My time at meditation bootcamp
A report on experiencing the 10-day Vipassana silent meditation course
I finally did the 10-day Vipassana silent meditation course that I’ve been meaning to do for the last 7 years. I used to meditate for 10-15 minutes every morning. After doing this meditation course, I’m now able to a deeper level of clarity in my meditation and sustain it for 30-60 minutes every morning with ease and joy.
Why Now?
It took me 7 years to finally commit to the 10-day course for a couple of reasons:
The opportunity cost of time was too high - when I was younger and hadn’t seen much of the world, so when I had 10 days of vacation in my hands it seemed more interesting and fruitful to travel the world instead of using that same time to meditate at a nearby centre.
I didn’t feel the need - I was growing so much by meditating for 10-20 minutes every day as it was.
But those barriers are now resolved:
I have travelled around the world to the point where I am more curious about my internal environment than I am about the external environment around me.
My meditation practice, although fruitful, was now in more of a maintenance phase than a growth phase given that the guidance I’ve gotten up until this point is studying teachers from tapes and books.
Why Vipassana?
Vipassana is a meditation technique that is simply focused on being aware of the sensations in the body. The practice is very pure and was passed down from teacher to student for the last 2,500 years, directly from the Buddha. The shortest course you can do is 10 days and they go up to 45 days at a time.
The other legitimate courses I’d be interested in, like Advaita Vedanta from Ramana Maharshi’s school, either require a longer time commitment than 10 days and/or are in a place that requires considerable time and money to get to.
Most other courses that are as accessible as Vipassana are based on claims by the meditation teacher without a robust technique, and show no proof of wisdom.
Vipassana is different that way because listening and reading to S.N. Goenka, the person who led the resurrection of Vipassana meditation and spread it around the world, you quickly notice how he never mentions his beliefs or opinions; he only talks about his experience of immediate reality.
What’s it like to be in silence and meditate for 10 days
The Structure
As you can imagine, this kind of thing draws an interesting crowd: a mix of investment bankers, artists, founders, nomads, and everyone in between. We weren’t silent as soon as I showed up; we had time to settle into our humble dorms and have a small snack upon arrival.
Noble Silence
Later that evening, all ~80 of us had our first meditation sitting. Going into the meditation hall, everyone was naturally buzzing, getting to know each other and understanding the common thread between us all. We were asked to take a vow of noble silence at the end of the meditation, which meant we promised to ourselves not to communicate, meaning no talking, gesturing, no eye contact with others, and even no reading or writing.
One of the most poignant moments of the entire 10 days was exiting the meditation hall after our first meditation and seeing the the stark contrast between the warmth and excitement of people going into the hall, and the single-file, dead silence, prison ward-like vibe as we left to our dorms.
Accommodation
The dorms were basic but quite nice. Rustic cabin setup, 4-6 single beds in each room. In other centres around the world though, accommodation is a lot more basic, meaning sleeping on cots in a giant room of 20-40 people.
Meals
These were the most “social” moments of the day. In the cafeteria hall, we got the chance to watch the way people would serve themselves food, their walking stride, the way they ate their food, the way they washed their dishes…a breeding ground for judgment toward others. But never communicating with each other.
The food was actually great. Vegetarian and tasty, so tasty that the Vipassana organization makes the recipes available post-course. Sometimes we even got dessert.
The Schedule
This example schedule (hyperlink) is pretty spot on for what we followed. Wake up at 4am, meditate for a couple of hours, eat, rest for an hour, meditate, eat, meditate, eat, meditate, sleep at 9:30pm. Rinse and repeat.
Beside the cabin, we stayed in was an impressive old-growth forest where I did walking meditation a lot during the optional meditation times.
The Meditation Technique
S.N. Goenka is the teacher for all meditation courses around the world happening at Vipassana centres; you hear the same guidance on a given day no matter when or where you do the course. This is because he recorded himself about 30 years ago when living in Burma and scaling Vipassana. (We had a meditation teacher on the ground, but they were there to only answer pressing questions if we had any, during a specific questions period.)
Day-by-Day Breakdown
Every day we got new guidance on how to proceed with our meditation. The first 3 days were focused on Anapana, which is awareness of the breath:
Day 1: Observe the breath at the triangular area starting at the top of your nose down until the area above the upper lip.
Day 2: Observe the breath inside the nostrils, at the outer rings of the nostrils, and above the upper lip.
Day 3: Observe the breath above the upper lip.
Day 4 is when the Vipassana technique got introduced, where we observed bodily sensations:
Day 4: Observe sensations at the triangular area starting at the top of your nose down until the area above the upper lip.
