What Really Happened on My 10-Day Silent Vipassana Meditation Retreat

Nothing could have prepared me for this experience.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to talk about my Vipassana meditation retreat for weeks now. Ever since I finally left after ten days of silence and over 100 hours of meditation, I’ve been attempting to comprehend my feelings about the experience, which was as rich with lessons as it was with challenges.

I had been wanting to do one of these 10-day retreats for years. I believe the initial seed was planted when I read about its life-changing effects on the author Yuval Noah Harari, and since then I’ve spoken to and heard from numerous people who also said this meditation retreat was extremely powerful for them. Thousands of students who have participated in the retreats have reported stories of miraculous healing and huge, paradigm-shifting changes. 

Frustrated with slow progress in my own life in terms of meditation and mindfulness, I wanted to challenge myself and learn more about my mind. I wanted to sit alone with myself, to get real, and to understand the patterns of my own thoughts.

Perhaps I missed, or willingly blocked out, Harari’s statements about how the retreat was the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life, statements echoed by many others on the web.

Well, the retreat was also the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, point blank. I am still trying to figure out whether it was worth it.

Day 0: Into the Wild

I arrived at Dhamma Shringa, a center on the outskirts of Kathmandu, on the morning of July 1st, 2024 with what I believed were few expectations. I was ready to live simply, ready to fight through any challenges that might have come. 

And, I told myself, I could always leave if it got too bad.

I spent Day 0 getting to know my fellow meditators and exploring the premises. I was on the top floor of one of the buildings along with the other foreigners — I’d say 90% of the people there were Nepali, and maybe 15 of us were from elsewhere. The travelers I met were lovely, and I felt inspired knowing I’d be meditating alongside so many wise women.

Men and women are kept separate at these retreats, and honestly I think that’s for good reason. The entire Vipassana process is designed to remove any and all distractions, allowing meditators to completely escape their lives in order to focus purely on the technique.

We would have no phones, and we would not be allowed to speak or even make eye contact with anyone around us for the full ten days, unless we needed something from the staff.

The center was pretty, with beautiful landscaping, but it was also a little smaller than I’d expected. There were no lush forests to walk around in, just a courtyard and a small path between the residence quarters and the golden temple complex. From my room, I could see misty green Himalayan hills on one side, but on the other side there was also a Holiday Inn that glittered garishly against the smoky city at all hours of the day, a reminder of the omnipresence of modernity and development that’s seemingly dogged me this trip.

We took silence at eight that night. I still had no idea what was coming.

Days 0-3: Panic

We awoke at four in the morning, and made our ways down to the Dhamma hall, where we’d be doing most of our meditations. To my surprise, there were no pillows or supports available to any of us — just a flat, hard cushion, where we were to sit for two hours, cross-legged.

The very moment I sat down, I knew I’d made a mistake.

I spent almost the entire first two hours planning to leave. I wasn’t ready for this, I told myself. My legs hurt. My mind was far too scattered. I just knew that I had to leave.

But then, eventually and miraculously, the sound of chanting marked the end of our first meditation session. Afterwards, I calmed down a little over milk tea and sweet oatmeal at breakfast. (There would also be no coffee for the next ten days, I realized with dread, though that didn’t turn out to be an issue. Nothing about the retreat was really very hard for me, as it turned out — except the meditation).

Over breakfast, I decided against leaving. I would just ask one of the assistant teachers for a chair; that would make everything easier.

So after another three hours of suffering through difficult meditation, I knelt before the shawl-wrapped teacher, her face intimidating and hawklike as she looked me over, and I issued my request.

Every single other student is having the same problem, she said. No, I would not be getting a chair. I tried to explain that I’d had a surgery and had written it down on my entry form, but she insisted I try to work through it.

I went back to my seat bubbling with anxiety. Thinking back, I do think this moment was part of the reason why I had such a difficult time overall on the retreat. I should have insisted on them giving me a chair instead of backing down so easily; after all, I’d had a surgery two years ago and my right knee has never been totally functional since. My worries were less about the pain than about the actual risk that sitting cross-legged for this many hours posed to my knee.

But my knees really weren’t hurting much at that point, honestly, and I knew that this was part of the process: to learn to sit through pain. Vipassana is actually really all about sitting through pain and learning how impermanent it (and everything else) is.

So I understand why the teachers deny students chairs. If they gave everyone a chair immediately, everyone would get one and no one would learn one of the most valuable lessons of Vipassana, which is impermanence.

