Life is extremely fucking hard.

You start off with unresolved trauma from childhood. Then you’re thrown into college/adulthood, the only hint you’re given is to make money, and have a successful career, because apparently thats all that matters. And then the mid-life crisis hits, because your heart knows you’ve been living by the wishes of others, and ignoring who you are.

I’m at the stage where externally, it looks I’ve made all the “right” decisions in life: successful, well traveled, social life, all that. But yet, I’m not exactly “happy”. I feel a constant angst of needing to do more, as if I’m not enough. If one event doesn’t go as planned, my brain feels like its World War 3 and goes into panic mode. To compensate, it continues to make these grandiose plans 5 years into the future, which inevtiably crumbles as life can’t be controlled.

We can’t have answers handed to us about how to live a “contentful” life. Living is by definition having to make decisions even as events happen outside of our control.

But, we never know if the decisions we made are right, until we’re on the hosptial bed about to flatline. Either we’re content with a life well live and can manage a smile and accept imminent death, or we’re completely drowned in a sea of regret begging for a do-over.

How do we stay afloat in this sea of chaos of life?

WTF is this 10 days of no talking challenge

If they’re lucky, most people in life end up tasting a bit of the mystical. Maybe its pyshedlics shrooms or the acid they tried in college. Maybe they give guided medtation a try, or stick to religious practices. But the underlying truth is, all of these methods rely on an external source of inspiration, which is inherently unsustainable.

I have been down all these paths. Tried the drugs, but started to rely on them to grow instead of me being able to find realizations by myself. I tried guided meditation, but it felt like mental masturabation listening to a grown man talking into my ears for 15 minutes. And the religious practices, although wholesome with the family, I am so disconnected from the ancient significance, it won’t be able to help me with what I’m looking for, unless I teleport back a thousand years.

Enter Vipassana. I first heard about this on Twitter, this ancient Buddhist medtitative technique. when Jack Dorsey talked about how this meditative technique helped ground him in his busy life. At first, I thought it was another guided meditation app on steroids, and that he and his crazy beard seriously lost it. Buddhism also isn’t extremely promoted in Hindu culture, and is relagated as some weird fad a couple centuries ago. I had no reason to pay it any attention.

But, my mind kept going back to the challenge. 10 days, 10+ hours a day of meditation, no tech, no talking, no eye contact, no reading or journaling, and minimal light vegetarian food. Could I handle it? I’ve survived extreme challenges before. I’ve fasted for 5 days straight, I’ve locked myself in remote woodland cabins for weeks without internet. Those were easy, because in hindsight, I still had so much to distract myself from my mind. But this Vipassana? The first time I would have to see how ugly my brain could be.

The actual Vipassana experience

I found myself in India for a couple months, and knew it would be the perfect time to do a Vipassana, seeing as I have all the free time in the world during my sabattical.

They had to come to New Delhi for the Vipassana, which isn’t the most spiritual city, notwithstanding the 6am Diwali explosions.

However, the monsastary turned out to be a beautiful hidden enclave. Tucked away in layers of gates, you could tell how lovingly they took care and curated the flowers, the gardens, the trees. They had peacocks and monkeys romping around, honeybees and hummingbirds buzzing away in the mornings. After all the emphasis we placed on mentally understanding our place in the world, seeing the ant colonies upclose, on how they were carrying out the hidden work of decomposing dead bugs and allowing the cycle of life to continue, was a real life example of what we were supposed to learn. They nature was not only for show, and even though this sounds all cliche, it was a reminder that you’re supposed to reach some kind of harmony with the world around us.

After anticipating this experience for weeks, it was surreal how fast we were knocked into the routine. We were each assigned small living quarters, literally a 6 by 10 foot room with the most minimalist bed that squealed every turn, and the classic indian bucket bathroom. I unfortunetly forgot my towel, so queue 10 days of air drying myself.

Everyday, the blaring gong woke us up at 4:30 to head to the center to start meditating, and the gong at 9pm to go to our quarters, and do it all over again. We had one lecture period from 7pm-8:15pm, and “official” breaks from 6:30 to 8, 11:30-1, and 5-6 to eat food, although people (myself included) had to take multiple breaks to stretch their legs, and to reckon with the fact of how distracted our brains were.

