Vipassana with SN Goenka: Pros & (Mostly) Cons

NOTE: If you’re reading my work here, you’re in the wrong spot! I stopped using Medium years back; my updated essays are all on my blog: storiesfromtheground.com

“Do not meditate to get the right attitude — get the right attitude, then you’re meditating.” — Tuck Loon, Cambodian meditation teacher

“Meditate to understand, not ‘because of gong’.” — paraphrasing Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Burmese monk

My First Retreat

In 2015 I attended my first meditation retreat, at a small centre on the prairies of eastern Alberta. Going in, I knew what to expect: ten days of total silence, physical pain, and little to eat. In this sense, I was more prepared than some of my fellow meditators. Basil, a University of Alberta medical student, was shocked to learn that he’d just signed up for ten dinner-free nights. Hino, an Eritrean immigrant living in Fort McMurray, didn’t know that we would have to give up our phones. Hearing Basil ask others whether they knew about the no-dinner policy, and watching Hino flaccidly protest the removal of his phone privileges, I felt a bit smug. The retreat hadn’t even begun and people were already suffering.

But not me. Yes, I knew that suffering lay ahead, but — having read Dan Harris’s 10% Happier, in which he recounts his first ten day retreat — I also knew that it would be worth it. After a few days of misery and excruciating pain, my mind would calm down, the pain would subside, and I’d find something life-changing on the other side of a few days of silence. Maybe, like Dan, I would feel enough love to bring me to tears. Or perhaps, like Dan’s friend Sam Harris, my body would feel like it was made of light. Of course, I wasn’t so naïve as to think that my experience would be identical to Sam’s or Dan’s, but I’d read enough to know that a silent retreat is a reliable route to bliss — of some form or another.

Then the retreat began, and it took a long time to end. Over those ten days, I grew to dread meditation: I dreaded the self-enforced pain of the incessant sitting, I dreaded the lack of reading and writing with which to keep stimulated, I even dreaded the future dread that I was bound to feel in the long days ahead. So severe was my dread that I often woke up and prepared to meditate, only to realize that it was still the middle of the night, and I’d once again hallucinated the sound of the meditation gong.

As advertised, meditation brought the timeless nature of the present into stark relief, but in a way that felt more confining than consoling — and with little bliss in sight.

Eventually, of course, the retreat did end. And as I approached the final day, some of my dread dissipated, replaced by excitement at the thought of returning to the world with a mind greatly improved by ten days of meditation. So it was with dismay that, once speaking was reinstated, I found myself more anxious than I’d been before the retreat. How could this be? Aren’t retreats supposed to make life less effortful, almost by definition? But after a few minutes of talking, I felt compelled to retreat to my room, lest I shatter the awareness that I’d worked so hard to accumulate.

SN Goenka’s Technique

The meditation technique expounded by the late SN Goenka — who led my first retreat via audio recordings, with a video lecture each night — is as straightforward as meditation gets. For the first few days, you pay attention to the breath in and around your nostrils. Then, after accruing some concentration, you focus on physical sensations, repeatedly scanning attention over every part of your body. The goal of the practice is to simply notice sensations without getting caught in their pleasant or unpleasant tenor. When pain arises, greet it with indifference. If bliss appears, just be aware of it without growing attached. By noticing, in a detached manner, how bodily sensations arise and pass away, you’re trying to better calibrate your emotional keel. In Goenka’s words, you’re developing “perfect equanimity”.

Goenka emphasizes silence and stillness. Talking with other meditators is forbidden, and you’re expected to carry out all meditation sessions seated, with eyes closed. This much sitting gets painful, especially from the fourth day onward when you’re asked to spend three one-hour periods each day without shifting your posture. But in Goenka’s view, coming to terms with pain is key to one’s practice. In his nightly lectures, he repeatedly apologizes for the “torture” but claims that it is “the only way”.

And the technique works, if you do it well. But many meditators — my 2015 self included — do it badly, gritting their teeth as they grind for equanimity, yo-yoing between brief delight and deep despair, all the while mistaking the peaks of their manic-depressive-type oscillations as blissful proof that, indeed, the practice must be working.

Many of us come to Goenka retreats hoping to shed our hang-ups and neuroses, to blast them away in awareness’s clarifying light. It is therefore unfortunate that so many people leave these retreats with newfound neuroticisms — about the serious attitude, perfect conditions, and dogged perseverance which they perceive as essential to proper meditation, and thus to a good life.

