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(In this post, I share my experience going on a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in July 2009.)
I just returned from the Vipassana 10-Day Meditation Course! The past 10 days have been some of the most well-invested days of my life. After 100 hours of intensive meditation — think continuous, non-stop meditation (save for a few breaks in between), from 4:30am all the way till 9pm every day for 10 consecutive days — I’m now filled with an inner sense of calmness and equanimity.
(On a separate note, I now face an inbox of nearly 200 emails, so that’s going to take some time to go through!)
The most important thing is that this is not a one-time effect that will dissipate. While I’m back in the real world where there is much noise and clutter (compared to during the course, when we were kept away from the hustle and bustle of city life at St John’s Island), the course has equipped me with the know-how to practice the technique by myself, so that I can continue to reap the benefits as long as I meditate daily.
As I have found this retreat really beneficial, I decided to share my experience so that others can learn more about it. If you have not heard of or experienced Vipassana before, I recommend you join this course to experience it for yourself. If you have no interest in meditation whatsoever, please skip this article. Otherwise, read on!
Before you continue though, I have two disclaimers:
- I’m not being paid to write this; neither am I affiliated with the organization that conducted the course. This is probably obvious, but it’s good to highlight it anyway.
- This course is not affiliated with any religion or sect. I have an acquaintance who thought this was part of a religious group when I told him that I was going on a meditation retreat. It’s really the opposite. This course is not linked to any religion, sect, denomination, order, cult, or communion and does not involve conversion or denouncing of religious faiths. It doesn’t matter whether you are Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, or Atheist. It’s for anyone who wants to self-improve and live a better life.
Meditation as a practice has never been limited to a particular sect or religion anyway. It is a universal practice which all the great spiritual leaders, religious or not, practice. Over the past centuries, certain forms of meditation started to become sectoral due to certain rites or rituals they are performed with, but this is not the case for Vipassana meditation. It’s a non-sectoral, non-religious meditation technique.
The intent of this 10-day course is to teach you the fundamentals of Vipassana meditation so that you can apply it and experience the benefits. That’s why this course has been so popular among people from all walks of life, religions, nationalities, and social classes, because it’s not specific to a community or sect. All these people have attended the course and walked away experiencing tremendous benefits, regardless of their values or belief system.
Personally, I’m non-religious; I seek what’s the highest truth, based on my own exploration and experience. To date, I haven’t written anything about religion on the blog, because religion typically involves deeply rooted beliefs and values which results in very sticky discussions beyond what I wish to handle at the blog. For now, I want to focus on the more immediately applicable frameworks of self-improvement.
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I always encourage you to consciously evaluate what you see and hear, including what you read here. Decide what’s your truth for yourself. It is not in my place to convert you to my viewpoints. Neither do I want anyone to unconsciously buy into what I say.
I’ll share some background on Vipassana meditation and its benefits in the first half of this article and cover the course details in the second half.
What is Vipassana Meditation?
The term Vipassana literally means “to see things as they are.” It is said to be the meditation technique that Buddha used to attain enlightenment. In my previous meditation post, I highlighted three main types of meditation: still/mindfulness meditation, moving/walking meditation, and concentration meditation. Vipassana meditation falls under still/mindfulness meditation.
To be honest, before attending this course, I thought I had kind of read and seen it all when it came to meditation. Sure, we can meditate to concentrate, remove the clutter, heal ourselves, visualize the future, communicate with our subconsciousness, and a whole series of other benefits. My original intent when signing up for the course two months ago was to sharpen my meditation skills and permanently instill the habit of meditating via a deep dive into meditation. Little did I expect to learn a meditation technique that has a different purpose — to purify the mind and body, at the fundamental particle level. This is what Vipassana meditation is about.
Purification of Mind and Body
What does it mean to purify? In our daily life, we experience different emotions, ranging from pleasant to unpleasant ones. The untrained mind deals with these emotions with a sense of attachment, or clinging. This results in craving for pleasant experiences and aversion against unpleasant ones. Over time, people’s happiness becomes hinged on external events. When they achieve a certain outcome, they are happy. When they don’t, they become miserable.
However, these are just objective occurrences. If something happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The negativity we generate is really just a product of our own creation.