Pain comes and goes. Everything is ephemeral. This is at the core of the founder S. N. Goenka’s teachings, and at the core of Buddhism itself. 

This is the core lesson of Vipassana. All of our suffering is tied to craving and aversion. And we can escape craving and aversion by observing these desires and realizing that they are impermanent.

Easier said than done. 

(It’s also worth noting that — to make a very broad generalization — Westerners tend to be far less used to sitting cross-legged than Easterners, who often spend much of their time sitting on the ground. The sitting position we were forced to adopt for the duration of the retreat is also very hard on the knees, and I genuinely think it poses some real risk to people like myself with mobility issues, a problem I’ve continued to mull over long after the retreat concluded).

Anyways, by the end of the first day I realized I was in major trouble. If I couldn’t even insist on a chair, how could I persuade the teachers to let me leave? They’d told us very clearly that if we left, it could be damaging, even dangerous.

And truthfully, part of me did want to stay, to tough it out, to see what happened on the other side. I do have a competitive side deep down. I wasn’t about to give up, not after I’d traveled half the world to get here, not after everything.

I knew then that I wasn’t going to be able to leave. I would just have to fight through whatever came my way.

Still, the desire to leave remained extremely powerful. I actually don’t remember all that much in detail about the first three days, as all the meditations blend together in a haze that felt something like terror.

Day 4: A Chair At Last

By the fourth day, my knees actually did start to hurt. There were sharp pains in both my knees, lasting long after I stood up from my pillow.

One morning, I left the hall for the first time during a meditation, deciding to do a meditation in my room on my bed. But after only a few minutes in my room, a staff member came up to find me and bring me back. It turned out that we had to be in the hall; we had no choice. We would be meditating, in the hall, ten hours a day, no matter what. 

Despite reading intensively about what the experience would be like, for some reason I’d been under the impression that there were only three hours of mandatory meditation per day when I’d signed up. The signs around the center and website do say that only three hours are mandatory, and I’d figured I’d do maybe seven or eight hours per day and rest when I needed to, but it turned out that this was not an option.

My claustrophobia spiked even higher. That day, I decided firmly to get a chair, feeling angry I’d let it go on for this long, and this led to my single emotional breakdown during the retreat. A server must have seen the tears pouring down my face during the rest of that meditation, and she finally took me to see another teacher with a much kinder face who at last kindly agreed to give me a chair.

I think it’s possible that a lot of my struggles and discomfort those first three days were heavily influenced by my body’s inner knowing — its deep understanding that I would injure myself and my knees if I sat cross-legged for so many hours.

Still, perhaps because I was already so shaken up, things didn’t necessarily become easier when I had the chair. I was still mostly a mass of pain and anxiety. And there were no distractions from them to be had.

Vipassana distills experience down to its purest point, and most of us never, ever encounter that kind of stillness in our daily lives. At the retreat, I realized I am pretty much always engaged in something — reading, observing the natural world or the people around me, planning my next move — but without that stimulus, there was no way to escape my mind. I became aware of a persistent anxiety I’d never before really registered. And I had to simply sit with it. There was no way around it. I had to go through it, every last endless minute of it. The minutes warped and stretched into fathomless expanses of time. I began to feel like I’d never leave.

The Daily Schedule

Each day was slightly different. The first day, we spent the whole time paying attention to our breathing, and on the second day we focused our attention on the sensations on and around our noses. On the third we focused entirely on the sensations in our upper lip, and the more I focused, the more I became aware of tiny little electrical impulses that shimmered over that small square inch of skin. By the fourth, we started the body scans, observing the subtle sensations on different parts of our body, moving our attention up and down and up and down.

Days were regimented into a rhythm: Wake up at four. Meditate four-thirty to six-thirty. Then breakfast and rest — a blissful hour in bed — six-thirty to eight. Meditate eight to eleven. Lunch and rest eleven to one. Then, the hardest part of the day for me: four hours of meditation, from one to five. A snack, fruit, and tea or milk at five. Then a final meditation from six to seven, which was always my easiest meditation because I knew it was the last one — a testimony to the power of impermanence. 

Then a two-hour discourse, which was always my favorite part of the day. We’d walk to a separate room, where we’d watch an English-language version of the late S. N. Goenka’s observations and reflections.

He was funny, a stark contrast from the dead-serious atmosphere of the retreat, and he explained the technique in detail, filling his stories with repetition and well-placed jokes and occasional genuinely staggering flashes of metaphysical insight.