Few of this fault lies with Goenka per se, though we’ll explore his foibles shortly. If you interpret his instructions as intended, and can relax within the confines of a disciplined meditation schedule, retreats can genuinely improve your moment-to-moment existence. But it is easy to misapply his messaging, especially given people’s highfalutin misconceptions about meditation, combined with their Protestant-like notion that discipline is synonymous with difficult work. In essence, people expect too much from a ten day retreat and as a result, they give too much of themselves.

I wish that I had known more about how I might go wrong on my first retreat. Although such knowledge may not have saved me pain (which is inevitable on Goenka retreats), it could have saved me suffering and made my practice more worthwhile. But to get this knowledge first took a trip to Asia.

Two Months in Burma

The causes behind my meditative shortcomings came to light while on a two-month retreat in Burma. After spending the first two weeks recapitulating the misery described above (exacerbated by the significantly longer dread-filled time horizon), I eventually decided to follow the head monk’s instruction — which I’d initially resisted, as his advice to “simply notice nature” seemed less like a meditative prescription and more like spiritual licence for laziness: simply notice what’s happening, with no more effort than is required to notice your foot touching the floor, or the sight of these words.

This technique — or perhaps, more appropriately, absence of technique — felt a world removed from Goenka’s. Where Goenka forces you to sit, here we were encouraged to sit, stand, walk, or even lie down as we pleased. Where Goenka emphasizes a serious attitude and rigid schedule, here we were instructed to use as little effort as possible and to meditate not because of the timetable, but because of a desire to better understand our minds. Where Goenka underscores pain, silence, and a narrowly focused attention, here we were told to move if the pain got intense, speak if we could remain aware while doing so, and focus on the quality of noticing more so than the content being noticed.

And, briefly put, this new technique worked. I left the Burmese meditation centre equipped with a stable, resilient awareness which didn’t instantly give way, even to the frenzied streets of Yangon and later Bangkok.

In the years since my time in Burma, I’ve sat multiple Goenka retreats. And fortunately, I’ve learned that the hardship of my first retreat is not intrinsic to the Goenka experience itself. By bringing the attitude I learned in Burma to Goenka retreats, I’ve found them quite bearable, even pleasant. Unfortunately, I’ve spoken to many meditators who have not had the benefit of such insight. For them, every Goenka retreat is a crushing ordeal, even on the fourth or fifth time around.

What are the mistakes that caused my 2015 self, and others like him, to struggle so badly, thereby missing much of the point of the practice? And how might we avoid making them, so that Goenka retreats — and by extension, meditation and life in general — make for happier, more fulfilling times?

I. Silence and Stillness are Useful but not Obligatory

After another retreat in eastern Alberta, I gave a fellow meditator a ride to my hometown in British Columbia. He had been at the Goenka centre for the past two months, alternately sitting and volunteering through a number of ten day retreats. It just so happened that his cushion was in front of mine in the meditation hall, so I’d noticed his shoulders creeping toward his ears, tension visibly accumulating as the retreat progressed. I’d wondered at the cause of his distress, and while passing through the Rocky Mountains he told me.

It was the noise, he said, which kept him from finding equanimity — the noise from the assistant teacher who, seated at the front of the hall, had a habit of breathing heavily and shuffling around. And to make matters worse, the teacher enjoyed opening the window, letting in distracting birdsong and other sounds. Now, I never noticed the teacher’s laboured breathing, which may indeed have been annoying, but I did notice the birdsong and found it quite pleasant. Rather than distracting me from the task of meditating, the birdsong offered a meditative interlude into hearing, which receives no attention on Goenka retreats.

This brings up the first problem with Goenka: by stressing the need to meditate in silence, stillness, and with eyes closed, he instils the idea that anything which pierces this mental veil must be a distraction. And when you’re trying to meditate, distractions are, well… distracting. But for better or worse, they’re bound to occur. Considering their inevitability, it makes sense to view distractions not as obstacles, but as just another thing to pay attention to. In fact, by understanding that every distraction presents a path to presence — offering insight into the nature of experience, however it manifests — distractions lose their power to distract. Given the right attitude, few things in life are distracting. Yet with the attitude propounded by Goenka, nearly everything is.

That said, silence and stillness are useful tools, especially at the start of one’s practice. In this sense, learning to meditate is like learning to read — both are easiest in quiet, low stimulation settings. But even though reading is harder amidst the bustle of everyday life, no teacher suggests that it can’t be done, or that one must first shut out the rest of the world. If teachers expressed concern about reading in public, what might students think? Far from helping, it would breed counterproductive tension when reading in anything but the most pristine of settings.