Day 5: Observe sensations in all parts of the body, piece by piece, going from head to toe
Day 6: Observe sensations in all parts of the body, piece by piece, going from head to toe, and then going from toe to head
Day 7: Day 6 guidance + do a full sweep of larger parts of the body at once (e.g. the whole arm) for the whole body, and then return to day 6 guidance
Day 8: Day 6 guidance + do a full sweep of the whole body gradually going from head to toe and then toe to head a couple of times, and then return to day 6 guidance
Day 9: Day 8 guidance + observe sensations in the whole body all at once
Day 10: Day 9 guidance + observe sensations inside the body, under the surface of the skin
For Days 4-10, we were instructed not to move our legs or hands during each of the three 1-hour sittings per day.
Note: Be playful; This isn’t to be prescriptive, but instead a guide to follow when seeking direction. As soon as this feels mechanical or mundane, you can change things up, like the size of the coverage when observing piece by piece in the body, the speed at which you are sweeping through the body, or the number of times you do a full sweep.
Unique Insights
Psychedelics
Psychedelics came up a lot in conversation once the silence was lifted on the last day. A lot of people would compare their experience from the last 10 days to psychedelic journeys they’ve had, and most of these people strongly prefer psychedelics over doing a Vipassana meditation course again because 1) the speed of reaching an altered state of consciousness is faster and 2) the pleasure and novelty of experience being greater with psychedelics.
I’ve learned to call these people experience hunters, their whole pursuit being to hop from one pleasurable experience to another, missing out on the value of experiences that are not pure pleasure. It was interesting to see how many people at this course were experience hunters who missed out on the wisdom that Vipassana had to offer. Instead of processing what they learned about themselves and the human experience over the last 10 days, they were immediately planning to hit up DMT asap.
Psychedelic experiences done with intention in a controlled setting lead to positive durable effects, that’s why they’ve gained so much popularity, but I think the experience from the Vipassana meditation course was more durable than psychedelics.
I’m a witness along for the ride in a psychedelic experience, at the mercy of wherever the psychedelic takes me. In this meditation experience, I was an active participant.
I had an experience on Day 5 during the course extremely similar to that of my last psychedelic experience, in terms of content and intensity of feelings. The difference this time was that, while surrendering to what is, I was able to actively inquire and direct the experience with questions fueled by child-like curiosity.
This led me into a place where I was able to come up with clear actions to take so that I could improve this aspect of my life, compared to the psychedelic experience where I gained the insight of the whole scope of the aspect without feeling empowered or clear on how to proceed.
Wisdom comes from experiential learning
The wisdom I received through the course was nothing ground-breaking. I’d argue there are a lot of 5-year-olds that know that things are impermanent; you have a cookie, you eat it, and then it’s gone.
But there’s a difference between knowing something and understanding it. A smoker may know cancer kills them, but then see their child die due to lung cancer, and now that smoker understands that smoking kills them and a behaviour change ensues.
By not moving for one hour straight while meditating cross-legged and my left leg or lower back going numb, I started to freak out during meditation sittings early into the course. I’d sweat, fear taking over me of the sensation amplifying and how it would get worse by the end of the hour.
But I learned, through experience, that these sensations that you would believe are only going to get worse, somehow change and oftentimes disappear.
As an educator and coach, I have a renewed appreciation for learning by doing. Theory gives you knowledge, but knowledge is limited. Experience takes this knowledge and turns it into wisdom.
There’s no substitute for putting in the work
I had no choice but to put in hours and hours of meditating every day. Nothing was there to distract me thanks to the course being fully silent. I accelerated the equivalent of probably 2-3 years’ worth of meditation in a ten-day span because of being an environment where I just did the thing, hour after hour.
No matter how many books I read, or how many different techniques I learn about from teachers, none of this is useful unless I sit down and do the thing. Putting in the work is the vehicle to make the knowledge come to life. But we are capped in our abilities and wisdom if we simply don’t do the thing. Don’t complicate it, just get to work and things will become abundantly clear.
Minimal guidance is an indicator of good design
We got around 10 minutes worth of guidance for every 8 hours of meditation. We also got to listen to our teacher, Goenka, talk about the practice for an hour each night before bed.
There were points where I was a bit frustrated because of how similar the guidance on a given day was to the day before. He didn’t get us to do anything fancy or elaborate just so we think it’s valuable. Instead, we trusted the process, and the bare-bones process paid off.
The reason it worked is cause of how well-thought-out the design of the technique is. Each piece of guidance, no matter how short it was, directly contributed to the outcomes we were working towards for the following day.
My craft of coaching requires me to ask concise, poignant questions where I am guiding the other person to some area of thinking, without explicitly telling them where to go. The less I talk, the better.
The minimal guidance I received made me think of a chiropractor: they do small adjustments, sometimes micro adjustments, to adjust the path of our body every so slightly, but which leads to a massive change.
I could tell you about the wisdom I received by doing the Vipassana 10-day silent meditation course, but as I mentioned above, it would just be more theory for you to chew on. You need to experience it for yourself so that it resonates with you.