Start Again: Remembering How to Love the World

Introduction

In the first parts of this article, I will try to give you a good sense of what it is like to sit a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat. If you have never done it, you will understand a bit about what it is like (this would probably be a very good article to share with anyone you know who is considering taking the plunge for the first time). If you have, it will be an enjoyable trip down memory lane.

After that, I will share some of the more personal experiences and insights that I was grateful to receive while I was there. This is not an astrology related piece. I may yet reflect on these experiences from an astrological perspective, but to do so here would make this article far too long. But this retreat was one of the best things I have ever done, and the inner developments that it precipitated are so poignant for me that I feel compelled to write and share about it.

I hope you find something here that it benefits you to receive.

“START AGAIN”

The recording of S.N. Goenka’s sonorous voice booms through the meditation hall for the upteenth time, “Start with a caaaaalm and quiet mind; alert and attentive mind—attentive mind; balanced and equanimous mind.” The resonance of his words, uttered with total confidence, cannot be ignored or tuned out. The idiosyncratic ways in which he emphasises, elongates and repeats certain words and phrases again and again, clearly designed to create a very specific impact. His command of the English language is unique: precise yet colourful; deliberate and somewhat hypnotic; he speaks with a poetic minimalism which gives one the distinct impression that there are no single syllables included in any sentence that do not serve a very particular purpose.

His voice is deep and controlled, punctuated by the characteristic coughs of a seasoned meditator—another exercise in brevity, no doubt honed in countless hours of group meditation, where one tries with great effort not to unduly disturb the others in the hall, agonising over any incoming cough or sneeze, silently strategising ways to make it as muffled and short as possible—even Goenka’s throat clearings demonstrate the proper attitude of the meditator. “Work very diligently, diligently, diligently;” he commands, “work patiently and persistently—very patiently, but persistently; work ardently; and work continuously, continuously, continuously.”

That’s all well and good, you think to yourself, if only this searing pain in my shoulder would go away… I would love to start again with a balanced and equanimous mind. That actually sounds wonderful. Great suggestion Goenkaji—I will get around to that, perhaps in my next life…

Still, though, the exhortations to patience and persistence land in the mind somewhere, and you summon up whatever determination you have to hand and… continue to sit still and do almost nothing for yet another hour. You take a five minute break, use the bathroom, drink some water, blow your nose, vainly attempt to stretch out your various implacable muscles, and then they sound the gong, you take your seat again in the meditation hall. “START AGAIN” booms Goenka’s voice over the PA…

Sharpening the Mind

Contrary to the peaceful and relaxing images that might be conjured up by the suggestion of a meditation retreat, most people’s experience of seated meditation, at least to begin with, predominantly takes the form of a prolonged and embattled confrontation with physical pain, and a frustrating encounter with the unstable and totally undisciplined nature of one’s own mind. Tasks do not come much simpler than sit still and do nothing but pay attention to the way your nose feels while breathing, and this is basically what one is asked to do for the first three and a half days of a Vipassana retreat. This technique is called Anapana meditation, and it is the first step in the Vipassana method that Goenka teaches. To begin with, it is difficult to complete even two cycles of breath without becoming distracted by a thought of some kind. Add to this the fact that your body, no matter how much yoga you do on a weekly basis, is certainly not used to sitting on the floor, unsupported and with a straight spine for hours at a time, and it hurts even more than you might expect.

So, on the first day, you sit from 4:30am until 6:30, then after breakfast, you sit from 8:00 until 11:00. when lunch is served. You then sit from 13:00 until 17:00, when you break for tea, and then you sit from 18:00 until 21:00 (during which there is at least the welcome distraction of a recorded talk from Goenka), and then you go to bed. Time slows down to an absolutely interminable pace. With almost no information or stimulation coming into the mind at all, and no external distractions from your physical discomfort and mental dissatisfaction, you are left to stew in exactly the kind of situations which, under ordinary circumstances, you would put a stop to just as quickly and thoughtlessly as you scratch an itch on the back of your neck. The first day feels like a week unto itself. Ten days of this you think to yourself. Can I really do ten whole days of this?

