# FWIW: What I noticed at a (Goenka) Vipassana retreat

> **tl;dr:** I went to a typical 10-day Vipassana Center retreat. I had some hopes going in for what I might get out of it and those were mostly fulfilled. I had some worries that it might be creepy, icky, cringe, or in some other way awful, and for the most part it wasn’t. I’m glad I went, but on the other hand am in no great hurry to return.

There are Vipassana Centers all over the world that teach a standardized meditation regimen designed by [S.N. Goenka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._N._Goenka). Their retreats are offered on a pay-what-you-want basis, and so are an economical way for people to explore what an intense meditation retreat is like. This post is just me giving my impressions as a first-timer.

I had felt a bit like I was spinning my karmic wheels too much in my meditation practice at home and wanted to get some more formal instruction, sustained practice, and feedback from knowledgeable instructors. I hoped I could develop better skills in practicing and some clear signs of a path with some forward progress. I also was enticed by the typical translation of [*vipassana*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samatha-vipassan%C4%81) as “insight.” I like insight, and hoped maybe I could get a slice of that.

Vipassana Center wasn’t my first choice. I didn’t know much about their approach, and hadn’t learned any reasons to expect they were especially good at knowing what they were talking about or were a good choice for addressing my particular situation. But I was pretty sure I wanted a sustained, in-depth, expert-led meditation retreat, and I wasn’t having much luck finding one elsewhere that I felt confident about at a price that made it seem like a good gamble. Vipassana Center was the best I could find so I decided to roll the dice.

What happened
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The course is ten full days plus stubs the night before and morning after. There was a mix of new students (probably ⅔s of us) and old-timers coming for a repeat course. There were something like 80 students. Men and women are segregated from each other. Except for the stubs and the last day of the course, everyone maintains “noble silence” which means no talking, but also no non-verbal communication. You’re not even supposed to make eye-contact with other students. You are meant to cultivate a feeling of being in meditative seclusion, though as a practical matter you are often meditating cheek-to-jowl with others. Once a day or so you can schedule some time to sit down with an instructor and briefly discuss questions about your practice, but otherwise students keep their traps shut.

It is very standardized. The schedule is more or less identical, I gather, from center to center (there are Vipassana Centers all over the world), and the course is almost entirely given by means of a series of recorded lectures from the founder (no longer living), S.N. Goenka. He also did a lot of chanting at us in Pali or something. (That was one of my least favorite parts of the course. It was never explained why we were getting chanted at so much, we rarely learned much about what was being chanted at us in a way non-Pali-speakers could understand, and Goenka’s chanting voice is a bit like the deathbed moans of Sesame Street’s The Count as voiced by William S. Burroughs.)

The morning wake-up gong rings at 4am, you go to the meditation hall for two hours of meditation, break for breakfast, do another three hours of meditation, break for lunch and an hour or so of rest or path-walking, do another few hours of meditation, break for tea and a bite of fruit, then do a couple more hours of meditation with an hour or so of “dharma talk” sandwiched in-between, then turn in for bed around 9:30. Sometimes the late morning or early afternoon meditation sessions also had a brief lecture in them explaining a new technique, trying to dispel a misconception, or teaching some point of Buddhist doctrine. For some of the sessions it was mandatory to be in the meditation hall, for others you could meditate in your room instead. (I had a small private room; others I think were in a shared dorm of some sort.)

There’s no dinner, but on the other hand I never was much hungry at dinner time, which still seems odd to me. *Ask Me How I Lost Nine Pounds in Ten Days by Sitting Around Doing Nothing.*

Each day you have a very specific meditation practice you are supposed to be doing continuously throughout your sit. This starts with pretty standard [*ānāpānasati*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapanasati) (mindfulness of breathing at the nostrils) on day #1. This becomes slightly more specific *ānāpānasati* on day #2, and shifts to mindfulness of sensations of all sort on the area between your upper lip and your nose on day #3. All this time you’re doing like ten hours a day of this stuff. And while you’re trying to be mindful of your nostrils or whatever, you’re becoming increasingly mindful of the pain in your knee, the spasms in your back, and various other physical maladies associated with trying to maintain an erect seated posture for that long (I even got side stitches and nosebleeds; it’s weirdly hard on the body). We’re all pretty miserable. All the new students are accumulating piles of cushions, bolsters, benches, beanbags, etc. around their zabutons, and squirming around trying to find less-uncomfortable postures. On day #3 I retreated to one of the chairs lining the wall as I couldn’t hack it on the floor any longer.

