Anicca, Anicca, Anicca
Ten days of silent meditation and what the body knows that the mind only thinks it does.
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That something is difficult should be one more reason to do it. This was the sentence I kept telling myself.
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I want to write about Vipassana. To document what I went through, to share the goodness I benefited from. I am far from perfect. I just dipped my toes into ten days of Vipassana kindergarten, yet it was powerful enough to shift my worldview and make me want to pass it on.
In March 2026 I undertook ten days of a silent meditation course called Vipassana. A technique originating from India and carefully preserved across 2,500 years, now being taught by S.N. Goenka (Goenkaji, as students affectionately call him, the ji a mark of deep respect in the Indian tradition) through centres across the world. I found mine in Kosgama, Sri Lanka, on a hill surrounded by nature, quiet in the way that only places built deliberately for quiet can be. My partner went first, in Nepal. The results he demonstrated without even meaning to created a strong interest in me. I signed up. I got approved. The days leading up to the course I waited patiently, nervously, excitedly. I had never stopped talking from the moment of my birth, not for one hour let alone ten days. This was a challenge I felt illuminated to face.
Before the course starts, as a new student you take up five precepts, the five basic moralities essential for participation. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not speak lies. No sexual misconduct. No intoxicants. You arrive at the centre, sign in, submit your valuables, your phone, computer, smart watch, any reading or writing material. You are to abstain from all other forms of meditation, yoga, exercise, spiritual or religious practice. I agreed to all of it.
I noticed the others around me. We were separated by gender, but during my course the male residential quarters were being renovated, so it was twenty to thirty women only for the entire ten days, with the exception of our lovely translator and assistant teacher Mario. Not only was I about to undertake my first ever ten days of noble silence, I would be doing it entirely in the presence of women. I was elated. Let us begin.
The centre, Dhamma Sobhā — meaning Radiance of Dhamma — sits on six acres of land in Kosgama, surrounded by mountains, about 50 kilometres from Colombo. After orientation and dinner, noble silence began. From that evening onward, no eye contact, no physical contact, no speech. The internal world was to remain contained, unaffected by external influences as much as possible. The sounds of wildlife throughout the day — birdsong, insects, tropical animals we could not identify — a living world continuing entirely indifferent to our silence. The distant sound of traffic and construction that never fully went away. At first a distraction. Then, without meaning to, a tool — one more thing arising, one more thing to observe without reacting to, one more practice in the practice. No mobile phone nearby, no other people's thoughts bleeding into yours. A refreshing new experience I had never before had.
I would describe Vipassana as being dropped into the midst of an ocean that is your mind. So deep. So shallow. So beautiful. So terrifying. Too vast and diverse and infinitely pulling me everywhere. Past, future, past, future, past, future. Anything was easier than to focus on the present. From day one to day three we focused our entire attention on respiration, the breath, as it is, not as we would like it to be. If shallow, shallow. If deep, deep. When the mind wandered, and it wandered constantly, we were simply to bring it back to the breath without judgement, without anger at ourselves for having done it again.
It felt like going from Tokyo, seeing thousands of people pass before you every moment, to suddenly being alone in a cave in the Himalayas with nothing but your own thoughts. Goenkaji called it a deep surgical operation on the mind. You must work hard, patiently and persistently. You are bound to be successful. Bound to be successful. The mind is used to being stimulated, constantly receiving input, constantly reacting. To sit with only the breath, something so ever-present it is taken entirely for granted, was extraordinarily difficult. The mind is like a wild bull. Raw, undirected, powerful force, charging without aim, not wanting to be observed, wanting only to move, to react, to do anything but simply be still. Every evening brought Goenkaji's discourses, which quickly became one of my favourite parts of the day, something to focus on that was not as demanding as the sitting itself, his voice patient and persistent and quietly certain of something I was only beginning to approach.
Gradually across the first three days we narrowed our focus from the full breath to a small area around the nostrils and above the upper lip. Second day, the triangle consisting of the area of the nostrils and above the upper lip. Third day, underneath the nostrils and above the upper lip. Notice if you feel any sensation. Heat. Tingling. Prickling. Anything. I was stunned to find that after several hours I began feeling heat coming from my nostrils. I started noticing the breath moving sometimes through the left nostril, sometimes the right, sometimes both. We were instructed not to develop any attachment to the sensation, not to feel happy when we felt something or frustrated when we did not. Just observe. Understand the nature of all sensation, which is arising and passing away, arising and passing away. This is the true nature of impermanence. Not as a concept borrowed from a book. Not because Goenkaji said so. A truth you experience within the framework of your own body. Whatever you experience in each and every moment. Moment by moment. Moment by moment. Tremendous patience was required, patience I often did not have. Yet the environment and the commitment I had made kept me there. Coming back to the breath. Coming back.
