When Meditation Became a Dead End

Photo by Dmytro Gilitukha from Shutterstock

About a year into a dedicated Vipassana meditation practice, I began suspecting something was off. I’d been waking up at 6 am each morning to ‘meditate’ upon my designer buckwheat zafu. When the hour bell chimed, I’d greedily record the session on the Insight-Timer app with stars brandishing my consecutive days of sitting. As months passed, I began placing higher value on stars than on the quality of my practice. Those stars felt…