My 10-day Vipassana experience in Chiang Mai, Thailand — 6 life lessons that changed my life.

at the main meditation hall (taken after the retreat ended)

I almost chickened out, but felt the fear and did it anyways.

I recently completed a 10 day silent Vipassana retreat at Wat Ram Poeng, a Theravada Buddhist temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As cliche as it sounds, it changed my life. I am a semi-long time meditator who’s mostly gone at it alone, so I was seeking in person training to advance my meditation practice and learn a new method. Prior to the retreat, I practiced a mix of Zazen and Shamatha meditations, but not Vipassana (insight) and have never sat for 11+ hours a day, so there I was, standing in front of the temple gates wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. I signed up with the best of intentions, but the idea of suffering from bodily pains, intermittent fasting everyday and drowning in sweat amidst the Thai heat, almost triggered my flight survival mode to literally get on the next plane ride out of the country. I stepped into the gates anyways knowing I could quit anytime and little did I know, I would end up completing the retreat feeling like a new person.

To give you some context on the six main lessons I’ve learned, below was the schedule and the rules we abided by. The goal of the strict schedule and precepts is for practitioners to simplify their lifestyles, spend more time practicing and going inwards and not be tempted by worldly desires. If these sound impossible to you, they were and weren’t, I’ll explain why.

Schedule

4am: wake up

4:30–6am: morning chanting + meditation

6–7am: breakfast + cleaning

7–10:30am: independent meditation

10:30–11:30am: lunch (no eating after noon)

11:30am — 2pm: independent meditation

2–3pm: reporting time (on hours completed and assignment for the next 24 hours)

3–10pm: independent meditation

10pm: bed time

the monastic style bedroom: one bed, one chair and one sidetable.

The Eight Precepts (as encouraged by the Buddha in old Pali texts to lay practitioners)

1. To refrain from destroying living creatures (including small insects)
2. To refrain from taking what is not given (stealing)
3. To refrain from any kind of erotic behavior (physical or intimate contact)
4. To refrain from incorrect speech (lying, dishonesty)
5. To refrain from intoxicating liquor and drugs
6. To refrain from eating after noon (liquids are OK)
7. To refrain from dancing, singing, playing music, wearing perfumes and cosmetics (to minimize desires)
8. To refrain from lying on high or luxurious beds (to discourage lethargy and oversleeping)

Other notable rules

1. Must wear white and keep attires clean
2. No talking and sharing experiences with other practitioners
3. No reading or writing (including Buddhist books and texts)
4. No napping during the day, but can lay down
5. All phones, electronic devices were locked away
6. No leaving temple premises without the teacher’s permission (even if quitting)

one of the meditation halls

Lesson 1. Pain is real, but suffering is optional

As the Buddha taught, pain and suffering are two separate things. Pain is natural when we have physical bodies and suffering follows when our minds identify and judge the pain. In the first few days, my knees and back hurt left and right from the long hours of sitting and in my mind, the pain was no different than suffering. I assigned the pain with labels like intolerable, miserable and plain bad and all I could feel was the inner angry voice shaming myself for not being good enough and why I even thought I could put up with this. This was suffering. Eventually, between necessary posture changes, honing my awareness to sit with the pain and not feeding it with more negativity, the pain became tolerable and was just that: pain. The mental anguish faded into the background and the suffering that came with the pain also packed its bags and left. Just like that, the remainder of the retreat became pleasurable when I continued to practice discerning between real pain and the unnecessary suffering that came with it.

When it comes to emotions the difference between pain and suffering becomes harder to distinguish, but the same rules apply. As we always say in the healing path, we have to feel our emotions before we can process them. For me, the feeling is non-negotiable (sorry, Buddha), but the amount of time we spend dwelling in the feeling and suffering phase can be trimmed down with meditative awareness. During the retreat, I found myself engaging in many of the same fears and worries from before, but was suddenly able to cut through the emotions faster and dissect them down to their core elements: the thoughts themselves, the actions I could take from the thoughts and my judgments of the thoughts that energize the emotions. Like pain, emotions are just words strung together to form thoughts and only become suffering when the underlying limiting beliefs overwhelm our psyches. We don’t need to become stoics and non-reactive to our emotions — that’s intellectualizing and bypassing, but with practice, emotions become more bearable and even help show us the way forward.

