🧘♂️ A comprehensive guide to Vipassana as experienced by tech entrepreneur (super practical!)
🧘♂️ A comprehensive guide to Vipassana as experienced by tech entrepreneur (super practical!)
I absolutely loved this experience and want to give back by sharing it. #productivity #lifestyle
If you’re new here: I’m Alexander Nevedovsky, a repeat AI entrepreneur currently running Socap.ai (YC W23). This is my personal blog/newsletter about navigating life as it is — I don’t post often/regularly but if I do, usually it’s about something interesting/important. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe as I’m nearing the 500 subscribers milestone.
A few days ago I came out of my 1st Vipassana course. I felt (and still feel) very light, calm, and empowered. There are a lot of wonderful things about this movement and in the spirit of serving (sharing love & compassion with y’all — more on that later), I want to share my experience — the good and the bad, the things I loved, and the things I wished were different.
But before we cut deep, a lot of you might be wondering — what the hell is this Vipassana even about?
Some people have never heard about this word, some have practiced it or are practicing it regularly, and some have heard but probably have a skewed perspective (slow down for a sec and ask yourself this question — remember your thoughts and compare them to what you’re about to read below — would be amusing to see what you’ve got).
I’m going to spare you with the generics — and instead try to answer using my own accumulated perspective/experience plus provide a few links you can study further.
First, about 2500 years ago (as I understood scholars fight over the exact years he was actively doing stuff) a pal that would later be called “The Buddha” or Siddhartha Gautama was born. At 35, he proclaimed himself “the liberated and the enlightened” thus becoming the Buddha (which is not a name but the translation of these terms as there were multiple Buddhas in history). Gautama was the founder of Buddhism (which originated from Ancient India’s Vedic traditions alongside Hinduism which was and is technically a competing religion in these parts of the world). Buddhism itself is a religion and to be honest, my knowledge of it is quite limited and by no means do I want to waste your time pondering over that (would appreciate interesting sources to learn more about it though — this whole experience sparked my curiosity about it like nothing before — and I’ve been to the Buddhist cultures like Sri Lanka).
Second, it appears that Buddha originated the so-called Dhamma movement (some call it a science, but I prefer a movement/set of techniques) which is, in simple words, “seeing the world as it is by observing it and liberating oneself from all miseries). Dhamma (of Buddhism/Vipassana-related — because as I understood Hinduism coins its own meaning of this word) technically consists of 3 parts (visualized like a pyramid):
Third, Vipassana is actually nothing more than a meditation technique — crucial to this whole path/movement and the 2nd/3rd parts mentioned above.
Fourth, Buddha practiced Dhamma/Vipassana for over 40 years after he became the Buddha and has apparently turned it into a super massive movement in Northern India. He has served people day and night by teaching them how to “walk on that path”. When he died, this original set of practices was slowly lost/diluted/polluted and went out of the mainstream. Luckily, when it was still up and running (and pure) missionaries were sent all over the world. Some, who got to the neighboring region that is currently Myanmar (prev Burma) have somehow managed to keep the original stuff safe and passing from generation to generation until at around the beginning of the 20th century some folks (mainly Sayagyi U Ba Khin) have started popularizing it within the country of Burma.
Fifth, enter the most popular movement guy of our times, S.N. Goenka — born into a wealthy family, and businessman until his 30s, he learned the technique (he claims that he wanted to get rid of migraine and accidentally stumbled upon it) from Sayagyi, was practicing with him for 10+ years and then in the 70s began his own teaching (based off the same original principles that The Buddha has created), starting in India.
Sixth, since then (I’m assuming largely because of Goenka) this movement (called Vipassana meditation courses) has penetrated millions of people worldwide and continues to be alive, well, and growing. The most interesting part — it’s all a non-profit (a collection of non-profits in each country) and is run/managed by volunteers. Here are some more numbers/facts:
~400 locations around the world with ~250 permanent centers
100k+ ppl (might be more) attend these courses every year
Goenka trained ~1350 assistant teachers who actually currently run these courses with his videotapes/instructions etc (these teachers are like bosses at courses — although for just the duration of the course)
Goenka’s vipassana movement is not the only movement, of course — but is by far the most popular. Based on some of the research I did, Goenka’s movement is largely about sitting Vipassana (more on that later) while some others have a wider variety of practices.
Well, there you go with the stuff I felt should give you the picture if you’re new to this/were unsure, or if you’re even more knowledgeable than me in this — perhaps a recap and an opportunity to correct me if misunderstood something/made a mistake.
Why did I decide to attend my first Vipassana course?
Naturally, I’m a very curious person and love all things exploring myself.
