If you’re like most people, when you’re told about a 10 day silent meditation retreat, your initial reaction is: why should I do something like that? What’s the benefit?
But the real question should be: why haven’t you done something like that yet?
You’re living in denial
You’ve been in this life for decades, maybe more than half a century, running like a hamster on a wheel, chasing one thing after another, doing stuff all the time and you haven’t seriously tried to sit down with yourself in silence for a few days straight, and figure out what this whole life is about?
That’s pretty insane, don’t you think? I mean, you’re alive but you have zero clue about this whole thing you call life, who you are, what’s going on and – instead of interrupting everything and trying to see what emerges when all distractions are stripped away – you basically keep filling your plate with more and more distractions every day. Let’s face it: you have life backwards and you are in denial.
A counterintuitive move
What you eventually learn through experience is: being still is the toughest thing to do in life. Everyone’s busy running around neurotically. And instead, through stillness you achieve your biggest growth. This is very counterintuitive, but deep down you know it’s true.
That’s why most people are afraid of joining a 10-day silent meditation retreat. They sense it’s going to be tough. They sense there’s going to be challenge and struggle involved, even though they’re supposed to just sit on a cushion all day. And where is massive challenge, there is massive growth.
As a matter of fact, a 10 day silent retreat is one of the surest ways to fundamentally grow all areas of your life, in one fell swoop.
So, you eventually realize that you need to sit down in silence at least once in your life and just see what happens when all the noise is removed, when it’s only you and yourself, when you’re left alone with your own mind.
You finally decide that it’s silly to keep escaping this encounter. Your mind is with you all the time, every single day, every single second, no matter what you do.
With all your Netflix, your work, your distractions and duties, in the end you’re just acting like someone who’s running around the house, constantly afraid of the mirror. You have all sorts of excuses for not taking the time to just finally observe yourself: family, obligations, work, holidays, hobbies.
But eventually you decide that time has come to take a good look at yourself and accept whatever image you see reflected on the mirror. You can’t keep hiding forever, so you choose a counterintuitive move and take the next step.
10-Day Vipassana silent retreats
Invariably, if you search for meditation retreats, and silent retreats in particular, you come across a technique called Vipassana.
This is only one of the possibilities available, but probably the most popular, for a number of reasons. The main one is accessibility. In fact, there is a whole network of meditation centers all around the world that offer residential courses of Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N Goenka (following the tradition of Burmese Master Sayagyi U Ba Khin) which can be accessed through the website dhamma.org
This network comprises hundreds of centers and all retreats are offered on a donation-basis, making it a very affordable option for everyone, regardless of location and pockets.
Another lesser known center that teaches Vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, is the International Meditation Center in the UK, the first to be established in Europe in 1978, following the death of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, by his leading disciple, Mother Sayamagyi. They occasionally offer residential courses in other locations too.
They offer donation-based Vipassana meditation retreats in the same tradition, with a few differences in the way the whole course is managed. The main ones being a more ‘feminine’ approach to teaching, with a slightly less rigid agenda compared to Goenka’s, the insanely delicious buffets prepared by the resident cooks and the beautiful location. It’s like a ‘luxury’ version of Goenka’s retreats you might say, which has its pros and cons when it comes to the practice.
Although Vipassana is just one of the retreat options worldwide, it is the only one that I’m going to focus on, in this article.
Personally, I have attended three Vipassana retreats to this date and I recommend this format for several reasons which I’ll cover towards the end of the post. But first, for those who are unfamiliar, let’s answer the most fundamental questions.
What is Vipassana?
Vipassana means “insight”: in the Buddhist tradition insight is into the true nature of reality, defined by three characteristics: dukkha (suffering or unsatisfactoriness), anatta (non-self), and anicca (impermanence).
It is important to note that the centers do their best to offer the teachings in a secular way. The only thing that matters is the actual technique, so nobody is required to buy into any ideology or belief, to access the practice. People from all walks of life and religions are welcome and they’re not required to change any of their existing beliefs or faith: as a matter of fact, adding more beliefs and mental chatter runs completely contrary to the aim of the practice.
