I Meditated All Day For 10 Days In A Row To “Purify My Mind”—Here’s What Happened
Vipassana is hard and a bit culty, but it works
“Start again. Staaaaart agaaaaain.”
These words were irreversibly branded into my mind over excruciatingly difficult 10 days.
10 very long days.
Courtesy of S.N. Goenka, a Burmese businessman turned meditation guru that made it his mission to spread Vipassana meditation first in India and then to the Western world.
Instructing me to start meditating again. Again and again.
Vipassana meditation is primarily taught through 10-day silent courses. They are the formal initiation into the Buddhist practice and challenge you to do nothing else but meditate all day. It’s as intense as it sounds. You also eat and sleep, but other than that, you really do nothing else.
So there I was, at a Vipassana meditation center in Massachusetts, which was actually the very first center Goenka opened in the US. Nestled in nature and surrounded by trees covered in breathtakingly beautiful foliage on hundreds of acres that had been generously donated by grateful previous students. All Vipassana centers run entirely on donations.
