Why I left my hardcore Buddhist Vipassana Silent Meditation Retreat after only 10 Days
(About a 20-minute read)
This blog post is a documentation and reflection of my Vipassana meditation retreat experience during Autumn 2021. I will do my best to relay everything as it happened, but do note that language is, ultimately, a woefully inadequate prison and will never truly do this (or any) experience justice. It’s impossible to completely describe what I lived through during these 10 days. This type of experience must be lived to be understood, and even then, we are going to have wildly different experiences and outcomes. Such is reality.
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I first heard about Vipassana a few years ago from someone I follow on Instagram. She described how she went for 10 days to a retreat in Argentina as a mind wash in total silence. No talking, no singing, no dancing, no reading, no writing, no sex, no music, no art, no yoga, no physical contact, no eye contact, no phones, no computers, no internet, nothing. 10 days with no one but you alone with yourself - I was fascinated and also terrified of the idea. It was a sign I had to go someday.
At the time, I was not in a good place to undertake such an endeavor. I hadn’t started my healing journey, and I was in the midst of a mental health crisis and the idea of going to spend 10 days alone meditating felt too daunting. However, I knew that someday I’d know when the time was right to try Vipassana.
That moment came in early 2021 after establishing a daily meditation practice for two years. I was trying to find different Vipassana retreats to attend and kept applying to the popular and well-known Goenka retreats. They are very popular and impacted, so I kept getting rejected from their courses. The pandemic also didn’t help, as many retreat dates were cancelled.
I was then searching for alternatives and found a center in Germany called Dhammacari Vipasanna Meditation Center. It’s located in the countryside in Bavaria, near Landshut. Their basic course is 15 days, which is longer than the more well-known 10-day retreat. It sounded hardcore, but I figured I could do it. I signed up.
Some background on Vipassana
Vipassana means “to see clearly what is”. It’s an ancient technique that has been practiced for thousands of years by Buddhists around the world. From the Dhammacari website, they write:
“Vipassana means seeing through the true nature of reality or Insight into the true nature of reality. It means seeing things as they truly are. Vipassana is the direct and intuitive understanding of the true nature of all mental and physical phenomena.”
To achieve this, the idea is that you spend an extended time in silence, meditating for 12+ hours a day, with some breaks and mostly fasting. This type of Vipassana comes from the tradition established by Ajahn Tong Sirimangalo, a well-known Thai Buddhist Monk.
The setting and general flow of the place
The basic schedule went like this:
4am – Morning gong / wake up
4:30-6:30 - Meditate
6:30 - Breakfast
7:00-11:00 – Meditate
11:00 – Lunch
11:30 – 22:00 Meditate (with breaks)
10pm – Lights out (at least for the first 9 days)
Tea and water were available 24/7
In the morning, from anywhere between 4am to 11am (except during breakfast) you met with the head meditation teacher and founder, Hildegard, for your daily check-in. Check-ins lasted anywhere between 10-20 minutes or so. You met in the reporting room and she’d start every check-in session with the question, “So, wie war dein Tag?” “So, how was your day?” and it went from there.
There was also one hour of daily “working meditation” where you’d get assigned a task to help with the basic running of the facility. This could be anything from washing dishes, cutting fruit and vegetables, cleaning the common areas, to garden work outside or chopping wood. This soon became one of my day’s highlights (who would have thought I’d come to love washing dishes).
Eating was at 6:30am for breakfast, and 11:00am for lunch. We were not allowed to eat solid food after 12:00 until the next morning. However, at 18:00 or so they would serve a tiny amount of chocolate pudding and allow us one small piece of chocolate as “dinner”. All eating was done alone in our rooms.
There were about 10-12 meditators at any given time and everyone was on their own schedule. This was not a group retreat where we all arrived and left on the same day, but rather everyone came at different times and was on a different number of days of their retreat. Everything was self-paced.
Every meditator had their own room and most rooms have their own private bathroom. The rooms were sparse but cozy. I was very fortunate and got a room with a beautiful view of the garden and a private entrance.
The Dhammacari Center is run by Hildegard, the head teacher, and her full-time live-in staff of four women. They support meditators, keep the place running smoothly, and cook for and serve the meditators.
We were expected to wear white clothing all the time - unless we were outside in the garden then we were allowed colorful clothing.
My experience
Day One
I arrived at the center and got a tour by the resident Buddhist nun, a Mae Chee as they are known. Dressed in all white robes and sporting a shaved head, she looked fairly young, perhaps in her 20s. I wondered what would motivate someone to take vows like that (celibacy!?). I never asked, though maybe I should have.
That day, another meditator named Markus began with me. We exchanged a few words as we signed in, but then quickly went into silence.
