Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
A Gentle Warning Before You Read
If you’re looking for a blog post that breaks down what Vipassana meditation is, what a typical day looks like, or any logistical details – this isn’t it. You’ll find plenty of other resources out there that cover those aspects in detail.
This post is a raw and subjective account of my inner experience – some glimpses into the internal shifts, realizations, and challenges that arose for me throughout the process. If you’re curious about that, then read on.
This is a journey of resistance and surrender. The absence of distractions stripped away the noise, leaving the constant hum of desires, memories, dreams, and questions.
For years, I had felt drawn to Vipassana – a 10-day silent meditation retreat. No external input. Just me, my mind, and the breath. I told myself I’d do it one day, when the timing was right. But was there ever a right time to strip away everything familiar?
Still, the call grew louder. The weight of unprocessed emotions, the relentless noise of life, the never-ending search for clarity – I knew something needed to shift. So, I finally said yes.
I arrived not as a beginner to inner work but as someone who had spent years plunging into the depths of healing – shedding old skins, dying, and being reborn over and over again. And yet, as I stepped into the silence, I felt the weight of something I couldn’t name pressing against my chest.
It wasn’t fear, exactly. Nor was it excitement. It was a kind of knowing – that I was about to meet something I had been avoiding, something that had been whispering from the edges of my awareness for a long time.
I have always been drawn to intensity – to practices that crack me open, that bring catharsis, that move me in ways that make me feel undeniably alive. The intensity and depth of plant medicine. The deep tremors of breathwork. The ecstatic release of dance, of sound, of primal movement. The raw vulnerability of therapeutic containers where the walls between me and my deepest wounds dissolve. Through diving into my pain, engaging fully with every layer of my being. I had danced my grief, screamed my rage, cried my eyes out, and allowed my body to be the instrument of my own liberation.
And now, here I was, about to enter a space where none of that would be available to me.
Vipassana was asking me to stop.
No movement.
No speaking.
No music.
No human touch.
No distractions.
Just this moment. Just the breath.
To meet everything, not through movement, but through stillness.
To face whatever arose, not through expression, but through witnessing.
And as I stepped into that silence, I felt both ready and utterly unprepared.
Because how do you prepare to meet yourself without distraction?
How do you prepare to sit with everything that has ever shaped you, with nowhere to run?
I didn’t know.
All I knew was that I was here. And there was no turning back.
Unless I wanted to make the conscious choice to leave.
And that would’ve also been okay if it was done in the name of self-love.
I trust myself to make these choices now.
The Gift of Stillness & Meeting the Inner Landscape
The first morning began with the sound of a gong at 4 a.m. – a soft, steady vibration rippling through the silence, calling us to rise.
Admittedly, I fell back asleep during many of those early morning meditations. I’ve never really been a morning person, and over time, I’ve learned to accept that about myself rather than forcing something unnatural. But still, something in me stirred – a quiet knowing that I was stepping into something vast, something that would strip me down to my barest self.
Later, as I walked toward the group meditation hall in the most casual clothes I could find – stripped of jewelry, of the aesthetic beauty that usually weaves into my identity – I could feel the weight of my mind pressing in.
Thoughts. Stories.
A thousand small whispers of resistance.
What am I doing here?
What if I can’t do this?
What if I lose my mind?
What if all I find is emptiness?
What if it’s too painful?
Familiar voices. The same ones that surface whenever I stand on the edge of something unknown.
Whether through ceremony, deep therapeutic work, or the wild, uncharted terrain of a transformative retreat, they always return – the guardians at the threshold of change.
I sat down. Closed my eyes. Followed my breath.
At first, it felt simple. Peaceful, even. The inhale, the exhale. The rhythmic rise and fall of breath in a room full of silent bodies. A part of me thought:
Maybe this won’t be so hard after all.
There was relief in surrendering the need to do anything. My life is built around movement – creating, guiding, healing, holding space. A relentless devotion to transformation, both my own and that of others. It’s beautiful. It’s meaningful. But it can also be exhausting.
And for the first time in what felt like forever, there was nowhere to go. Nothing to plan. No one to care for.
Just me. Sitting. Being.
The Body Speaks
Eventually, the silence became something tangible – a presence in itself.
At first, it felt like a void, an emptiness I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet. But as I settled into it, I realized that silence is not empty at all. It is full. It holds everything.
And within that silence, my body began to speak.
In words, thoughts & sensations – the subtle language of aches, tensions, and flickers of energy moving beneath my skin.
I had tried to meditate with my mind alone, focusing on my breath, attempting to still my thoughts. The practice is very simple, but not easy.