Towards the end, I started getting extremely hardcore about the practice. I became a little “competitive” (which was obviously against the point of the whole dang thing), waking up at 4, eating only one small morsel of food per meal, and taking less and less breaks. You can see how skinny my face became towards the end. I probably lost like 3 or 4 pounds and with an overgrown beard, I achieve the stereotypical monk look.

The Physical Technique

We talked a lot about the practice, but not exactly what the practice is. Turns out, its pretty simple, but ever heard of “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master”?

The goal is to increase your awareness of your body. You spend the first 3 days of the experience focusing only on the tip of your nose. This “anapana” gets you used to getting out of your thoughts, and into the physical sensations of the body. You constantly keep track of if your nose is tingly, or humid, or itchy, or dry, and you ultimately notice that if you notice these senstations for long enough, the senstations go away.

You carry this lesson onto the next seven days. You start flowing your attention from the crown of your head, down to the tips of your toes, and back up. You scan every inch of your body, taking careful consideration of tingling feelings anywhere on your body. This is a completely new action most people have never done, and its natural to not be able to scan every inch. Sometimes you can’t focus enough, and can only pay general attention to your entire hand, which we call “gross sensations”. But, this lack of concentration is good, because these “gross sensation” areas reflect parts of your brain that are suffering from the gravity of bad thought loops.

You know how when you get a massage when you’re stressed, and the massuese notices you have a lot of knots in your traps? Then when they keep massaging the traps, eventually, even your stress clears away? The Vipassana process is infact extremely similar. Though the powers of the mental, you’re able to develop your mind muscle connection, and overcome the stresses yourself.

The Mental Philosophy

Definitions

Before we get into the philosophical take aways, keep in mind the following concept.

Our brain takes in 5 inputs: taste, touch, sight, smells, and sounds. These are converted into thoughts, which the body decides how to react for its next course of action. This reaction time is a miracle. The mistake however, is when the brain overreacts, thinking any of these inputs, and ergo the thoughts, will last forever.

This is the core philosophy of Vipassana, that the sixth sense bodies of your actual body, like taste, touch, sight, smell, sound, as well as thoughts. Vipassana treats the mind, like the conscious mind as like an input and its output as just thoughts and thoughts are just sensations.

Real world examples

Consider flowers. We admire flowers for their beauty, but don’t become attached to a singular flower since we know it will eventually wither away. A more poignant example is food. Even though its impossible for a singular food to last us forever, the food generates plesant thoughts in our head. And, fearing that we might never be able to generate that pleasant thought by eating that specific food again, we start over craving the food, leading to food addictions.

The inverse is, when we get an unideal input, like getting hurt. The meditation session was full of pain ofc. Sitting for hours at a time, its hard to describe how weak your knees become, the ligaments feel like they’re made out of cotton candy, and you start itching to move every couple seconds to quench the thirst of freedom for your legs.

But if you force yourself to sit through the pain, its a miracle but eventually the pain goes away. In my case on the third day, my legs felt like they were going through that Wolverine scene where the adamantium is inserted into Logan’s bones. But, my willpower won out, and when my brain realized there would be no moving, I gave in. The bliss that washed over me was indescribable.

Again, similar to the craving, people throughout life develop so many aversions to life, our of understandable fear. But they make the mistake of thinking the fearing inducing inputs will last forever, and react out of proportion. You should not be attached to, let’s say, a thought of anger or a thought of lust.

Takeaways

Vipassana ends up teaching you this idea of the imperance of sensations, what they call “Anicca”.

First, cravings=aversions, since aversion itself is a craving for the absense of something. There’s no such thing as good or bad now, it just is.

Cravings are rooted in fantasy. Acting on a craving is rejecting reality, since you are pretending it is never possible to experience a sensation again. (one can argue it is impossible to eat smth at a certain time again, not sure about this logic here). It is a rejection of Anicca

A craving is an addiction out of your control. If you constantly satisfy cravings on impulse, you get the high, but after it fades, you chase it again. You chain your mental wellbeing to an emotion, which we know is temporary, and thus the wellbeing itself is temporary.

All these are reflected in your body and when you keep paying attention to the sensation, you notice that over time, sensation dulls and goes away, and it makes no sense at all to get overlly reactive to any emotion, since eventually the emotion, the sensation will pass.