I asked the site manager for an Advil at one point and he said “sure: let me get you an appointment with the assistant teacher to talk about that.” (They’d asked us to surrender our medications along with our phones for safekeeping when we checked in, saying at the time, in an offhand way, “just ask the site manager if you need an aspirin or something.”) At my meeting, I complained about the pain, and was told basically “yes, of course you’re in pain. Everyone is at this point. It’s just part of the process. The practices you’re doing to become more aware of your bodily sensations are lowering your pain threshold. You would be better off not taking any medicine for the pain, as that will just undo the work you’ve been doing and make it harder to get past this into the next thing.” So yeah, no pain relievers either.

On day #4 we switched from *ānāpānasati* to *vipassana*, which takes the form of body scans. You start at the crown of your head, register all of the physical feelings going on there (using the sensitivity you’ve learned from your relentless attention to your upper lip), and then move on through the rest of your body to the tips of your toes. Most of the rest of the course consists of refining this body scan technique. During all of this you are meant to maintain an attitude of vigilant attention to physical sensations of all sorts, as well as complete and perfect equanimity about those sensations (not attraction to pleasant sensations, aversion to painful ones, or annoyance/boredom towards ho-hum ones). I remember when we got to *vipassana* meditation thinking “body scans? that’s the big reveal?” and being a little disappointed it wasn’t something at least a little bit more exotic.

But one exciting effect of this was that the pain and discomfort began to subside. All of that equanimous scanning seemed to be having the effect of turning the pain and discomfort into just-another-sensation in the field of play. And on day #8 I got some brief experiences of what I was told was [*bhanga ñana*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1%B9%87a), a curious altered state of consciousness. More on that below.

The last day Goenka introduced [*mettā*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB) meditation, but in a comparatively superficial and rote way. I had the impression he thought it was a traditionally necessary ingredient in the recipe but that he was using it more as a soft landing from all of the hard *vipassana* work than as anything he thought was particularly important on its own.

*Bhanga ñana*: theory and pet theory
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Experientially, *bhanga ñana* goes something like this: I would do my body scans and a sort of ring of buzzing sensation would follow my attention through the body as I was reading any gross (itch, pain, ankle pressing into the floor) and subtle (pulses of blood moving through my skin, waves of oxygen replenishing my body as I breathe, ongoing white-noise buzz of my peripheral nervous system) sensations happening along the way. But every once in a while I could sort of ride this wave and get inside of it instead of viewing it from the perspective of an outside observer. And then if the stars were all in alignment or something, the body scan would become autonomous: instead of me *doing* it, it would just be *happening*, and instead of just being a ring of sensation going from crown to toes, it would be more like being immersed in a pool and having waves of sensations slosh over me from various directions.

It was pretty cool, and certainly the most trippy thing that has happened to me during meditation. But, that said, I’ve had wilder experiences on unextraordinary doses of cannabis edibles, so it wasn’t all that. (As an aside, I’m amused that *bhanga* means both “dissolution” as in the doctrinal “arising and passing away” experience this is supposed to illuminate, and “marijuana” as in “the first thing I thought about comparing it to when I emerged from *bhanga ñana*.”)

Goenka seems to be of the opinion that what’s going on here is something like this: All your life (and past lives for that matter), whenever you’ve come into contact with anything, you’ve been reacting to the bodily sensations that result by creating perceptions (what is going on), then judgements (is it good or bad, do I like it or not), then feelings and actions of clinging (to the pleasant) or aversion (to the painful). This knee-jerk cascade of reactions has become integral to your self-image, and this makes you miserable because you are always defining yourself in opposition to reality (this is bad and I can’t prevent it, or this is good but I can’t keep it). When you meditate in this way and keep yourself relentlessly at the sensation level without allowing this cascade to proceed from sensation⇒perception⇒feelings⇒reactions you can erode those habits, both at the conscious and unconscious level, and thereby live less reactively and more deliberately, while also becoming reintegrated into your reality rather than fighting it all the time and never being able to reach satisfaction. When you can stop digging [*saṅkhāras*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%85kh%C4%81ra) reactively every time you feel sensations, you can reverse course and get yourself back to nirvana where you belong. The more time you spend in this *vipassana* state, the more time you’re eroding your *saṅkhāras* (it’s also a good idea to extend this to the rest of your life off the cushion as well by indulging your reactive clinging/aversion habits less through consistent practice of Buddhist virtues).