We also were forced to listen to a recording of Goenka’s chanting at the beginning and end of every meditation session, and the center would play a droning, impossibly loud recording of his singing many times each day. Sometimes I was able to relax through it, but most of the time, his singing honestly bothered me immensely, and I wished I could teach him a bit about breath control. It all contributed to something that was becoming difficult to ignore: a growing frustration with Goenka and the entire program.

The Bad: My Issues With the 10-Day Vipassana Retreat Structure

Alarm bells were ringing in my head constantly during those early days for many reasons, but specifically, Goenka’s methodology was firmly rubbing me the wrong way. I’ve studied cults in detail, and while I don’t think Vipassana is a cult, I do honestly think it uses some cult-like tactics that can be very dangerous.

First and foremost, there’s the fact that cults will almost always say that any challenges or difficulties you’re experiencing are your fault — they’re projections of an inner problem, not anything to do with the outer world or the systems they’re putting into place. This may be technically true, and indeed, had I been placid and calm on the inside, I’m sure I would’ve had a blissful experience at the retreat, but still, I found Goenka’s repeated use of this tactic to be manipulative.

Cults will also frequently use manipulation to prevent people from leaving, which I do think they did at this retreat by telling us leaving could be dangerous. That might also be true, but I also firmly believe staying could be dangerous, and many people have unfortunately had traumatizing experiences such as psychotic breaks while at these Vipassana retreats.

I also even recognized some signs of neurolinguistic programming in Goenka’s hypnotic, hyper-repetitive way of speaking. It spooked me to think about how he was getting hundreds of people into an extremely vulnerable, impressionable state, then forcing them to listen to his messaging and his messaging alone for ten days. Of course many, if not most, people would easily fall under his spell given the circumstances.

I’ve never been successfully hypnotized. There’s something in me that really balks at hypnosis, or any effort to lull me into a totally compliant spell.

Something in me resisted what Goenka was offering, hard. I couldn’t just relax and accept it. He also continued to tell us that Vipassana was all about testing out the technique and figuring out if it worked for us, and I felt like I was figuring out that it really wasn’t working for me.

But then, later, he told us several times that if the technique wasn’t working then we had to be doing it wrong because it had worked for so many people in the past. I just could never really get over the hypocrisy.

The Good: I Find Out I Can Change Reality With Just My Thoughts

By the fifth day, I was feeling desperate, and something Goenka said during a discourse actually inspired me to try to make a change.

When we die, he said, we are reincarnated in the state of mind we have when we die, so if we die screaming in pain, we’ll wake up screaming in pain. In essence: We need to have a placid frame of mind in this life so we can have a more peaceful life in the next one.

I do have a tendency to ruminate and worry. I might as well try to change that here, if only to survive it, I thought. If only to see if I could actually change the world with my mind, as all the spiritual leaders say. If only to protect myself in the next life, if there is one.

So I changed my thoughts. Instead of blaming Goenka and calling him a manipulative cult leader in my head, as I had been for the first five days, I filled my mind with thoughts of gratitude. I am so grateful to be here, I thought. I am learning so much.

I rationalized that although I had issues with Goenka’s methods, really, it was just ten days. They weren’t asking for money or free labor. And he and many others very clearly truly believe in what he teaches. Goenka truly believes he is giving the world a gift of wisdom and insight, and many people have received benefits from his teachings. His motives were pure.

I shouldn’t deprive myself of this wisdom and insight just because of misgivings, I thought. I was here; I might as well embrace it. 

When I started forcing myself to practice gratitude, everything else started to change. And lo and behold: I actually started feeling a lot better.

I think the shift I experienced on the fifth day also may have been because allowed myself to visualize a little bit during the meditations, too, which helped a lot, even though it isn’t technically allowed. Vipassana firmly bans all mixing of techniques, including visualizations, and Goenka says that although mantras and visualizations can help relax us, relaxation is actually not the goal of Vipassana at all.

Instead, Vipassana is a rigorous, scientific examination of what actually is.

Goenka constantly criticized religions based on blind faith during the discourses, instead saying that faith without actual practice and accountability is nothing but madness. I do agree with this, even though I thought it ironic that he was technically praising his own spiritual methodology while criticizing all other ones.

But I did need to calm down a little in order to practice the technique, I figured, so I allowed myself some visualizations every now and then. I envisioned a persistent pain in my chest splintering into fragments and floating out of my body. I looked straight at my desire to leave, and saw within it a desire to avoid pain — and I looked beyond all my fear and aversion, peering over the edge until I was staring that pain straight in the eyes, maybe for the first time in my life. 