So, what are these three characteristics? According to the Buddhist framework, our subjective reality is a constant flow of sensations (anicca). Although we perceive the body as solid and unchanging, we know – even from a strictly scientific perspective – that in reality the body is a complex dynamic set of biological processes, constantly in motion and – on a deeper level of examination – an incessant movement of atomic particles.
So, we may say that solidity is just an illusion. However, for lack of “insight”, we tend to perceive our sensations as steady or unchanging.
We might conclude that the Buddha had a direct experiential insight into the nature of reality, which mankind collectively has confirmed thousands of years later, in a mediated and purely intellectual way, by means of microscopes, hadron colliders, etc.
That’s the main reason we react so much to what happens to us in life. We react to events and mostly we react to physical sensations (pleasant and unpleasant) because we lack true insight into their ephemeral and fleeting nature. Once we gain a better grasp on that, we also gain insight into the other characteristics, in particular anatta, or unsatisfactoriness.
Since nothing lasts and everything is in constant flux, no physical sensation or material reward in this life can bring lasting happiness or satisfaction and that’s ultimately why we always experience that undercurrent of anxiety or incompleteness throughout our lives: no achievement ever quenches our thirst for more.
This last point leads us to the more controversial idea of no-self, anatta, one of the most discussed and unclear even among scholars. In layman terms, we might just say that if everything is anicca (impermanence), including our thoughts, emotions, memories and physical body, then there is also no permanent self-structure in our life.
Ultimately, the clearer our view becomes through practice, the more these characteristics become apparent on an experiential level. That’s Vipassana. And that’s why there’s no place for ideology here: the truth can only be revealed through direct experience.
Since nothing lasts and everything is in constant flux, no physical sensation or material reward in this life can bring lasting happiness or satisfaction. No achievement ever quenches our thirst for more
Liberation from suffering: how is that going to help me?
Our mind, without Vipassana, lacks proper insight into reality and that’s the reason we end up suffering. In fact, what we usually call the ‘subconscious mind’ is nothing but our bodily sensations that are perceived at the level of nervous system, but often go undetected in our conscious field of attention.
In Vipassana there is no separation between mind – in the way we conceive it as the thinker of thoughts – and body. The mind is distributed all over the body and it constantly reacts to sensations.
Usually, when our mind-body system is stimulated with a sensation of pleasure, we respond by clinging and craving. We want more of it, or we don’t want it to go away. But because everything is impermanent, if we cling onto that sensation, we’re inevitably bound to suffer when it passes away.
Likewise, when our body-mind system is stimulated with a sensation of pain or discomfort, we respond with aversion. We resist it, wish it away, enter a state of conflict with the present moment. We fight something inevitable and by generating resistance, we create suffering. Although intellectually we understand that the sensation will pass, our lack of ‘insight’ makes us react as if it never will.
Essentially, all our life is spent jumping from craving to aversion and from aversion to craving.
Whenever an event occurs in our life, whether it’s something physical or even a comment somebody makes about us, that causes sensations in our body. A twitch in the stomach, a hot flash, a tingling, a tension, anything. The mind immediately jumps in and evaluates those sensations on a two-sided dimensional scale: good or bad. I like it or not. This judgment happens so quickly that by the time the sensations hits us, we’re already set up for suffering. We’re already clinging of resisting, without even being aware.
All our life is spent jumping from craving to aversion and from aversion to craving and because everything is impermanent, that leads to a never ending cycle of suffering
Luckily there is a way out of our predicament: equanimity.
Vipassana practice in fact, allows us to develop equanimity: a clear mind that is not clouded by cravings and aversion. When the mind is polluted by cravings and aversions, we do not perceive the present moment as it is, and create the conditions for suffering. But if we are able to catch the sensations before they turn into clinging and aversions, and see them for what they are – anicca, impermanence – then we have a chance at rising above this duality and liberate ourselves from much of our own suffering.