Like pain, emotions are just words strung together to form thoughts and only become suffering when the underlying limiting beliefs overwhelm our psyches.

Lesson 2. Not all thoughts are created equal

As someone who has been on the psychospiritual path for a while, I have become skillful at crisis managing my thoughts (especially when they become self-sabotaging) and my inner-mother knows the fire drill procedures by heart. But as I walked and sat mindfully for hours back to back, I realized I became the helicopter parent that I despised and was treating every thought like a disaster relief (thank you, hypervigilance). It was then the teacher’s words of thoughts are just thoughts, finally clicked with me. I have always dismissed Buddhism’s disregard for thoughts because as I often say, we need thoughts to treat thoughts, but as I found out myself, not all thoughts are substantial enough for our attention. Disobeying the teacher’s guidelines to just let thoughts pass, I chased my thoughts to classify the different types of thoughts. Say thoughts one more time.

1. Mental chatter — the endless dialogue our ego engages in to take up space and fill up time. Our ego is like a child — it gets bored easily and is scared of emptiness
2. Practical thoughts — the type that helps us get through life, like interacting with strangers, crossing a road, driving a car (a mix of semantic and procedural memory)
3. Beliefs — our aggregate of past traumas, events that form our brain’s predictive model and is what sets apart those who survive and those who thrive

There is a fine line between mental chatter and beliefs, and time helps draw that line. When I was meditating for hours, there were some thoughts that simply came and went like passing clouds, and others that kept knocking on my mind’s door. We need to care for the repeat visitors because they show us deep rooted beliefs that hinder our abilities to thrive, but for the passing tourists, we can let them pass in and out like hotel lodgers. Time and patience ultimately help us discern between the two, but in the interim, sometimes all we need is just a few more concentrated breaths before time does its magic and shows us which thoughts demand our full awareness.

The abbot’s (head of monastery) office where we reported our progress daily

Lesson 3. Boundaries are also for ourselves

Boundary setting with others has become quite popular in mainstream CBT psychology, but what no one talks about is boundaries with our very own selves. Per previous point, our egos are inner children who demand our attention 24/7 and will not spare us of their endless desires and cravings. That’s when self-boundaries come in. Between walking and sitting mindfully all day, I learned to discern between mental chatter and limiting beliefs and the appropriate treatments for both. For deep rooted beliefs, loving nurture of a good enough parent from the higher Self is required and for mental chatter, boundaries or rather, soft discipline is needed.

When I let my thoughts cascade like a never ending river, I worked my mind overtime and as if the wake-up-at-4am-schedule wasn’t enough, my mental chatter knocked me into a deep fatigue. But when I created distance between myself and the thoughts by paying attention to the rising and falling of my breath, the thoughts understood the importance of a time out and quieted down. We don’t need to shame or beat down our thoughts and repeat cycles of poor parenting, but at some point, we also need to tell our thoughts, “I see you and hear you, but let’s take a breather break.” After learning this the hard way through feeling endlessly tired the first few days, I finally enjoyed my feet kissing the grounds and my breath nourishing my body. Like how Kelly Kapoor of The Office said, “I am not easy to manage,” sometimes when our minds become little tyrants, they need gentle reminders that we are not doormat parents.

Lesson 4. Letting go is pleasurable

In our macho culture where we’re often told to just toughen up and get over it, for me, whether it’s an iron fisted authority figure or a bald enlightened man telling me to let go, I have viewed letting go through the lens of tough love and ironically, held on even tighter. As I busted my helicopter inner-parent on Day 5 however, I finally felt my body ease into the upright sitting posture naturally. I finally became both the good enough parent and the cool chill dad and released my mind-body’s tensions that I gripped onto for dear life. Like foreplay, the release brought waves of pleasure with each in and out breath and I entered into a meditative orgasmic state. Instead of rising and falling, it became ooo and ahh and I repeatedly wondered whether meditation was just intercourse with life itself. Of course, this is not Buddha-approved language because you know, abstinence, but the buildup-climax-release sequence radiated pure joy and liberated my burdens who overstayed their stays. Did I violate the precept on no erotic behavior? Maybe.