I’ve been into meditation and other awareness-related practices for over 7 years now and tried some things, most notably the Shaolin/breath-focused meditation techniques and a variety of focus meditations (with both closed/open eyes, but mostly sitting). I noticed that over the last few years, I haven’t really actively practiced — and instead relied on “trying to be aware in the daily life moments” which is cool but hard to control/observe as a pattern and you tend to naturally forget about it during the periods of high stress and when life stuff happens.
On the other hand, I recently went through a period of high stress/low energy level and felt like a recharge like the Vipassana course offers would certainly be of benefit. I wrote about it and how I dealt with that at length in this article:
It’s fair to say that I’m always on the hunt for techniques/practices that allow you to be:
Calmer and more relaxed as unconscious tension in the body brings nothing but bad things
More aware in the moment and quicker to realize negative reactions to what happens
More focused (or rather better focused) — which is tightly connected to the previous point
With all that in mind, I was really to invest that time into myself, after thinking about it for over a year following the conversations with 3-4 of my friends who have attended these courses in the past and they have really changed them (in their opinion — for the better).
How to register for the course?
Quite easy but one needs to be very quick in applying a few minutes after a specific course opens admissions and they close in literally minutes (shows how big the demand is)!
Go here and see which locations are closest to you: https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/locations/directory
I went to the main Polish location called Dhamma Pallava and absolutely loved it (some say it’s one of the best centers out there for a few reasons I’m going to mention later): https://www.dhamma.org/en/schedules/schpallava
This location is about a 2.5h drive from Warsaw and is also very close to Berlin/Prague so there were folks from there too.
Usually, you need to apply 2-3 months before the specific course begins (if you’re a new student) so keep that in mind. For older students late applications in general are much easier (a ton of people return to do more courses)!
And bear in mind that new students can only register for a 10-day course. Unless you can’t carve this time out, you would not be able to make it — it’s strict. And it’s more like 11 days you need to spare.
What does the course look like?
A few things that make or break it:
You need to accept and follow the precepts (if you remember the sila part above — this is it)
There are additional rules specific to the course in order to help you get the best possible experience (not chilling, but actively working on and with your own mind)
You need to maintain a noble silence (speech/contact etc) in relation to other students — speaking only once every often with the assistant teacher and the manager (who is actually another volunteer just for the course)
By default, this means not interacting with friends etc
You need to give out your phone when checking in and be completely cut out from the outside world
You should not:
Read
Write
Practice sports (it was said that in general but with the explanation that it may disturb others so if you have your own room — you can practice there as it’s not against Vipassana itself)
Men and women are completely separated (usually left/right side of the physical center location). You’re only in the same room when you’re in the big meditation hall and even then you’re physically separated and obviously, everyone maintains silence.
You should diligently observe the timetable (which is very strict and unusual)
You should always be present at the mandatory meditation sessions in the main meditation hall (3+ times a day on average counting in about ~5 hours — not all at once of course, but mostly in 1h chunks with small or big breaks)
If you look at the timetable, though, you would see that there are an additional ~5 hours of meditation daily which is technically “not mandatory” as you can do it in your own rooms (especially if you’re living alone).
You can not leave/cross the designated course area (not big) — basically the buildings area and the surrounding forest (again, separate for men/women).
That doesn’t sound chill, right? Because it actually isn’t.
What is the benefit/approach of such a Vipassana course in my own post-course overview (exactly how I explained it to my own curious and questionable mind)?
Simplifying things A LOT, Vipassana teaches you about the impermanence of all things based on your body and its sensations, allowing you to practice “observe, don’t react” when applied to any (positive or negative) things — mainly cravings or aversions. This means things that are actively poisoning your mind because you waste a ton of mind resources on dealing with them.
These are the things that add to your miseries and Vipassana (and Dhamma) helps you to purify your mind and get rid of all of your miseries. Not during the 10-day course, of course, but if you actively practice it.
And you practice it by basically scanning your entire body over and over again during the 30-60m time period from head to feet and in reverse. Doing nothing but observing sensations and not reacting to them.
Just to avoid any confusion of terms, let me try to paint the whole picture of how practice is structured throughout the course
First, you have the Dhamma way which is taught in this 10-day course
For the first 3.5 days of the course, you practice Anapana meditation (observing your breath — more below).
Then for 5.5 days, you practice Vipassana meditation — the main technique and the name of the course
Then for <1 day before the course ends you practice Metta meditation (sharing love and compassion with the world)
How did it go for me?
Despite working hard and having tough times, I loved it. I wouldn’t be writing this post like that otherwise.
I feel like I had a very good rest (it’s interesting how different “rests” can be — prompting you to rethink the whole concept of people living inside the hamster wheel and taking only the classical “travel vacations”).
I came back to life and work with many fresh ideas and perspectives, and, most importantly, a fresh look at how to change some of the patterns I didn’t particularly enjoy in my life.
