How Vipassana Meditation Changed my Life
Silence.
No talking.
No phone, no books, no music, no sex, no exercise. No damn distractions.
Instead meditation. Mindfulness. 10 hours per day. For 10 days straight.
And I did this deliberately. Not once but 5 times.
Why?!
Two weeks ago I came back from my last 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. Like every time, I got asked many questions. Mostly what people can’t seem to understand is the why. So here it is in short:
Vipassana meditation is the single most effective tool for personal growth I have come across. It has profoundly changed my life. It has made me happier and healthier. It gave me an incredible sense of clarity. And it helped me improve my relationships with myself and others.
Every time I go on a retreat it feels like my personal OS gets a major update. It’s a real game-changer.
That’s why.
I’ll go into more detail on the benefits and mechanics of the technique later on (parts 3 & 4). For now, here’s the outline of this article. I organized it around the most frequently asked questions that I got about Vipassana over time:
- What was my experience at a 10-day Vipassana retreat?
- What is Vipassana meditation?
- What are the benefits of Vipassana meditation?
- What happens at a 10-day Vipassana course?
- What happens after a Vipassana retreat?
- Who is a Vipassana course (not) for?
- How can I register for a 10-day Vipassana retreat?
What was my experience at a 10-day Vipassana retreat?
I took my first 10-day Vipassana retreat in 2017 and remember quite well how I felt after: Delighted that it was over — but also really awestruck.
After the 10 days, I was incredibly excited. I felt like I had finally encountered something legit, something that actually works. The retreat had allowed me to practice mindfulness and reconnect with myself. But more importantly, it had also shown me a clear and practical way to make peace with myself and the world.
Since then I have taken 4 more 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats. I can undoubtedly say that this technique has completely changed my life. Vipassana has helped me to heal, become a happier person, and enjoy a more peaceful life.
If I could give only one piece of universal advice to any person, it would be to take a 10-day Vipassana retreat.
I want to keep this short, so I’ll leave it at that for now. There will be a couple more personal anecdotes throughout the remaining text. If you have more questions about my own experience, feel free to shoot me a message or leave a comment. But for now, let’s get started with the most important hard facts about the technique…
What is Vipassana meditation?
Vipassana is the Pali word for insight. It is most commonly used to refer to the buddhist Vipassana meditation techniques. As the name suggests, the techniques aims at developing insight into the nature of reality. Ultimately, the goal is to purify the mind and reach enlightenment through this insight. Sounds very spiritual, I know. I’ll go more into how this works later. For now, bear with me…
Vipassana meditation was originally taught by the Buddha in India over 2,500 years ago. As with most ancient buddhist teachings, there exists a variety of different traditions. The most predominant tradition nowadays is Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka.
It is important to mention there are other Vipassana techniques out there that I have not tried. When I write about Vipassana in the following text, I refer to Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. This tradition which was preserved by a series of Burmese teachers after being lost in India. In the second part of the 20th century, it spread to back India and ultimately also to the West and all over the world.
The primary means of teaching Vipassana are 10-day meditation retreats. These retreats take place in one of the over 380 locations around the globe. They are open to anyone willing to follow the course rules. Retreat schedules and registration information are available on the website dhamma.org.
All Vipassana retreats are non-commercial. This means that students are not charged for teaching, boarding, and lodging during the retreat.
Yes, you read that correctly. It’s 100% free. There’s no catch.
The retreats are financed exclusively via donations from people who have completed at least one 10-day retreat. Also, teachers and retreat helpers do not receive anything for their work. This is to ensure that the teaching of Vipassana does not get commercialized and thereby corrupted.
What are the benefits of Vipassana meditation?
1. Higher levels of inner peace & happiness
The practice of Vipassana is all about dissolving the ego and changing the reactive habit pattern of the mind. Instead of blind reaction, the technique teaches you to cultivate equanimity. Being equanimous allows you to observe reality as it is, objectively. This skill helps you to navigate everyday life with a much-increased sense of inner peace and happiness. Let’s illustrate this with an example:
Somebody at work openly criticizes you in front of others. If you are like me or most other people, something like this will happen: At first something inside you contracts. Anger arises. Immediately, your mind either goes on the defensive or on the offensive. You start justifying yourself or looking for things to criticize in the other. Maybe you express that or you suppress it. Whichever way it goes, you probably carry that comment around for a while. You keep playing it back in your mind, reheating your anger again and again.
Although, we know we should just let it go, we can’t help it. It all happens automatically. Our mind has the habit pattern of reacting with aversion when our ego gets threatened. This is exactly where equanimity is a game changer: If we manage to stay equanimous, we can just have an objective look at what that person says — without taking it personally. If their criticism is justified, we act consciously to change what we can — and be happy. If it wasn’t, we let it go — and be happy.
