My Vipassana Journey: Discovering Strength in Silence

I went for Vipassana last month in April. As most people I know have no idea of what Vipassana is, let me first give you an overview of what it is, then I’ll share why I did it, and finally, how my experience was & what I learned.

Vipassana is a 10-day residential program. They have 243 centres across the globe and over 115 centres in India (find the one near your residence here ). It is a religion-neutral program where they teach you a meditation practice and a way of life—no words, only action.

This is no place for intellectual discourse, discussions, or proving why what you think is right, etc. It is a place of pure practice. For the 10 days, everyone on the premises maintains noble silence, which means silence of speech. You can’t speak at all or communicate with anyone in any form. You can’t make eye contact with your fellow meditators or even talk to them in gestures or body language. You are not allowed to carry any books to read or a notepad to write your thoughts. No musical instruments are allowed, and all your electronic devices, including phones and earphones, are confiscated and submitted in a locker for 10 days. You can’t communicate with anyone outside the premises, not even your family, in any way. You aren’t allowed to leave the campus, and nobody from outside can come inside. There is no newspaper or any communication with the outside world in any form at all. You are in complete confinement (though voluntary and consensual).

You have to meditate for over 10 hours every day, sitting in the meditative posture with your back straight. And for foodies like me, something worth mentioning is that they don’t serve dinner either. Here’s what my daily timetable looked like for reference.:

So, it is an easy conclusion that it is not a very easy task. Given that I work a salaried job with limited leave days, why did I spend 11 of them on Vipassana when I could have used those days to enjoy a crazy party in Goa or take a long-due trip to Turkey instead?

You must have these and many more questions in your mind. The common questions that people around asked me were: “Oh, so do you hate everything around Meghna? Are you depressed or experiencing depression? Are you running away from something? Have people around you made your life so miserable that you have to go for such extreme isolation for 10 days, and that too in your 20s? Have you given up on life? Do you want to renounce everything and become a monk? Don’t you love your family? You are too young for Vipassana.” Etc., etc.

I’ll address everything one by one.

First things first, I am not depressed, going through a rough time or anything even remotely like that. In fact, it is quite the contrary. This is the happiest and most at peace I have ever been. I am truly happy and grateful for everything. I absolutely love my family and friends, and I engage with life as much as I can, or feel like engaging.

Then Why Vipassana? 

Today, we live in an overstimulated world loaded with unnecessary conveniences and distractions. Let’s define distractions first: what is a distraction? Anything that diverts attention from where it is supposed to be. Where is the attention supposed to be? On your own body, to start with.

We have zero awareness of our own mind and body; we run from one task to another, hardly sitting with ourselves and our thoughts anymore. Because that is hard. Looking in the mirror and reflecting on yourself is hard. It is very difficult to examine your own wounds, operate on them yourself (without anaesthesia), and heal them yourself to become truly healthy.

So what do we do instead? We cover it with a distraction and seal it with a layer of convenience on top, hoping that it doesn’t get worse, or saying we’ll turn to it only when it gets bad enough that it screams for our attention, till then we let it get worse and pretend like it doesn’t exist. 

Sadly, this is the mindset most people have when it comes to mental well-being. From hair oil to human beings, literally, everything and everyone is available on apps and can be delivered to your doorstep in less than 30 minutes. The irony is that we are so deep into distractions that we don’t even realize they exist.

Even though I mostly live in isolation and silence, I am still surrounded by distractions all the time. My distractions look like this: playing music when I am cooking or cleaning or when the silence in the house is just too loud, listening to podcasts, munching on chips, talking on calls with friends, giving instructions to Zomato and Blinkit delivery boys for the nth time, calling the people I love and checking in on them, chanting mantras or singing bhajans in the morning, syncing to every drop in EDM beats at night, imagining what Gulam Ali, John Eliya, or Gulzar sahab must have been thinking or doing when he wrote the song/nazm/sher I am listening to, binge-watching movies and documentaries, endlessly scrolling on Instagram, sending memes to my friends to strengthen our friendship lol, and reacting to the ones they shared to express validation and stay in touch, planning for the next trip, planning for dinner, making to-do lists for the weekend, thinking of the next business plans, stocks to buy, checking the IPO list, doing something as noble as reading a book, listening to my brother’s voice notes that run half an hour on average, and adding cool stuff to the cart across all platforms. I mean, do I need to continue?

Long story short, why did I go?

As an individual, I wanted to challenge myself, test my limits in a safe environment, strengthen my emotional and mental capabilities, become silent enough to be able to look into my head and do a bit of cleaning there, learn the actual meditation practice step by step, and experience living in absolute zero stimulation for 10 days at a stretch.

These days, if someone quits junk food, starts going to the gym, and makes an effort to build and maintain a healthy body, do we look at them in amusement and ask, “Hey, you haven’t even had a heart attack yet? Why are you doing these things? What is the need? Don’t you think this is too much?”

We don’t.

Then why is a small effort by someone to proactively strengthen their mental and emotional resilience so difficult for us to digest? How is this too much then?

I have come to a realization through observation that there are two types of mindsets in people in the world.