An equanimous mind doesn’t have a preference for a sensation over another. Any sensation it observes for what it is: impermanence. Please notice that this is not an intellectual realization. Everybody already knows that everything passes away. And yet, everybody reacts so much and is so attached to his own belongings, status, youth, fame, likes and dislikes, physical body and all the things that will eventually be wiped off by reality itself.
Hence, intellectual understanding doesn’t cut it, in this work. The understanding, or insight, needs to happen practically, at the level of sensations and bodily awareness.
That is why, during a 10-day Vipassana retreat you hear so much emphasis on observing the sensations throughout the body and the way they constantly change. There is a lot of emphasis on perceiving the subtle sensations, with as much precision and concentration as possible.
Understand that equanimity and impermanence are two sides of the same coin. In fact, when your mind becomes equanimous and stops reacting with craving and aversion to each sensation, you can finally observe the flow of energy-like sensations that your body is really made of. And vice-versa, the more you become aware of the impermanence of all sensations, the more equanimous you naturally become.
In fact, what is the point of strongly reacting to something that’s clearly… already passing away?
How the 10 days work
It’s day-1 of your Vipassana meditation retreat. After the initial formalities and getting to know your fellow meditators and roommates, the Noble Silence is enforced, meaning that you won’t be allowed to talk to anyone until the last day of the retreat.
There is a schedule for meditation, breakfast and lunch, with short resting periods between the meditation sessions.
For the first few days you practice Anapana meditation. In very simple terms, you focus only on your breathing. As thoughts come and go, you always bring your attention back to the breath, patiently and persistently.
Your mind naturally wanders. When you catch it wander, you just bring it back to the breath. You focus first on the contact of the breath with your nostrils, then you start to expand your awareness to the whole area at the root of your nose.
The goal is to develop one-pointed attention, meaning that you can focus all your awareness on this limited area of your body, recognizing all the subtle sensations occurring there: the temperature, the tingling, the touch of the breath, the different feeling of each inhale and exhale.
This is the foundation of your practice. After a few days of Anapana in fact, your concentration is sufficient to allow you to perceive subtle sensations in a given single point of your body and that’s when you begin Vipassana. With Vipassana, you start moving your awareness from head to toes and toes to head, observing all the sensations that appear and change across your entire body.
Through your disciplined observation, you start to recognize the three characteristics more in depth, in particularly anicca or impermanence. Sensations that may initially appear as gross and solid, such as pain, tension, heat or heaviness may occasionally dissolve into a subtle vibration, a fluid feeling, as your awareness becomes subtler and your equanimity develops.
Suffering = Resistance to pain
This is when you might be finally hit by a realization that several meditators have experienced during a retreat:
Pain and suffering are two separate things. There can be pain without suffering.
This is so counterintuitive that – unless you’ve had a first-hand experience – it may seem outright illogical. After all, most people go about life equating pain and suffering. In a sense we tend to assume that suffering is nothing other than the presence of pain in our body or mind. We treat the two virtually as synonyms.
But since the distinction cannot be grasped as a merely intellectual one, I’m just going to share my practical realization of this, during my first Vipassana 10-day retreat.
It was around day four and I had been struggling with shooting pains in my knees and hips due to sitting crossed legged for so many hours a day (you do anywhere from 6 to 10 1-hour sits per day, during the course). Being my first Vipassana retreat, I assumed that the pain was a normal physical reaction to being seated for so many hours. Little did I know that it had to do with the mind, not the body!
My natural response was to constantly change the position whenever the pain became too strong: isn’t that what we all do in life, when something hurts, we tend to avoid it and move away?
But then I realized that no matter how often I changed, ANY position would become painful after ten minutes. By day-4 I had nowhere to turn. The more I changed positions, the more the mind became restless. And ironically, the next position would provide relief for only ten minutes, before I needed to change again, as pains quickly appeared in other parts of the body that had previously felt perfectly fine.