I Discover The True Source of My Lifelong Sense of Dread

And then I saw it. My true issue. My existential problem. My fundamental argument with God and with life itself.

I always thought I was at peace with suffering. Life is suffering, right? It’s the first noble truth of Buddhism. Why resist it? Resistance won’t change anything. Might as well embrace what is.

But at the retreat I learned that on a much deeper level, I actually have a serious problem with accepting all the suffering in the world.

How could all this suffering be needed for spiritual growth? I wanted to ask Goenka, or God, or anybody who’s ever claimed to know any of the answers about the nature of reality.

I’m certainly not the only one who has suffered during these retreats; many people, and not just Harari, have said they’re the hardest things they’ve ever done. I found myself wondering: Why was this necessary? Why do so many people sing this thing’s praises?

But I eventually came to realize my problem was not just with Goenka and the retreat. It’s with life itself. I cannot accept that there’s so much pain in the world. I can’t understand why so many people voluntarily bring children into such a world. I cannot understand why any of it is necessary. All the suffering makes it difficult for me to believe in any sort of creator, in any sort of religion or higher meaning, and in any sort of escape from the suffering.

My issues extended even to Buddha’s teachings. Sure, it’s great that he discovered enlightenment and a way out of suffering — but what good is it, if so few people can actually achieve it? If one in a billion can escape, does that mean anything? How is it fair that everyone else must continue to suffer? Why must it all be so hard?

I know that there are many explanations for this. I know that there’s the argument God or our creator gave us free will; we chose to eat the apple. I know that Buddha himself said that we originally left our blissful state as light-beings because we were curious about the forms beyond paradise, and so here we are. I know that also, even though many people don’t reach enlightenment, practicing meditation and Buddhism do make life easier, little by little, regardless of whether you attain the final goal or not.

I also know, and believe, that Buddha was actually able to escape suffering by realizing it’s all impermanent. The past and future are projections on a screen. The present won’t last. Suffering doesn’t last. Nothing does. That makes it bearable.

But really internalizing impermanence is easier said than done. I’ll probably be working on that one for the rest of my life.

What is it all for? I sometimes wanted to scream. All the sadness, the isolation, the rage? How can I accept it if it isn’t all for something? Why do we have to exist at all? Why couldn’t we all have just stayed asleep? Whose dumb idea was it to create a world so full of pain?

But I can also understand why it happened. If you’re sleeping peacefully, but you see a fragment of a light — a distant door — it’s in our nature to open it. Maybe once we were all peaceful and unified, but for whatever reason, now we live in this world.

I hope someday we can find our way back to oneness. Most likely finding our way back begins with accepting what is instead of running from it.

So at last I decided to just do what was being asked of me. I sat with what was, without judgment, and let it be.

Day 6: Moments of Clarity

By the sixth day, I finally wasn’t suffering as much as before, and I even started experiencing the occasional hour where I’d actually be able to do the body scan meditation technique successfully. A few times, I even fell into a state of stunningly transcendent bliss and joy. 

We were spending all our meditation hours tracking sensations from our head to our toes, focusing on individual parts of our body until we could feel them ignite with electricity, and soon I was able to do that much more easily. I could train my attention on my head and immediately feel pins-and-needles spanning my skull, penetrating down into my brain. I could feel rays of subtle energy racing up and down my spine.

And I could witness the impermanence of everything, in real time. A stomachache that was there for an hour was gone. A knot in my shoulder would ache and ache as if it was being pulled apart by hot pliers, and then the ache would just disappear.

But, in Vipassana, you are also not supposed to get attached to the good moments, and that’s also quite difficult to do. After I experienced a blissful meditation for the first time, I was sorely disappointed when my mind was unfocused and wild for the next few hours.

But when you get to the point of true stillness — when you stop generating new cravings and aversions — that’s when older and more deeply rooted cravings and aversions come to the surface, Goenka said, so it’s only natural for difficult experiences to follow blissful ones.

I could also understand why so much discomfort was coming to the surface for me. Since I was very little, I’ve often suppressed my emotions. I sort of have the ability to consciously cancel out emotions and pain — to sublimate them almost entirely just by will. There’s a famous story about when I was in a car accident as a toddler; as I was getting two hundred stitches in the hospital, my grandparents walked in and asked me how I was, and I just smiled and said good.