Equanimity allows us to act instead of reacting.
Unfortunately, although most of us know this, it is very hard to change. That’s because intellectual understanding alone can’t change the mind’s habit pattern. That’s why the usual mindfulness blah blah usually does not get you anywhere.
Vipassana is so effective because it gives us an actual practice. It allows us to actively develop our equanimity and thereby change the habit pattern of the mind. It offers a practical solution to becoming a more peaceful and happy person. And it actually works.
2. Improved (mental) health
Apart from allowing you to navigate everyday situations better, Vipassana also helps you to get rid of some of the baggage from your past. By practicing Vipassana, you start dissolving your ego, suppressed emotions, complexes, and traumas. As you work on our liberation from these issues, you will find that you experience improved states of mental and physical health.
Since this may sound fairly abstract, let me give you a personal example: I used to get panic attacks. In one of my retreats, I suffered one of those attacks while meditating. While I felt the anxiety washing over me, I remembered my Vipassana practice and started examining my fear equanimously.
In that moment something changed radically. I realized that, all the things I was panicking about were in fact utterly meaningless. The anxiety started dissipating. I was filled with an incredible sense of inner peace and security. The technique helped me to get rid of it then and there.
I have not had a single panic attack since. Not one.
Of course that doesn’t mean that taking one Vipassana retreat will cure any kind of trauma and get you straight to enlightenment. Still, there are many incidents in which people managed to overcome mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, or addiction as well as many kinds of psychosomatic, physical symptoms.
3. More compassion & love
As a result of the above-mentioned points, life becomes more peaceful and harmonious. However, as always, these internal shifts do not stay limited to ourselves. They also fundamentally change the way we interact with the world. Once I had resolved certain issues within myself, not only my relationship with myself but also my relationships with the outside world changed.
Before discovering Vipassana, I had often felt strong negative emotions towards others — even in my most intimate relationships. I understood quite clearly that these emotions were coming from my own issues with self-worth. They ultimately stemmed from a sick relationship with myself — yet I couldn’t help feeling them. This made me feel ashamed, which lessened my self-worth and aggravated the problem further.
Now I’d love to tell you that I never feel negative emotions anymore. Unfortunately, I still do. However, their frequency and intensity have strongly diminished as a result of the work I did on myself. Instead, I increasingly experience a sense of love, compassion, and gratitude towards others. Ultimately, this has led to an overall increase in my relationship quality.
4. Heightened sense of clarity & awareness
During a 10-day Vipassana retreat, you step out of your normal life to do some intense introspection. You are also not really given any opportunity to distract yourself from what’s going on inside you. No Netflix, no social media, not even a damn book or newspaper.
The result is almost always an increase in awareness and mindfulness. You get to take a step back and look at your life from a different perspective. It can feel as if you suddenly switched from a worm’s- to a bird’s-eye view of your life.
For me, taking this different perspective usually leads to a very clear notion of what I need to change in my life. Past examples were going vegetarian, changing my career plans, or quitting alcohol. These things suddenly became very clear to me. After the retreats I stuck to the decisions with relative ease, even though I had been avoiding them before.
In summary, a Vipassana retreat always seems to help me recalibrate my inner compass. It gives me the necessary clarity to make important (and sometimes uncomfortable) decisions. Now whether that is a result of the meditation or simply the solitude, I’m not 100% sure. All I can say is that after a Vipassana retreat, I feel very much in touch with my intuition and have a clear sense of what to tackle next.
What happens at a 10-day Vipassana course?
Now how does all this magic happen in only 10 days? What do you actually have to do? A Vipassana retreat is what you could call a crash course in both the practice and theory of the teaching of the Buddha. The practical aspect of the technique is given more importance though. The reason is that it is only through the practice that actual understanding can be achieved. We only learn our lessons when we actually experience something after all.
What happens at a 10-day Vipassana retreat can be summarized under the three main pillars of Buddha’s teaching:
A. Moral behavior: This is ensured by the strict rules of the retreat.
B. Mental clarity: The focus of the first 3 days of the retreat is to sharpen your concentration.
C. True insight: The aim of the following 6 days of the retreat is the purification of the mind and the development of wisdom.
Ultimately, on the last day of the retreat, you will then learn how to share your merits with others, cultivating loving kindness and compassion.
In the following, I’ll go into some more detail on the three pillars and how they reflect in what happens at a 10-day Vipassana retreat:
A. Morality: Retreat rules
The rules of the retreat set the foundation that is necessary for you and others to be able to develop mental clarity. This clarity is necessary for the development of insight into the nature of reality and thereby purify the mind. The retreat rules are strict. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that they have been designed to ensure that everybody can get the maximum effect from their 10-day Vipassana retreat.
