I completed a 10 Day Vipassana Silent Meditation Retreat (my experience, learnings, is it worth it?)

Transcript

three years ago i attended a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat no talking no writing no music a lot of people told me that these retreats are life-changing and for me it really was one of the best things i've ever done for my emotional well-being today i want to talk about what vapashna is and what it's like at one of these retreats the benefits and challenges and finally is it worth it for you to go if you enjoy this video feel free to click like so more people can see this video and if you want more content like this definitely hit alright so what is vipassana as jack dorsey ceo of twitter puts it after his retreat he wrote this proposing is a technique and practice to know thyself understanding the inner nature as a way to understand everything it was rediscovered by gatama the buddha 2500 years ago the rigorous scientific self-experimentation to answer the question how do i stop suffering vipassana means to see things as they really are and in this way we're able to experience real happiness the passion is a technique about self-observation so observing your breath and your sensations and through that you're able to face and really be aware of your emotions going on inside and in turn you can accept those emotions and experience for yourself that they're impermanent that nothing lasts forever and so you can let all those emotions go i really wanted to get more mental clarity around my life direction my career my relationships got off the waitlist so uh i will see you guys in a few days and uh report back hopefully i will have learned a little bit about myself what's the meditation retreat like the goal of the course is to basically teach you how to do vipassana meditation so that you can learn how to manage your emotions and feel happier here i am i'm a pasta meditation retreat uh before i have to uh turn on my phone before the course starts here in north fork it can be uh 10 days of silent meditation i am about to unpack and then it's going to start and then i can't talk anymore and no more phone it's 4 am tomorrow meditate breakfast meditate meditate lunch meditate you're not able to read or write anything and from that point on there was no more talking and normal eye contact so you basically shut off as many outputs as possible so that you can go inwards and really see what's going on inside they have five moral guidelines they basically help you to have a clean conscious so that you can focus 100 on meditating no killing so that's why all the food is vegetarian no lying no stealing no sexual misconduct and no intoxicants the first day i woke up you go into the meditation hall it's 4 30 a.m and it could sit at maybe like 80 to 100 people and then you could go grab your own cushions and then from 6 30 to 8 we could go eat breakfast and then so i walked to the cafeteria and there were volunteers that were preparing all the vegetarian food everything was clean the food was super fresh and actually really really good we meditated from 8 to 11 and then there's a few like short breaks so that you can stretch because your body gets super sore and then from 11 to 12 we would go eat lunch soup salad vegetarian pasta it was like really good stuff i remember putting on sriracha and after a few days of meditating my senses were so heightened and that my sense of taste like it made the sriracha like explode like an out of bomb in my mouth between 12 and 1 there were office hours with the course instructors if you wanted to go in and talk to them for a few minutes or just take a break and a lot of the times after lunch i would just go and walk around the path and it's kind of like these dirt trails and you could go see the flowers you'd be walking on the path and you see other meditators but you wouldn't make eye contact and you just walk past them from one to five we would sit again and then from five to six would be our tea break so there's no dinner um we would just go back to cafeteria grab tea you could go sleep get fruit from six to seven we'd go back and meditate from seven to eight fifteen would be a discourse from the teacher and so essence he's the founder of these centers um there's tapes of him basically teaching the technique and then from 8 15 to 9 we would you guessed it meditate at that point from nine to nine thirty we could ask the instructor a few questions you just go to the front and wait in line and i would highly recommend asking questions um whenever you can afterwards i i went to my room it's like a cabin dorm style so i had a room with two twin beds i fortunately didn't have a roommate but most people do and there's a communal bathroom and everything was really clean i'd take a quick shower and communal showers generally there weren't that many lines everyone's super respectful and then at 9 30 it was lights out so that was kind of your typical day all this stuff was so hard in the first half we learned the technique of anapana which is a way to basically focus your attention with laser-like accuracy by the first day i was like i don't know if i can do this for 10 days by the second day i was like i don't know if i can do this for 10 days by the third day it started to get a little easier but then i was like there's seven