Vipassana invites us into endless body scans – patiently, persistently, from top to bottom, bottom to top, over and over again. Or at least until Goenka’s chanting signals the end of the session – a sound that, strangely, grows on you, simply because it means relief from sitting still for an hour. For 10 hours a day.
My mind swirled between restlessness and focus. My body felt heavy with exhaustion. So many times, I could barely keep up with the rising and falling of my breath before my thoughts swept me into memories, visions, long-forgotten sensations. And sometimes, despite my immense effort to stay present, I drifted into sleep.
It didn’t take long before I started resisting elements of the practice. The structure felt rigid.
And yet, I found myself battling an inner voice that said, You’re being a spoiled brat. Why can’t you just surrender?
I sat with that too.
I saw how often I equated resistance with entitlement, as if struggling meant I was ungrateful, as if wanting comfort made me weak. A familiar feelings from plant medicine ceremonies. But the truth was, both could exist – I could deeply appreciate the teachings and still question them and feel uncomfortable in it. I could honor discipline and still listen to my body’s needs.
So, I did what I could. I skipped some of the early morning meditations but committed fully to the group sits. I gave myself permission to balance self-discipline with self-compassion. And in doing so, I found a way to stay – not out of punishment, but out of choice.
Then, one morning, I woke with a deep, searing pain in my shoulders and neck.
Maybe it was the way I had slept, my neck twisted into some unnatural position.
But maybe it was something else. Something old. Something buried. Something that had been waiting – perhaps for years – to be noticed.
My mind leaped ahead, projecting suffering onto the day ahead. I debated with myself about asking for a chair, like many others had done for extra support. Instead, I chose to sit with the pain.
And ironically, that was also the first day of Adhiṭṭhāna – the practice of strong determination. A challenge to sit as still as possible, no matter how uncomfortable, itchy, or desperate the body became to move.
That first session, I committed fully. I didn’t flinch for the entire hour. I remember the power of that experience – how accomplished I felt, how proud of my discipline. Later sessions were far more difficult. But that first one showed me something profound: when I truly devote myself, I am as unshakable as a mountain. Yet, when my whole being isn’t fully aligned with my commitment, everything becomes a struggle.
Physical pain comes and goes.
Emotional pain comes and goes.
It’s all impermanent.
Learning to be with it – fully – is liberation.
This pain was not a punishment. Not something to fear.
It was a doorway.
A doorway into the parts of me that had been waiting to be seen.
A doorway into the wisdom of my body – the knowing that had always been there, beneath the noise, beneath the stories.
The body remembers what the mind forgets.
And in the silence of Vipassana, without distractions, without movement, without any of the tools I had relied on before, I was finally able to listen.
That’s when it happened.
The retrieval.
The purification.
Not through clarity. Not through ease. But through something more primal, more elemental.
This was a cleansing.
A scrubbing, cleansing me from the inside out.
Vipassana doesn’t give you an escape. It doesn’t let you bypass discomfort. It doesn’t allow you to pick and choose which parts of yourself to keep and which to leave behind.
It scrubs everything.
And in that cleanse, I found myself facing pieces of my past I thought I had already healed.
The betrayals I still had to fully feel and all the mind loops associated with them.
The heartbreaks I had intellectualized but still needed to be grieved.
The words I had swallowed instead of speaking.
They all returned – not just as memories, but as sensations during meditation.
A tightening in my throat.
A rawness in my chest.
A sharp, electric heat in my hands.
I had spent years engaging in deep healing work – soul retrieval, parts work, somatic therapy, plant medicine, breathwork, movement. I had danced, cried, purged, screamed, and surrendered in more ways than I can count.
And yet, here I was, sitting in absolute stillness.
And it felt like I was just beginning.
Because this was different.
This was without story. No music to carry me. No ceremony. No guiding voice reminding me that I was safe.
Just me, sitting with everything I had ever run from.
But then, the mind began its work.
The first thing that surfaced was the past. Not as a distant memory, but as something alive – woven into the very fibers of my body.
I saw the faces of people that have hurt me. Felt the imprint of their touch. Heard the echoes of words whispered in moments of tenderness, or shouted in moments of hurt.
The ones I had loved so deeply it had hurt.
The ones I had left.
The ones who had left me.
The ones who had shattered me in ways I never thought I’d recover from.
And with them came longing. Not just for them, but for the me that existed in those moments. The version of me who had once been so open, so unguarded, so full of belief in love.
I wanted to reach back. To soften the sharp edges of loss. To rewrite the endings.
But in Vipassana, there is no reaching.
There is only observing.
So I observed.