The nun took my phone and showed me to my room. She then told me to change into white clothing and cover my visible piercings with tape. Turns out these Buddhists are against jewellery, go figure.
Another staff member later taught me the basic meditations. We started with the mindful prostration, which was how we were to open each meditation session. After the mindful prostration, she showed me the traditional walking meditation. Walking meditation is not simply walking, but a very finely choreographed stepping movement synchronized to your naming the part of the step you’re doing. As you walk, if you realize you’ve had a thought, or hear something, then you say “stop, stop, stop” and then “thinking, thinking, thinking” or “hearing, hearing, hearing” – so you learn to notice when you become distracted from the focus on the walking meditation.
Sitting meditation came after and also had its own set of instructions. We were to focus on the rising and falling of our abdomen as we breathed, then began body scans. After completing the sitting meditation, we were to spend 2-5 minutes doing a lovingkindness meditation where we sent Metta to ourselves, our parents, our partner(s), our family, our friends, our teachers, all living beings near us, and then all living beings. Metta is meant to strengthen feelings of kindness and connection towards ourselves and others.
We could take 15–30-minute breaks between meditation sessions.
On the first day I was instructed to start with the mindful prostration, then 10 minutes of walking meditation, and 10 minutes of sitting meditation. Each day thereafter, they added 5 more minutes. I was allowed to practice in my room, in the meditation hall or outside in the big garden. Armed with a kitchen timer and a giant dose of courage, I diligently went to work meditating for the next days.
When I started my meditation rounds on the first day, I promptly began crying. I felt heaviness, hurt and heartache. I missed my husband horribly already. Doubt and fear crept in – what had I gotten myself into? I think I did my last meditation in the evening laying down and fell into a weird sleep with bizarre dreams.
Day Two
My alarm went off at 4am. Fuck. I have never been a morning person. I stumbled out of bed to splash water on my face and went to do my first sessions before breakfast. To be completely honest, I was able to do one round and then promptly went back to bed until breakfast at 6:30. I was already exhausted and had barely begun.
At breakfast I finally got to see the other meditators. We didn’t make eye contact or speak, of course, but it was interesting to see who else was there. Most seemed under 40 or so. We all got in line with our plates and took turns being served food. The food was actually delicious, I have to hand it to the Buddhists there. They grow a lot of their own food organically and make everything vegetarian. I did eat well – when I was allowed to eat.
After breakfast, I was called in to meet with Hildegard. She gave me a lecture on the Buddhist concept of Tilakkhana, or the three marks of existence, which are: Impermanence (Anicca), Suffering (Dukkha) and Non-self (Anatta).
“The meditator who develops Insight Knowledge will realize that everything inside oneself and in the world outside of oneself is constantly changing, uncertain or Impermanent; is stressful, dissatisfactory or Suffering; and is uncontrollable, devoid of substance, not belonging to oneself, or Non-self.”
She said the essence of Vipassana meditation is to see through the true nature of reality, to see things as they truly are. She then instructed me to raise my time to 15 minutes and get on with my meditations for the day.
On that second day, as I meditated, I began to notice how much my heart hurt. It was as if I had a nail stuck in my heart that had sort of healed superficially but was festering and infected underneath. I knew this had to do with some heartbreak I experienced as a result of ending of a relationship with someone I loved deeply. I wept that whole second day, the pain of the emotions felt so overwhelming. I realized I hadn’t given myself adequate time or space to grieve that ending. I’d been ignoring the pain for months by distracting myself, and now, here I sat in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but to sit with the pain of this loss and whatever else arose. I did my best to focus on my meditations and stay present, but it felt like no matter what I did, the pain just wouldn’t go away. This felt excruciatingly painful.
Day Three
I woke up feeling extremely dizzy and nearly fell over during my first meditation at 4am. I noticed the heartache remained, but it felt a little less powerful. I brought this experience to Hildegard. With regards to the dizziness she said, “things change suddenly, this is no exception”. Regarding my broken heart, she instructed me to not give more energy to the nail in my heart and other wounds I might be carrying there. Instead, I was to only notice the pain, name it, name the emotion, say to myself “let go, let go, let go” and keep focusing on the walking or sitting meditations. She also suggested I try a forgiveness meditation if more difficult situations or people came up who I needed to forgive.
I took Hildegard’s advice and did a series of forgiveness meditations towards the person who hurt me and other people involved in that entanglement. It was heavy, difficult work. I cried so much I thought I’d run out of tears – but they kept coming like waves crashing on a beach. It was exhausting. The depths of the pain and the emotional hurt felt so overwhelming.