These first three days were the necessary introduction, sharpening the mind enough that on the second half of day three we would begin Vipassana itself. When we narrow the area of focus on our bodies, the mind becomes concentrated and starts noticing sensations it never knew were there before. Without forcing, without clinging to want a certain sensation, without feeling aversion from anger that we feel nothing. Like the weather, some days you see the sun, sometimes you do not. The nature remains the same, coming and going, coming and going, coming and going. No matter how much you try to preserve the delight and warmth of the sun it is bound to change. No matter how much you wish the rain away it will come regardless of what you want. Our definitions and our judgements of what these natural phenomena mean to us is why and how we form attachments and aversions. They are just as they are. Same with sensations. They are just as they are. And we were to observe them as they were.
You have to work for your own liberation. No one else can liberate you.
On day three we began learning Vipassana. We were to observe and move slowly from head to feet, covering as many parts of the body as possible, noticing whatever sensations arose. Tingling. Heat. Cold. Prickling. Pinching. Numbness. Pain. Perspiration, sweat. Pleasant or unpleasant we were to observe without preference, move through the body part by part, give no sensation more importance than any other, give all importance to the one universal truth that every sensation arises only to pass away. Anicca. Anicca. Anicca. These words ended every sitting, every beginning, every end. Impermanence. Impermanence. Impermanence.
The unconscious mind is not truly unconscious. Everything we experience arrives first as sensation, through the five sense doors of eyes, ears, tongue, skin, and thought. Sensation arises. Perception follows. Then comes the reaction, craving or aversion, and this reaction is the root of all suffering. Not the sensation itself. Not what happens to us. What we do with what happens to us.
None of what your five sense doors tell you is ultimately reliable. All of it is conditioned, shaped by perception before it even arrives at what you call the mind. Sensation arises. Perception names it, instantly, before you have chosen how to name it. Reaction follows, faster than thought. By the time you believe you are responding to reality you are already three steps inside a story your nervous system wrote without consulting you. The practice lives in the gap between sensation and reaction. Vipassana widens that gap until the choice becomes visible.
By day four or five I could observe sensation across my entire body, moving head to feet then feet to head, a continuous sweep. Vibrations. Wavelets. All of us, the entire material of our experience, arising and passing, arising and passing. Equanimity, the steady balanced observation of whatever arises, meant not wanting unpleasant sensations to cease, not wanting pleasant ones to continue. Simply to observe. To let the wave be a wave without becoming it.
The mind is a dividing instrument. It takes one undivided reality and cuts it into pieces. This is mine, that is yours, this is beautiful, that is dirty. Consider hair. Someone tells you that you have beautiful hair. Then you find a hair in your food. The same hair, from the same head, and now disgust. Dirty. The hair has not changed. The mind has divided one undivided reality based entirely on context and arrangement. Beautiful while assembled on the head. Revolting when displaced. The same with nails. The same with everything we call mine. We like it while it is assembled. And yet all of it is bound to pass away.
My partner. My family. My home. My, my, my. We build an identity from the things and people we attach ourselves to and then defend that identity fiercely, feeling elated at praise, distressed at blame, because we have confused the assembled picture with the self. What is mine is priceless to me because I believe it adds to my identity. This creates tremendous attachment and therefore makes me prone to suffer when it decays, because I have not yet understood what impermanence truly means, not in the body, not as a truth pertaining the framework of the self. One must develop their own wisdom, to understand and therefore fully know it as ones own truth. Not one from the books. Not because Goenkaji said so. I may be a writer. I love to intellectualise impermanence and philosophise about life. Yet until I experienced the nature of impermanence within my own body, felt sensation arise and dissolve, felt the mind grasp and release, it was all theory. Intellectual entertainment. The difference between knowing anicca and feeling anicca is the difference between reading about the ocean and being dropped into the middle of it.
On day three, towards the end, we were also introduced to adiṭṭhāna, strong determination. For one hour, three times a day, we were to sit without shifting our posture, without opening our legs, our hands or our eyes. Developing strength of the mind.
Oh the excruciating pain. The numbness. The legs trembling. I contemplated whether to sit in this position with intolerable numbness or in that one with intolerable pain. After a while I started telling myself that this pain cannot hurt my mind. It may feel like pain but it is a sensation and it is bound to pass away. This is a thousand times harder to do than to say. After forty five minutes the real challenge begins. Surely the teachers have forgotten to ring the bell, surely it has been more than an hour. I tell myself anicca, anicca, anicca, eagerly waiting for Goenkaji to begin the closing instruction, yet it keeps not coming. And then I catch myself. This waiting, this desperate clinging to the sound that will end the suffering, is the same mechanism as the suffering itself. Clinging to the absence of pain. Aversion from the pain. The bell I am waiting for and the pain I am avoiding are the same thing wearing different faces. Look, I tell myself. Let us see how long this lasts. This too will change. And when the bell does ring and we come out of adiṭṭhāna, the heavenly bliss of easing the pain feels like a balm over the soul. And that too, I know, will change.