But, even on that first day, something precious has begun to unfold. Maybe at one point in the afternoon, you experienced three or four whole breaths where you were able to stay focused, and no thoughts came up. Maybe, in the short session in after the talk, just before bed, you caught yourself experiencing a fleeting hint of what you wonder might be referred to as peace. This is how it works. If, in eleven hours of frustration and suffering, you experience an aggregated total of fifteen seconds of real peace—that is enough. The fact is that although in ordinary life, you are able to constantly distract yourself from the frustration and suffering, it is there, all the time, living in the shadowy corners of your mind, and in your body. The only differences, at Vipassana, are that A: you stop (or try to stop) avoiding it; and B: there are a few moments where it genuinely ceases. So even one second of peace in eleven hours of strife is a vast improvement compared with your usual total of precisely no peace whatsoever.

Towards the end of day 3 of my second retreat, I experienced several minutes of pure, uninterrupted, distinct awareness of the softest, subtlest breath, going in and out over a tiny area below my nostrils; an area smaller than the tip of my little finger. I walked out of the hall that evening and there was no doubt in my mind that this was the most peaceful I had ever felt—and I have taken ketamine in therapeutic doses while lying down on a bed listening to Brian Eno with a blindfold on. Such drug induced experiences certainly can be extraordinarily healing, but one always knows that the drug will wear off—indeed, one requires the drug to wear off, because its therapeutic benefits come along with rather disabling (though often enjoyable) side-effects. But even putting that to one side, there is something qualitatively different (and I would even say better) about earning the experience of peace, and learning first-hand that it is possible to bring about that experience using only determination, and nothing else.

I later spoke to somebody who had just undertaken a 20-day retreat, the first 7 days of which were devoted to Anapana, and he reported that, much to his own surprise, he had experienced one full hour of awareness with no interruptions at all. I have no doubt that many thousands of people have had similar or even more profound experiences. But even this is not the ultimate aim, or a cause for celebration. It is only a natural, ordinary occurrence. At this point in the retreat, you are still only preparing. You practice Anapana in order to get a hold of your mind, and to sharpen your faculty of awareness. You peer deeper and more powerfully and continuously into a smaller and smaller area on the body, using no mantras, verbalisations, visualisations, or imaginative techniques of any kind, focusing only on the actual reality of what is physically happening.

By the third day of a 10-day sit, your thoughts have calmed down considerably. You have watched all the replays of the previous week’s conversations and events. You have noted all the anxieties and loops of nervous energy. You have observed the ideas, plans and fantasies that the mind is keen to explore. The mind has begun to run out of steam. The distractions that it serves up begin to be either surreal and nonsensical, or they start having more to do with the meditation itself, so at least they are relevant to your work. In addition, you have developed some strategies for coping with the pain, and you have experienced enough fleeting moments of peace and mental stability to convince yourself that you are, in some ways, progressing. You have been disabused of the notions you had about mystical transcendence and straightforward relaxation. You better understand the reality of your task, or at least you think you do, which is good enough.

Putting a Stop to New Misery

On Day 4, the real work begins. Whatever sense of peace you have managed to accumulate is about to be tested. The meditation begins to take on a more serious tone. You are asked, in many of the sessions, not to move your body or change your posture in any way, which may seem (and certainly feels, at times) punitive, but it serves several purposes. The most basic reason for these so called Adhiṭṭhāna (sittings of strong determination) is that in Vipassana meditation, you are taking your newly honed faculty of awareness, and moving it through each part of the body, either in a slow, deliberate, sequential manner, or in some situations, sweeping through the entire body in a smooth motion. A very still body is needed in order to create a stable foundation for this dynamic mental activity. Any movement in the body is likely to break your concentration.

The second (and ultimately more important) reason is that the faculty you are now trying to develop is not simply awareness, but also equanimity. Your task is now one of not-reacting. Having noticed how prone your mind is to wandering away and getting distracted, you are now trying to notice how its usual pattern is to react compulsively to sensations in the body, and try to break that pattern. Here is where your pain begins to serve a purpose. The usual habit of the mind is to ease pain and avoid discomfort wherever possible. A sensible survival strategy, you might think, and perhaps it is so. But here, it presents your first opportunity to interrupt the automatic cycle of mental reaction to physical sensation. It is not dissimilar to taking a cold shower, and adopting a strong determination to stay under the water for at least 1 full minute after you are sure it is time to get out. Except it is harder, because at least in the cold shower, you have a barrage of sensory input to distract you and entertain the mind, while being present with your pain in a simple seated position without moving takes longer, and there is absolutely nowhere to hide.