I always used to think this made me mature, maybe even zen. It’s why I’ve (almost) never yelled at anyone, and probably part of why I was constantly called an old soul as a kid. So often I just haven’t seen the point in getting mad at someone else or at a given situation. Why would I, when I can see the other person’s side and all the pain that makes them act the way they do? Why get mad about things I can’t change?

I’ve been working on feeling and processing my emotions in a healthy way in therapy for years. But truthfully, I know I still often leave out a critical part of the process, which is feeling feelings in their raw form — and then observing and releasing them. I still often just cut out the feeling part entirely, or I offload my feelings into art and writing later on rather than actually engaging with them in real time.

And now that I was finally unable to write or go online or distract myself somehow, it truly felt like all those feelings I’d sublimated over the years were coming up all at once.

And yet even so, the feelings never lasted. I was amazed to see how quickly and dramatically my emotions changed over the day, and how tethered they were to what was happening in the moment. I’d have a good meditation and I’d be flying high, seeing the intricate beauty in the natural world around us and feeling at one with the entire universe, and then I’d be back down in the trenches again, wondering when the hour would end, praying for Goenka’s guttural chanting to free me from the chains of time.

Day 7: Time Stops

The days stretched into what felt like years. At one point I accepted the fact that I just had to stop hoping I’d get out. I had to embrace that this was where I was. Part of me even had the feeling that I was never going to get out at all — that whoever walked out of there would be fundamentally different than the person who had walked in.

During the second half of the course, I did slowly start to see the merits and wisdom of Vipassana and of the 10-day course’s structure. Many meditation and spiritual retreats are designed to take us out of reality. They put us in states of bliss or give us temporary insights into the truth of oneness, but they don’t really prepare us for going back into the world and dealing with the suffering that defines everyday life. 

Vipassana is not about escape. Vipassana is about learning to live with suffering, the suffering that defines our lives every single day. It’s about actually seeing our emotions as they are, and seeing the impermanent nature of pain and of everything we encounter in life, and learning to remain calm and impartial through it all. 

I can even see how this could lead to a sort of enlightenment.

Days 8-9: A Glimpse of Bliss, and a Return to Suffering

On the eighth day, during a particularly blissful meditation, someone tapped me lightly on the back. I followed the server out of the Dhamma hall to a line of other English-speaking students, and without any of us saying a word, we were led up a hill into the central golden temple.

Someone ushered me into a tiny, cell-like room, turned off the light, and shut the door.

Suddenly I felt strangely liberated. Wrapped in total darkness, I felt I could rest and focus at last.

I began to pay attention to sensations, and I felt acutely aware of each and every organ in my body. With a single mental shift, I could feel all vibrations at the center of my heart — a collection of tiny little fireworks bound together by the illusion of permanence. Then I’d move my attention until I felt the clouds in my ribcage, and then I’d move the cloud all the way back down to the veins in my feet and up again to the neurons of my brain.

I began to feel I could actually see everything objectively, from the outside, and I felt like I was letting go of something I’d been holding onto very tightly.

Afterwards I was on a high, but I tried — rather unsuccessfully — not to become attach to that experience either. Instead, I walked around the courtyard in a daze.

Everything appeared rendered in stunning detail. My favorite part of the entire retreat, honestly, was observing the little creatures who lived in the center’s very healthy garden.

Large, slow snails that chugged their way across the stones. Spiders spinning their webs in between jasmine bushes that seemed only to be fragrant at night. Wise green moss spreading across the stone walls. Swirling cacti in clay pots. A huge luna moth, fluttering fast as a hummingbird, that alighted on the edge of a building.

These were angels to me during the retreat, reminders of the real world and all the beauty in it.

Only they were as impermanent as everything else, of course. I walked past many smashed snails — we weren’t supposed to kill anything during the retreat, so I’m sure those deaths were accidents — and swatted away many mosquitos, though did my best not to hurt them as I ushered them away.

But after being in that dark cell, I felt completely at one with nature. Humans are just nature’s art projects, I thought, tracing a patchwork of moss on a stone and relishing the rare sunlight; it had been raining for most of the retreat.

Perhaps I’d turned a corner, I thought.

I was wrong. The next meditation was one of the most difficult I had the entire time. It was as if all the insight and bliss I’d experienced while in the cell had opened up spaces for new fires to start in my body and mind.

By now, though, I knew enough to just sit through it, to observe it until it was eventually gone.

I observed. I felt the sensations move up and down in my body. I felt grateful to be there. I felt grateful to be in my chair instead of on the ground. I had convinced myself to be grateful, and against all odds, suddenly, I was.