Students left during the course. Of course I too entertained the idea of stopping. But I had made a strong determination at the beginning that I would persevere. And so I did. There were those who had to leave. May they find peace within themselves. It is not easy. It may not be for everyone. But if you come, and you keep being prompted toward it, will you try to give a fair trial to this technique.
It is not total isolation. Students may request brief interviews with the teacher to ask questions about the technique itself. The silence is from each other, from the noise of the external world, from the accumulated distraction of ordinary life. Not from guidance when guidance is genuinely needed.
No ritual. No belief required. No god to pray to or doctrine to accept. Just three things, interlocked, each one necessary. Sīla, morality. The ethical foundation without which nothing else can stand. Samādhi, the right concentration that can only arise from morality. You cannot still the mind while guilt or fear occupies it. And paññā, wisdom. Not borrowed wisdom, not the wisdom of books or teachers, but your own wisdom arrived at through direct experience within the framework of your own body. These three are like a three legged chair. Remove any one and the whole thing falls. What has anyone to criticise in this. Morality. Mastery of the mind. Purification of the mind. Any religion, any culture, any background. Nothing to add. Nothing to take away.
Dhamma means universal law of nature. The truth of how things are. Not as we would like it to be, but as it is.
One hundred percent of suffering comes from you. None of it is external, however much it may appear to be. From the moment one takes birth one believes they are in a constant cycle of misery that others are afflicting upon them. I could tell from first hand experience, seeing my anger arise and pass away in the hall, my fear arise and pass away, my joy and sense of peace arise and pass away. And depending on how I reacted to it I created sankhāras. Sankhāras are the old patterns of the mind, the deep grooves worn by years of reacting in the same way to the same sensations, the cause and effect chain that keeps firing long after the original cause has gone.
Sensations that were always there, firing constantly beneath the mundane of daily life, suddenly observable once all distractions are removed and the attention is trained finely enough to feel what was already happening. This is the nervous system becoming visible to itself. Sit long enough in silence and you will start meeting your own habit patterns.
The more equanimous you remain, the more old sankhāras come to the surface and pass away. The more you react, the more you multiply them. Only love and compassion can bring you out of misery. Suffering just creates more suffering. In ordinary life we find other ways. A run, a film, a drink, a substance, anything that generates enough sensation or distraction to push the discomfort back down. It works temporarily. But the sankhāras remain underneath, like volcanoes. Never addressed, building pressure, capable of erupting at any moment and overpowering everything. The only way out is through. Not suppression. Observation. Not numbing. Feeling it clearly enough that it loses its grip.
In my case many of my sankhāras had to do with anger I felt, fear I felt, from being misunderstood, from old wounds carried without examining. Like the sensations, they arose. Like the sensations, they passed. I clung to past moments that made me feel violated and I clung to moments of joy and happiness, not letting either go, causing myself misery in both directions. Misery is universal. Comparison is meaningless. The past is gone.
If one hundred percent of suffering comes from you, then one hundred percent of liberation also comes from you. Nobody can give it. Nobody can take it. The same truth that removes the excuse also removes the dependency. ‘If only my mother changed a little.’ ‘If only my partner changed a little.’ ‘If only my daughter, my son, my colleague, if only others changed a little’, never me.
You cannot change other people. You can only train the mind. And a trained mind, meeting the same world, creates a completely different experience of it.
The technique itself was preserved over 2,500 years, taken from India to Burma where Goenkaji was taught by his teacher Sayagyi U Ba Khin, and brought back to India and eventually to the world. It asks only that you try the technique purely, so that whatever benefit or lack of benefit you experience you can attribute entirely to it. You are not asked to believe anything. You are asked to observe.
The course is free and entirely based on donations. You are living as a beggar, eating whatever is given to you, in our case delicious vegetarian food, wearing clothes that do not reveal the body, trying to reduce the ego as much as possible. You are eating food paid for by someone who came before you. Your course will be paid for by no one yet, because you will pay it forward for those who come after. The economic structure of Vipassana is itself a teaching. You receive without possessing. You give without clinging to the giving.
The ten days had a rhythm that became its own world. Wake at four. Meditation from four thirty to six thirty. Breakfast until eight. Group meditation, then individual practice through to eleven. Lunch. Rest. Back into the hall at one, continuing through to five with group sittings woven in. Tea break. Evening group meditation from six to seven. Then Goenkaji’s discourse until eight fifteen. A final sitting. Question time. Lights out at nine thirty.