I learned (and lived through) a couple of very useful and transformative experiences and realizations:
1. I’m now much more aware of the the changing nature of all things (they call this Anicca)
I feel way lighter when it comes to dealing with reactions: good or bad. In practice this usually results in the following:
When something bad happens or when you start craving something, how quickly will you realize that you don’t want this to influence you in a really bad way and add to the miseries you have
2. I’m now better at not reacting to pain — observing it and feeling less anxious about it.
During the 3rd day, I had moments when I actively contemplated leaving the course because I started feeling pain in the area of one of my sinuses as well as the nerve-connected tooth. Sometimes very avid, pulsating pain. And the worst was that it was during the meditation hours when you were asked to exclusively practice Anapana, meditation oriented at observing sensations in the triangular area of your nose (meaning that my pain was right near this triangle)!
And you know what — meditation helped me to push through and I adopted the mentality of “I’ll take this pain to the max and if that happens, fine, I’ll just take the pain-reducing pill and see the next day”. So basically that “let’s see how it goes moment by moment” mentality.
This worked — coincidentally, the next day we started Vipassana (although I continued the meditation practice of Anapana for over 24 hours before that happened) and the pain started going away.
I thought I had the inflammation but as it happens I probably didn’t. Regardless, I’ll go and see both the ENT and the dentist but this was extremely interesting and I currently associate that with some kind of muscular memory:
I placed SO MUCH attention to this area of my body for over 3 days that my brain was naturally “You’re a fucking moron — stop that or I will make you stop this” then producing this. Curious as to whether there are better explanations.
3. I’m not way more comfortable with nothing but my own thoughts.
At lunch, there was this veeeeery long (as it felt) time window where basically zero dopamine was produced. You finish lunch, there will not be more food (like one apple and banana is not really super registering by the brain) and all you’re left with is rest time to spare on one with your own brain (again, a reminder that you can’t read/write etc and you basically only think/do sports/walk in the forest) as well as 4 hours of continuous meditation (I’ll be honest, I was actively meditating for usually about 2.5h in this period and doing things mentioned above in the remainder of the 1.5h).
This is probably the only way to REALLY realize how dependent you are on dopamine and only after a few days I started to feel calm about simply lying down/sitting, drinking tea out of my bottle, and thinking/looking at the wall/trees out of my window.
4. I miss the quiet. I miss the nature.
It was awesome meeting sunrise every day, and doing my 10k steps by walking in the small designated forest area.
The city is so fricking loud and busy. We forget that we need more nature/silence moments.
Maybe we need to move.
5. I feel like I have a new back.
Sitting for 5-7 hours daily with the straight spine has really made me much more aware of it all the time and I actually feel like I strengthened it a lot (along with my knees because this was basically my go-to meditation pose — with two variations — legs inside and legs outside):
6. I’m obviously now much calmer/more aware of what I do.
I don’t multitask without a good reason. I eat slowly. I think twice before I do things.
7. I did the longest reset of my neural pathways related to phone/laptop/internet consumption so far (before it was max 10 days).
And still am very careful as to designing how I want to change them. Example: I decided to only check news/info groups/hobby stuff once a day in the evening.
Here’s my prev article on doing 7-day digital detox trips which is way easier than vipassana if you’re looking for a similar pathways reset technique:
There is much more but I don’t want to bore you plus I would rather write another post overviewing the results of some of the habit/approach changes I’ve decided to encompass after coming back. If you want to see my previous productivity tips, I also wrote about them here:
What else did I love/enjoy?
The first thing that comes to mind is this almost unbelievable realization of how cool people attending are.
Only 3 people out of the 50+ males in our course have dropped out. I honestly somehow expected at least 2-3x more.
I have not heard even a trace of anyone breaking the Noble Silence
Some of the silent meditations in the hall were purely magical (100s of ppl sitting, not moving and not making any sounds)
I was also amazed by the organization — both the underlying non-profit as well as the volunteers present for this particular course
As I mentioned above, no one is getting paid. Not a dime. Assistant teacher (the boss), Male/Female managers (one for each), and about 10 servers from each side — all were old students (the teacher being the “super-student”) who came to also practice vipassana this way. And you can certainly feel their energy/compassion/willingness to make your practice great.
Just to reiterate again, no one pays for the course. The approach is that your participation has been already paid for by previous students and you can do the same by donating if you want. I was happy to and will likely donate again/recurringly.
The non-profit itself (PL branch) was super transparent with its financials and horizontal management style and this immediately makes you very compassionate to help the cause. They built this beautiful center in 2017 by using some of the donated money (30%-ish) and borrowing the rest from older students (wealthy ppl attend Vipassana, yes!) in order to purchase land and build this center. Most of the money per student is still spent on repaying the loans.
The center was beautiful and the ability to stay in your own room alone was spectacular — it’s really rare across the world.
Pro tip — optimize for this when you search for your first Vipassana location, it’s worth it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to practice yoga/exercise, etc.