I felt like I had no escape. I realized that changing every ten minutes was making things worse, so I tried to stick with the pain and hold a position for half an hour at least, before moving my legs. But this solution was short-lived too. Although it didn’t make the mind as restless, soon enough I found myself engaging in a fight with the pain. I was resisting every bit of it, just trying to outlast it.
This showed me a lot about my own mind and my whole approach to life. A mistaken approach that we all fall prey too. We tend to use strength instead of power, action instead of observation. Especially in modern western societies we always try to push harder, make stuff happen, impose ourselves onto reality. We live in a macho-culture that glorifies strength, endurance, breaking limits, records etc.
But within that context, it all backfired. Trying to be stronger than the pain wasn’t the way to go. It all became clear towards the end of day-5.
Especially in modern western societies we always try to push harder, make stuff happen, impose ourselves onto reality
I was sitting in so much pain that it almost seemed like my knees and hips could explode at any moment. With so much pain, I also started to feel misery and depression in my heart. I didn’t want to quit the camp but all I was dealing with was pain. Physical pain for hours at hand and no relief in sight. Not what I expected at all from meditation.
Then during one of the last sits of the day, I was about to release my legs in defeat one more time, but just one second before moving my knee, I had an intuition: wait, let me focus on the area of pain one more time. Let me see what is this pain. What is pain actually? I’ve never seriously asked myself this question.
While sitting with my eyes closed, through my awareness, I examined more carefully the sensations in my knees. Then something almost magical happened: from what was a strong shooting pain, I started to perceive heat. This heat then started to feeling like a fluid sensation moving from the knee to the thigh. Then I felt tingling. Then it all started to feel like a buzz or a vibration. In a matter of seconds, I was feeling my entire lower body as one big flow of energy.
All the pain was gone. The perception of having one right leg, one left leg, a calf a thigh, all gone. All I could feel was only constant incessant flow of sensations, pretty much like a vibration. I couldn’t feel the solidity of any part of my lower body, anymore.
A few seconds before, I was in so much pain that I needed to release my legs and interrupt my meditation. And now I could blissfully sit in that position indefinitely. I could stay there for hours. In fact, I decided to extend my meditation by another extra hour, before leaving the empty meditation hall and going back to my room.
That moment changed my whole retreat. I’d finally had a glimpse of what equanimity meant: I had stopped having a dislike for my pain and finally observed it for what it was. And while the pain was still there, it had completely transmuted as I entirely stopped suffering.
A few seconds before, I was in so much pain that I needed to release my legs and interrupt my meditation. And now I could blissfully sit in that position indefinitely
Now I knew – practically – that pain and suffering were two separate things.
I still had to deal with occasional pains in the next days, but I was finally on the right path. No longer I tried to outlast it or fight it: I patiently I went back to my detached observation until the pain dissolved into subtler sensations. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t and I had to release my legs. But I had finally learned a saner approach to the present moment.
Now, you can’t realistically expect to maintain perfect equanimity in front of all your life’s pains, and struggles after just one retreat. Or maybe ever. But even one realization of this kind is a great re-wiring of your whole brain and if you practice meditation consistently, the amount of suffering you experience in life can be greatly reduced over the years.
Vipassana: a real gem in spirituality
Now that we’ve covered some of the essentials of Vipassana, I want to get to the real meat of the article. I don’t claim that Vipassana is the best practice out there, but I encourage anyone to attend at least one 10-day retreat, because it provides distinct benefits that make it a very safe choice and an almost necessary step in anyone’s spiritual journey.
Even if you have your own practice and favorite retreat style, I encourage you to join this one to help you balance your practice and have something extremely no-nonsense to contrast whatever you’re doing with. Here are some of the features that make Vipassana so strong in my view
1) It’s brutally honest
Our lives are full of distractions, delusions, projections and avoidance mechanisms. Unfortunately, spirituality is no exception.
