10 years of Therapy, in 10 days

Last week, I shared on Linked in that I had completed a 10 days silent meditation retreat and how much it has utterly changed my life.

Since that post, I have been inundated with DMs. The level of interest has been extraordinary.

So here goes - Here's the unfiltered lowdown!

The Sharpest I have Ever Felt

Completing Vipassna is like having deep colonic irrigation... but for your mind.?

The longer you stay in the deep meditation, the deeper you go into your subconscious, and the more you discover you have suppressed.

Across 10 days, I dug deep and unrooted decades of suppressed anger, regrets, passions, guilt, fears, and sad memories. You have no idea how much you have buried until you start digging.

People you have not thought about (on a surface level) for years, come up during the meditation and you realise how long you have carried them for (on a subconscious level).

Perhaps you have not forgiven them for something they did, or you have not forgiven yourself for something that you did.

When I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I said it was akin to starting as a blunt knife which, over 10 days you sharpen. You become sharper and sharper and more precise. When you come out, you are the sharpest you have been in a very long time. ?

Everything looks clearer, less clogged with emotion - more objective.

And it feels so good.

Why is there is so much to unleash?

Everything we experience, our bodies feel.

We may not have the headspace to process what is happening at the time of those emotions; we are busy people, we want to keep up appearances, we are too young to understand, we are overwhelmed and cannot deal with it in the moment. There are so many reasons why we park emotions instead of fully feeling them.

As Gabor Mate says, "the body keeps the score". Everything we bury into our subconscious stay with us, until we pull them out. If we ignore them, our bodies finds ways to tell you that all is not well - you develop headaches, chronic pains, autoimmune diseases that are hard to explain, you may suffer from anxiety and not know what the root is. Things annoy you constantly, you just don't feel at peace.

The longer we neglect dealing with these issues, the stronger they they take root in our minds and are much harder to remove. Like a poison, they can infiltrate every aspect of our lives and leave us feeling not quite happy, but we don't know why.

We can distract ourselves with a juicy new project, or an adventurous holiday, a new relationship, retail therapy, but after the buzz dies down, we find ourselves feeling, just okay again.

For 10 days I invested in the process of unleashing what had been buried in my subconscious - I dedicated myself to unrooting as much as I could.

It is why I feel so light now.

Becoming the Master of your Mind

Completing a Vipassna course is like under going open-heart surgery, except you are both the patient and the surgeon.

It is not easy.

It hurts, and is really quite scary.

If you follow the technique properly, it is painful. But you also feel in control. Going through this process will liberate you from years of not feeling quite right within yourself.

The technique feels more like a psychological, mindfulness exercise than a spiritual one.

As someone who has had psychotherapy for years, it was interesting that Vipassna took me deeper than any psychotherapy ever has My opinion is that you can quickly go deeper using this technique because it is so intense and the environment and regime has been designed to support you stay in this state of surgery for 10 whole days.

Instead of an hour a week with a therapist, this is 11 hours of seated meditation per day, for 10 days. That's 110 hours of work in one go! YEP! It is not for the faint-hearted.

This is not to say that psychotherapy does not work; it is very helpful and I have benefited from it for years. But Vipassna shows us that only you have the keys to your mind to reach its greatest depths. To stay in excavation mode for longer than an hour per week delivers crazy benefits. This technique helps you to develop a trust that you are the best person to do this surgery and you can do it on your own.

I would actually recommend Vipassna once you have tried some therapy actually, as it will warm you up to the deep levels of self-reflection.

By the end of the 10 days, you feel like the master of your mind together with a delicious calm.

This ain't no retreat

I really should stop calling it a retreat. This was no holiday!

I worked harder than I ever worked before (And that is saying something!)

I signed up because I was desperate.

I was in pain; physically and mentally. I had an awful Christmas.

The year prior was rough; things in my life I thought would always be a permanent fixture; my business, my relationships, family members, started to fall away, began to break, and many died.

The friend that recommended I go on this course told me that it was life-changing and particularly good for grief. It will help you let go, he said.

I went straight to the website and booked on the first one that come up. End of January, Suffolk. You can do it in much more exotic locations, but I couldn't wait for those other dates, and didn't want the faff of booking flights.

As I said, I was desperate. So Suffolk it was. An hour from London - easy.

I did not do any research. I didn't check out the location, the schedule, what to expect, I didn't trawl through google reviews, I didn't go onto Youtube to find any testimonials - I just booked it.