Based on the philosophy of Vipassana, every negativity we generate creates an impurity in our mind and body. Bit by bit, these impurities accumulate. It was never directly articulated during the course, but the insinuation is that over time, these impurities manifest outward in the form of physical ailments or diseases. Common solution is to use medicine but that’s just dealing with the problem at a symptomatic level. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t work. When they do work, the physical problems return again later on, since the original framework of the mind that creates impurities (due to attachment, craving, and aversion) was never dealt with.
That’s where Vipassana comes in. It lets you purify yourself at the particle level. When you purify your mind, your body starts becoming purified as well. To do that, you have to stop generating attachment, cravings, or aversions. Meaning, a completely objective state of mind to anything that happens, i.e. equanimity.
The Technique
How do you do that? By becoming an observer of yourself and see reality as it is. During the meditation, you turn your focus inward and objectively observe your respiration (as it is, not by regulating your respiration in any way) and sensations all around your body.
Being an observer of reality means that if there’s any unpleasant sensation during the meditation (perspiration, aches, pain, numbness, itch, external disturbances, etc), you observe it without generating any negativity or aversion. If there are any pleasant sensations (cool breeze, nice music, etc), you observe it without generating any attachment or craving. When you achieve the state of perfect equanimity regardless of what’s there, the impurities of your past will start to clear away, layer by layer.
No chanting, verbalization, or visualizations take place because these distract you from seeing reality as it is; they also involve you altering reality. This is why the technique is different from mainstream “healing” techniques. Those typically involve you being a “creator” of some sort, by using visualization or imagination such as white light surrounding your body.
While it sounds simple, there are several steps to take before one can accurately do what the technique requires. During the course, they trained us to be objective observers during the meditation, without resorting to verbalization or visualizations of any sort. Then, they taught us to sharpen our mind’s focus such that we can sense minute level sensations in our body. We also learned how exactly to go about “observing” our sensations. There is a good balance of theory and practice during the course.
Because the Vipassana technique is more complicated than regular meditation techniques, a full explanation of what it involves and how to apply it is beyond what I can do with an article. If you are interested, I highly recommend you take the 10-day course and experience it for yourself under the guidance of the teachers, its facilities, and a controlled environment, so that you can reap the most benefits. The cost is free and donation-based anyway, so if you don’t like it, you can choose not to donate at the end. I’ll share more on the course later in the article.
Benefits of Vipassana Meditation
Of course, the course does not directly claim to be a remedy for illnesses or medical conditions, though there have been many cases of people whose physical and mental problems became remedied after they practiced the meditation technique.
I haven’t mentioned this before, but since the past year, there were often times when I couldn’t sleep fully flat on my back. Whenever I tried to do that, there would be an unbearable pain on the base of my spine. I think it’s partly due to my poor posture when working at the desk, which resulted in pressure on my lower back. Because of that, I usually sleep every night on my side or curling up.
As I didn’t research Vipassana before the course so as to approach it with an unbiased mind, I wasn’t holding any specific expectations other than increased mental clarity and concentration. Physical healing was definitely one of the last things on my mind.
Yet during the first few sessions of meditation, I started to be able to lie on my back at times. It happened so naturally that I didn’t even realize that this was happening until after a few days. Towards the end of the course, I started to be able to lie completely flat on my bed, much to my surprise.
During the course, the teacher S.N. Goenka (you can read his wiki profile) shared through pre-recorded video lectures that he experienced acute migraines many years ago when he was in his previous job as a highly successful businessman. Consultation with top doctors around the world brought fruitless results.
After that, he sought out Vipassana meditation as a last resort for his migraines. Somehow, after practicing it, his migraines went away. Just like that. Since then, he has committed himself to a life of sharing and spreading the technique to others.
This probably sounds ludicrous if you are a pragmatic person. How can this be possible? Some will be quick to say that it’s just all in the mind, like it’s made up or imagined. Probably a placebo effect?
All I can say is, don’t take my word for it. Try it out and experience it for yourself. The truth can only be experienced by yourself. That’s something I really like about the course. S.N. Goenka repeatedly emphasizes on discovering the truth as you experience it, not because he teaches it. At no stage did I feel like I was imposed with any of their views.
(S.N. Goenka has since passed away in 2013, R.I.P.)
