I Meditated All Day For 10 Days In A Row To “Purify My Mind”—Here’s What Happened
Vipassana is hard and a bit culty, but it works
“Start again. Staaaaart agaaaaain.”
These words were irreversibly branded into my mind over excruciatingly difficult 10 days.
10 very long days.
Courtesy of S.N. Goenka, a Burmese businessman turned meditation guru that made it his mission to spread Vipassana meditation first in India and then to the Western world.
Instructing me to start meditating again. Again and again.
Vipassana meditation is primarily taught through 10-day silent courses. They are the formal initiation into the Buddhist practice and challenge you to do nothing else but meditate all day. It’s as intense as it sounds. You also eat and sleep, but other than that, you really do nothing else.
So there I was, at a Vipassana meditation center in Massachusetts, which was actually the very first center Goenka opened in the US. Nestled in nature and surrounded by trees covered in breathtakingly beautiful foliage on hundreds of acres that had been generously donated by grateful previous students. All Vipassana centers run entirely on donations.
I handed in my phone and checked into my basic but sufficient room, embarking on my first course with curiosity but also a lot of respect.
Vipassana is the oldest meditation tradition and teaches us to observe everything exactly as it happens
I won’t go on too long about the origins, but essentially there are two types of meditation in Buddhism: Vipassana and Samatha.
In Vipassana, you observe your bodily sensations from moment to moment. In Samatha, you train your mind to concentrate on one thing (your breath, a mantra, a visualization, or contemplation) for an extended period of time.
Samatha is more common in the West, but Vipassana is the oldest meditation technique. It’s also directly attributed to Buddha. He shared it himself in the meditation courses he taught following his awakening in the 5th century.
The tradition somehow got lost for a long time but was maintained by a small number of practitioners in Burma. In the 1970s, it got picked up by S.N. Goenka who spread the teachings and technique to thousands and thousands of people. Goenka, a well-traveled businessman who was born into a rich family, had suffered from crippling, treatment-resistant migraine. After discovering the technique he embarked on his “dharma”, which was to spread it across the world.
The concept of “Dharma” is a core Buddhist teaching that is at the center of Vipassana philosophy (and Buddhism for that matter). Dharma is the law of nature. It has different meanings across religions, but in Buddhist philosophy, it refers to the teachings around the nature of reality which are regarded as universal truth (more on that later).
Vipassana is mainly taught through vigorous 10-day retreats so meditators can immerse themselves fully in the technique
There are currently 341 Vipassana meditation centers across the globe. That alone should be proof that there must be something to this technique.
Before I go into the aim of this type of meditation, let me walk you through what a 10-day course looks like.
The schedule is pretty rigorous. 4am wake up bell, meditate 4.30–6.30am, breakfast and rest, meditate 8–11am, lunch and rest, meditate 1-5pm, afternoon tea, meditate 6–7pm, evening discourse 7.15–8.30pm, final meditation at 8.30–9pm.
Everything is taught through audio recordings of S.N. Goenka himself, the evening discourse is a video of his “Dharma talks” about the technique and philosophy behind it.
The themes for the meditation itself evolve throughout the 10 days as follows:
- Day 1–3: Breath awareness (all day)
- Day 4: Breath awareness (half day), followed by introduction to Vipassana in the afternoon
- Day 5–9: Vipassana
- Day 10: Metta day (loving-kindness meditation)
There is noble silence throughout the course, which means not only can you not talk but also not communicate non-verbally, i.e. through gestures or even smiling at someone. This definitely needs a little getting used to, but what I found hardest was the absence of distraction — aside from giving up all your technology, you’re also not allowed to read, write, or do any type of exercise other than walking.
This rigor may seem excessive, but it’s instrumental for ensuring one is able to fully immerse themselves in the technique. A lot of things come up when you meditate this much (also more on this later), and when you’re not able to distract yourself from it you have to face it and think your way through it. Ideally outside the meditation sittings of course.
The goal of Vipassana is to gain insight (into the nature reality) and purify the mind (by changing its habit pattern)
So why this specific schedule, and what’s the technique doing for you that justifies spending so much time learning it?
The course is designed for the meditator to experience the fundamental Buddhist teachings of impermanence and the four noble truths around suffering.
Life always involves suffering (truth #1). This is due to the mind’s nature to consistently create either craving or aversion (truth #2). But once we understand the reality of impermanence and know the cause of our suffering, we can see the way out (truth #3). The way out is the awakening that is possible for everyone (not just the Buddha), which is the path of liberation through meditation and wisdom (truth #4).
Buddhism always emphasizes experiential over intellectual knowledge, so the goal of the course is for the meditators to discover that the theories above hold true for themselves and their own minds.
In order to experience the four noble truths for yourself, you need to practice the skills of awareness and equanimity.
This is the sole goal of your meditations.
Awareness of your bodily sensations, and equanimity towards whatever you may be experiencing, whether pleasant or unpleasant. It’s the mind's nature to react to sensations with either craving or aversion, and by meditating and not reacting to sensations but simply observing them, we break the habit pattern of the mind.