Something inside me said - this is for you, you need to do this.

There was a pull that I cannot explain.

Breaking the body in

I should qualify that I had hardly done any meditation before. I have a couple of apps on my phone which I dabbled in, but I had no routine - I was not really sure I was doing it right.

I had never meditated for more than 30 minutes before, because... life is busy.

But also because my discipline is terrible; I struggle to sit still. Each time I tried, my mind would wander off, I would give up and often think that meditation isn't for me.

If this is you too, then you need to trust me that you can do it.

From the odd meditation session to 11 hours a day, it was quite a shock to my body. The first 2 days were excruciating. Sitting only with your own thoughts, you realise a lot of things about yourself. If we don't have a life to tend to, no meals to plan for, no cleaning up, no work to go to, we are forced to face our inner voices on loop.

We think about the same things all the time; the same scenarios play out in our heads, conversations that annoy you, conversations that you wish you handled differently, conversations that you want to have in the future. Fantasy scenarios are acted out, scene after scene.

After a few days, you want to scream.

You become so bored of your own monologue.

The mind is a wild place. And if we don't learn to master it, we become at its mercy, never feeling at peace. Always a little on edge.

There is no phone to give you a dopamine hit, there are no books to distract your mind and feed it with any stimulus, there are no chores to do, no meals to prep, no work to busy yourself with to make you feel important. There are no conversations with people where you need to position yourself, negotiate, or tell them what you do for a living or which countries you have visited.

Most painfully for me, as a life-long journaller, pens and paper were banned. This was so hard for me, I wanted to get all my epiphanies down. The purpose of this was to show us that what we THINK does not really matter. Thoughts come and go and pass like clouds.

It is more about how we FEEL.

And I felt incredible.

You already know you need this

I think Vipassna is for everyone.

It might not be the right time right now, but there will come a time in your life, when you will think I need to do that thing that Bonnie wrote about.

You will know when you are ready to take this on.

You will need to be brave, because it is hard.

It is possibly one of the hardest ( and best things) I have ever done in my life.?

By Day 10, you are so so proud of yourself for reaching the end goal. I cried with relief. Like, actually sobbed.

I am aware that many people quit the course before it ends. Most commonly, people start packing their bags on day 2 and 6, notoriously the hardest days to get through. These are the days when your body is properly broken in, and you can either stay and get through it, or you can run away.

Pass the tissues

I have always been a crier. A shameful crier.

My tears would always come with a serving of guilt though; am I making this other person feel uncomfortable? I am such a baby, why do I would feel so angry - why can't i control my emotions better?

But here on this course, tears are welcome and normal. I cried every day, because each day came with painful realisations and truth bombs would hit me. Looking around me, everyone else was crying too.

For 10 days, I was hit with truthbomb after truthbomb.

Your mind is an absolute minefield.

We exhaust ourselves with our inner thoughts for the first couple of days and the same narratives. But day after day, as you start to work through it....You experience a sense of?peace and calm, a lightness.

So how does it actually work?

I have to assume that many of you will google it anyway, so I won't hide what it is all about. For those of you feeling nervous about, this might help give you the courage to book yourself onto a course, when you need it.

Here are the key principles, as I interpreted them.

Of course, there are hundreds of ACTUAL Vipassna teachers who will give you their OFFICIAL version, so please just take my description as based on my single experience only.

Introducing 'Sankaras'

1. Any misery, negativity, or anxiety in our lives are caused by ourselves and our perceptions of realities. When we hurt others, we usually hurt ourselves first. Our miseries are rarely caused by others, it is more likely to be caused by the way you perceive events and people in your life.?
2. These experiences and feelings are built up throughout our lives in the forms of “Sankaras”
3. Sankaras can be any negativity, sadness, any traumas that you have suppressed, anger that you have swept under the carpet, perhaps it is some shame that you couldn’t admit earlier in your life - they are intense emotions like fears, jealousy, passion, cravings and aversions. They have a negative impact on others and ourselves.

Holding Sankaras in our Bodies and Living in Denial?