If letting go is pleasurable, it begs the question: why is letting go so hard? As you can probably tell by now, I repeatedly chased my thoughts during the supposed no-thinking retreat. Through repeated practice of releasing burdens over the next few days, I realized that the fine print of letting go is that it only feels pleasurable when it’s timely. When we’re accustomed to just get over things despite the constant nudging from our fearful inner children, we participate in self-abandoning rather than true letting go. The letting go that our culture borrows from Buddhism is often tough love in disguise and induces a sense of loss and sacrifice. Letting go happens naturally when we’re ready, when love triumphs fear, not when the suffering still feels raw and like new. Premature letting go neglects and minimizes our true suffering and unlike a bittersweet farewell, the suffering is simply shooed away and eventually finds its way back to our doorsteps. Karma, it’ll say. So was Frozen’s Elsa, the queen of letting go, a master of self-abandonment or a true nun? Both, I suppose.

Letting go happens naturally when we’re ready, when love triumphs fear, not when the suffering still feels raw and like new.

The main stupa (shrine) by the main meditation hall

Lesson 5. Appreciate, not attach

According to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the root of suffering stems from our attachments to our desires, to the impermanent and to the self. Hence, the culture of detachment, or really just avoidant attachment at work, has become quite popular these days. As I paced back and forth in the temple, I was repeatedly enamored by the ostentatious beauty of the architecture and what quickly followed, was my spiritual perfectionism telling me to let go of any visual attachments. This shaming voice was not new for me, since my passion for psychospirituality started with fashion, or rather an over “appreciation” of design and beauty that forced me to confront my shopping addictions. So for my black and white ego, the antidote of attachments was detachment and a complete rejection of material gratification. Thankfully, the retreat teacher reminded us that the middle way of joy was to appreciate things as they are; to neither attach joys to our happiness manifestos nor withdraw from life until no joys exist. Certainly not easy, but I took this advice to heart.

Every time I condemned myself for enjoying the temple’s beauty, I redirected my awareness to the shaming voice, thanked it and let myself indulge in the visual pleasures without becoming enslaved to them. A detached appreciation if you will. Turns out, detachment is not a banishment of attachments, but an appreciation of what is right in front of us. The is-ness, a test for our endless desires to finally appreciate the beauty in anything and everything, and dissuading them of their obsessive fixations on what happiness should feel and taste like. As I knew for a while but finally fully integrated into my psyche, joy and happiness always exist regardless of our preferences; we only need to unpeel our deeply conditioned senses to recognize and appreciate them.

detachment is not a banishment of attachments, but an appreciation of what is right in front of us

Lesson 6. Accept and let it be

In my vocabulary, acceptance has always been a dirty word. From fully embracing the American work ethic to my life long battle against the chronic unhappiness I’ve felt since childhood, acceptance was anything but a tactic to finding lasting joy. In my eyes, acceptance was giving up and letting life be that tyrant child. Over the past few years, as I discovered our ego’s tendencies to assume God, I learned to shift my life model from one of dominance to one of cooperation, yet not one of radical acceptance. I was still resisting and rejecting life in many ways and my ego still managed to find new attachments to latch onto sneakily.

As my meditation practice deepened however, my awareness slowly eroded my perpetual quest for change. I recognized the ways I was fighting life and being stuck in samsaric cycles of remorse and regret when I didn’t allow life to take its natural course; my ego always leaping with the mind rather than the heart and in retrospect, always wishing it had done something differently. I realized that my ego evolved into the helicopter inner parent and confused acceptance with neglect and was over-honoring the duties of a good enough parent. When I thanked it for its time and service, and practiced the just let it be motto, I finally started to meditate properly. In one particular sitting, when I let grief be grief, joy be joy, sadness be sadness and love be love, acceptance pierced my heart tenderly. I was no longer seeking to transcend all my thoughts and emotions, but rather sat with them fully before moving onto the next present moment. As I learned, acceptance is not inaction, but the precursor for life in action. Acceptance allows us to live each present moment to its fullest meaning before hopping onto the next. Without acceptance, the here and now is simply a means to an end and makes each passing moment void of meaning. Acceptance embraces what is and gives rise to a well-lived life: present moment on repeat. Rather perfect, if you ask me.

acceptance is not inaction, but the precursor for life in action

So long story short, yes, go on that Vipassana retreat you’ve been curious about. The non-thinking and non-doing is well worth it.