I Did a 10-Day Vipassana course (Pronounced: Vi-pash-na).
My Mind Was Blown.
I went in thinking I was doing something good for myself. A break from the noise, maybe some clarity, and back to life. What I came back with was something I genuinely did not expect and I’m still processing it.
Let me tell you what actually happens inside.
First: The Rules
No talking. No lying. No killing. No stealing. No intoxicants. No phones. No books. No eye contact. No communication of any kind.
It sounds extreme until you realize this is exactly why it works. The moment you strip away every distract-ant, you stop getting distracted . Your nervous system can breathe. You don’t even notice it happening. At first you do feel agitated, scared, not not knowing what is going to happen.
Then they wake you up at 4 AM.
The Schedule is just CRAZY
4 AM wake up. Meditate until 9 PM. That is 17 hours. Then sleep. Then repeat, for 10 days.
Breakfast at 6:30 AM (Break from 6:30 - 8 for breakfast and bathing and cleaning up). Lunch at 11 AM (Lunch Break 11-1). No dinner — just a light snack (light snack is really light - it’s muri (puffed rice) and chai at 5 PM.
What this taught me, viscerally, is that our bodies are overfed and overstimulated. We eat out of boredom, anxiety, habit, and social pressure. We probably need half of what we actually consume.
(My only real complaint: zero protein. Pure carbs. From breakfast to dinner everything is carbs. 10 days doesn’t cause damage but you can’t exactly replicate this lifestyle)
What Happened to My Mind
Day 1: I could hold my attention for maybe 5 minutes. And I’m being generous. At one go. And imagine I had to sit for 13 hours. Every minute felt like centuries, literally. I slept, dreamt, drooled and came back and the clock would have moved 2 mins :P
Day 9: I sat completely still for one full hour. No fidgeting. No scratching. No shifting. Just sitting with the discomfort, watching it rise, watching it pass.
Here’s what nobody tells you: your body can handle far more than you think. Pain is not always a signal to move. Sometimes it’s just a sensation asking to be observed. Observation is the biggest part of Vipassana, we are never in sync with our bodies. Each sensation is a sign of what’s happening in the body but we are not aware of 99.9%
The Ego Chapter
I’ll be honest about something I’m not proud of. When I arrived, I looked around at the other women and quietly judged them. I assumed most of them were housewives with free time. I, on the other hand, run a business. I have things to get back to. I’m important. I wanted to leave almost every single day. (And while you could leave, I would request you not to even if it feels difficult — the rules inside are closer to a prison than a retreat.)
But slowly, something shifts.
You start to see your ego for what it is. And you realize it shows up everywhere — looks ego, height ego, colour ego, job ego, money ego. The whole architecture of social media is built on it. If you’re reading this, you have it too. Even if you think you don’t. Especially if you think you don’t.
And those women I had so casually dismissed?
Railway officers. Police personnel from Electronic City. Designers. Business owners. Housewives who had survived things I cannot imagine. Every single person in that room had a story that would humble you.
That was my first real takeaway. Since we could not speak, we only spoke on the the 10th day evening.
Anicca (pronounced Aniccha). Impermanence. That’s the Whole Thing.
The technique itself is non-religious. You can believe in any tradition, any god, any framework — Vipassana doesn’t ask you to abandon any of it. It just asks you to observe.
And in that observation, something cracked open.
I remembered things I had no business remembering. My grandparents’ voices. The layout of houses I lived in at age 5 or 6. Conversations I didn’t know I had stored. Everything became — I don’t have a better word for it — clearer. Like a lens that had always been slightly smudged was finally wiped clean.
The central teaching is impermanence. Everything arises. Everything passes. The thought, the pain, the joy, the craving, the fear. None of it is permanent. None of it requires your complete identification.
This sounds simple. It is not simple. But when it lands in your body rather than just your head, it changes something that is difficult to undo.
So after everything good or bad, we said Anicca. Simply put, this too shall pass.
The Hardest Part Hasn’t Started Yet
13 hours a day on the floor, on a cushion, with no back support — that was the physical hard part. (I had a disc herniation so I was given a flat chair with back support - sitting on the floor with some support). I also got a chair for a couple of hours a day but most people sat on the floor only.
The harder part is what comes after.
Going back into a world that is engineered, with extraordinary precision, to distract you every single second. Sounds, notifications, conversations, screens. All of it pulling you away from the one thing that actually builds you: stillness.
The real practice isn’t the 10 days. It’s the daily meditation after. It’s choosing, in a world that profits from your distraction, to stay a little bit inside yourself.
Work is not everything. It is one part. I am building a life where I actually believe that, not just say it.
If you read all of this and something stirred inside you, even if you felt scared— go. It is free. It is hard. You will want to leave EVERY SINGLE DAY. But it’s also like a movie. Every evening, there is a debriefing by SN Goenka Ji (Founder of the Dhamma Vipassana org and someone who reignited Vipassana in people across the world. This art o meditation was almost lost to the world for 2500 years.
I would say you should go for it. It requires supreme amount of resilience bu you will not regret it.
Vipassana centres are available across India and globally. dhamma.org