30 Posts in 30 Days Challenge

Can Meditation Make You a Better Writer?

I don’t know but it leaves a lasting mark: Find out which!

4 min readFeb 13, 2024

The following text is a slightly edited exercise from a writing class that I took in Berlin several years ago.

It contains a memory from my Vipassana meditation retreat, a 10-day silent retreat in rural Austria that I took somewhere between 2015 and 2017 (the exact year escapes me).

Vipassana is a rather hard style of meditation. Each day has a rigorous structure, starting at 4 am in the morning (yes…) and ending around 9 pm. There are blocks of meditation strewn all through the day, 1–2 hours each. These are guided by two teachers who sit in with the rest of us in the meditation hall. They play a tape with guidance from S.N. Goenka, the Indian teacher who invented this type of meditation.

That is it.

We eat breakfast and lunch, both vegetarian, and have a light supper of fruits around 5 pm. Each evening we watch a video taped Goenka explaining the pillars of his school. I was looking forward to this cinematic hour every day, which provided a welcome distraction and reward.

I wouldn’t repeat the experience and have since mostly given up on meditation but I keep this fond memory of a very special time in my 20s.

I hope you enjoy the following snippet.

Six senses

It’s been five days at the meditation retreat and I still have trouble waking up at this hour.

But I do.

I stretch my torso and emerge from layers of softness and then I lie there, half-naked and half-awake, as if I’m letting my body breathe; in through the toes and shins, the sides of my body, right into my forehead and out of my fingertips, my wrists.

I had heard stories from friends going to Vipassana meditations in India or Burma, wallowing on rough cots, and had to let out a dry laugh, seeing my bed in the center. It is inversely proportional to the level of discomfort we all endure the rest of the day. As a matter of fact, I have slept worse in some four-star resorts. The pillow puts my cushion at home to shame. It makes me doubt that I am here to curb my physical needs.

I feel like a Western pastiche of a hermit; closer to Howard Hughes than to our master S.N. Goenka.

This is what I leave behind at the crack of dawn. Back home I would marvel at the idea of being awake and sober at this time. Technically, by the time the soft alarm catches my ear, we have not yet crossed the threshold to “morning”.

Most times when I enter the meditation hall, I am about twenty minutes late, which is around 4:45 a.m. Sometimes I don’t, since the meditation schedule, the same for every center, tells us “4:30 -6:30. Meditate in the hall or your own room”. On the first days, I had been stealing some thirty to sixty minutes extra sleep. Until I got used to the schedule, until the schedule became the only sensible schedule and I got a tingly feeling upon waking.

“It’s time”, the feeling says.

The hall is less than half full for the morning meditation. I park my slippers outside and enter the bubble of silence that closes behind me and carries me to my mat. There, I build myself from blocks: my legs folded and stowed beneath, covered and cushioned, my papery back slightly arched, growing into my neck, topped with a head. The structure rises towards the top of an internal pagoda.

I close my eyes and welcome Goenka’s full-bodied voice, a voice of infinite undulations, drilling into the core of the silence, supporting each of the hundred bodies on their mats, wrapping itself into the folds, smoothing the creases with long fingers.

“Beeeeee alert, be very alert”, the voice says “attentive, ever so attentive”.

I clear my mind and start sweeping my body — that is the meditation technique we use. I direct my attention downwards, fixating on every inch of my body. From the tip of my head, I sweep down, through my face, and Goenka’s voice follows, blooming from sonorous English into Pali, as I sweep on down into my chest, as my attention moves into my back and my loins.

The room widens and I am sitting on a mountain-top, syllables falling softly, waves spreading into the distance. From milky clouds leak sounds, an incantation, vibrations in the hills around me, wrapping themselves around the clouds and the stones, and rising on, on, carrying me up until I feel nothing but the cosmos, pulsating.

The voice comes to a statement and ebbs out wave by wave, leaving our bones and organs.

“Bhavatu sabba Mangalam. Bhavatu sabba Mangalam” (“May all beings be happy! Be happy!”)

“Saddhu sadhu sadhu” the voices in the hall respond.

My eyes fall open softly to the light. The teachers uncross their legs and exit the hall in a slow procession. I wrap my hands around my kneecaps and gaze straight ahead. A bell calls for breakfast.

“It’s time”.