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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

If you're into this sort of thing, I highly recommend Goenka's 10 day Vipassana retreat:

http://www.dhamma.org/

I did the course in Kyoto years ago (there are locations worldwide: http://www.dhamma.org/en/alphalist.shtml ). The entire 10 days you do nothing more than watch your breath. First 6 or 7 days are hell, the remaining days are heaven. Just need some time for the dust to settle.

The entire course, accommodations, and meals are offered completely free of charge. They won't even accept a donation until you've experienced the course. Even then, there was no overt push to collect money from participants.

They ask you to leave your existing practices at the door, and offer no new dogmas other than watching your breath/mind.

I haven't been back to another course or otherwise involved with the group since then, but it had a profound impact on my life.

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Funny moment during my course: it was during the Indian monsoon in Dharamsala, and it was raining outside. There were a limited number of umbrellas. We were not allowed to talk. As I went to leave the meditation building, someone came inside with an umbrella. He wanted to hand it to me. We couldn't look at one another or speak.

I made him wait like 10 seconds, just standing there at the door. I couldn't ask for the umbrella, he couldn't offer the umbrella. It was profoundly funny to both of us. We laughed about it 6 days later.

I still laugh out loud whenever I think about it. A joke in total silence.

I took the course in Jaipur, and went up to Dharamsala right after. Taking this course totally changed my life. What can be more important than understanding and coming to terms with your thoughts and conscious mind? I have been able to handle very difficult emotional situations (e.g. fear, despair, panic) much better because of taking this one 10-day course.

Can you talk more about your experience? How are the last 3 days "heaven"? What was the "profound impact" on your life?

We might not have words for what he'd like to say.

So invent and define new words. Where do you think words come from in the first place?

No, seriously, before I spend ten days on anything I'd like to have some idea what the point is, even if the communication isn't perfect.

While I haven't ever been on a several-day retreat, I meditate periodically, and the most fitting way I've heard it described is this:

"You spend so much time trying to think that it's like clenching your fist all the time, and you've been doing it so long that your wrist is shaking and your knuckles are white and your arm is cramped and you don't even notice. You need to just stop, shake it out, and let it relax."

I don't know whether doing a big blowout extreme retreat thing is worth it or not (I'm a bit wary of them being cult-ish), but meditating now and then really helps. It's a small and mundane-sounding thing, like flossing or getting enough sleep, but it adds up.

The point, according to the people who run the course, is to develop your equanimity - your ability to take life as it comes without reacting badly. I found that it worked, but I didn't keep up with the practice after leaving the retreats and I'm about as equanimous as I was before.

To me, it's worth doing for the experience. You perceive the world and your own perceptions differently when you've been meditating all day for a week or more. According to the instructors, this is playing a sensation game and isn't valuable, so I'll probably be reincarnated as an syphilis spirochete or something like that.

Aloha, Kolya3!

It is difficult to try and relate in words - it really is the kind of thing you just need to experience. Rather like trying to explain the taste of vanilla ice cream. My experience was something like this:

discomfort, billions of thoughts, wait, do i always have this many thoughts, oh yeah, i need to be watching my breath, etc, etc, etc, days pass along the same lines, intense light/energy, no thought, pure experience of what seems like our original state, back to thinking - OMG, can i stay here forever? reluctant return to daily life

That is a very poor substitute for what actually happened - it bears almost no semblance whatsoever to the experience.

Thanks for responding. What would you say is the lasting profound effect on your day to day life?

Thanks for responding.

My pleasure!

What would you say is the lasting profound effect on your day to day life?

The lasting impact has been a sense of connectedness and perfection behind our apparent reality. Yes, I know this sounds trite and the same sentiment can be found in countless books on near death experience, spiritual life, etc, etc, but that is the best way to put it.

What do you think would be the take-away if you already felt "connectedness and perfection behind our apparent reality", because of one of those other things?

Here's a report from my friend who went:

""" the basics: for 10 days, i joined roughly 50 other people in onalaska, wa (a little town in the middle south of olympia) and we learned anapanna and vipassana meditations (as intepreted by s. n. goenka). we weren't allowed to talk to one another. in the evenings, we could ask questions of the teacher, but at the end of it all i probably said about 30 sentences

here's the schedule that we followed scrupulously every day:

4am - wake up bell 4:30 - 6:30 - meditate in the hall or the sleep quarters 6:30 - 8 - breakfast and rest 8 - 9 - meditate in the hall (strong determination starting on day 4 (more on this below)) 9 - 11 - meditate in the hall or the sleep quarters 11 - 1pm - lunch and rest 1 - 2:30 - meditate in the hall or the sleep quarters 2:30 - 3:30 - mediate in the hall (strong determination starting on day 4) 3:30 - 5 - meditate in the hall or the sleep quarters 5 - 6 - tea/fruit break 6 - 7 - meditate in the hall (strong determination starting on day 4) 7 - 8:15 - video discourse 8:15 - 9 - meditate in the hall 9 - 9:30 - ask teacher questions if desired 10 - lights out

in general we were instructed to sit however was comfortable and change position as sparingly as possible. "strong determination" sits beginning on day 4 meant that we were to not move the entire hour. of course, as the pain got really bad, we were free to do so. i'll get back to the madness of this later.