The fact that these sensations will keep rearing their heads inevitable, you can’t control it. But, if you pay close enough attention to the sensation, without losing yourself in it, without developing these cravings and aversions, the reaction loses control over you.

You do this by maintaining alertness, and remaining equinanimous. Every time a craving arises, you have to be extremely aware that you are experiencing a sensation that would normally make you react. Once you experience it, you have to be equinanimous: you have to be forgiving and accepting that your brain works like this, not get dragged away by its emotional delusions

One final author’s note. Ironically, it is even possible to start craving this “detachment”, which becomes the worst of all the hurdles. Imagine you crave the meditation, how can you make any progress in a state of desire?

My Vipassana Experience

Spoiler alert, I’m not some kind of Buddha. Even after this intense experience, I’m not any different. I’m still the same temperamental, emotional Harsha, who still gets mad, or goes on delusional thought loops.

Most people find out about Vipassana, or enter any sort of spiritual path, after some deep loss or trauma.

Atleast thats my story. A couple months ago, I was suffering from intense anxiety, the usual breakup relationship stuff as you can imagine. I still remember the hand tremors I faced, the grey mental cloud I was operating from. In general, I was (and still sort of am) lost about the next steps in my career, life, what the purpose of anything was at all. Its a luxury to have even gotten to the point where I had the time and resources to be pondering these questions, since I was introduced to the habits needed to overcome it all.

Infact, I now see how much further I am than I ever thought I was. But, for the first time, I am starting to make out what I’m even aiming for. Even though I still go through the same mental loops and bad habits, I am atleast the tinest bit more aware of what exactly i’m doing. Even during the meditation, I fell into the usual habit of competition. This other guy used to eat as little as me, get even earlier to the meditation spot than I was. At a certain point, I was getting distracted by looking as if I was doing my best, versus not being hypocritical and seriously acting out of my own volition.

I grew up with hindu philosophy, and anything buddhist felt looney. We thought that we could follow our rituals, and we would achieve all the blessings and enlightenment we could ever want. But I always gravitated towards the philosophical side of Hinduism. I liked the ethical questions raised in the Mahabharata, the questions of duty raised in the Ramayana, the methodical guide to daily life in the Bhagvad Gita. But to be honest, these texts seemed like the end result. How was I supposed to ever get the same level of understanding as people who lived thousands of years ago, where as I am in the world of tiktok brainrot.

Vipassana is essentially applied Bhagvad gita. Its the physical manifestation of doing the work, without being attached to the fruits of the labor.

Finally, its surprising how fast discipline can wane. During the experience, I was able to crank out sitting for hours at a time, for days on end. But now, I’m struggling to maintain even 10% of the same depth, for even a single hour a day. But, I’ve still been atleast sitting for twice a day, and I’m proud of atleast being able to build the medtiation habit.

Overall

Achieving mental mastery is the most important task we can spend out lives doing. Everything else—social fulfillment, material success, legacy—is all downstream and is a result of how well you can emotionally self-regulate.

For day to day living, being able to not be trigged by small inconveniences would completely change the course of happiness for a day wouldn’t it? Which in turn would change your weeks, months, years, etc.

For business, being able to act out of selflessness and not greed, would infact result in more success than you can ever imagine.

If you’re able to figure this out, the end state is you do everything for purely sense of love.

This selflessness will pervade every single action you take. I can sense that if I get out of my own head and embody these values, I’ll become better holistically. I’ll be becoming better at decision making and everything. But again, getting to that level of awareness is a lifetime of work.

Overall, people, the onset sounds insane like oh 10 days of no talking, just meditation, but it flew by faster than I would ever know. I was looking forward to the Vipassana for months.

It came, it was hard, and it happened in less than a blink of an eye.

And I’m already planning for my next one, so I’m glad I found out about this and hopefully I continue this for the rest of my life.

other stuff

There’s no magic man in the sky who will hand you the answers. Your family and friends, even though they mean the best, don’t know whats going on in your heart.

There’s no one I can ask for help for what to do in life. I have inherently learned that anyone else’s advice is from the life they’ve lived, not mine. But if I’m still lost, the answers lie within, as the ancients say.