10 Takeaways from 10-day Silent Meditation, 1 Year Later

Introduction

I completed my first 10-day Vipassana Silent meditation course in January 2020. Unlike a lot of other blog posts about Vipassana, which are written immediately following the experience, I wanted to outline some of the takeaways from the program as I reflect a year later. My goal of this post is to focus less on the experience itself and more on what I gained from it, but it’s important to contextualize with a brief overview of the program.

The Program

At a high level, the program is a silent meditation retreat intended to teach a specific meditation technique by removing all distractions. That includes no talking, no outside contact, no internet, no TV, no exercise, no writing, no drawing, no eating past noon, or even eye contact. No anything besides listening to the instructions of the technique, meditating, walking, sleeping, sitting, thinking, or eating at specified times for 10 full days.

The technique itself is a body scan method with the first few days dedicated to only scanning the area on your face between your nostrils and upper lip to “develop the faculty of awareness” to later use on your entire body. It also introduces Buddhist teachings like Anicca (Impermanence), Adhitthana (Self-determination), and the general message that the way to remove suffering is to let go of new and old cravings and aversions (Four Noble Truths). Basically, Vipassana (the technique) lets you recognize cravings and aversions by examining pain and pleasant feelings (but mostly pain) in your body, realize they’re impermanent and therefore shouldn’t be attached to, and accelerated using self-determination to sit completely still for an entire hour.

The lessons and strict lack of distractions made it easier for me to learn the meditation technique more quickly, but it also revealed lot about my natural thoughts and tendencies.

Here are my takeaways as I reflect a year later.

Key takeaways

1. Suffering comes not from what happens to us, but how we react to it. It’s a cliché because it is so easy to accept and I already had going in, but having spent so much time on it, I feel like I experientially know this to be true rather than having only logically accepted it. The distinction is subtle but profound.
2. Impermanence, or colloquially, “life goes on” and “things don’t matter as much as you think they do right now” is not only true, but liberating. It helped me realize so many things like news cycles rarely affect your date-to-day life outside of mood and mental energy.
3. You’re the center of your “observable universe” but the world definitely does not revolve around you. This is another that was not a revelation but a shift from logically accepting to experientially knowing. The geese don’t honk to annoy you and they’ll do it whether you’re there or not. This is true for most people’s behavior toward you as well.
4. Almost any habit can be completely destroyed in 10-days. One unexpected benefit of doing such a strict course is almost all of your habits are broken. When you have a strict regimen of when to wake up, when & what to eat, what you are and aren’t allowed to do in your free time, and when to go to bed, you don’t have room for almost any of your habits. This includes all habits both good and bad. At the end of the course you have the opportunity to add back in the habits you want to keep and not add back the habits you don’t want. For me, this looked like adding back in my habit of journaling, and not adding back my habit of scrolling Instagram and snacking on fatty or sugary foods. (I was surprised how I could look at all my favorite unhealthy foods and not have a strong craving for them, though this habit has slowly crept back. The people who went in saying “I don’t even know how I’ll survive 10 days without my phone” were also the ones that didn’t turn them back on when they got them back.) Habits, especially bad ones, can come back very quickly if you don’t change your environment.
5. There are alternative ways of living with different value-sets. Most modern values and lifestyles aren’t optimized for happiness. Having done a course like this, I can better see why people in alternate communities, like the Amish and indigenous people, choose not to join modern society when given the opportunity.
6. It’s tragic how little time we spend being aware.
7. There’s value in boredom. One of the old students asked me after the course “Where did your mind wander when you were bored?” He says he finds that the most happy and successful people are those whose minds naturally wander to the activities they spend the most time doing ‘in real life’ like a comedian turning his experience into jokes or a programmer trying to fit the technique into an algorithm.
8. Focusing is hard. 10 days is a very small time in the grand scheme of things, but 10 days of dedicated effort toward a single topic can have incredible lasting effects. I wonder what else could come from a program like this which focuses on a topic besides Vipassana with the same dedication to a single focus with just as few distractions.
9. We’re obsessed with results. Sometimes our desire for results are the only thing preventing us from achieving them. Focusing on the technique rather than the outcome tends to produce better outcomes.
10. Our sectarianism, “us vs. them” is natural but strange. Fundamentally, the human experience is pretty universal. Everyone craves good feelings and is adverse to bad feelings. Splitting people into groups makes us forget we’re all human acting in response to the same desires.

Conclusion

Overall, I feel like it was definitely worth the 10-day investment and I would recommend it to anyone who has the time and the slightest bit of interest. It’s important to note, if you go in expecting answers to specific questions or thinking you’ll have some type of revelation, then you’ll probably be disappointed or leave early. Ultimately, their goal is to teach you a meditation technique and the philosophy behind it — not merely to challenge you or be some type of initiation — and these takeaways were a bonus for me.

If you’re interested in doing a course yourself, you can search for courses here. It’s 100% donation based and there was absolutely no guilt tripping or sales, which surprised me because there were 12 days and 11 nights of food and accommodation in addition to the teaching.

Feel free to reach out to me directly write another article elaborating on my personal experience or my thoughts on the “pros and cons” of Vipassana for those interested or considering doing a course themselves.