There were also other benefits from the retreat, like better concentration, being more present, inner calmness from clearing significant clutter (after about 100 hours of intensive meditation!), and an increased sense of objectivity or equanimity. I had quite a few deep revelations about myself during the 10-day period, though some are more of a result of being given time alone to think rather than from the technique. I’ll be sharing these over time through future articles.
While Vipassana meditation is very powerful, I still see the benefits of different meditation techniques, such as for problem solving, to brainstorm, and to consult our subconsciousness, so I’ll be using different techniques as the situation calls for it. (By the way, if you have not cultivated the habit of meditating regularly, perhaps it’s a good time to start doing it now with a 21-day trial!)
Different Vipassana Techniques
After Buddha’s time, Vipassana continued to be widely taught in India and other countries for many centuries, until people started altering the technique and the original technique became lost. According to Goenka, the purest form of Vipassana continued to be taught and passed on from a limited line of teachers to pupils only within Burma. It was only a few decades ago when the Vipassana movement started and spread beyond Burma, extending across Asia and even to the West.
Today, there are many different variations of Vipassana taught by different groups all around the world. Goenka claims that the Vipassana technique he teaches is the purest form of Vipassana as taught by Buddha. Frankly speaking, it seems legit, and I don’t see any reason for him to lie. To date, the technique has delivered tremendous benefits for tens of thousands of people since he started teaching it about 40 years ago.
If you have learned Vipassana from a different meditation group, it is likely a variant form. The best way to know is to try out this 10-day Vipassana retreat yourself.
Information on the 10-Day Course
If you are interested to take part, here’s some information which might be helpful.
Location
While the course I went to is in Singapore, it’s offered all around the world, including the US, Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, Taiwan, Europe, and Australia. You can see the full list of locations at the official site. There are different languages offered based on the location. The retreat locations are typically at a rural and quiet place away from noise and clutter typical of city life.
Frequency
The frequency is dependent on the location. For Singapore, it’s held thrice a year — in April, July and November. In some countries like Taiwan and Malaya, it occurs as frequently as once to twice a month. Check the official site for more details.
People
The size of the course batch varies based on the center you are having the course and the number of people who apply. They definitely try to take in as many people as possible. In my course batch, there were about 80 course participants, half male and half female. Almost half of them were Burmese (since this course is well-known in the Burmese community), and the rest were people of different nationalities. There were numerous ex-students as well — people who have taken it before and were retaking it again, to reestablish themselves in the technique or as a regular retreat practice.
As for the people running the course and the assistant teachers, they are all volunteers who took time out of their busy schedules to help out. Extremely kind and benevolent people who have a nice harmonious aura around them. It was a pleasant experience taking the course in their presence. :)
Food
I thought I should mention that the food was quite amazing, despite the course being free! I was probably eating better and a greater variety of food during the course than in my regular meals. When I was talking to one of the volunteers after the course, they revealed that there is a regular chef who cooks for every retreat. The recipes are specially catered to suit local tastes. For example, the Singapore retreat typically has Burmese and Chinese participants, thus the menu will have primarily Chinese and Burmese dishes. Quite a lot of effort has been put in to maintain the welfare of the people.
By the way, the food served is vegetarian, in adherence to one of the moral codes of Vipassana, which is not to kill living beings. Most of the participants are non-vegetarian and found the food really amazing. Some of them felt really clean and clear in their stomachs from the dietary change in the 10 days.
Fee
As mentioned above, the course is entirely free and runs solely on donation from previous course participants. Even the food and accommodation provided during the 10-days are free, which I thought is very generous. At the end of the 10 days, you can make a donation based on what you can give and what you feel is appropriate from your experience. It is entirely voluntary.
If not limited by financial reasons, I don’t see any reason why one shouldn’t donate — the course is well run, the people are great, the food is amazing and most importantly, the meditation technique taught has invaluable benefits. If anything, it’s priceless.
All the money donated goes directly to the running of future courses. Neither the volunteers nor teachers are paid.
More Information
If you are interested to learn more about Vipassana meditation, you can do so here. Information on the course and how to sign up can be found at the respective country sites. If you do join, let me know how it goes for you — I’m sure you will get great benefits from it as many have. :)
Check out my 3-part meditation series:
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