My own pet theory is that when you do body scans—restricting your focus to only your sensory perceptions and sweeping your attention back and forth across your body at a variety of rhythms—you can eventually stumble upon something like the resonant frequency of your sensory [cortical homunculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus), at which point you have something like a benign brain seizure in which this sensory data feeds back upon itself in waves of weird feeling. I raised an eyebrow when I learned that Goenka himself came to *vipassana* only after having unsuccessfully traveled the world trying to find a doctor who could cure his migraines.

Goenka and the assistants took pains to emphasize that *bhanga ñana* is not important in and of itself but is just a sort of milestone in your practice. In particular it’s a bad idea to get hung up on pursuing it, as a) that won’t work, and b) it’s a counterproductive sort of craving that causes backsliding. But, that said, I did get the impression that it was something like the boss room of the 10-day beginner course, and I was happy I got to do a little victory dance there a couple of times.

Theory and practice
-------------------

Goenka takes pains to make clear that his Vipassana is nonsectarian and nonreligious. I didn’t see a Buddha, a dharma-wheel, or any sort of Buddhist iconography anywhere on-site, except on some book covers at the literature table on the last day. Goenka himself is assertively layperson: no robes, no shaved head, no fancy titles. He says over and over again that Vipassana is not something to be believed, or a set of rituals to be practiced to appease the gods, or a method of petitioning some Buddha, but that it is a practice that you do yourself so that you can see the truth with your own eyes and unravel your own knots. Anything less than you actually doing the work is not the dharma.

That’s all very attractive to a skeptical fellow like myself. But I think Goenka is not aware of just how much his religious theories are shaping his experiences and his assumptions about our experiences. “So now you can see for yourself the impermanence of and the endless rising and passing away of all sensations!” Well, yes, but you’re also importing a lot of other stuff into your definitions of those words and how you are applying them, and those things are not all things I can see for myself. And all that Pali chanting that’s of no good to anyone but your dead recorded self betrays that you’re still a big believer in magic spells. At the end of the course, there’s a lot of Q.E.D. that to me still seemed like things you had to accept on faith, not on experience.

Which leads me to...

The part that’s a little creepy
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Goenka seemed to me entirely philanthropic and benevolent and someone who has done something remarkable by setting up something like a Starbucks franchise system for churning out effective meditative training. I didn’t see anything of a deliberately sinister nature when I was there (except for that somewhat shifty way they took away our pain meds without being upfront about the hoops we’d have to go through to get them back).

And yet. We could not communicate with anyone but the teachers, we were put into extended situations of pain and sensory deprivation and strange states of consciousness, they determined our schedules and where we could go and what we could do. To try to understand what was happening to us, we would listen desperately to the words of the teacher who would tell us he had the ultimate solution to confusion and suffering and wanted so badly to give it to us if we would but hear him and follow his instructions to the letter. On one hand, at every individual step, these things made sense and (I have to admit) they worked, in that they pushed us over some difficult hurdles and actually got us to accomplish what seems to me like it was some useful stuff. But on the other hand, ingredients like these are what the Stockholm Syndrome is made of, and I saw that taking hold in myself and those around me.

(For example, Goenka would from time to time tell jokes in his monologues. They weren’t very good jokes, the delivery wasn’t amazing, and you could oftentimes see the punchline coming from far away, but still a lot of people laughed out-loud and in a genuine way, and I couldn’t help but feel that they were uncritically trying to please the—dead, videotaped—master.)

But in conclusion
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I wanted to get some formal instruction, sustained practice, and feedback from knowledgeable instructors. I hoped to develop better skills in practicing and some clear signs of a path with some forward progress. I also hoped for some undeniable insights into intriguing but slippery revolutionary philosophical bedrocks like [*anicca*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence_(Buddhism)), [*anattā*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81), etc.

I think I got all but the last one. I had some helpful insights, but they were mostly things that resolved confusions about my meditation practice rather than big-picture things.

I’m absolutely glad I went. Yet I’m in no hurry to sit through more of S.N. Goenka’s chanting.