Should i go to vipassana

You can also listen to audio recordings or attend a class for guided mediations. Meditation is the process of redirecting your thoughts to calm your mind. It may also improve your overall quality of life. This is what the research…. Metta meditation is a type of Buddhist meditation. During metta meditation, you recite positive phrases…. Kundalini meditation is a practice rooted in ancient concepts of spirituality and enlightenment.

Here's everything you need to know about trying it in…. Recharge, practice presence, and connect more deeply with a meditation retreat. There's no right or wrong way to meditate.

Discover the technique that's right for you. Meditation may help with reducing anxiety, stress, and depression—find the best meditation podcasts to listen to. Vitamin D has numerous health benefits, but it's tricky to know which supplement to choose. Here are 13 of the best vitamin D supplements, according….

Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. Mental Health. What is Vipassana meditation? What are the benefits? How to do it. Tips for beginners. The bottom line. The 10 days of any silent Vipassana meditation course taught by SN Goenka are part of a guided process through which you learn a certain method of mediation.

This method of mediation is strictly non-sectarian and open to anyone of any religion, race, gender or sexuality. The non-denominational set of principles it employs are universal and no in way part of any dogmatic organisation seeking to convert you or fool you. Vipassana meditation courses are free and rely solely on the donations of old students. This makes the whole process very untainted from vested interests as well as hierarchical structures of power and influence that may distort the teachings.

Vipassana meditation courses take place all over the world meaning you can participate in one just about anywhere. The schedule for the 10 days are exactly the same no matter where you sit your course, so too is the technique. Bilingual courses are also run in lots of different speaking countries — this how I sat my course in Ecuador — and, as the courses are conducted in near silence, so long as you can understand the guided instructions, there is no need for you to communicate with anyone else.

This makes a Vipassana mediation 10 day course a great thing to try while you are travelling. In fact, I know of many people, myself included, who have travelled and participated in many courses in many different centres around the world. Vipassana courses are usually conducted in established centres or other peaceful and secure locations around the world. Normally situated in quiet and rural areas, the centres are great environments for contemplation and reflection.

Although you are in silence for the majority of the 10 days of a Vipassana meditation course, there is always a pastoral team of volunteers there to ensure your well-being throughout the experience. You are able to speak with any of these people at any time should you have any issues, problems, concerns or queries. The secure environment provided by Vipassana meditation courses makes them an excellent place to push yourself beyond your comfort zone — knowing you are still safe and cared for.

Acknowledge that fear and harness your inner courage by signing up to try something difficult and different. Sitting through 10 days of silence at a Vipassana meditation course might seem an impossible task.

However, when you surprise yourself by doing just that, your sense of achievement will show you just how capable you really are. Challenging yourself can massively boost your self-esteem and self-confidence; you push your boundaries, test your resilience and come out glowing with the knowledge you endured something you found both difficult and uncomfortable.

Harnessing this awareness of your own abilities can be a potent catalyst in changing unwanted habits in your life or adopting new patterns of behaviours you may want to effect. Whatever your goals are, sitting through 10 days of a Vipassana meditation course will give you the power to believe they are possible… and the tenacity and strength of mind to achieve them.

As a result, you start to experience fleeting mini-moments of true calm and peace. This can be a very liberating sensation, allowing you to dumb down those negative thought patterns, to-do lists and unnecessary anxieties we all suffer from. To lose these, even for a mini-moment, can grant you a sense of clarity that is far more productive in life than any mental checklists.

In fact, it gives you a whole new perspective on the working of your mind and your behavioural patterns. We all get times when we feel lost, confused or down — and often our families and friends bear the brunt of this. Having an extended period of time in your own isolated world can, ironically, be a grounding and stabilising experience.

Helping you out of an emotional rut you may be stuck in or giving you some fresh perspective, it can bring a new focus to your state of mind. Such practice would have been impossible for me without learning the Vipassana method of meditation and having 10 days in which to silently learn to establish this technique had greatly helped me. Coming out of the silence, you repeatedly feel a renewed sense of gratitude for life in general.

Please be aware that these 10 reasons are taken from my own personal experience and are not certified or guaranteed outcomes. To found out more about 10 day silent Vipassana meditation courses taught by SN Goenka visit dhamma. As you can tell from this article, my opinion is that yes, Vipassana meditation is incredibly worthwhile. Many of my friends have also tried Vipassana 10 day courses following my recommendation and they too have found the benefits enormous. Unlike the many spiders on the veranda, this one was huge.

I leapt out of bed in a panic. Every time I tried to reach the spider, it would crawl in the hole again and disappear. I left the light on, drifting off only to dream about spiders and wake up breathless. Finally I shut the light decisively. At 2am, I awoke to a feeling of deep alarm and turned the light back on. The spider was dropping from the ceiling, right above my head. Gasping, I fell sideways out of the bed.

The spider, as startled as I, hastily clawed its way back toward the ceiling. I watched in horror as it spent the rest of the night eating other spiders in my room. I did not sleep at all. Studies have shown that people who are blind or deaf have heightened ability in other bodily senses. I felt a small, temporary version of this phenomenon at the course. I could not speak or write, but my mind was whirring away at an alarming speed.

Trapped in a cognitive cycle of shame and blame, my phobia of spiders was magnified. The next day, I swallowed my pride and broke my noble silence. I begged the female volunteer leader to let me switch rooms. At that point in the course several people had left, and I was able to move to a different cabin.

For the rest of the week, as everyone else sat on the grass enjoying the sun between sessions, I stayed in my room, too scared to leave.

A friend once said that in life, worrying ahead of time was futile, because what you are scared of never manifests. Instead, what you least expect creeps up behind you and scares you out of your mind.

Or in my case, drops down from the ceiling in plain view. I wish I could say that the spider incident was a turning point. It was simply a bump along the way. By day six, I felt exhausted by the pain, the sleepless nights, and a mind slowly unspooling. Some people talk about intruding memories of childhood or overly sexual thoughts during their Vipassana experience. For me, the challenge was suppressing the urge to run around like a toddler. Instead of doing a body scan, I fantasized about flinging off my pillows and running through the empty space in the center of the hall, screaming like a banshee.

I daydreamed of doing snow angels on the worn carpet, making a mockery of the meditation. When the gong rang, I was covered in sweat from the effort of thinking past the pain. By the end of the course, students often report feeling full body flow of energy during meditation. I did not. I felt shelves of pain along the way, no fluidity between them.

But by the last day I could scan fluidly through arms or my right leg. More importantly, I could refocus my mind away from the pain. I emerged from the course a calmer, temporarily less anxious version of myself. I started to sleep again. The relief of rest was palpable. I wrote down the following takeaways once I was reunited with my pen and paper:. Our collective obsession with finding happiness is not a reason to meditate. Logic and neuroscience might ground the modern rationale for meditation, but to meditate in order to be happy is counterintuitive.

The practice is a counterweight to the jagged peaks and valleys of the human experience. To remain stable when life goes awry is a happier result than grasping for whatever society tells you will make you happy.

So much of what complicates our lives comes from assumptions we make and our reactions to them. In the quiet of those 10 days, you see how much your mind distorts the reality you perceive. You project your fears on to their perception of you.

For me, this meant creating inaccurate stories about the other participants, as well as their reactions to me. I kept falling asleep during morning session, keeling over into the person next to me. I heard the snickers of the group as I righted myself again, and vowed to apologize to that woman as soon as the course was over.