Goenka does something similar, suggesting that even opening one’s eyes is a dangerous foray into distraction. To his credit, he does emphasize the importance of remaining aware during breaks (with the movement and stimulation they entail), and says that, given enough practice, it is possible to meditate in the outdoors. But he repeatedly counters such sentiments by saying, for instance, that serious meditation cannot take place once talking is reintroduced, or that the still, silent practice he espouses is “the only way” to achieve liberation.

Essentially, Goenka doesn’t trust us to be responsible stewards of our minds unless we’re sitting down, rigidly following his prescription. And his prescription is fine, as far as it goes. But in life as in meditation, other stimuli will arise, and he does not equip us to build equanimity when meeting them. If anything, he does the opposite, leading students to resist or regret the arising of anything other than sensations of the breath or body.

Ultimately, fetishizing stillness makes it hard to integrate meditation into daily life. And, at least for me, that is the goal of the practice — to transfer the equanimity I find on the cushion into my daily affairs. Although I love silence, stillness, and the quality of mind that comes from sitting for hours with little movement, I also recognize that these are luxuries, not necessities. By failing to make this clear, Goenka trains us to reject much of life as being beside the point. [1]

I tried explaining all of this to my irritated carmate, suggesting that he pay attention to the arising of sound just as he might pay attention to the arising of sensations. (Not wanting to blaspheme too badly, I framed this as a means to get his mind focused back on sensations, rather than as an end in itself). But he struggled to see the merit in this, so conditioned was he to view the breath and body — and nothing else — as the way to equanimity. Which brings us to the next problem with Goenka.

ii. Sensations can Lead to Equanimity, but so can Anything Else

Breathing and bodily sensations are favoured by Goenka for good reason: they are ever-present, relatively stable, and tend not to trigger distracting cascades of thought. Compared to seeing, hearing, or thinking, they have little power to distract. (Try looking at something without thinking about it, listening to something without visualizing it, or thinking about something without getting lost in thought — it’s hard!) It therefore makes sense to use the breath and body to focus one’s mind.

However, this does not mean that other experiences must be excluded from meditation. To the contrary, since they tend to dilute awareness, we should incorporate them into practice.

Many meditators believe that life’s problems could be solved if only they meditated more. In some sense this is true, but it’s dangerously close to missing the point. For most serious meditators, their problem is not that they haven’t spent enough time on the cushion — it’s that they haven’t yet transferred their cushion consciousness into daily life. Because normal life consists of much more than just the breath and body, if you believe that these are the only ways to achieve liberation, your liberation dreams are doomed, bound to leave you forever trying to escape most forms of experience. This is what happened when I started talking after my first retreat. Instead of bringing a meditative mindset to the experience, I withdrew to the cushion, where I could firmly place my mind back on sensations of breath and body.

None of this implies — as Alan Watts has half-jokingly said — that you should crank open the tap and start meditating in construction yards. What it does suggest, though, is that you should open your meditation to the world wherever possible. And the easiest place to start doing this (though by no means the only place) is on the cushion.

But instead of opening up awareness, Goenka tells you to shut it down, restricting it to a narrow band of experience. I’ve now spent hundreds of hours diligently following his instructions, and, as promised, I’ve reached states of serene equanimity where pain and pleasure both lose all power to sway experience. On occasion, though, I’ve drawn back and noticed that this equanimity, along with the awareness it grows out of, is limited and fragile. By venturing away from the breath and body, awareness quickly starts to waver.

For many, this common experience lends credence to Goenka’s instructions: if we lose equanimity when we drift away from sensations, shouldn’t we do as he says and not drift? No, for a few reasons.

By focusing on bodily sensations to the exclusion of all else, you miss what’s happening in the background. And the background is the bridge to a more expansive, robust awareness. Throughout my many hours of body scanning, I’ve frequently realized that I’d been thinking. But, being so preoccupied with sensation, I had no idea what I’d been thinking about. Other than a dim sense of thoughts coursing through the background, I had no awareness of them.

Now, if thoughts were present, they were undoubtedly affecting my experience. Had I been aware of them, I could have directly applied equanimity, rather than hoping for it to eventually seep out beyond my sensation-oriented awareness. As I learned in Burma, you need not wait for a more encompassing equanimity, biding your time with sensation — you can begin applying equanimity to a range of experience right now. To do this, however, requires the right attitude, which can be tough to acquire under Goenka’s tutelage.