During a lot of the later days, I also felt an old knot in my shoulder coming apart piece by piece. Unlike other kinds of pain I felt during the retreat, this one actually felt productive, even cathartic. I’ve had this knot for about twenty years, for as long as I can remember, but at last I was truly paying enough attention to whatever lies deep within there for it to come undone. The sensations in my shoulder would only begin twenty or thirty minutes into each session, after I’d worked my way through surface-level impurities and fully relaxed into the flow of the body-scans.

Now, if nothing else, I can say that the knot is definitely less tight than it was before.

Day 10: Finally Over

At last, somehow or other, the final day arrived and we were allowed to speak again.

The first person I really spoke to was the girl who had been sitting next to me at meals, a fellow writer and wanderer. She’d absolutely hated the retreat, too, she told me, and we commiserated joyfully over our daily lunch of dal bhat — rice, potatoes, vegetables, chapatis, and green dal in a silver bowl. 

She may have even hated it more than I had. She had as many misgivings as I did about the technique, and she’d never really been able to make peace with it as I had tried to.

But as I talked to more people, I found that though everyone admitted that it was hard, many people seemed to have really benefited from the past ten days. I talked to one girl who had been crowned Miss Nepal four years ago, which led to a crisis of ego, which led her to these retreats, and ego death, and ultimately to ego integration and a love of nonviolent communication. She was on her fourth course.

That night I listened to the other women on my floor have a labyrinthine conversation about psychology and Buddhism. I felt unsure exactly how to articulate my experience. I knew I’d be peeling this one apart for days, maybe years.

I will never do this course again. And I can’t in good faith recommend it to all but the most experienced meditators. But having done it, I can admit that there were powerful lessons and insights that I probably never would have experienced if I hadn’t done it.

It felt like I’d opened a door into the deepest part of my psyche, and indeed, Goenka describes his Vipassana retreats as brain surgery without anesthesia. It sure felt like that to me.

Life After Vipassana

The night after we left the retreat, some of the girls and I went out to a Nepali music concert at a nice bar in Kathmandu. I hadn’t missed talking or the internet at all during the ten days, and my happiness about having my phone and socializing lasted for maybe a day or two before I was over them again, ready to go on another silent, solitary, and tech-free retreat.

Still, it was nice to be out, nice to hear music again, nice to speak and laugh.

And it was so nice to not be forced to meditate for ten hours a day. Slowly the other girls told me the truth about what they’d experienced — someone had even had four PTSD-induced panic attacks during the retreat. But it was all still worth it, she said. Just sensations passing.

Many of us seemed to be living parallel lives. No less than three of us, one fellow East Coaster and one Tibetan woman, were all uncertain about whether we wanted to move to New York City in the next year. Many of us had no idea what we were doing with our lives and our careers. But we were all interested in alternative ways of being, and in meaning, and in truth.

I was on a little bit of a high those last few days in Nepal, just glad to be out in the world again. And I was happy I’d made it through the most difficult experience of my life — and that I’d gained lessons from it, alchemizing my doubt and pain into real insight.

I tried to apply Vipassana techniques to my life over the next few days, and successfully kept meditating for an hour each day. My real goal with this retreat was to get better at meditation, and I do think I did achieve that.

I still don’t know how I feel about it all. I don’t think it was the right time for me to do something like this. I think a more somatic, gentler approach would have fit my current mindset much better. I went in feeling a bit down and a bit lost; if I went when I had fewer uncertainties and more structure in my life, maybe it wouldn’t have been so difficult. 

I am also on antidepressants, which I neglected to mention on my application. Maybe they would have rejected me if I’d been honest, and maybe I should have just told the truth and missed out on it. But Goenka also says that this retreat can help with depression, and I really had wanted to challenge myself. I honestly thought I could handle it, and I suppose, in a way, I did. I just never in a million years thought it would be so hard.

My issues with the retreat are connected to my issues with life. I honestly just don’t like that life is so difficult. I don’t like that people have to suffer, and that most things worth doing require immense amounts of suffering and pain and sacrifice. 

I wish that people didn’t have to hurt in this world. I wish it was easy. I wish we still lived in paradise.

But we just don’t, and wishing we did helps nothing. And Goenka knows this. He explained that he’d been a rich businessman before becoming a Vipassana teacher, but horrible migraines led him to try Vipassana when all doctors failed him. The technique clearly worked for him, and he obviously loved the technique and believed in it deeply. Vipassana obviously works for many, many people, otherwise these ten-day retreats wouldn’t be full months in advance all over the world.