day 1 we were instructed to focus on our breath. we were to keep only our breath in our minds. no counting, no visualization, no mantras. not deep breath or shallow breath. just breathe naturally and observe. as the mind wanders away, we we were told, notice it without anger or frustrating and resume observation of the breath. my mind wandered away after observing my breath for about 10 seconds max. it got a little better throughout my stay there, but not much.

day 2 we were given the same instructions as day 1, but were told to also start paying attention to the area of skin right below the nostrils. we were to note wherever the breath brushed past that area and focus on the smallest point of skin that we could.

day 3 we were told to look for sensations on the same moustache-zone. at this point, i began to feel an odd tingling sensation very lightly and ocassionally.

day 4 we were instructed in vipassana meditation. it basically consists of observing every part on the surface of the body, in a fixed order, piece by piece. we were told to observe any sensations as we go through the body and not react with craving or aversion. just observe the sensation and pass to the next part of the body.

day 5 - 10 was the continuation of this with additional elaborations on the nature of passing attention through the body. these were also the days when the weird shit started happening. i think sometime during day 5 i discovered that my entire body actually experiences a low-grade tingling 24/7, but i just never had the awareness to feel it. the ability to discern it comes and goes, but, just today during my evening meditation, i felt it on nearly every part of my body. (addendum from a month later: the tingling is gone, but still does show up from time to time during particularly good sits.) it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant and has its own internal logic. every person there felt it, as i discovered after i spoke to them on day 10.

during one of the strong determination sits, at about minute 45, the pain in my back became really bad. my mind started screaming for me to move, but i had built up enough experience at this point to have a little delay in response. i started examining the pain, really understanding it. i noticed that the pain itself, the sensation, was not so bad. what was horrible, was the nagging child inside me, the one that felt entitled to feel good all the time. the child pulled on my entire body, trying to force it to move. i ignored it and ignored it and really analyzed the pain. and... it all went away in a single instant. just dropped from my body. i don't know what happened, but i suspect i somehow managed to undo all sorts of knots of tension. i felt perfectly at ease and sat out the rest of the hour plus another 10 minutes. afterwards, i felt a tremendous elation. """

I'd like to second that experience, and to comment on some parts of it.

On one end of the spectrum, I am baffled by the drama surrounding the "weird shit" happening to your body. I had the same stuff happening during my meditation but I didn't find it to be all that notable. Yes, after several days you begin to isolate tiny little sensations (like weak electric current) all over your body. It's really just that and nothing more though. I guess I question the value of that particular experience - is it really such a huge revelation that practicing a small task over and over makes you better at it, sometimes enabling you to do things you didn't think were possible?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I feel like people don't give enough credit to the experience of forcing yourself to keep a position in spite of searing pain. I am preparing to give birth soon and one of the exercises for pain management is to practice relaxed breathing while squeezing ice cubes in your hands. It's painful but also incredibly empowering to learn that pain can be overcome, and unlike meditating for days to achieve a few weird sensations, it's a practical skill. You don't have to commit yourself to a 10-day retreat or practice a particular form of meditation to achieve that though, there is a variety of ways to do it, none of them particularly mystical.

By the end of the course, I could scan my beating heart within my chest. It freaked me out. I wanted to tell my classmates all about it, but couldn't for a couple more days.

I had severe back pain, have lower back issues, and it took days to get them to allow me to meditate sitting against the wall. When my concentration would break every few minutes, I would gasp in pain, my lower back muscles cramping and spasming the whole time, because it was overwhelming. I thought, and I still think, that requiring me to go through that was ridiculous, and it was only when I told the lead teacher I was leaving if he didn't allow it that he permitted me to sit against the wall. It still hurt like hell, and that was fine, but I could hold myself physically upright at least.

I don't think the courses in the US are so uptight, though.

Mine was the same in terms of the requirement to sit upright with exceptions granted to just a couple people. It was in Massachusetts although I forget the exact name of the place.

Thats how it should be. I was a medical exception, though. I crushed two vertebrae, and so the muscle is pulled over them at a weird angle. They cramp is I sit/stand without moving too long. The instructor didn't want to hear that, because I told him the fracture had healed. Said it was my body's way of 'letting out the suffering' basically. Which was nothing other than stupid, because actually it was my body telling me, "Hey stupid, your muscles have been cramping for 20 minutes. How can you possibly stand the pain?"

Everyone should have to sit, and everyone will hurt when they don't move, but if your back muscles don't freaking work, you should be able to sit against the wall. Which they did let me, eventually.