At one point, some of the people involved and others I needed to forgive began to appear before me during my walking meditation. I held my hands out to them and began to do a Forgiveness Meditation, as per Hilegard’s suggestion, and a Ho'oponopono Meditation. If you’re unfamiliar with this type of Hawaiian practice of forgiveness, I suggest learning it and doing it regularly for any difficult situation that needs forgiveness. The Ho’oponopono mantra goes like this: “I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you.”
This went on for hours, but I honestly had no notion of time while I was there. Time is literally a construct and when you’re meditating for 12+ hours a day, time truly loses meaning.
The remarkable thing here is that this method works. The more I forgave and gave space for all the grief and pain, the less energy it seemed to take up. The point is to not give the emotion more energy by really going into the emotion, but rather naming the emotion and giving it space to be. All it wants is some loving attention, compassion and acceptance. This wasn’t new to me, I’ve been spending the greater part of the last 3-4 years doing this work, but now I was in a place where I could focus solely on this practice.
Days Four and Five
After doing all these forgiveness meditations is where things got really interesting. It felt as though once I got through all the emotional turmoil and energetic fuel of that breakup, I was able to release the hurt, sadness and anger. However, after that, my mind moved onto deeper hurts and traumas.
Let me explain what I mean with the metaphor of a fire from this blog article from Kelly Robinson’s experience at her Vipassana retreat:
“He (Goenka) laid it out that our minds cling to certain patterns that we’ve held onto for our entire lives. [And our past lives]. These patterns are called ‘samsaras,’ which can also be thought of as karmas. If those words are too heady, you can even think of them as patterns we’ve picked up from our parents, which they picked up from their parents, etc. These samsaras tend to own us in a way, keeping us in a never-ending cycle of craving and aversion. Craving things we like, avoiding things we don’t like. And when we sit for Vipassana we take a break from these cycles and remain equanimous. When we sit for long periods of time without buying into our samsaras, they begin to clear away. The mind begins to clean.
If you have a nice bonfire going and you add more wood to the top, the fire immediately begins to eat the new wood. The old wood stays at the bottom and doesn’t really disintegrate. So when we keep adding new fuel to the fire (new cravings, new aversions) our old junk can’t burn away. But when we sit silently and equanimously, we don’t add new fuel, and our mind can release all the old stuff it has held onto for ages.”
Vipassana retreats essentially condense months of meditation out in the “real world” into a space where you have no more input and have nothing to focus on but the bonfire that you have going inside of you. It is a purification process of the mind.
So, in my case, the most recent “wood” I had thrown on my bonfire was that of this breakup. It was recent, therefore it was sitting on top of the fire and needed to be ‘burned through’ first. What came next was more difficult.
These two days were when I had deeply buried major traumas and resurface. They all had to do with things that happened to me and my family before I was 18. These were long forgotten memories that, I later realized, I never had the chance to properly grieve and process. I simply had to get on with my life and survive after these things happened.
It was here that younger versions of myself appeared to me. 16- and 17-year-old Mariana in the room with present 30-year-old Mariana. I took them both by the hands and embraced them. I was sobbing and crying as I held them. They were both so scared, sad and lost. I told them it was okay, that everything would be okay, that I’m here for them, that I take good care of them now, that we’re all safe, we’re all okay, that there is nothing to fear because I can provide for and protect them. I felt all three versions of myself, past and present, merge into one. This happened during a walking meditation. I took 16- and 17-year-old Mariana by the hand and we all stepped forward together in the walking meditation. It was powerful and difficult inner child work.
Day Six
I remember feeling significantly lighter after working through all these traumas, wounds and hurts. I had a clear day of really good sittings and I reached a level of focus I had never before achieved in my life. This was especially true during my sitting meditations. I could see my focus and attention as my energy and I could remain completely thought-free and focused on where I directed that energy. As I did the body scans, my focus moved with laser sharp precision to where I sent it. I felt powerful and calm.
I brought this to Hildegard who said to not get so focused on my focus [sic], that this is just the mind trying to grasp or cling onto something – as it loves to do. Fair enough. Though after this day, I felt like I could do the rest of the time without any issues. Hildegard warned me that “anything could happen or change at any moment”. And oh boy was she right.
Day Seven
I began to get restless and antsy in the meditations. I felt I had no more major things to grieve or process. The only highlights of this day were a dog stealing my meditation cushion when I left it unattended briefly, and what happened with Markus.
Markus, the co-meditator I had started with, left the retreat suddenly and without saying goodbye (obviously). This threw me into a bizarre panic, which was interesting to observe. Here was someone I’d barely spoken to but felt a camaraderie with. I felt we were in this together. Our once-a-day sneaky eye contact making were sustaining and motivating me to keep going. Just before I completely freaked out, I asked one of the staff members where he went. Turns out he had already planned to only stay for seven days. I was relieved. In my mind I had made up dozens of wild stories about him leaving early to due the difficulty of this retreat, or that something grave had happened. This became a good insight into how our minds create unfounded worries and stories.