Goenka also told stories about alcoholics and grieving mothers being cured by ten-day courses, and on the last day, they showed us a video about the retreats being used in massive men’s prisons in India. There is something beautiful about that, and about the fact that these retreats are completely free and donation-based.

Still, I think this experience taught me that authoritarian, military-style retreats really aren’t my thing. I didn’t like how we weren’t allowed to do anything to make it easier on ourselves — we were only allowed to sleep for six hours a night, and we weren’t allowed to read, or exercise, or even really go into nature.

Ironically, not being able to be alone at all was also hard for me. I had to share a room with several other girls, and even though we were in silence, I was always around other people. As someone who feels other people’s energies quite strongly, that alone was challenging. 

Additionally, I actually think these retreats could be quite dangerous for people with actual mental or physical health issues. If you’re suffering, just observe it can be a powerful way of being, until you’re suffering from something that will actually do damage long after you stand up off the pillow. My whole knee ordeal taught me that, and I think that’s part of why I was so angry at the technique in the beginning as well: I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of disregarding and minimizing pain in vivid and horrible detail in the past year, and I wasn’t about to easily agree with someone who was telling us to ignore our physical pain. They did say we were supposed to feel our feelings, at least, though we of course weren’t supposed to react to them.

It was not all bad. The retreat had taught me incredible lessons — about how easily my mind switches throughout the day, about how short-lived moods and pains are, about how our thoughts create our reality, about how we really are just collections of moments threaded together on a projection screen.

But ultimately, I can’t bring myself to advocate for these retreats. I think if you really love meditation, and regularly practice it for significant periods of time, and can easily clear your mind and focus only on your breathing without interruption, you might like it. If you really, truly love challenging yourself, you might appreciate how difficult it is. If you’re far along on your spiritual journey, this also is definitely a good way to go really deep. Also, needless to say, I think you should be fairly mentally stable or at least in a fairly good place to do one of these.

But for someone like me, who’s still a relative meditation beginner, it was just too extreme. I’ve heard the retreats in the USA are less military-style, and regardless of whether that’s true, something in me really didn’t respond well to a lot of what was done here — the whole not letting us leave the hall and saying that it’s harmful to leave retreat really bothered me, even though I understand the reasoning.

Had I left in the first half, I definitely wouldn’t have learned any of the lessons I did in the second half, and it could have left me in an extremely vulnerable state. But I haven’t felt great since the retreat either, to be honest. Upon arriving in Thailand, I immediately started dealing with insomnia and a strong sore throat. I soon found out I had COVID for the first time, well, ever (that I know of), which felt almost like a delayed consequence of all the emotional exhaustion I went through in the retreat.

I’ve also been reading lots about the experience, and it sounds like many people have similar experiences to me — a lot of pain, a lot of lessons. Heavy emphasis on the lot of pain.

I, for one, won’t be doing one of these again. But there’s no reason to regret the past, and after doing it, I can only be grateful that I made it through. Was it the life-changing, healing experience I’d hoped it would be? It certainly didn’t feel like it immediately afterwards, though may still be too soon to say.

But then again, Vipassana is not about that, and if you go into it expecting it to change your life, it certainly won’t work.

Vipassana is not about escaping anything. It’s about learning to be with what is. To really be with it, in its fullness, in its chaos, in its misery and in its wonder. And to not be attached to any of it. To watch it go by. To connect to the deeper parts of ourselves, the cosmic watcher, the ocean of reality that lies just beyond this world of projections.

Sounds great, right? And yet it’s so very hard. I don’t want the suffering. I want to feel at peace, and I want everyone and everything else to feel at peace too. 

And maybe that will keep me in cycles of death and rebirth for the rest of this lifetime and maybe for several after. I’d love to escape the cycle and not be born again, but if escaping suffering requires me to accept it completely by observing it without reacting to it, I just haven’t been able to master that art and I’m not even sure I want to at this point. I keep wishing it was all easier. 

Did Vipassana Make Me Less Spiritual?

In its immediate aftermath, I felt the retreat actually may have had a detrimental effect on my relationship with Buddhism and spirituality, raising questions and exposing issues I hadn’t thought about before. After all, the Buddha always says we should test his methods before agreeing with them.

I’d always sort of blindly accepted the Buddha’s revelations. I love Buddhism, and I do think Siddhartha Gautama penetrated the secrets of reality under that Bodhi tree so many thousands of years ago.