Here's a fun factoid about my experience: the water was contaminated, and had flat worms in it. I got Amoebic dysentery, for the second time (having just recovered from the first), DURING the session. This made the session all the more challenging, nevermind that you're on a pretty severe caloric deficit in the first place :)

A few months ago, I did the same course here in the US and I am sorry to report that I did not have a great experience.

For one, I was disappointed with the supposed difficulty or profundity of the course. Just like miles above, my fellow attendees, the teacher, the guru, and the friend who recommended the course to me in the first place, all described the experience in very dramatic terms (hell, heaven, profound impact, etc, etc). In reality, for 10 days, you don't do anything but sit in a dimly lit room for hours on end and concentrate on your breathing and other sensations. In between, you eat and sleep. That is all. Personally, I haven't found it especially challenging to shut up and focus for a few days. I also can't say that several days of highly-enhanced perception that followed the course had any profound long-term effect on my life. It was nice, but not more than that. (Those of you who do yoga probably know what I am talking about - those couple hours of feeling balanced, clear-headed and less "ADD" immediately following a yoga class).

Also, I felt that the course was misrepresented. What attracted me to this particular form of meditation was the promise of a 100% non-religious, 100% evidence-based practice. The website, the live teacher and the videotaped guru/founder S.N. Goenka stressed over and over the importance of personally and physically experiencing any insights. On the first day, we were told that we must simply observe any sensations that come with the breathing and not intellectualize the experience or give it any meaning other than what is. However the very next day, we were fed a whole bunch of hooey about the life of Buddha Gautama and the attendant reincarnation theory. The Buddha's tale was presented as a true story, and the reincarnation cycle was presented as the imperative to practice Vipassana mediation. The gist of it was, if you are good (i.e. you practice) you will eventually graduate to an enlightened status, but if you are bad (you don't practice, or waste your time with other meditation methods that may mean well but are silly because they focus on chanting or other false techniques) you will continue to suffer here on Earth. I really didn't appreciate the disconnect between the non-sectarian promise of the course and the reality of what the guru was telling us from his videotape each evening.

To be fair, I will add that the brainwashing is of spiritual rather than commercial nature and the course organizers do not want anything from you other than to "get" it. I would say that if you can set aside the negative aspects I mentioned above and you have 10 days to spare, it's a great way to reset your focus. Just don't buy it when they tell you that something incredible happens on the sixth day. They re-iterate over and over during the first 5 days that you must stick it out and something profound will happen on Day Six, but it's the same thing every day - meditate, eat, sleep, meditate, eat, sleep.

This is interesting, because in my course nobody that felt the way you did lasted the entire ten days :) You must have been totally miserable.

To me the course was mostly a secular study in mind hacking.

Yes, you are just quiet and meditating. But most people find that... in that total silence that stretches to days, during the extended meditation sessions using the techniques, profound and terrifying things you have long suppressed come bubbling up. Its really intense and emotional. Women often burst out crying during the sessions.

The idea is that while you are cultivating detachment, these things bubble up, and you are not reacting, only observing... you condition yourself to deal with them. By doing this for ten days at length, you wash yourself of your demons.

I found that this happened for me. I stopped worrying about the things that had bothered me daily after that course. I was in India when I took the course, and consider myself a half-assed buddhist, so I didn't have a problem with the relgious aspect, but you're right, it is not totally free of dogma.

The key thing to remember though is that they don't claim that a single ten day course will dramatically improve your life permanently. They just claim that you can learn the technique in that length of time. You still have to practice daily, several hours a day according to them. I admit that... I don't, really. I did for several months and then stopped.

But what I have taken away from the course is a deeper understanding of myself, and I make daily use of anapana when I experience distress. It works, helps return me to equanimity, and I think it actually makes me smarter.

I can say that for me, the experience was... deeply spiritual. Only I don't believe in spirits, I'm an athiest. The things that happened to me during that ten days were profound, and were pretty on par with the claims the hippies coming out of the courses before me were saying.

The course was the hardest thing I've ever done, by far. I'm really glad I did it. But as your experience points out, mileage will vary.

The key to the whole thing for me was that... verbal thinking is not thought, its just a reflection of underlying mental processes... and if you just shut the fuck up inside your head, you find that you have a lot more room for productive work, and thought, and you become smarter. Before that, I confused thought with productive mental work, and so the chatter in my head never ended. Now I can clear my thoughts, and have an empty mind and this is so important for using my limited brain power productively.

The REALLY interesting thing is that at the beginning of the course, nobody can NOT THINK for more than a few seconds. By the end of it, you can go for minutes at a time. And it feels GREAT :)

>The entire 10 days you do nothing more than watch your breath.

Your memory may be a little rusty - they have you watch your breath for 3 days ("anapanna") to sharpen your concentration and then you spend the rest of the time doing vipassana, which they define as scanning your body focusing on the sensations.

Everything else you said matches my experiences there.

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