1. Everything we experience, we feel.
2. Our bodies feel every sensation that happens to us, and sensations that we refuse to feel at the time, or cannot feel at the time (we are maybe too scared, too young, not ready, find it too hard etc),?will be held onto by the body.
3. We store them in our subconscious, like a deep store or vault.?
4. Over time, we become heavy with issues and stories from the past that leave us feeling miserable, uneasy, anxious.?
5. Think of a laundry basket that is over flowing with clothes you have forgotten you had. You only wash and deal with the clothes at the top of the laundry basket, never reaching down to the bottom to get rid of those at the bottom.
6. If you continue to add Sankaras to your pile, they not only weigh you down, they multiply, which is the equivalent of any religion’s version of hell.?
7. In our day-to-day lives, we deal with stuff on a surface level only, we can easily distract ourselves; go on holidays, have hobbies, indulge in alcohol and drugs, to escape the need to deal with our deep-seated issues.?
8. We can never get away from our own misery if we don’t go deep to the root into the subconscious to pull them out from the root.?

Extracting sankaras, one by one.?

1. In order for us to get out the miseries and stress in our bodies, we need to pull out the sankaras from our store room.?
2. You need to dig deep into the basket and remove them, one by one -? you cannot get rid of it en masse. You need to pick up each piece and examine them before it can leave your subconscious.
3. The 10 day course teaches you a technique that helps you to dissolve the traumas that you have held onto, the sankaras you have built up. The technique is refined over 10 days of daily teaching, and you get better and better at it.
4. To support the mission, you need to stop adding new sankaras to the pile too, so during the 10 days, normal life is suspended.
5. It is a painful process to be confronted with all that you have buried. But it is also very liberating to uncover what has been holding you back for so long.
6. ?The longer you stay in this state of serious meditation, the more that comes up. In daily life meditation, you are less likely to make this much progress in one go. The 10 day is a deep-clean.
7. Misery will follow you, unless you deal with your issues from the root and take them out properly. We hold onto everything until we cannot hold them onto them anymore - often manifesting in emotional breakdown and illness and bodily pain. (autoimmune diseases in particular). I have experienced all of these.
8. ?After the course, you need to keep it up - 2 hours per day, but the foundation of the practice would have been built in the 10 days.

How the Environment and Regime is essential for Results

Like going into any hospital for surgery, you need to abide by the rules of the hospital.

The regime is gruelling, let's be honest. It is a bit like a prison camp where leaving before the 10 days is highly discouraged. You are locked in there, but for your own good. You are asked 3 times before the course begins whether you are definitely committed to completing the course, before the gong is rung and the rules are in place.

A 4am gong wakes you up and you start meditating at 4.30am

You have a total of 11 hours of meditation PER DAY, with breaks.

Breakfast is at 630am, lunch is at 11am, and there are no other meals until the next morning. That's almost 19 hours of fasting, to keep the mind alert. The food is wholesome and there is plenty of it.

Since you have not paid for the meals, there are no demanding customers. You receive the food gratefully. This is an essential part of the design of the course because meditation works best when there is no ego involved. Here, living like monks, you get what you are given and you are grateful.

At 5pm there is an offer of tea and some fruit, but quite honestly, I was never hungry for it.

For 10 days, you observe silence. You do not make eye contact, you are in your own world, on your own journey. It is a relief to be honest. I loved the silence. By not connecting with anyone you are not busy thinking of what people think of you, or what you think of them. Nobody knows who you are and nobody cares. It is bliss, it is a treat to feel like a total nobody.

There is a daily slot with the teacher (if you want it) to ask questions about the technique and to check in, so you are not totally isolated.

Initially I thought the silence would be the hard part but I was wrong. The hardest bit is sitting with your own thoughts for 11 hours a day. It makes you go a little crazy.

Day 2 and Day 6 are notoriously the hardest days to get through. These were the days that I felt quite depressed and wondered how I was going to complete the week.? Some people packed their bags on these days because the process of excavating all your past traumas is so painful - you need stamina and courage for it. I felt emotionally exhausted every other day, intermitting with relief and joy.

There were times where I was so exhausted from examining myself that I wanted to run away. But you keep going, knowing that by Day 10, there is a promise of bliss.

There were about 80 people there on my course. The men and women are separated, and you live like a monk - you have no choice in the meals, all the food is vegan or vegetarian, and you follow a strict routine of waking and lights out. There is little room for "chilling" - you are there to work.

There are times when I felt painfully bored. But this is because we are so used to the dopamine hits from daily interactions and praise from others or notifications on our phones. When we starve ourselves of those thrills, we realise we depend too much on them to feel good about ourselves, to feel important. These are the distractions from the work we need to do on ourselves.?

I thought I would miss not having books or music or my phone or a notebook, but I was grateful for the lack of distraction. You are there with a job to do.

