My Vipassana Experience

My Vipassana Experience: I feel compelled to pen my thoughts of my recent experience of completing 10 days of Vipassana residential Course in the larger interest of all.

After lazily thinking about it for years, I finally decided & survived through my10 days of Noble Silence i.e. no mobile, No Internet, No Entertainment, No Communication, No eye/ physical contact, No reading, No music, No writing, No devices, No running/ exercises, No intoxicants and No to just everything that you do in your day to day life besides you wake up @ 4AM followed by 10+ hours meditation every single day…….…..continue this for the next 10 days…. This is unusual & demands an immediate bodily adjustment…….Yes this is Vipassana! I am sure many of you would have heard about it and some of you would have undergone this as well.

One of the course precepts is to maintain “Noble Silence” at all times i.e. silence of the body & speech during the entire duration of the course and this is how Vipassana Meditation technique is being taught worldwide across centres built, maintained, and run by an organization founded by the Late Shri S.N. Goenka and I am being blessed to have taken out time to experience the same, could not have started 2020 better than this. This is truly a scientific & practical way to examine the reality of one’s own body and mind, to uncover and solve whatever problem lie hidden there, to develop unused potential, and to channel it for one’s own good and the good of others. The technique is extraordinary in nature in its simplicity, it lacks all the dogma, and above all in the results it offers.

The experience of ten days is likely to give a number of surprises and the first one is that Meditation is a real hard work and the popular idea that it is a kind of inactivity or relaxation is soon found to be misconception. One feels exhausted by the pain, the sleepless nights, and a mind slowly unspooling. Pretty soon, everything about the course may seems to be unworkable & unacceptable including the technique itself but all goes well as one progresses. Vipassana is a serious matter as it deals with the depth of your mind and in the tranquillity of these 10 days; you will see how much your mind distorts the reality you perceive.

Life isn’t a bed of roses, it never was, and it’s not meant to be, it’s a rollercoaster, with ups and downs and Vipassana Meditation techniques here gives you an understanding of impermanence and suffering and the fact that there is no “self” apart from a constant braiding of mental and physical processes.

Needless to say, mindfulness is the #1 skill anyone can learn in life, unfortunately, it’s been acutely ignored by all of us. It’s a life time experience which everyone should try at least once.

If you wish to register, check out this website, plan well in advance as most of the centres are having a waiting period.

https://www.dhamma.org/