← Back to the Toolkit | Vipassana
Vipassana Meditation is Hardcore
I sat silently in the woods for 6 days and gained a valuable tool from the experience. No speaking, no eye-contact, no reading, no writing, and no modern technology. Many forms of meditation are about relaxation and treating stress. Vipassana is about directly confronting the impermanence of reality, the pain in our bodies, and the instability of our minds.
We have intellectual knowledge that everything is temporary, but this technique provides experiential knowledge that impermanence is real by using our own body as a tool to investigate reality.
It also allows us to process past emotional trauma which resides in the body as pain. I became intimately familiar with the feebleness of my own mind. I learned that I can withdraw from the overstimulation of modern life and find the center of my being where there’s nothing but the electric fuzz of my nervous system vibrating from one instant to the next.
(I went to a center in Kelseyville; Warning: Might cause existential crisis.)
