwartz also joined the board. Robert Hover was initially the biggest draw, but after an alleged ethical violation he was not asked back, after which Goldstein and Kornfield took leading roles at IMS. Michael’s involvement there ended because of some disagreements with the way things were run.
Goenka’s first visit to North America came several years later, in 1979, when he taught a course in Montreal; he led his first US retreat a year later. When he returned to the US again in 1981, Goenka taught a course at temporary site in western Massachusetts, in 1981, his first course outside a Center run on a donation-only basis, which had long been Goenka’s goal. He received an invitation to teach at IMS, but declined to even visit there, although his ex-students at IMS—Goldstein et al—came to see him. He refused to go in part because IMS charges money for courses. Michael shares there had been quite a bit of skepticism at the time in the US that this would work, and so in this sense, that course functioned very much as an experiment. But it was one that proved to be successful, and it continues to define the tradition to this day.
After that retreat, Michael hosted Goenka for a week and together they searched for land where Goenka could establish his first Center in the US, in fact the first one ever outside of India. Michael persuaded Goenka to confine his search to western Massachusetts, and they eventually found a suitable site in Shelburne Falls, a farmhouse on eight acres that ultimately became Goenka’s first established US meditation center, Dhamma Dhara.
As Goenka’s global mission really began to take off, he made two important decisions: to appoint assistant teachers, and for the assistant teachers to use Goenka’s taped discourses for instruction. “It was a little concerning at first,” Michael says of the recordings. “But people started accepting it and seeing that it was working. But there were a lot of old students of Goenkaji who weren't really that thrilled with it to begin with.”
As a founding member of both IMS and Dhamma Dhara, Michael has seen both places change and grow. Of course, he has devoted much of his life to the latter. He reflects on the evolution of the Dhamma Dara into the large, well-established Center it is today—with an infrastructure can comfortably support hundreds of students at a time to learn meditation—especially in contrast to those early days of cramped sitting spaces and crowded lodging in India. “Really we did, I considered the right way, over 40 years ago, and we got great results from it, and people keep coming, and they're very appreciative. And everything is working really well. I couldn't be happier about that part, it's a fantastic place to sit,” he says. “I remember sitting in India, compared to what I have now: my own bathroom, my own room, a cell. It’s like night and day!”
As wonderful as this growth has been, Michael admits a certain nostalgia for those early days, as rough as it was. That unique and bonding spirit of togetherness is gone. “We did all the work ourselves,” he recalls, “It doesn't have that same feel now of how we were all in this together type of thing, it's much more mature in that sense… so it's all different, it's just a different thing. But everything grows, everything changes.”
Michael also feels some students today don’t properly appreciate the challenges that Goenka had to overcome to accomplish this mission. “None of this would have happened without him and the gratitude you should have towards him is immense,” he notes. “People don't realize he could have had a very comfortable life. He didn't do this for fame, fortune, or anything. He did it to help people, and he tried his best. Was he perfect? No, but he tried everything he did. He tried. It was for people to gain a deeper understanding of Dhamma and to be able to progress [on the Path].”
For Michael, Goenka’s legacy can ultimately be summarized by what he accomplished. “He wanted people to be able to meditate, he wanted people to learn this technique, and you have to surrender your life towards doing these things,” he says in closing. “That's the gratitude I have, because I can't tell you how much it's helped me in my life. I was pretty messed up! I've gone through quite a bit over the years, and whatever came my way, I was not perfect in it, but I had the Dhamma and I kept my sīla, and I got through everything.”