I felt anger so hot in my solar plexus, burning through me with an intensity that took my breath away.
I let grief rise – thick, heavy, unrelenting.
I let longing wrap itself around my ribs, squeezing tight.
I let myself ache for everything I had lost.
And then – eventually – it passed.
Not in a way that erased it.
Not in a way that made it all feel okay.
But in a way that revealed something simple and undeniable:
That all of it – the love, the loss, the longing – was just energy.
Not something to cling to.
Not something to fight.
Not something to solve.
Just something to witness.
And as the days stretched on, this became the rhythm of my practice.
Grief would rise. And then it would fade.
Anger would surge. And then it would soften.
Memories would pull me under. And then they would let me go.
And in between, there was space.
Stillness.
A quiet presence beneath it all.
Even longing showed up – this time, not for people, but for the aliveness of life itself.
For stimulation.
For laughter.
For dancing under a starlit sky, barefoot and free.
For being wrapped in the arms of friends.
For the thrill of creation – the electric energy of a new idea taking form.
For the pull of the unknown, the hunger to explore, to travel, to taste the world.
And yet, Vipassana invited me to see it for what it was: another thread in the tapestry of craving.
Another way my mind tried to resist the present moment, convincing me that something out there – somewhere beyond this cushion fort I had built to support my body, beyond this silence – was more real, more meaningful, more me.
I watched it all.
And then, the deeper question emerged:
If all desire is suffering, does that mean I must rid myself of it entirely? Is wanting to love, to dance, to create, to serve others something to transcend? Vipassana teaches detachment, that freedom comes from letting go of craving and aversion.
But wasn’t it also desire that had shaped my entire path – my longing for healing, my hunger for truth, my devotion to living fully?
Maybe the suffering wasn’t in the wanting itself. Maybe it was in the grasping, in the belief that I could not be whole without fulfilling it.
So, I sat with it all. The wounding, the wanting and the witnessing. The hunger and the spaciousness. The paradox of being human.
Who am I without all this?
If I was not the one healing…
If I was not the one carrying stories of loss, of longing, of love found and love lost…
If I was not the one constantly reaching, searching, seeking…
Who was I?
And deeper still – who was I beyond all of it?
The one who had always been there.
Silent. Steady. Observing.
And maybe that was enough.
And instead of moving through it, this time I let it move through me.
Tears came and went – not in a flood, not in anguish, but in steady, quiet streams. A gentle washing.
Grief softened into gratitude. Pain dissolved into openness. The sharp edges of old wounds became something else – something that no longer needed to be held so tightly.
I had spent so long fearing this process. Fearing the stillness.
But now, as I sat there, breathing, watching the rise and fall of my chest, I understood.
Purification isn’t about getting rid of anything.
It’s about letting everything be touched by presence.
By breath.
By love.
And in that presence, everything changes.
Everything heals.
And then there were my dreams.
Lucid.
Vivid.
An endless display of my conscious and subconscious minds intertwining realities.
I had always been a vivid dreamer, my unconscious painting landscapes rich with symbols – some familiar, some utterly foreign. But something about the silence, the stillness of Vipassana, made them sharper, more insistent.
My dreams became portals, unraveling unhealed wounds, tangled family dynamics, and echoes of past relationships.
Symbols emerged – mushrooms, grotesque scenes, holographic tools, a bee butterfly weaving webs of light not wanting to be captured. My childhood home expanded with psychedelic new rooms, holding new hidden dimensions. Cleaning the hidden gunk beneath the shiny white tiles. Cleaning the mess that wasn’t mine to clean. Flowers whispered for me to drink them, jewels shimmered, waiting to be embodied.
Each night, the veil thinned, revealing not just my past, but glimpses of who I was becoming.
They weren’t just dreams.
They were messages.
This was my unconscious revealing itself, layer by layer, asking me to witness the things I had left submerged and I was now purifying.
In one specific short day-nap, I was thrown into revisiting the betrayals that had shaped me into who I am today.
The heartbreaks that had cracked me open.
The moments when trust was shattered, when love was lost, when I stood in the wreckage of something I had once called home.
I had already done the work around these wounds before – applied therapeutic modalities and expressed my feelings, sat in medicine ceremonies with the intention to heal my heart, spoken words of forgiveness. And they healed a few different layers. There was another layer to be revealed.
This was cellular.
The betrayal lived in my body.
It was there in the way my shoulders tensed when I felt unsafe.
It was there in the tightness in my stomach when I let someone get too close.
It was there in the part of me that still flinched at the thought of trusting again.
My dream revealed the longing – to express how their avoidance had wounded me, to be met with even the slightest acknowledgment. Just a hint of accountability. A trace of responsibility.