Gurus, retreats, seminars and books, in many cases may end up providing even more material for distraction, delusion, food for the mind and ultimately, avoidance of the real work.
With Vipassana there’s no room for avoidance. You’re in silence, with yourself, sitting in meditation all day, relentlessly observing your mind and body. There’s nothing you can entertain yourself with, as an attempt to escape your present moment reality.
You have to be brutally honest with yourself. You can’t lie to yourself about how you feel, about what your mind is conjuring up, about your life.
Ten days of silence will strip you of a lot of bullshit and, whatever is inside you, you’ll have to deal with. You can’t rationalize, explain it away, share it for relief, or buy into a guru’s framework to story-tell yourself into some fantasy. Whatever troubles you, you must face it squared. That’s it.
That’s also the fastest (perhaps only) way to truly overcome your problems: having a brutally honest look at yourself and your life, with no room for avoidance.
2) No-bullshit spirituality
The technique is extremely simple and clear. First you observe carefully and attentively the area below your nostrils, and for the rest of the retreat you move your attention all around your body, observing the sensations. You don’t judge them or develop feelings towards them, you just observe them. With perfect equanimity.
That’s all. It’s you and your bodily awareness. That’s a great yardstick to evaluate the seriousness of a practice. When it’s about bodily awareness you can never go wrong. Vipassana is observation of the present moment as it manifests through your bodily sensations and spirituality is nothing but acceptance of the present moment, not some fantasy-land excursion.
And what else could spirituality be? Eventually you always have to accept and surrender to reality, haven’t you noticed? There’s no winning this game, reality always wins. You wish your body didn’t age, but it does. You wish you could prevent those you love from dying but they do. If you’re doing anything else than learning to accept what is, you’re just using your practice as another escape or distraction, and like to call it spirituality.
Vipassana teaches you to stop resisting what is. You do it is by swallowing the bitter pill, not by theorizing or fantasizing about spiritual ideas and concepts. There’s no space for chakras, psychic healing, quantum leaps and this sort of things: there’s nothing particularly flashy about the retreat.
It’s just you consuming your butts on that goddamn cushion until you give up all your cravings for flashy material and spiritual stuff and surrender to what is. That’s why Vipassana is so great in a world where spirituality is 80% bullshit, marketing, business and delusions and 20% is real work, which often feels a lot less appealing. This 10-day retreat will certainly bring you back to earth.
3) No emotional and social rewards
The beauty of the silence rule is that it leaves no room for fancy spiritual conversations. And that’s so important for getting the most out of this work.
You see, connecting with other ‘spiritual’ people, sharing one’s own experiences and exchanging energy, so to speak, can be a great thing and push you to grow, true.
However, in a group retreat the possibility to chat often backfires in so many ways. Retreats may devolve into subtle spiritual contests where everyone tries to come up with the deepest insight. Often, there’s also an underlying seek for approval, the desire to sound very enlightened in the eyes of the spiritual community.
Moreover, in the name of being vulnerable, a much-loved expression in the spiritual community, seekers end up becoming so attached to the constant recognition and support they receive from the group each time they share their ‘vulnerabilities’ or experiences. Some retreats emphasize sharing so much, that participants end up regressing instead of progressing, while also developing a strong attachment to the group setting.
Sitting in circles and receiving rounds of applause, hugging all the time, validating each other with constant positive talk, often time hypocritical – “you’re such a being of light”, “a Goddess”, “a loving human”, “a powerful individual” – is what makes a lot of spiritual retreats devolve into juvenile self-help circles of immature people craving for attention and validation, while simply replacing their everyday materialistic egos, with spiritual egos.
While all the routines above can find their place in a well-structured retreat, they present a lot of dangers. Because at the end of the day, sharing and connecting always comes with some level of emotional reward and ego-stroking in various sneaky ways.
When you’re doing Vipassana there’s no room for that emotional reward. That’s a distraction from your inner work. Most other retreats end up nurturing that distraction, unless the Master is extremely wise to nip it in its bud. But since retreat facilitators are often far from being that wise themselves, the whole thing easily becomes just spiritual entertainment, not spiritual work.