5 moral rules (precepts)
As mentioned, the retreat rules are designed to allow everyone to calm and sharpen their minds. For the mind to be able to calm down sufficiently, it is important to abstain from immoral behavior (as such behavior agitates the mind). So, for the duration of a 10-day Vipassana retreat, everybody must follow the 5 basic moral rules of Buddhism (5 precepts):
- Abstain from killing: This applies to both humans (duh) and animals (yes, also mosquitos). As a result, the food that is served at 10-day Vipassana retreats is also vegetarian.
- Abstain from stealing: This one is pretty self-explanatory. You can leave your valuables with the retreat management if you don’t trust the other students on this one btw.
- Abstain from sexual misconduct: This precept aims at ensuring sexual responsibility. It is to preventing stuff like rape, adultery, or sexual excesses. As the term misconduct leaves some room for interpretation, the actual retreat rule is complete celibacy (i.e. no sexual activities at all). To avoid temptations (at least for heterosexual students), men and women are kept separate for the entire duration of the retreat. Clothing should also not be unnecessarily revealing.
- Abstain from improper speech: Improper speech includes things such as lies, insults, or gossip. This is probably the most difficult of the five precepts. As a result, students must maintain complete silence for the entire 10 days (more on this in the next paragraph).
- Abstain from intoxicants: The term intoxicants refers to any legal or illegal drugs (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, marihuana, psychedelics, tranquilizers, painkillers, etc.). The only real exception is caffeine, as most retreats will have instant coffee or some sort of caffeinated tea. You should basically only ingest the provided food and drinks. Anything else (e.g. prescribed medication) should be consulted with the teacher before the retreat. It will usually be allowed if it is truly necessary for your physical health.
Noble silence
Why is the retreat silent? As mentioned above, one of the reasons is to prevent improper speech which agitates the mind. Additionally, the retreat aims at minimizing any kind of external distractions. You (and everybody else) should be able to maintain full concentration on yourself. This is why you are asked to refrain from communication. This also includes non-verbal communication and physical contact with other students.
However, there are of course people you can (and should) talk to, if you need to. If you have questions about the technique, for instance, you can approach the teacher. If you have other concerns or problems, you are always free to approach the retreat manager.
So don’t worry: Although the silence is weird at first, it is actually very easy to maintain.
Avoiding distractions
Apart from maintaining Noble Silence, you also are asked to refrain from working out, reading, writing, listening to music, and using digital devices for the duration of the retreat. The reason is that these activities could distract you (or others) from yourself. On the bright side: It’s a great opportunity to finally get the digital detox you’ve been wanting to get for a while now ;)
Lastly, to ensure the technique has the desired effect, it should be practiced exactly as described. For the duration of the retreat, you should, thus, practice exactly as the teacher asks without adding or subtracting anything. After the retreat, you are of course free to do whatever you like.
Daily schedule
The Vipassana schedule is designed to give you a maximum amount of meditation time while still allowing for sufficient rest. Meditation starts at 4:30 am (yeah, I know…) and finishes at 9:00 pm. In between you have 3 longer meal breaks and various smaller breaks between meditation sessions. Although no session is longer than 2 hours, the total amount of meditation time is around 10 hours per day. Yeah, It’s a lot — but it’s doable.
B. Clarity: Anapana Meditation
Now that we have covered everything that you can’t do at a 10-day Vipassana retreat, let’s dive into what you actually should do. As mentioned above, the prerequisite to be able to develop your insight is to calm down and sharpen your mind.
The technique which you will apply to achieve this mental clarity is called Anapana meditation. Anapana is a respiration-based meditation technique. This means that you focus your attention on your breath and try not to give importance to your thoughts. This practice develops your mindfulness and sharpens your concentration.
While this sounds nice and neat in theory, the monkey mind obviously does not find the breath quite as fascinating as that last Instagram reel we saw just before handing in our beloved phone. This is part of the process and gets better over time. Usually, by day 4 the mind becomes more disciplined, calm, and sharp. You are ready to move on to the actual practice of Vipassana.
C. Insight: Vipassana Meditation
The practice of Vipassana meditation only starts on day 4 after you have calmed and sharpened your mind sufficiently. Think of it as an operation: You have to sharpen the scalpel (i.e. your mind) before being able to start the operation and remove the cancer (i.e. your mental impurities such as your ego, suppressed emotions, complexes, and traumas).
So how does Vipassana work? Vipassana is a sensation-based meditation technique. This means that you focus your attention on your bodily sensations. Maybe you have done some kind of body scan meditation before. It’s basically that. The main difference is that through the previous practice of Anapana, the mind is much calmer and sharper. This makes you able to observe more and subtler sensations.