To begin with, it may be that in an hour of sitting and scanning the body, you spend most of your energy simply trying to endure. How am I supposed to practice equanimity, you wonder over and over, when the entire field of my experience is filled with nothing but hot, angry pain? But, once again, it is the case that in any given hour, you might experience one or two fleeting moments of real equanimity, where you can really just observe the discomfort without striving, without seeking, without wishing or praying for it to abate. And, though these tiny islands of equanimity seem insignificant in comparison with the oceans of reactive torment that surround them, they are solid—orders of magnitude more solid and reliable than the suffering that they punctuate. You have started to find your strength—the kind of strength that can only be found through a forthright engagement with the unbridled reality of your mind’s propensity for suffering.

With these small rocky outcrops of inner steel established, the rate at which it becomes possible to build up true equanimity with the unpleasant sensations increases with surprising rapidity. Soon enough, you are able to let that pain your shoulder be, while you scan through your other, less painful body parts. In these other areas, you start to become aware of very interesting sensations, and depending on how refined your faculty of awareness has become, you can peer into these at various levels of depth. What appears first as an itch on your armpit reveals itself to be a kind of vibration, oscillating at a frantic speed, which you then realise is also pulsing in a slower more regulated manner, in tandem with surrounding areas. "“Don’t develop a preference for this sensation or that sensation” booms Goenka’s voice, (by this time living rent free in your head) and however fascinating you were beginning to find that armpit itch, you move on to the next body part.

You work your way around, eventually getting to that painful shoulder. Well, I hardly need to observe this, you think to yourself. I know what this sensation is—it is pain. But once again, in comes your newly internalised Goenka: “See that you don’t miss out any little part of the body”, so you attend to it. Perhaps this time, you notice that this pain too is also pulsing, vibrating or buzzing. Ah, you realise, this pain has its own unique character, and you become curious about that. This is the objectivity Goenka has been calling upon you to enact, the calm, detached, diligent mind that seemed so unattainable just yesterday or the day before. Suddenly your mind is like a research scientist with a clipboard and a list of questions, doing its rounds around the parts of the body, collecting data.

The inquisitive part of this mindset might be tempted to start establishing patterns, developing theories of why this sensation is like [x] and why that sensation is not like [y], but by the time you come back around that armpit itch, it is gone, and a whole new show has started. In fact, every sensation except the most solidified and uncomfortable ones seem to bear these characteristics. Fleeting, impermanent, unpredictable, unstable and even nonsensical at times. What would be the point in trying to develop a coherent theory of such activity?

“ANICCA” (a Pāli word pronounced a-nee-chur) booms Goenka again and again at times throughout the entire second half of the course. It means impermanence, and you are continually pressed to remember that every bodily sensation has this characteristic: “arising and passing away, arising and passing away.” Yes, even that pain in your shoulder that appears, for all intents and purposes, to have the character of absolute persistence.

Think of it this way, you tell yourself, even if that pain endures until I die, it will pass away then. My pain is at least as impermanent as I am. Eventually, that whole shoulder will be gone. What a relief!

So, say we have reached day 6 or 7 of the retreat. By this time, you know that you are physically capable of doing the hardest things you will have to do for the rest of your stay. You have become curious about your pain, and have discovered a great deal of strange activity happening throughout your body. You might even be starting to feel pretty good about things. As your knots get loosened, you become able to explore the possibility of sweeping your attention through the body en masse, which brings a little bit of variety into your daily activities. Your consciousness learns to switch modes from meticulous clipboard wielding data-gatherer to mysterious band of pulsating energy that sweeps over the body like an experiential x-ray.

As you begin to get a foothold in the practice, one pattern of activity that is worth paying attention to starts to emerge. You may start to notice a correlation between the kinds of sensations you are experiencing and the character of the psychological material that is surfacing simultaneously. It seems that painful, solidified, uncomfortable sensations seem to correspond with difficult material, repressed memories, and imaginal or speculative situations which you are resistant towards or averse to. This makes intuitive sense. Perhaps I am storing that painful childhood memory in my shoulder for some reason you ponder to yourself, before remembering that such speculation has no place in this technique.

What is a little more surprising is that as you begin to access states in which you experience pleasant sensations throughout the body, the upwelling of troublesome psychological material does not cease, but merely changes tone. Pleasant bodily sensations seem to correspond with feelings of craving: life-like memory replays involving the gratification of instinctive desire, and fantasies and imaginative scenarios in which all of your compulsive wishes are coming true. This may sound perfectly wonderful, but in the context of the retreat, it can be extremely challenging. Remember, your task is do not react. As the flood of imagery, memory and fantasy rolls in, and as you battle to remain equanimous in the face of it, you might start to understand how powerless you have been to actually choose your path through life. Experiencing the intense somatic reality of craving without reacting to it is an extremely unfamiliar feeling. Oh shit, you think to yourself, I literally cannot be trusted. These pleasant bodily sensations seem to alter your means of determining what is important and relevant so drastically that when they arise, you have about as much agency as a moth circling ever closer to a candle. But on this occasion, you do not react.