Vipassana is immune to those dangers thanks to the silence rule and the strict agenda. That’s why, if you haven’t done a silent retreat, it’s hard for you to have a complete and honest appreciation of what real spirituality is about.
4) Patience and persistence
During a Vipassana camp you can’t help but apply some of the most important virtues you can cultivate in life in general: patience and persistence.
In fact, nothing else will come in your rescue. With patience, also comes the quality of self-acceptance and self-love, because as you experience the inevitable ups and downs of the practice you won’t be able to force your mind to accept the present moment or will your way into equanimity. Paradoxically the more you try to will yourself into any state, the more equanimity will elude you.
Sometimes pain or thoughts will defeat you. Sometimes you’ll be able to observe their impermanence. The only thing you can do is to patiently fail and start over again each time, constantly restoring that balance between accepting your shortcomings or struggles during your sits, and gently persisting at the practice.
5) Power of stillness
The growth you can achieve through stillness is unfathomable. Your entire life is predicated upon constantly being busy and taking action.
Therefore, in stillness, you’re running against all of your programming. In a Vipassana 10-day course, there are two to three sits per day called aditthana, or strong-will meditation.
During these sessions, you make the resolution not to move by an inch for the entire hour, no matter what physical or mental sensation arises. You probably never thought that stillness could be such a test for your willpower, but through aditthanas – paradoxically – you’ll become so much more capable of achieving anything else.
Also, many other retreats and techniques, especially in the yoga realm, often translate in just further agitation of the mind. Or you might notice an underlying tension towards a goal in the practice (achieving a certain form, doing a certain position, showing others something etc.), lying in the back of the mind.
With Vipassana meditation, there’s only stillness and no goal. There’s no goal to the practice other than observing sensations with perfect equanimity. No tension towards achieving this or that state, this or that sensation, or executing a perfect form. All of that, in fact, would be contrary to equanimity.
6) Incredible momentum
Finally, within a 10-day silent retreat, an incredible momentum builds up. And meditation is incredibly reliant on momentum.
For example, if you try to move your attention around the body at home, it’s usually a lot more difficult to perceive sensations (and tremendously difficult if you’ve never even attended a 10-day retreat).
But during the course itself, your focus is 10X, because you’ve built it up through Anapana for consecutive days and you’re never interrupted by external distractions such as television, cell phones, conversations, etc.
The mind has finally some time to settle down, so your concentration and mindfulness grow exponentially. That’s why it’s not uncommon to experience all sorts of reactions from nightmares or lucid dreams, to psychosomatic responses, memories from the past coming afloat, emotional upheavals and so on.
Because your awareness is likely to be as high as it’s ever been during a 10-day retreat. That’s thanks to the incredible momentum you build in the 100 or so hours of meditation at the camp. It takes you very deep.
10 day silent retreat: in conclusion
Going to a 10-day silent retreat is one of the best investments you can make in your life. Even if you do it only to increase your productivity at work and earn more money, or to be more resilient, more focused, better at writing, it will do that for you. But in truth, it will do so much more.
It’s going to level up all areas of your life and make you a lot saner than you are.
On a more existential level, it will provide a way out of your current predicament, a way to cope with the suffering that’s inherent to life. It’s going to be a deep surgery for your neurotic mind.
You’ve been spending thousands of hours chasing pleasures, dealing with all sorts of problems and getting involved in the most meaningless and outright absurd activities throughout your life: what do you keep waiting, in order to tackle your existential suffering at the root?
A lot of problems in your life stem from you being in complete denial. You probably think that all your busy life is so important and these 10 days are a waste of your time, where you’ll accomplish nothing practical. But then you’ll realize it’s the other way around: you’re accomplishing a far more meaningful work in those ten days than in the rest of the year.
There’s no excuse, nor time to waste: book your retreat right now.
Also published on Medium.