This means that as the course progresses, you learn to sit still no matter how uncomfortable you are. After 45 minutes, when your legs start burning, instead of changing the position or delving into “your” pain, you simply observe: I feel pounding. Heat. Tingling. And so on.
At the core of this is the fundamental Buddhist principle of impermanence: Everything is fleeting, so if you feel a comfortable sensation, it will go away. But so will the pleasant sensations.
You learn to not judge what you observe, but instead, disassociate from the sensation. In Buddhist philosophy, there is no “self”, so when you’re feeling pain you’re encouraged to observe it without identifying with it. You continue telling yourself it’s simply pain, not your pain.
So the theory goes, by learning to be non-reactive (and non-judgemental) towards our sensations during meditation, we’re able to cultivate these qualities more frequently in our daily lives.
This is super relevant for people with addictions, in which the addict is faced with strong physical sensations for the substance or habit. But it’s also helpful for being a better human in general: less anger, more patience, less impulsivity, more intention, and the list goes on.
You get the story.
During the course, you break down the barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind
The first three days are entirely focused on breath awareness and serve one single purpose: to sharpen the mind.
Once it’s sharp enough, and the space below your nostrils and above your upper lip has turned into a field of sensations, you’ll be able to feel sensations everywhere on (and even in) your body.
And then the actual technique of Vipassana does just that: you scan your body from top to bottom, from bottom to top. All day. You start with individual parts. The more sensations you begin to feel, the more you learn to scan simultaneously, and faster. By Day 9 you can scan (and feel) your entire body from head to toe on your inhale, and go back up on your exhale.
You feel everything.
In fact, there’s a part of your consciousness that consistently does just that. Observing all your bodily sensations 24/7 and determining what needs to be reacted to. It’s the subconscious, or, as Goenka argues, actually not so subconscious since you can make yourself aware of it through meditation.
By making yourself aware of what previously you’ve only been subconsciously aware of, you begin to break down the barrier between your conscious and your subconscious.
The byproduct of this is that for many people, suppressed memories will surface during the retreat. You suddenly remember things.
Often, that’s in addition to seeing things in a different light, which is the result of silence and deep reflection that takes place during these long periods of self-configuration.
By transcending the mind-matter phenomenon you may experience “nirvanic bliss”
Last but not least, nirvanic bliss.
Nirvanic bliss is the end all be all for many meditators (and all the experienced meditators rightfully argue it shouldn’t be).
It’s hard to describe the feeling to someone new to it, but I will give it a try.
Here’s my personal experience:
After a few days of scanning my body, I started feeling more and more. The tiniest most random parts of my body were full of sensations. It began to increasingly feel like an energetic flow rather than individual sensations. Eventually, I felt this “free flow of energy” on parts of my body. And then on more parts. And then on the entire body.
At some point, towards the end of a long sitting, all sensations of pain were suddenly replaced with a feeling of pure bliss. My entire body was vibrating. It felt warm. I felt formless. Like I was filling up the entire room. It felt orgasmic. Similar to what I imagine a strong drug-induced euphoria to feel like. Or the peak of a psychedelic trip.
It only lasted briefly the first time I experienced it, but it came back. By the end of the retreat, I was reliably feeling at perhaps every other sitting for extended periods of time.
The struggle to meditate faded. Hard work does pay off. I was looking forward rather than dreading each setting. Because even if I didn’t experience bliss, I had learned to neither crave it nor feel aversion towards sustained unpleasant sensations. I had learned to become equanimous.
Experiences like this change your perception of reality because they make you question what is real, and who or what you really are.
Physics tells us that nothing is solid and everything is energy, but Vipassana meditation shows us.
And that’s why this technique is so powerful.
If practiced intensely, it allows you to peak into the reality of nature. If practiced continuously, it allows you to eradicate suffering in your life by changing the habit pattern of your mind.
Before applying for the course, I had done some (limited) research. I came across a few articles of people who had gone to take a course but left after a few days with the verdict that Vipassana is a cult.
I have to say, I get where they are coming from. There’s lots of rules. Males and females are separated entirely through the whole course. There’s lots of things you can’t do. If you don’t show up for a group sitting, the course manager will check-in on you to make sure you’re coming unless you’re seriously unwell. There’s definitely an undeniable amount of devotion to S.N. Goenka among teachers and old students.
And then there’s lots of chanting.
The chanting threw me off quite a bit in the beginning. I did not expect it, especially because Goenka repeatedly emphasized the secularity of this technique.
However, by day five, I loved it.
Because when your entire body becomes a fluid, vibrant field of sensations, you perceive sound differently. Listening to Goenka’s became soothing rather than offputting. I felt his voice moving the smallest particles of my body.
Goenka’s recommendation for continued practice is two hours of meditation daily (one hour in the morning and one in the evening), combined with one 10-day course a year. This is quite the commitment for most people, and not feasible for many (I’m thinking primarily of parents here).
And while my instinct now is to say “never again” (because it was so hard), many of the people I met on the retreat (you’re allowed to talk again on the last day) said they thought the same. But then they just sat their 8th course.
This means that for many people, the long-term impact of the practice is so positive it outweighs all its hardship.
Whether I will be one of them — only time will tell.
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