You might think that this problematic psychological material, be it related to aversion or craving, needs to be addressed in some way. Perhaps the psyche knows that I need to watch this memory replay again and again, in order to make sense of it and change my narrative, you may well assume. But, if you ask the assistant teacher, they will simply tell you that while it is perfectly normal and OK that the material is arising in whatever way it is arising, you are not supposed to do anything with it at all. When I asked my assistant teacher such a question, he told me to remember that the material flooding my mind was “not real”—that the sensations on my body were the real thing, and that my only job was to pay attention to them. It was not that the sensations on the body are of any particular importance, in and of themselves. What was important was that during the practice, I was able to remain focused on the reality of the present moment, and maintain (insofar as I was able) a state of equanimity.

I must admit, the psychologist in me found it difficult to accept this as an adequate strategy—surely this is no different than pretending that psychological complexes do not exist; just another dissociative strategy, dressed up in spiritual clothing, but doomed to fail nonetheless? But, by the very same token, I was prompted to wonder whether or not this objection was merely an instrument being used by my mind to strengthen my clinging to its old habits. After all, if it were possible to allow my damaging cycles of compulsive behaviour to simply evaporate into the ether, wouldn’t it be worth a try? I had already proven to myself that implacable pain could, in fact be placated, and that my uncontrollable thoughts could, in fact, be controlled. And, while some of the Buddhist doctrine by which the technique is contextualised seemed a little simplistic and even contrived (to my mind), there is a certain compelling logic to it all.

After all, if one’s aim is to be liberated from compulsive and unconscious patterns of thought and behaviour which perpetuate misery and suffering in one’s life, is it really all that sensible to attempt to deal with those patterns on their own terms? So much of my own identity, I realised, is wrapped up in the stories I tell about myself. But what if these stories are merely after-the-fact rationalisations of life-events which have occurred mostly because of the very compulsive and unconscious patterns which I am so ready to be rid of?

Towards the end of the course, Goenka’s evening talks continually emphasise the idea that all this material, all these patterns and complexes (or volitional formations of mind which in Buddhist philosophy are called saṅkhāras) seem to actually want to come bubbling up to the surface and evaporate away. It is, surprisingly, in their nature. The only thing keeping them down in the depths of your psyche is the endless supply of more saṅkhāras which the mind is constantly generating. Just as, on day 1 and 2 of the retreat, you struggle to believe (and even strive to reject) the idea that most of your pain-related suffering is optional and can be worked with rather than against, now you struggle to believe the idea that your trauma and addictions, shame and pride, limiting beliefs, depression and anxiety are all actually ready to leave, and the only thing keeping them inside you is your ingrained tendency to constantly identify yourself with them, to reaffirm them, doubling down on them at every opportunity.

If you feel triggered by the previous paragraph, I do not blame you in the slightest. It is an extremely triggering sentence. But if you can, also ask yourself, would my life not be better if it turned out to be true?

You do not need to solve all the problems of the past, or even protect yourself against future woes. All you need to do is to find a mode of being in which you stop creating new suffering, and every second that you live in that mode, your old supply of suffering gradually takes care of itself.

I do not actually, personally know the extent to which any of the above is “true”. I am just reporting from my second 10-day course. I am certainly no expert. Perhaps it is the case that this method has its limits, that this approach is only suitable for people of a certain disposition or mindset, or that there are certain types of psychological material that simply cannot be processed or released in this way. I do not mean to make a definitive claim about the ultimate truth of the (simplified) doctrine that is presented in Goenka’s 10-day program.

What I can say, is that it seems to work for me, despite the many tools that my mind has its disposal for resisting, rebelling, critiquing and rejecting it. I am increasingly noticing that when I want to be, I am a highly committed person. I go all-in, especially when it comes to inner work and spiritual practice (a reflection of my natal T-square between Sun, Moon and Pluto, no doubt). I often come away from classes, courses and retreats feeling sorry for other participants who I can tell did not commit to the experience in the same way, and wind up having underwhelming experiences, and leave feeling a little unsatisfied. So perhaps it is the case that if you are like me in this respect, and are ready to dive in, a Vipassana retreat is a good idea for you, while if you were to approach it more tentatively, just dipping your toes in the water to see how it feels, you might not get to experience the challenges and benefits to the extent that I have described them. By all means, bring your doubts, ask your questions, take nothing at face value—Goenka, I am sure, would say the same thing. But commitment is non-negotiable (at least for 10 days) if you are to benefit, so you might as well bring it.