I started noticing restlessness at night, unable to sleep despite working so hard all day. My dreams became extraordinarily vivid. Childhood. Old miseries. Things that had made me happy. The surgical operation was in full effect. Towards the end of the course we were also to move through the body in sweeping motions, trying to feel sensations not only on the surface but through the entire body. Not to imagine the internal organs but simply to feel.
If all we are is sensation, sensation arising and passing away across the entirety of this body, then what is I. The elements are not merely metaphysical. They are the direct physical qualities of every sensation you feel. Earth — solidity, hardness, heaviness, pressure, the weight of the body against the cushion. Wind — movement, vibration, oscillation, the tingling that travels across the skin. Fire — heat, burning, cold, the warmth of breath leaving the nostrils. Water — binding, fluidity, perspiration, the cohesive force that holds it all together momentarily before it passes. We are temporary patterns of earth, wind, fire, water. The distinction between inner self and external world dissolves not philosophically but physically. The same elements as the rain. The same elements as the hill. The same elements as everything. The taboo against knowing who you are dissolves when you feel clearly enough that who you are is earth, wind, fire, water — arising and passing like everything else. Is this bubble of wavelet I. Is this hair that is currently still on my head, is this I.
We arrived as strangers. We lived alongside each other for ten days without speaking, without touching, without making eye contact. And yet something else happened in that silence. We became curious about each other in the way the mind becomes curious when its usual tools are removed. The human mind is so inquisitive. So relentlessly interested in other people, in their stories, their interiors, what they carry, what they are working through. Strip away the phone, the conversation, the eye contact, the entire social infrastructure through which we normally satisfy that curiosity, and it does not go away. It intensifies. It turns toward the only information available — the colour of someone’s toenail polish, the way a person holds their shoulders, the particular quality of someone’s stillness or restlessness. I watched my neighbour. She watched me. Ten days of silent curiosity building between us. You cannot touch anyone. So you hug yourself instead, shifting in your seat, arms folding across your own body in the small unconscious gestures of a person who is craving contact. You get to know each other without knowing each other at all.
When the ten days ended and noble silence was broken, the feeling was overwhelming. Tears. Faces turning toward each other as if seeing for the first time. Hugs, the full body relief of contact after ten days without it. My neighbour and I had been living next to each other for the entire course, curious about one another, constructing each other in our minds from nothing but presence and peripheral glances. She had been wondering about me. I had been wondering about her. And when we could finally speak I told her that I had heard her cry one night in meditation, and that when I heard it tears had welled up in me too, and that I had felt from that moment that I was free to cry also. In the shared crying of two strangers who could not speak to each other and could not touch each other something had passed between us that needed no words and needed no contact. Just presence. Just the sound of someone else's grief making your own grief feel less alone in the dark.
On the last day, after ten days of no rain, a heavy downpour came. The sound overpowered the discourse itself, drumming on the roof of the hall so loudly that Goenkaji's voice was swallowed by it. When it ended we came out. A few of us walked straight into the rain. We stood in it and let it soak us completely, stood there alive and laughing and holding each other in a group hug, soaked through, the sky having done what ten days of sitting had been trying to teach us. Everything passes. And when it passes something else arrives. And that something else is allowed to soak you to the bone if you let it. We let it.
There were moments I wanted it to end. When the bell would not come and the legs were trembling and the mind was exhausted, I wanted the last day to arrive. And then the last day came. And when it did I felt something unexpected. Grief. Not for the difficulty. For the leaving of something that had, in its ten days of total demand, become the most honest place I had ever been. I had never been anywhere so difficult. I had never been anywhere so pure.
I feel enormously fortunate to have found this technique. That I went when I did, where I did. That the conditions were as they were, that the hall was full of women, that the rain came on the last day, that my neighbour and I had the moment we had. None of this was guaranteed. All of it arrived. I received it as fully as I knew how.
This is not a destination. Far from it. Goenkaji taught that the work continues long after the ten days end. Morning and evening sittings. The practice returning in whatever city you find yourself in. I am at the very beginning of understanding what that means.
Far from perfect. I dipped my toes in and the toes went in knee deep without my noticing, perhaps up to the shoulders. Vipassana is not a vacation. It is not a retreat in the gentle sense of that word. It is the hardest and most worthwhile investment of ten days I have ever made in myself. Time is so precious. To cultivate strength of the mind is to cultivate the source of everything. Keep the mind as a wild untamed bull, raging, reacting, reacting, reacting, and misery awaits. Train it, and the same world becomes a completely different experience entirely.
See for yourself.