Ten days of silence.

No talking to anyone.

You aren’t even allowed to acknowledge others using eye contact or hand gestures.

No phones, laptops, or other communication devices. No reading or writing material or any kind. Even exercise was highly discouraged.

Worst of all for a carnivore like myself: 2 vegetarian meals per day, plus tea in the evening. Which meant I ate my last meal of the day at 11:00 AM for lunch.

Amazingly, being deprived of all these things was not difficult. On the other hand, the meditation was extremely, extremely difficult.

The Meditation Major Leagues

My experience with meditation before the course was a few spurts of 10-15 minute Headspace meditations. From this, I considered myself an intermediate meditator.

In retrospect, comparing a 15-minute Headspace meditation with even one day of Vipassana is like comparing Tee-ball to the Major Leagues.

The schedule for each day was as follows:

In the meditation hall, we sat on cushions, but other than people with back problems or chronic pain, we had no back support.

For two days, I complained to the teacher about back and hip pain and begged him to let me meditate in a chair. To be fair, I ran the Abu Dhabi marathon the exact same day the course started, so my body was a little wrecked.

But, he straight up told me no, that what I was feeling was normal, and to embrace it as part of the process.

I’m extremely glad he did.

The Technique

The Vipassana technique is incredibly simple, but even so, we had to work up to it for three and a half days before being ready.

The first few days, I was a victim of my own “Monkey Mind,” a common problem for new meditators where their mind wanders without their realizing. But once these and other problems got worked out we proceeded to Vipassana on Day 4.

We were instructed to maintain awareness of our bodies and started by doing simple body scans, see-sawing our awareness from the top of our heads to the tips of our toes, back and forth, back and forth.

We were then instructed to be aware of any sensations conjured up by our body on the specific area we were focusing on–tingling, soreness, itching, pain, etc. Any sensation we felt, we were supposed to observe.

Finally, whenever we encountered a sensation while moving throughout the body, we were instructed to simply observe the sensation equanimously and objectively.

Feeling pain? (Yes). Observe the pain. Don’t react to it. Understand that it is impermanent.

Got an itch? (Literally all the time). Observe the itch. Watch it arise and pass away.

Feel a pleasant sensation? (Only near the end of the course). Still simply observe the sensation. Stay equanimous.

Vipassana Building Blocks

I’m going to attempt to sum up over 10 hours of lecture videos we watched in just a few sentences, so this is bound to leave out some gaps in the theory.

Vipassana gets its roots in Buddhism, although the practice is completely non-religious. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists, and more all attended the same 10-day course as me.

Vipassana is simply a technique that overlaps all religion without acknowledging their underlying beliefs because all religions strive to eradicate your misery, purify your mind, and live a life of morality. These traits are also at the core of Vipassana.

Throughout our lives, we have all developed reactions to everything that happens around us.

These reactions are either aversions, things to which we react negatively, or cravings, things to which we react positively.

Someone punches you in the face? You react negatively and whenever you see that person again, you will continue to react negatively.

You eat a delicious bowl of ice cream? You react positively and whenever you are contemplating your choice of food, you will crave the taste of that bowl of ice cream more and more.

These habit patterns and countless others are developed in our subconscious mind. Craving for this, aversion towards that.

On and on the cycle goes.

It turns out this cycle is at the center of all misery.

Anicca: The Law of Impermanence

It’s no big secret that everything is impermanent.

It is a fundamental universal truth that things are always changing.

What that means is that every feeling of aversion you have is impermanent. Likewise, so is every feeling of craving.

We all know this to be true in our daily lives. Sometimes, life is just rocking. You’re happy, and you think you’ve got it all figured out. All you have to do is keep the momentum going.

Then, by the law of impermanence, things change. Eventually, there will be times when life sucks and you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

Up and down this rollercoaster goes.

It doesn’t stop when you graduate high school.

It doesn’t stop when you get married. In fact, the married men in my group would tell you that’s when it’s just getting started 😂.

Through the highs and lows, the gap between our expectations and our reality, we generate constant misery, which embeds itself deep into our very being.

Layers upon layers of misery. Because much of this misery is generated by our subconscious mind, we don’t even realize it’s there.

Breaking the Cycle

When you get an itch on your nose, what do you do?

You scratch it.

Doing so doesn’t take any brainpower. It doesn’t distract you for more than half a second before you eradicate the problem.

However, at a much deeper level, you’re doing this because your subconscious mind has an aversion to that itch. Thus, it reacts accordingly, perpetuating this sensation-reaction cycle, and accumulating misery within.

Vipassana helps overcome our misery by turning the subconscious reacting mind into an equanimonious, albeit reaction-less one. Throughout the process of meditation, we are simply observing sensations on the body.

During Vipassana, if you get an itch on your nose, you don’t scratch it.

You simply observe.

That itch is not good, or bad. It just is. It is an itch.

An impermanent itch at that.

When you observe the itch objectively instead of reacting to it, you break the cycle of react that we are all so used to.

Then What?

If a human stops eating, do they die right away?

Not quite. It takes time. First the body consumes existing food in the stomach as fuel. Then the body will consume stores of fat and muscle on the body to survive.

Only after our stores of muscle and fat are eradicated does the human die.

Likewise, if your subconscious mind stops generating reacts of craving or aversion, the brain needs to run on some sort of stimulation.

If you’re not providing it that stimulation in the form of quick-acting reactions, it will draw on your old reserves of brain food–these deep-rooted reactions of craving or aversion, stores of which we have subconciously built up over years and years.

And such, remembering that our deep-rooting sources of craving and aversion are actually the cause of our misery, releasing these feelings from our body actually work to eradicate our misery, help us find peace and happiness.

The best part? This peace and happiness is not rooted in some external outcome. Just as all misery comes from within, so too can the peace and purity of mind.

It’s simply up to the individual to choose to commit to the technique and stick with it long enough to get the results you want.

I’m Supposed to Believe all This?

Honestly, I can see a skeptical person immediately writing this all off.

Before my ten-day retreat, I would have been in the same boat.

There’s nothing I can do to convince you other than to suggest that you try it yourself.

When you’re going through it, ten days feels like an agonizingly long amount of time. But when you think about how small tens days is in in the span of a year or even a lifetime, it could legitimately be the best allocation of time you ever make.

For what it’s worth, courses are offered in over 150 countries all around the world, and they are completely free, relying entirely on voluntary donations.

At least give it some thought :)