Prepare the Way for Love

When it comes to my personal relationship with Vipassana meditation and the philosophy that accompanies it, there is a question that has always bothered me: What is the difference (if any) between not reacting and not feeling?

When I got home from the retreat, my partner had baked a delicious carrot cake for us to enjoy upon my return. Surely, it is not Buddha’s suggestion that I decline to enjoy the cake, and instead eat it in a state of perfect neutrality, feeling and expressing no pleasure or gratitude? Yet on the course I was told again and again: “See that you don’t develop a preference for this sensation or that sensation, for very quickly that preference will turn into craving, craving; clinging, clinging…”. You can see the conundrum. When we expand the boundaries of this issue, the situation quickly becomes extremely troublesome. Am I supposed to listen to music and watch movies without reacting, working constantly to quell my emotional responses before a new saṅkhāra takes hold? If I cry at a wedding or a funeral, am I regressing on the path, and creating attachments which I will have to work to eliminate in subsequent meditation sessions? When you apply this logic to all of life, it makes you wonder if Vipassana is just preparation for an emotionless, hollow shell of a life. Goenka talks about “Infinite Love, Infinite Compassion; Real Peace, Real Harmony” often enough, and he himself does seem to be…quite happy. But the question of how to get there, even after my previous retreat, lingered on.

I arrived at the course with this question on my heart, understanding that I did not know the answer, and holding a firm inner commitment not to leap to any conclusions, but to allow the inquiry to unfold naturally.

My assistant teacher, on this occasion, was rather relaxed in comparison with his predecessor, and in all of our interactions—perhaps seeing that I was of a mind to torture myself, approaching Vipassana as a kind of psycho-somatic endurance sport—he emphasised compassion, and gently reminded me that learning to give myself mettā (loving-kindness) was also an important lesson. I was continually touched and surprised by his kindness and support, and became gradually more and more aware of something coming to life within me; a flickering candle, dimly visible and increasing steadily in brightness the longer and more seriously I practiced.

On day 10 of the course, after the morning group meditations, the noble silence is lifted, and you are given instructions, for the first time, on how to practice mettā meditation. As a returning student, I knew this was coming, and the night before, towards the end of the final group sitting of day 9, a gentle voice in my mind said to me, “you’ve gotten what you need from this Vipassana technique for right now. Let’s start practicing mettā right now.”

I wondered briefly whether I was trying to escape something, whether this was just another distraction, but this felt like a compassionate voice, and an equanimous one. My thoughts turned to all the other people in the hall, particularly to the men whom I had witnessed going through the ringer throughout the previous 9 days. You can tell a lot about the emotional state of a person by the way they carry themselves from the hall to the toilets, or their body language in the dining hall, or the way they tie (or don’t) tie their shoelaces. Unbeknownst to them, and despite being instructed not to, I had formed a connection with many of these humans, and in that moment, I allowed myself to fully feel the love and compassion that I felt for them.

I remembered Ram Dass’ words, “you start to love that which you can love, and just keep expanding it”, and I started to allow the feelings of love and compassion to grow. Within seconds, my heart exploded with mettā in a way that I have never felt before. It was as though with every exhale, tremendous waves of my compassion surged to the farthest corners of the universe, sweeping through the cosmos with a great and powerful purity that could heal and hold any being that was ready to receive it. After 9 full days of disciplined inaction and non-reaction, the dynamism and emotionality of this experience utterly overwhelmed me. I cried a lot of times, in different ways and for different reasons throughout the retreat, and they all felt healthy. But the tears that I cried now were arising because I was suddenly able to feel-with the world, to suffer-with it (literally com-passion) and I knew that a deep reconciliation between my mind and the world had taken place, and I was so grateful for that. It was as though I was coming back to life, tear by tear, breath by breath. That flickering candle of mettā had become a roaring fire.