The food was vegetarian but actually very tasty. Servers are always cooking based on instructions but adding their own fling to it.
Lastly, there was almost no control at all and I was amazed at how ppl were diligently following what was put out. No one has ever entered my room or checked my luggage — I could have easily brought a laptop with Starlink (there wasn’t much cell coverage on the site) but I didn’t and will not because this would not be the spirit of the movement/I would break one of the precepts.
What I was confused about/didn’t accept/didn’t like
Some parts of the teaching/movement felt a bit superficial, e.g. in the traditional approach, the concept of changing the neural pathways is explained by you “releasing samskaras” which are these trapped reactions in the body — and by doing that, you’re freeing yourself from the impurities of the mind. I feel like this is the part that needs a complete revamp within the course.
It’s good though that you not taking something specific from the theory is not impacting your overall experience and Goenka explicitly states that in his discourses.
Sometimes Goenka’s instructions were too full of his singing — and it’s not for everyone, let me tell you. Someone pointed out to me that this is probably because of the specifics of how the language (Pali) was communicated (vowels pronounced etc) but still. I’d drastically cut the singing and perhaps make someone female with a great voice redo what’s left — purely to have the singing as the extra part before/after meditation.
I felt like overall the whole course is a bit too strict and tied to these original Goenka’s instructions — you could see that with many things, e.g. “not meditating outside”, “limiting standing meditations”, “not meditating lying down” and the assistant teacher sometimes being hesitant to give a straightforward, simple answer or help with the request (e.g. improving sitting posture).
The course area was also a bit too limiting for my liking.
Adding to the point above, some of the rules and the timetable were not good for me, specifically:
Not being able to practice sports (luckily I had my room and could do stuff there but still) — I’d love to have daily guided 1h yoga sessions with other folks — don’t see any difference with joint meditation, to be honest
Going to bed at 9-9.30 and waking up at 4-4.30 was a bit too stretched for me. Initially, I tried doing 9-4.30 but later on shifted to 9-5 while not being able to fall asleep until 9.30-9.45. Honestly came back feeling a bit sleep-deprived
Breakfast/lunch times were way too early — and I don’t understand why they can’t shift it by 2 hours (making it 8.30 and 13) while not losing the overall concept of fasting + meditating in the evening on an empty stomach
I followed the rule of not writing anything but have doubts that it gave me more benefits vs allowing me to think in writing and perhaps noting down some things. There’s the counterargument though that your mind will remember the things which are really important and that’s already good enough
Lastly, there were things that I think would have benefited the practice but they just weren’t there which is ok — I would love to help design/create a place where they would be a part. And yes, I know that they would significantly dilute the original teaching — but so what if they ACTUALLY seem to have a clear benefit to the practice itself? Surely the official movement would not incorporate many of them but unofficial ones/branches could.
Sauna (body temp changes are great for sensing)
Some kind of swimming body of water nearby (river/lake/ocean/sea) — similar to a sauna plus refreshing and gives you something sporty to do without disturbing others
Mountains with the views — this was the specific thing that the Polish site was lacking — it was flat as hell and I had 0 floors climbed on my Garmin for the whole course
Daily yoga (mentioned before)
Possibly — massages? Anything that helps you to release body tension in a way yoga/pilates/other things can’t
Some kind of sound therapy — I felt like the whole audial apparatus was underserved in some ways
Do I recommend Vipassana?
Absolutely and wholeheartedly, otherwise, the tone/connotation of this post would have been different. It has given me a lot and in the spirit of serving, this is one of the things I serve with.
I especially recommend trying this for entrepreneurs/founders/investors — folks with a lot of context switching and a very very stressful environment. I know it’s not easy to carve out 10(11) days out of your schedule and “get lost” — but if folks like Jack Dorsey can do that, can’t you figure it out too? Think of it like a mix of your vacation days + actual work investment — because it WILL make you more productive because of the better focus, less agitation, and calmer mind.
We’re recording a video podcast tailored to founders/startups/tech with another founder from the community who just happened to have completed a similar 10-day course at the SAME location 3 days before me (basically the previous shift) — and I’ll share it in a separate post.
Would I go again?
I think that I would. Not sure about going straight for another 10-day course like that but most likely:
Either the 3-day course
Or the 10-day course as the server. Being the server is not as demanding (fewer restrictions etc) plus I love cooking and could see myself enjoying doing this kind of service while actively practicing Vipassana and getting the same detox benefits (servers still meditate 3-4 hours a day in the hall and more if wanted on their own)
Aaand, that’s a wrap. Hope that it was an interesting read and wish you peace + being able to get rid of your own miseries, whether through Vipassana or any other methods.
As for me — I’m going back to raw-dogging life (I might rename my blog to that) and feel super pumped about the new Socap.ai initiatives we’ve planned for the next few months. Stay tuned!