1. 1. First: “There are no evident problems in my life, so I’ll just have a good time with my friends and family, and we’ll see if and when a problem arises. I won’t prepare for future problems today.”

1. 1. Second: “There are no evident problems in my life, but I am well-prepared for anything that may come my way. Now, I’ll enjoy my time with friends and family with a free mind.”

The problem I find with the first approach is that you don’t know when the problem might come. It might come today, tomorrow, or 10 years down the line; you don’t know. And the bigger problem is you don’t know if you have enough strength to handle the problem when it comes because you never tested yourself. For example, in my family, an uncle lost both his parents within a month, and then he collapsed emotionally and slipped into severe depression, consequently, the entire family crumbled and suffered. 

Another example to explain this is: Can you truly enjoy your vacation if you know there isn’t enough money in your bank account? Or worse, you don’t know how much money you have in your bank account. I don’t think so. Even if you do, it will be superficial enjoyment.

I subscribe to the latter mindset. It is the same mindset as going to the gym or working out every day to build a healthy body, not because you are waiting for a heart attack or something, but because it makes you better prepared. You are healthier, you minimize the possibility of illness, and even if it comes, you have a healthy and strong body to deal with it.

It is the same mindset that if I know I have enough money in my bank account, I will fully, deeply, and truly enjoy my vacation with a free mind. So it increases your engagement with life, not minimizes it.

Enough of reasoning, let’s talk about my experience.

So, I went to the Dhamma Sota Center, and as with all the centres, there was complete segregation of men and women. In the women’s residential area, there were 5 compounds, each with 12 cells. You are allotted a cell on day 0, and your room number becomes your identity thereafter. You will sit on the same seat in the meditation hall every day with your number on it, and you will eat at the same spot every day, in front of your number on the slab. I was F-04, Here are a few pictures that I took on the 11th day when I got my phone back:

You are given one cell. As I had nothing to measure, I counted it with my steps, so it was 11 steps by 5 steps (steps as in toe touches the heel of the next step). There is one fan, one single bed, and one slab in your room with a tiny personal bathroom that you have to clean every day.

Out of the 12 cells, meditators live in 11 cells, and sevika (sevaks in the male ward) stay in the 12th cell. This extends to all the compounds; sevikas live in multiples of 12 cell numbers. Their job is to wake you up in the morning with a bell and make sure that you report to the meditation hall every time, on time, and are not hiding in your room, sleeping, or resting.

The 10-day journey starts with physical challenges. Once you overcome them, you face emotional challenges. On the 6th day, they allow you to meditate in the pagoda, where I had a very strong intuitive-spiritual experience (not sharing because it’s too personal), probably the strongest of my life. I had that experience, maybe because by then, after 60 hours of active meditation and 6 days of absolute silence, my intuition had become supernaturally strong. I still don’t know how; I don’t have any logical reasoning for it, to be honest. Then, by the end of the program, you get pretty advanced in meditation and experience a sense of peace like never before.

So, what did I learn?

• • I discovered the power of fixing my circadian clock by getting up at 4 am every day. I met fellow meditators who were in their 60s but looked like they were in their early 20s, not kidding.

• • I physically experienced how the spices in our food run through our bodies.

• • I learned how to make decisions that are truly correct and in what direction to align my life choices and behaviour by attending daily evening lectures.

• • I can feel that my intuition has become significantly stronger.

• • I have learned, and I am still learning, a pretty straightforward and effective meditation practice that I can turn to any time to enhance equanimity.

• • A deeper sense of gratitude towards life has led me to want to engage with it even more—in fact, as much as I can. This is a total contradiction of what I thought would happen. I was scared it might push me into isolation (which I have a very strong natural affiliation towards), but it instead made me realize that going into isolation and not maximizing my involvement with the world does no one any good. We should actively engage with the world and try to make it a better place.

• • I realized that just because I love (in general) someone doesn’t mean that person feels loved by me. Loving someone in my head isn’t enough; I must express and make sure that they feel loved by me. We don’t have much time.

• • I truly realized (with a mental breakdown) that we as humans are very ephemeral, so now I actively engage with those who love me. We often ignore them, taking their love for granted, while focusing on those who don’t, leading to misery.

• • I have developed a deeper sense of love and compassion for those who make an effort to reach out and stay connected with me (often taken for granted), because once they stop or aren’t there anymore, we realize their value. Unfortunately, this realization often comes too late in life for people.

• • The gratitude for someone’s presence and the ability to communicate with them is so powerful that petty quarrels seem even more insignificant.

They might look like regular statements, but they aren’t. They aren’t just words on a screen; these statements have been etched in my heart.

So, do I recommend Vipassana to you?

A thousand percent.

Silence and solitude purify the mind like fire purifies gold, and learning Vipassana is like having a very powerful arrow in your quiver. It increases your strength, gives you more clarity to engage with life, and maximizes your involvement with life in the right way.

So, if you have any doubts regarding Vipassana, you may reach out to me on WhatsApp if you have my number. If you don’t, then drop me an email at meghnadhariwal06@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. But I strongly recommend that you give it a try. You have absolutely nothing to lose (it’s a free program) and almost everything to gain.

And everything above zero is profit.

So, go and give Vipassana a try.

Best,

F-04