The following day, in the final session of the morning, just before the lifting of the noble silence, I settled into a very peaceful meditation. My various aches and pains were all still there, but we were, by now, good friends. I knew that I had already gotten so much more than I could have asked for from the course, so I was no longer worried about squeezing every last drop out of every minute. It just so happened, that very close to the end of this session, the answer to my question crystallised perfectly, instantaneously in my mind.

What a fool I had been! It was so perfectly obvious!

I had been wrongly assuming that if you stripped away all the reactivity from the human mind, you would be left with nought but an emotionless robot, wandering about the world, detached, waiting blankly for some kind of instruction. But by now, it was obvious to me that this simply was not the case. I have not detailed it all in this article, but I had cleared out a serious amount of highly charged psychological material throughout the 10 days, and having done so, the light and warmth of my heart had been allowed to glow and shine unobstructed, in a way that I had not known was possible. So it was now clear to me that this was the basic resting state of my consciousness: not neutrality, but love; not objectivity, but compassion; there was nothing blank about me, or about any human being, or about any being of any kind, for that matter.

So, I realised, I was learning non-reaction as a defensive tool, but not for defending a blank canvas against colour; not for defending a neutral mind against feeling. No, I was learning to defend my love and compassion for the world against the insidious compulsive and addictive mental patterns that would fill up my heart with craving and aversion, and prevent me from remembering my interconnectedness and goodwill towards myself, my fellow humans, the entire biosphere and the wider cosmos.

If somebody hands you a tiny, flickering candle of mettā, what a wonderful gift that is, but it comes with a responsibility: do not let it go out. Winds and rain will come. Cruel, ignorant people who want to blow it out will come. There will be times when you do not believe that you have the strength to carry on protecting it. But if you do, if you keep it safe, you will find that you might be able to light that candle for somebody else, and remind them that they too have a chance to love themselves, their fellow humans, all beings on Earth, and throughout the universe.

What if you could let go of all the attachments of which your identity is constructed, and simply let your actions flow from the compassionate centre of being itself?

Well, what if the centre of being itself is not as great as you say it is? you may well ask. But then, I suppose the question remains, would you not want to find out for yourself?

I’ll leave you with a poem which I wrote a while ago, and which I understand better now.

Prepare the Way for Love

Hold no secret in you, move softly
Speak your heart into the trees
In the welcome haven of night’s darkness
If that is what it takes, go.
Unburden yourself—gently. Remember
How it was when first you loved
And nothing else was there to be prepared for
And nothing was salient but love
Prepare the way for love
With desperately brazen adolescence
Trembling just beneath the skin

Keep no object about you, let go
And melt your boundaries down
Like unattended ice cream in hot sunshine
Exfoliate your edgy
Disposition into talcum powder
Trim things you’ve not thought to trim
Like nails, or pubes, or bitterness, or nose hairs
Put down what love would push against, and
Prepare the way. For love
Comes bidden to those ready to be merged with.
Where love’s agenda can be served,

Love arrives resplendent, and receives
You without question, golden
Like sunshine if the sun were your own lover
Folding you within a cloth
Of iridescent quality, of colours
Which shall stay unnamed forever.
Bring your flowers to the road love walks on,
Lay them down and then, with empty hands
Prepare the way for love.
Love expands to fill what would contain it, so
Pour out your cup, it’s time to fill it up with something better

Some Reflections

I’m no fool. I know this experience is a peak experience, and that you can not build your house at the top of the mountain. I know these feelings will fade, and that other perspectives on spiritual practice will come into the foreground. I do not plan to quit the world and retire to a monastery (though I have to admit, it holds a serious appeal for me), and I certainly do not plan to cease practicing astrology, depth psychology or plant medicine work.

I hope this did not read as a preachy or evangelical piece—I believe that each person has the right and the responsibility to create their own spiritual path, and that while two paths may take parallel courses for a while, all will diverge eventually, and this is just as it should be. However, I do recommend that anybody of relatively sound mind and body consider sitting a 10-day silent retreat, at least once. In the times that we live in, surrounded by invasive, addictive, pernicious media and technology, the chance to eschew all the bullshit, even for a short time, is utterly invaluable, and even if we lived in simpler times, there will always be some things you simply cannot learn about yourself until you really sit down and shut up.

I’m sure other courses are also valuable—maybe even more valuable—but Goenka Vipassana is available all over the world, and it is entirely funded by voluntary donation, even including your room and board. Every person working at all levels of the organisation does so on a voluntary basis. If you take the view of “you will know a tree by its fruits”, then this particular method does seem to be particularly nutritious.

Thank you for reading.