Instead when I opened my mouth all that came out was “I love you”.
I woke up right in that moment.
And in that dream, I didn’t need to force it.
I just needed to witness it.
True forgiveness isn’t something we decide.
It’s something that happens when the body is ready.
It’s a softening, a surrender, an exhale that comes not from the mind, but from the deep, unseen places where the pain was first stored.
To sit with the hurt parts of me the way I would sit with a grieving child. Not rushing them, not silencing them, not telling them they should feel differently.
Just being with them.
And in that presence, something shifted.
An instant release.
The quiet breaths of something new.
The Mandala Effect
One day, during one of my walks through the incredibly beautiful birch forest surrounding the meditation hall, I noticed a small heart made of red berries placed carefully on the ground.
Oh, how sweet, I thought. I’d love to be more creative like that.
These forest moments quickly became some of my favorite parts of the day. The quiet, the fresh air, the way the sunlight filtered through the trees – it all made space for something softer to emerge.
I started gathering leaves, pine cones, ferns, moss, and branches, arranging them into a little mandala along the pathways we shared. The next day, another mandala appeared. Then another. And suddenly, they were everywhere.
I remember laughing to myself – of course this happens when you gather a bunch of women and give them nothing to do but meditate and take short walks. We create because it’s in our nature. As much as we are observers, we are also the divine creatrix.
On the final day of the retreat when we could exchange words, not just the occasional glance towards each other, I spoke to one of the women who had started making mandalas after seeing mine.
She told me how much she had been inspired. But I had only been inspired by that tiny heart of red berries someone else had made. And isn’t that how it works?
Creativity moves through us like an invisible thread, connecting us, whispering, Here, let me show you something beautiful.
The path of integration
Desire is the breath of creation – the longing that pulls life forward, shaping our experience in every moment.
In some traditions, such as Vipassana, it may be seen as the root of suffering, something to be transcended through detachment and observation.
But what if desire isn’t the enemy?
What if it is the very fabric of our becoming?
In other traditions and lenses, desire is not a flaw to be purified but a sacred intelligence moving through us, calling us deeper into life, into embodiment, into intimacy with the mystery.
When we meet it with presence rather than suppression, we begin to see that beneath every craving, every ache, is something profoundly tender – a part of us longing for connection, safety, expression, or love.
Rather than rejecting it, we can turn towards it, listening, feeling, allowing it to unfold without grasping.
In this way, desire becomes a path of devotion, not to external fulfillment, but to the raw, unfiltered experience of being alive.
Vipassana didn’t give me a singular moment of enlightenment.
It didn’t erase my struggles or make me immune to the complexities of being human.
What it did was offer me a deeper relationship with what is.
A bridge between stillness and movement.
Because I am not just one thing.
I am the part of me that longs for silence, for retreat, for the pure simplicity of just being.
And I am the part of me that dances wildly under the stars, that loses myself in music, that finds the divine in movement as much as in stillness.
I am the part of me that journeys deep into the unconscious, searching for truth in symbols and dreams and plants.
And I am the part of me that lives fully in this world – in relationships, in love, in heartbreak, in laughter, in messy, beautiful imperfection.
I am the part of me that creates – because creation is as natural as observation. The part that sees beauty and wants to add to it. That arranges leaves into mandalas, that shapes words into meaning, that lets inspiration move through me like a quiet, unseen current.
I am also the part that struggles to focus, that is bored out of its mind, restless and seeking.
The part that bursts in anger when it feels injustice – toward myself, toward another – when a boundary has been crossed, when something sacred is disregarded.
The part that coils in shame when the sting of failure seeps in, when the raw nerve of not being good enough is exposed, when the cringe of imperfection makes me want to disappear.
And yet, I am all of these parts, woven together, learning to hold them with love.
Vipassana didn’t teach me to reject any of these parts.
It taught me to embrace them all.
To purify and alchemize them.
To sit with my fire and my water.
To hold my grief and my joy.
To meet myself in every form I take.
Because integration isn’t about choosing between stillness and movement, between desire or detachment, between discipline and surrender, between structure and flow.
It’s about weaving them together into a life that is whole.
And that is what I take with me.
Not the need to escape.
Or to meditate for 2 hours every day.
Not the illusion of an arrival point.
But the quiet knowing that whatever arises – I can sit with it.
And in that sitting, in that witnessing, in that unwavering presence –
Everything transforms.
When one experiences truth, the madness of finding fault with others disappears.
S.N. Goenka
Feel free to drop me a message with any insights if something in you resonates with my journey!
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