I don’t practice Vipassana meditation, leaning towards more concentration-based techniques instead, but I think vipassana is an excellent meditation technique for beginners and everyone should do a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

2. Vipassana Meditation
why you should spend ten
days in silence

4. I don’t practice Vipassana meditation, leaning
towards more concentration-based techniques
instead, but I think vipassana is an excellent
meditation technique for beginners and everyone
should do a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation
retreat. Make no mistake; this ten-day course will
be among the most demanding endeavors of your
life (see the rigorous daily schedule here).

5. Just sitting with your spine erect for eleven hours
a day can be a challenge, now add complete
silence and two sparse meals a day to it, and
you’re guaranteed some level of physical and
emotional agony. Yet, I’ve completed three
courses in the last ten years and am now
committed to doing one each year. You’ll learn the
proper way to meditate in the course but you’ll
also learn more as follows

6. You’ll get at-least one great insight about an
area you’re struggling with in life.
I’d been trying to crack the premise for The
Seeker for a couple of years but wasn’t making
much progress despite many fits and starts. Then,
Kerry and I stopped in Dhamma Atala, the
Vipassana center in Italy, while backpacking from
Europe to India during our sabbatical.

7. Our goal was to learn a proper meditation
techniques for beginners, not think of book ideas,
but on the fifth night of the course, the whole story
of The Seeker came to me in a flash. And I
immediately knew it was the right idea to pursue. I
attribute it to the elimination of all “noise”—
chatting, reading, exercising, everything—
enabling disjointed subconscious thoughts to
connect into

8. a coherent whole. This burst of insight doesn’t
happen just for tangible questions. After my next
vipassana course in Kohlapur six months later, I
quit drinking and became a vegetarian for good. I
hadn’t been thinking of diet explicitly but
somewhere deep down I’d been bothered by my
drinking for years. The silence just made it burst
onto the surface.

9. You’ll be deeply touched by people’s
generosity, changing you for the better.
I’m not a particularly emotional person but I found
myself in tears on the tenth day of the course
struck suddenly by the knowledge that all ten days
were paid for by people’s generosity. Yes,
vipassana is completely free. You don’t pay for
food, lodging, the beautiful surroundings,
teachings, even transportation to the retreat in
some places, nothing.

10. There’s no hard-sell to solicit donations after and
no attempt to convert you into any religion or
ideology. For ten days, you’re just taught
meditation techniques for beginners with complete
sincerity with no expectation of return. The
dhamma humbles you, turns you into a monk with
a begging bowl, grateful for whatever’s given, not
judging or expecting something from every
transaction.

11. You’ll learn the proper way to meditate in a way
you’ll never learn elsewhere.
As I said, I don’t practice vipassana meditation since
the technique of observing the breath is a little too
dry for me. Yet, I credit the first vipassana course I
did almost fifteen years ago in Dharamsala as the
foundation of my spiritual life. The theory behind
vipassana

12. observing the constant state of flux your body and
mind are in to realize there’s no permanent “I”—is
scientific and robust. The no-nonsense, non-
sectarian, non-religious video discourses
expounding the science of meditation at the end of
each day are a welcome relief from the soft,
hippie-ish talk of “vibrations”, “chakras”, and
“energy fields” in most modern meditation classes.

13. All in all, even if you experiment with other
techniques as I did after, you’ll learn the
foundations of meditation that reinforce the old
yoga adage that the paths are many but the truth
is one. All spiritual and religious traditions are
fingers pointing to the same moon.

14. You’ll meet your people.
What is it about seekers after truth? We’re all cut
from the same cloth, a couple of shades different
from the world of men and hobbits. You stay silent
for nine out of ten days in vipassana. On the tenth
day, you can talk for a few hours—and
immediately you meet people who understand you
better than people you’ve known all your life.

15. I’m still friends with a French writer and an Indian
banker I met in Vipassana in Dharamsala and
Kohlapur respectively. A Krishna-Bhakt from
Slovenia I met in vipassana in Italy became an
inspiration for one of my favorite characters in The
Seeker. Others have drifted in and out of touch but
left a glimmer of a memory behind in a way few
people do.

16. You’ll realize what a dark place your mind is…
I did my second ten-day course after practicing
meditation 2x a day for a few months. I thought I’d
become calmer and would sail through the ten
days of silence. But once again, I found my mind
in a similar chaos, thinking of how X or Y had
failed me, remembering past humiliations,
constructing elaborate future fantasies of wanting
to be

17. the world’s #1 bestselling novelist, worrying that
my father was having a heart attack (he hasn’t
had one in twenty years), and so on. And each
day was still a torture, still the same mathematical
calculation—“3 days over, only 70% left to go; now
50%, now 40% etc.” So much for spiritual
progress!

18. …yet a glimpse of a solution emerges.
Westerners often find Buddhist philosophy with its
assertive “life is dukkha” declaration pessimistic.
On the contrary, I find much to cheer in how
clearly it states an irrevocable truth. Life indeed,
as characterized by all of our experiences, is full
of anguish and incompleteness. Yet, a solution, a
path to completeness exists.

19. In that sense, the ten-day course is a microcosm
of the Buddhist world-view. The mental agitation
one feels in the silence is counter- balanced by
the growing knowledge that a state of complete
bliss exists. How do you access it? I encourage
you to spend ten days in silence to find out!

20. You can sign up for a vipassana course here. And
if this inspires you to meditate, don’t forget to sign
up for my free meditation video course, Kerry’s
nutrition guide, and a free preview of three
chapters of The Yoga of Max’s Discontent here.
Yes, just like vipassana, they’re free

21. For more details
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