Despite having only 6 hours sleep, I woke every day before the gong feeling refreshed. I was amazed by this. I never incredibly alert and sharp-minded all day.

A Cocoon for our Healing

Whilst this might all sound pretty gruelling, you also spend 10 days with a deep feeling of gratitude. This helps you keep going with the surgery.?

You are there because someone donated money to pay for your place. There are no fees to pay. The food is lovingly made, the rooms are cosy and there is a real sense of community. This positive feeling helps you with the 10 day gruelling journey.?

The silence and regimented regime helps to create a lack of ego and this supports you to not create more sankaras.? Ego can be a big cause of sankaras.

The environment is a cocoon for our healing hearts and minds.

I understand why the course looks after the students so lovingly and carefully now. ? Without this full schedule, you would find it much harder to do the work - here you don’t need to think about what time to get up, what to make for dinner, cooking dinner or cleaning up, when to shower, your whole job is to work on your mind. Everything else is scheduled. You don't need to make any decisions.

This unique environment helps you to go as deep as you can, knowing you are being held.?

After a few days of intense meditation…. The mind really does start to become less cluttered. As you clear-out of the old sankaras, and no new ones are being added, you feel lighter and happier.

I found myself smiling to myself as I meditated and by the time it ended, I cried and mourned the experience. I didn’t want it to end.?

A return to the OG version of you

The journey you will take does not make you into a new different person.?It might feel like that.

Some people in my life have said to me in the past week that I feel like a new person. Maybe that's how it seems.

But quite the opposite is true.

Vipassna takes you back to the person you were once before.

Before you learnt how to be the person that others wanted you to be.

Before you learnt to edit yourself in order for people to love and accept you, more easily.

This style of meditation takes you back to your original, authentic self.?

This is why it feels so good.

To untether the pain in our lives, we have to go to the root level at the subconscious level to discover who we were before life got complicated with emotions that we had to bury, to cope.

I think this experience has changed me forever, and for the best.? I am forever grateful to the person who suggested I go on this course. I am thinking clearer than ever, and I am more honest to others and to myself.?

I imagine most people will want to do this at a crossroad in their lives. You may hear about it a few times before you book yourself onto a course.? There are courses in most countries - an incredible feat. It has been going for more than 30 years. You should be taught in your first language, for best results - let them know and you will receive your own audio for the classes.

My biggest breakthroughs came on day 9, with glimmers showing on day 3, 5 and 7, so it built up over the week.?

I feel stronger, braver and clearer than I have ever felt.?This year 2025 , my word of the year was HEALING. So we are off to a good start!

You have to choose when you want to face the truth of your life and then Vipassna will be there waiting for you.?

Keeping the knife sharp

Through Vipassna, I have uncovered some major epiphanies which I am still processing now. Some of them have been very hard to accept and I will need time to work through them.?

You are meant to continue the practice 2 hours per day, an hour in the morning, and an hour at night. It feels like a lot, I know. I have kept up the morning hour so far, and will soon introduce the evening hour.

My first thought was how on earth would I fit in 2 hours per day!! I have stuff to do.

But the remarkable thing is after Vipassna, I am so alert and sharp, my productivity is super high and I am finishing things much quicker. Your powers of concentration have been enhanced because there is so much less clutter now. I plan to volunteer for the charity (you can go and cook the food for instance) as my way of giving back to it, even though I don't think I can ever return the value that I have gained.

At the same time, I have developed a self-love I have never felt before, and a compassion for others that I never had the patience for until now.

For the first time in my life, I have tasted peace.

I hope you will taste it too.

If you still have any more questions, feel free to DM me.

The Origins of Vipassna and a note on religion

Vipassna is a technique of meditation.? While it originates from Buddhism, Vipassna technique is open to all religions and sects.?

Unlike many other types of meditation, it does not use mantras, any visualisation of any forms or words - no gods or goddesses, no worshipping.? As such, it felt more like a psychological and mindfulness practice than a spiritual one to me.

There are some buddhist ideas like non-attachment and impermanence, and there is a bit of chanting by the teacher (you don't join in ) but apart from that, it did not feel religious and they emphasise that they are not teaching or converting you into religion - it is a meditation technique open to all.

The purpose of Vipassna is to give you the tools to? purify and calm your own mind. It puts you on a path of peace and happiness. It did for me.

Vipassana is a charity and their wish is for anyone to have benefitted from their course, to share with people they think will benefit from it. You can also donate money at the end of the course, should you wish.

https://www.dhamma.org/en/index