If Goenka told students to simply notice thoughts before returning to sensation, he would be in good company. Nearly all meditation teachers highlight the point that noticing thought — or really, anything at all — is not a problem. In fact, it’s excellent, because the act of noticing means that you are already aware of what’s happening, and therefore well situated to view experience with equanimity. But instead of framing such noticing as an opportunity, Goenka frames it as an interruption. In this way, he doesn’t just miss out on an important piece of instruction, but actually undermines it.

In my early days on retreats there were countless times when, upon noticing that my attention had drifted, I uttered the mental equivalent of a silent “fuck” before scrambling to reconnect with sensation. What might otherwise have been a moment of clear mindfulness was muddied by the thought, “I’m doing this wrong.” This is unfortunate, because without such a thought I’d have been doing it as right as I possibly could. The act of noticing, instead of (correctly) confirming that my practice was on track, signaled my meditative failings; since Goenka taught that focusing on sensations is right, anything else must be wrong.

On longer retreats, Goenka apparently says that all experience is fair game for mindfulness. It’s too bad he doesn’t make this clear on ten day retreats (regardless of whether he emphasizes body scanning or not), since this is all most students will ever do. If they never seek out other teachers, they’re apt to wind up like my carmate, their fixation on sensation causing them to disdain the beautiful and banal alike.

iii. When “No I, No Me, No Mine” Doesn’t Cut It

I was introduced to meditation via a series of Jon Kabat-Zinn recordings. On perhaps my third time ever meditating — long before hearing of Goenka or the concept of a silent retreat — Kabat-Zinn led me to ask a simple question: where do thoughts come from? By skillfully framing this inquiry in the space of mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn made me wonder, for the first time in my adult life, what I really am. Over the course of a few minutes, it became clear that I don’t consciously think my thoughts. Rather, they just appear, in the same way that the sound of traffic outside my ground level apartment had been simply appearing.

So it was that within my first few hours of meditating, I was directly introduced to the fact of selflessness. No effort, no struggle, no years on the cushion (or, at that time, desk chair), it was just there, an unexpected insight which has since uprooted and reordered my perception of what it means to be human.

Had Kabat-Zinn decided that thoughts were not appropriate for beginning meditators, I would not have made this realization so soon. In fact, I might never have made it, since the curious absence of a concrete self was the ingredient that piqued my interest in meditation in the first place.

Goenka is aware that knowledge of selflessness reliably reduces suffering, and tries to instill such an understanding in his students. But unlike Kabat-Zinn, he does not adeptly guide experience to this fact. In place of clear instruction, he repeats the phrase, “No I, no me, no mine”, and basically hopes that students get the message. And while students may leave retreats confidently asserting the truth of selflessness, I’ve found — after only minimal prodding — that for many of them, their belief in the self is alive and well. After all, they say, if it’s not me, who’s doing the meditating?

It’s not surprising that students get confused. Despite Goenka’s oft-repeated refrain about selflessness, it’s hard to notice the absence of self solely by zooming in on sensations. Combined with the effort he expects when meditating, it often does feel like there’s a self in the machine.

If you wanted to sit down, close your eyes, and try to falsify the notion that you have a self, where might you look? Well, you should probably start with the place where you assume yourself to be. You wouldn’t look in your toe, nor would you search through your leg, because your sense of self was never enmeshed in these to begin with — you could pay attention to your toe for a dozen years, and while this might prove interesting, there’s no guarantee that it would illuminate your selfless nature. Would you look in sensations? Paying attention to those in your face might work, since most of us feel like we exist behind our faces. But we don’t really feel like we exist within sensation, so can we do even better? If you drill down on what people mean when they say they have (or are) a self, you eventually triangulate on (you might have guessed it) thought. People may feel like they’re many things, but at their core they’ll likely tell you that they’re the thinkers of their thoughts.[2]

For some reason — likely involving the relation between thought, communication, and our niche as social creatures — thought carries the signature of the self, a seeming testament that, indeed, there is some unchanging being who resides in our core. (Never mind that it disappears with alarming regularity, misses most of what goes on around it, and actually has no idea how it does anything — take reading these words, for instance.) By turning my mind to thought, Kabat-Zinn loosened the sense of self, shaking my conviction that I even have a core, let alone an unchanging, thinking one. I can only imagine that had Goenka chosen to do the same, he could have surprised students with direct experience of selflessness, rather than merely supplying them with a dogmatic mantra.