While observing the body sensations, you come across both unpleasant (our backs and limbs are just not used to sitting 10 hours per day) and pleasant sensations. The habit pattern of the mind is to react to the pleasant subtle sensations with liking and to the unpleasant sensations with disliking. With Vipassana though, the main objective is to remain equanimous and not react to the sensations. Thereby, you start changing the habit pattern of your mind and develop equanimity.
When practicing Vipassana (often already with Anapana), suppressed emotions, complexes, and traumas (impurities) start coming up and manifesting as physical sensations. When you manage to observe these sensations equanimously, without reacting, you start dissolving the underlying emotional charge of the impurity. After a while, the sensation fades away and you become free of the related impurity (like with my panic attack example).
I know it sounds too good to be true. But it actually works!
The more equanimous you become, the freer you become. As you are dissolving your impurities, the initially gross physical sensations also start dissolving and become increasingly subtler. Understanding this interaction of the mind-matter phenomenon on an experiential level within the framework of your body is how you develop the true insight that is Vipassana.
Compassion: Metta Bhavana Meditation
After practicing Vipassana for 6 days, on the last day, a third type of meditation called Metta Bhavana is introduced. The aim of Metta Bhavana is to cultivate loving kindness and share your positive emotions with others.
After the instructions for Metta Bhavana have been given on day 10, the rule of Noble Silence is lifted. You can finally talk again. This usually feels weird — for about 30 seconds. Soon enough everybody is usually chatting as if there had never been any silence to begin with.
The atmosphere on this last day is usually very cheerful, making it a perfect shock absorber before everybody returns to the normal world again (which is in many ways not so normal after all).
What happens after a Vipassana retreat?
After the retreat, you don’t have to stick to the retreat rules anymore. You are free to do whatever you want. There will be a lot of seemingly normal things that you will really enjoy doing again :)
If you decide that you want to continue practicing Vipassana, it is recommended to establish a daily meditation practice. You should also try your best to lead a life in accordance with the 5 precepts (don’t worry — you can speak and have sex again). In addition, you should commit to taking one 10-day Vipassana retreat a year.
From my own experience, I can recommend continuing the practice after the retreat. Ultimately, it is about applying the lessons you have learned to your life and the practice helps with that. The same goes for repeatedly taking retreats. For me, every single one of my retreats felt like that OS update that I described above. In fact, the retreats get more and more effective over time, as you continue to understand the technique better.
Who is a Vipassana course (not) for?
The benefits from Vipassana meditation include increased levels of mental health, happiness, mindfulness, and clarity as well as better relationships. All these benefits are universal. You’re going to have a hard time finding anybody who does not want to experience an improvement in any of these life areas. So, Vipassana meditation is a practice that is for everybody.
Despite having a buddhist background, the technique is completely non-religious. So there is no need to convert to Buddhism or anything. In fact, it does not require for you to hold any kind of belief to work. It is, therefore, compatible with all kinds of religions and creeds (including agnosticism). There is no need to consider oneself religious or spiritual at all.
Also, there are no demographic limitations, except for being at least 18 years of age. Most Vipassana retreats, thus, display a large variety of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, different sexual orientations, religions, and age groups.
The only real requirement is to accept the rules of the retreat and practice according to the technique. The retreat rules are strict and life during a retreat is very different from what most people are used to. You should, thus, ask yourself if you feel mentally and physically up to the task of sticking to the rules for the entire 10 days. If so, give it a go!
In my opinion, the rewards are worth way more than the investment you make. Sure, 10 days is a lot of time. The retreat rules also don’t exactly match most people’s idea of a relaxed holiday.
It’s work. But it’s time invested to become a better person and live a happier and more harmonious life. What better investment is there really?
I hope you decide to go on a 10-day Vipassana retreat soon. It’s an intense but incredibly rewarding experience that will surely be a game changer for your life — as it has been for mine.
How can I register for a 10-day Vipassana retreat?
The first step is to identify a retreat that fits your calendar and location preferences. You can check the retreats that are taking place near you on the website dhamma.org. Ideally, you do this a few months before you want to take the retreat.
Once you have identified a suitable retreat, check when the registration opens and set a reminder to fill out the registration form on that day. A couple of days after submitting the form you should hear back from the registration team via email. They will let you know whether or not you have been accepted or put on the waiting list.
After that just stick to the instructions in your emails. Don’t get discouraged, if you don’t get a spot on your first try. Since the demand for retreats is usually higher than the supply, it can take more than one try.
That’s it. If you read until here I strongly suggest, you hop on dhamma.org now and check out which retreat suits you best. You won’t regret it!