Buddhism did help me a lot when I first discovered it, and specifically, its teachings on compassion and interconnectedness helped with my social anxiety. Buddhism also fundamentally altered my worldview, setting me on a path that led me here today, and it influences all my writing, saturating my philosophical and artistic sensibilities. I will also say that the month I spent at the Buddhist nunnery six months ago was one of the best of my life. There, I meditated just over an hour a day and followed the Eight Precepts, just like we did at the Vipassana retreat, but there I was also allowed to create art and socialize and not be meditating ten hours a day.

But maybe I’d gone a bit too far over the edge in my pursuit of spirituality, I thought, sitting in my Kathmandu hotel’s courtyard a few days after the retreat and trying and failing to write about my experience.

Reading this a few weeks after the retreat, however, I can now say that I think all this probably ultimately strengthened my relationship with spirituality and myself, since it forced me to really investigate some major doubts I had. Although it was so hard, I definitely know myself better than ever now, and there is immense value in that.

I’ve also felt more inspired to work on myself on a deep level than ever before, and have been experimenting with various healing modalities, counselors, and therapists. I want to work on myself so I can be a better person and so I can spread more love in the world, and Vipassana has certainly lit a fire in me to do just that.

I will also keep practicing meditation, if only because so many people have said it’s the solution to everything. But until I see true results from meditation — until I actually feel more peaceful or at least changed in some small way because of it — I won’t be able to fully believe in it.

I know what’s actually helped me in my life. Nature. Friendships. Community. The little snails on the stones, the droplets of water hanging on the plants reflecting the world inside them. The sound of rain at night. Writing — essays like this, and all my songs and poetry. Walking in the woods, which is its own form of meditation.

And maybe all that’s me clinging to the ephemeral world of form too much. And maybe I don’t care.

I’m officially not going to be a Vipassana meditator. And I can’t pretend I am or will be. There’s only so much denying my own experience that I can do. It’s just reality, not good or bad. And maybe that’s a lesson I can take from the retreat after all — and maybe it did work its magic in that sense.

No, there’s no good or bad. There’s just sensation, and then our reaction to it. It’s just a dance. It’s the dance of all existence. 

Final Reflections

Maybe there’s no God, no Buddha, no order. Maybe we’re all just swimming in a sea of chaos. Maybe God or the creator is just as messed-up as we are, and we really are all just mirrors of each other. I don’t think that makes anything better or worse. It all just is. And loving what is seems to be the key, according to most, if not all, sages. 

But what about when what is is just terrible? 

It never lasts forever — that’s what Goenka and the meditation teachers and the sages will all always say. Nothing lasts. We can’t control what is, but have all the power over our reactions to what is.

But it seems a small consolation, like not quite enough to make up for the scale of suffering that lives inside what is so much of the time. Then again, so much of that suffering is usually born not of what’s actually happening but of memories of the past or fears of the future or conditioned responses that we can change. 

Deep inside this moment, when you stop running, that’s where the lush and fertile ground of eternity lives.

Or so they say. Some part of me understands. But another part of me still fights against it. Perhaps a petulant, hidden child who never felt free to express her rage.

I’ve been thinking about inner child work a lot, and how I stopped her from feeling so much. This retreat did expose some of that deep-rooted, long-buried anger, which I really think is mostly directed at the existence of suffering in myself and in the world. And I suppose that’s okay too. Now I know it’s there.

But how can I be okay with it, when everyone I know is suffering so much, and when the world is burning, and when coming out of this suffering seems to be a near-impossible task?

Anyways, all around the world, thousands of people are in the midst of their own Vipassana retreats right now. I can understand why Vipassana works so well for some. It’s actually a powerful somatic technique: By sending energy up and down our spine we activate and re-activate our chakras, stimulating hidden parts of our bodies and unearthing old emotions and opening space for new ones.

In its true form, Vipassana helps us really, truly see the nature of who we are, which is constantly changing, and constantly following the same negative thought patterns that keep us locked in suffering. It’s a path of purification, Goenka often said, that pulls our suffering out by the roots rather than just treating its symptoms. I just honestly think that in general, you have a much better shot at reaching this state if you’re an advanced meditator.

I still don’t know what to make of the whole experience. I haven’t just been able to leap into the rest of my travels joyfully, and even if I had, COVID made sure that I stopped short.

So, just a few days after my 10-day silent retreat, I embarked on another 10-day retreat of sorts, spending my time in Chiang Mai lounging in my hotel, drinking smoothies and coffee, and doing what I’ve always done to process things, which is writing.

As always, thanks for reading.