And, to be honest, he needn’t have even invoked thought. You can notice selflessness regardless of what you’ve been paying attention to, meaning that sensations could also do the trick. All it takes is a shift of perspective, and selflessness can be made readily apparent. [3] But this shift must be accompanied by a relaxation of effort, which is something Goenka does not seem eager to condone.

Diligently. Seriously. Ardently. Patiently and persistently. These are the words Goenka uses to describe the attitude he wants you to bring to meditation. If you’re like me, hearing these words on repeat for ten days might lead you to think that meditation is a solemn task, requiring near-Herculean levels of effort. Maybe I’m an an outlier, but these are not the adjectives I’d use to describe a mind free from agitation. Nor are they ones I’d use to describe a mindset primed to spot selflessness.

When you consciously apply effort, you tend to feel like a self. Think of times when you’ve felt self-conscious — whether when public speaking, fretting over social media, or berating yourself for your social, professional, and physical shortcomings. These are times that feel anything but effortless. Now think of times when you’ve felt less confined by self — whether after great sex, a solid workout, or while falling asleep. These are times where effort plays no part. Indeed, selflessness and a relaxed quality of mind go hand in hand.

One of the hardest parts of meditation is dropping the effort to meditate, and one of the most desired states of meditation is that of selflessness. Thus, meditators spend vast amounts of effort pursuing a state that is, in many ways, the antithesis of effort. To unwind this Gordian knot, it helps to accept that, ultimately, one’s mind is out of its own control, and sometimes the best approach in meditation — as in life — is to step aside, do nothing and watch events unfold. Just as conscious effort can interrupt a musical performance that was flowing unaided by (conscious) mind, so it can do the same to meditation.

In Burma, my two weeks of suffering came to a close when I heard the simple instruction, “Do nothing.” Until then, I’d been trying (as diligently, ardently, and persistently as I could) to just be aware, as if awareness could be induced through sheer strength of will. But when I heard those words — do nothing — articulated by a trusted figure in the meditation world, I let them in and found great relief. (Incidentally, at a Goenka retreat these words, so beautiful and liberating, would have been contraband, since they were in a set of Steve Armstrong recordings supplied to me by my roommate).

Goenka never suggests that by doing nothing with your mind — in other words, relaxing all effort — you can succeed at meditation. Instead, he says that you should pursue equanimity with ardour, perhaps not realizing that the word literally means “intensity, or extreme vigour.” Needless to say, ardour and equanimity make strange bedfellows. If instead, Goenka relaxed his rhetoric around effort and his sanction against thought, meditators could see that equanimity and selflessness need not be hard-won. Then, they’d be better poised to inhabit such states — both on and off the cushion.

Loosen Up

Reading this, you might think that I dislike Goenka. Maybe even that I hate him. But actually, I am so fond of him that after finishing a retreat, tears of appreciation well up whenever I speak of him. (Which is simultaneously a testament to his character and a sign of the human susceptibility to cults.) I love Goenka retreats. I love the forced sitting, which builds equanimity through dispassionately observing pain. I love the injunction against speaking, which lets me indulge my inner introvert. And I love the rigid structure, which saves me the trouble of deliberating over how much meditation might be best.

And because I love these things, I have to be careful in how I relate to them. It would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that I must simply meditate through more pain, stay silent for longer stretches, or feel just a bit more sensation if I am to remain firmly on the path to liberation. I suspect that, for the most part, the people drawn to Goenka retreats are a lot like me — introverted, anxious types who pursue meditation intently, but struggle to lay to rest their neuroses to rest so that they can find peace. For people like us, we don’t need constant admonishments to dig deeper; we need gentle reminders that it’s okay to loosen up. I hope that these words can help a meditator or two to do just that.

[1]He also fails to warn of the real dangers associated with ignoring discomfort. Knee injuries can and do occur on retreats. I’ve found that sitting cross legged (instead of kneeling) helps. As does asking the question “Can I walk normally within 4 or 5 minutes of getting up?” (if the answer is no, consider changing your posture).

[2] This has been made vivid to me on the occasions when I’ve been stupid enough to try arguing people out of a belief in free will. Once the argument begins, they repeatedly concede until inevitably hitting the statement, “I think my thoughts! Me!” After uttering these magic words, they become unwilling to concede any further.

[3] Check out Rupert Spira, Richard Lang, Sam Harris, or a host of other meditation teachers for guidance on this shift. Just don’t expect anything mind blowing — if you do, you’ll almost certainly put in too much effort and just brew a stronger feeling of self. And for more of my thoughts on selflessness, see here and, to a lesser extent, here, here, and here. (I kind of think it’s worth thinking about).