days left my body got more and more sore by like the fourth fifth day my back was hurting so much then the second half that we started learning the technique of a pashana by around like day six i was like oh screw it and i just went to just sitting without any support and i just used tons of cushions um and i was just trying to do tons of yoga because my body was like not able to keep up around day 9 i was really starting to learn these lessons of impermanence and i just let it go right i'm back i think the biggest thing i've taken away so far is just through a lot of actual physical pain through the method and then mental through the meditation learning acceptance of just things as they are and uh it's very liberating the main thing i learned was this tool that i can use for the rest of my life to manage my emotions and stress how to be aware of my emotions and to feel them all the way through and then to accept them as they are to experience that they don't last forever and so that i ultimately could let them go and going back to the analogy of your brain as glasses and the dirt being all the subconscious emotions inside of you buried deep inside of you but pashana is a way to use your conscious mind to unearth all these subconscious feelings bring them to the surface see them as they are don't attach anything extra to them realize they go away let them dissolve so that you can see things as they really are i learned about the different levels of wisdom and how important personal experience is the course they talk about three levels of wisdom one getting wisdom from what you read two getting wisdom from talking to experts three experiencing something for yourself and this really helped me because it helped me to decide to don't take the job that's just more prestigious and easy more stable but i'd be bored with not growing and go for the job go experience the job that i've never done before because i want to experience it for myself i i'll never know what it's like until i do it myself another key benefit i'll touch on is yeah all the cool people you meet it turns out when you go meditate for 10 days out of pocket for 10 hours a day the kind of people that like to do that are really introspective and interesting people and so i loved meeting other people on the last day to learn about them their experiences and it opened up my perspective all right let's talk about the challenges one it's physically super painful so just sitting for one hour straight four hours straight 10 hours a day back was killing me my upper back my butt bone was like felt like it was splitting in half my ankles because i was resting my legs felt like they were gonna die my knees were feeling all this pressure sometimes i wondered if i was gonna have permanent damage um but you don't but you don't two the mental challenge is really tough when you're calming your mind a lot of thoughts and emotions do surface people say some people do have breakdowns if they have a lot that they've been holding in a lot of things in their subconscious but yeah so you should just really be ready for whatever's inside of you to really come up and for you to be able to see it and really process it and that can be hard sometimes i felt super sleepy so it turns out when you wake up at 4am every day and meditate for 10 hours a day you start getting really sleepy so that's just really hard i think you just gotta like sleep when you can getting a spot at one of these courses is actually really hard um they open up and they like fly by really quickly and finding 10 days to be out of pockets really hard it took me about two years to have all that line up another challenge is that it could feel a little culti religious pashner is just a meditation technique but it is rooted in buddhist philosophy so when the course instructor is doing things like chanting while you're meditating it does feel a little weird but when i acknowledge yeah it has buddhist philosophy for me i just focused on learning the technique itself it's basically a technique anyone can use to strengthen your mind to get more mental clarity to release yourself from stress and feel happier everyone always asks how much it costs the food the lodging so these retreats are free they're all run by volunteers at the end you can donate whatever amount you want to or not and it's all about paying it forward to the next cohort of retreat goers overall if you're not that interested in this course or it seems like too much work for you or if you have any doubts 100 don't go because again it's you get out what you put in but if you're interested in building a meditation practice you want more mental clarity you want these tools to manage your emotions and your mind better i 100 would recommend that you do of a passionate retreat there's retreat centers all around the globe like california nepal romania et cetera so just go to the website and see if there's one near you if you have any questions about proposition or the retreat drop in the comments i'll try to answer them if i can and i also made these videos to help with your meditation about my experience meditating for 30 days straight and also 10 popular types of meditation so you can choose which one's best for you if you want more videos like this definitely hit i will see you next time [Music] find that heart of gold