Days Eight and Nine - aka why I left my Vipassana retreat early
After Markus left, I came to a very strange point I’d never reached before. I can only describe it as something similar to the agitation that comes with boredom, but somehow deeper. I was beginning to meet some of my more camouflaged demons.
I was meditating in my room and everything was completely calm around me. The garden was idyllic, the room was warm and clean. Everything was objectively okay. However, inside me I felt like I had a raging category 5 hurricane with an electricity and madness so great that I didn’t know what to do. Suddenly the room began to spin around me. There was so much turmoil and chaos and intensity inside of me all of a sudden. The bizarre part is that it was completely born from nothing. There was no drama, person or situation I was reacting to – it was just me, alone in this room, sitting with the agitation that rests in the deepest parts of my being.
It’s the demon that wants expression, movement, novelty, adventure, intensity, creativity, destruction, art, chaos – the part of me that wants to carpe diem the fuck out of every moment I have on earth in this incarnation. I’ve long known this demon quells briefly when I go dancing at Berlin clubs for hours without drugs, outlasting my friends. It’s the fuck-it-all energetic supernova that rages inside of me.
Had I reached the inner depths of my madness? Was I going crazy? Am I crazy? Here I sat nakedly with myself. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
I did my best to observe it and name it as I had been doing with all the difficult traumas and emotions that arose in the prior sittings. But this was a different beast. I spent those two days oscillating between what felt like total madness and lack of focus, to complete focus, calm, and allowing the madness to be.
Up until Day 9, I had truly stuck to all the rules and intended to stay the full 15 days. But my breaking point came during one of my check-ins with Hildegard. She instructed me that I had to do all but one meditation session locked inside my small room and only get five hours of sleep.
I had noticed that some of the other co-meditators were suddenly not going outside anymore. The weather was beautiful and I was genuinely perplexed at why they were confining themselves to their rooms. At this point it all became clear – this was what Hildegard had told them to do. To spend 16+ hours a day meditating alone in their rooms.
I had been doing a wonderful mixture of meditations inside and outside my room. I was enjoying being outside in nature, in the garden and to be told I now had to spend the majority of my days meditating inside my room, I completely lost it. Anger arose in me; she was effectively sending me into solitary confinement with sleep deprivation. Nowhere on their website does it say that this is part of the practice.
On the 9th day, I escaped to the forest nearby and took a long break between meditation sessions. I talked to the trees and plants. I danced and sang. I stopped caring. That night I took out my smuggled notebook and furiously wrote for hours nonstop until my hand cramped and I went into a frenzied sleep. I had broken almost all the rules.
Day 10
I was torn. Do I stay or leave? I was leaning towards leaving, but the pressure to stay was enormous. Doubt crept in. Would everyone on the outside be disappointed in me? Would I lose my credibility as a meditation and mindfulness coach? Do I grit my teeth and suffer through this solitary confinement nightmare? Do I stick it out and keep breaking the rules?
Also, the dogmatic rigidity of the place and religion was giving me major catholic and cult-y vibes. I realized I had put myself in what amounts to hardcore Buddhist boarding school. As a recovering catholic, I’ve spent my entire adult years unlearning and healing from the rigidity and oppression of that religion. When anything gets too dogmatic and rigid, I’m out. Plus, I’m a free spirit who detests and rejects authority and rules.
I closed my eyes and meditated on it…getting wholehearted bodily FUCK NO and FUCK OFF. What would the point of staying be if I was just going to break the rules every day and stop giving a fuck? I knew I needed to go.
I spoke with Hildegard that I wanted to leave. She tried to talk me into staying the last five days. She said I was in the middle of a beautiful cleansing and healing process and that I would suffer greatly if I left early. She said she wasn’t attached to me leaving, that I was free but that it would be “such a pity” if I left. I held firm, but had three other well-meaning staff members try to talk me out of leaving. The pressure to stay and conform was enormous, but that just showed me that it was really my time to get the hell out of there.
I cleaned my room, packed my stuff, got my phone back and called my husband. He was surprised but happy as he didn’t expect to hear from me for another five days. I got a ride from one of the center’s staff to the train station, who still continued to try to talk me out of leaving. It just got annoying at this point.
Leaving Dharma Jail and Reentering the World
My dear reader, you have no idea the profound joy and ecstasy I felt when they dropped me off at the train station. It felt somewhat akin to what I imagine it might feel to be freed from prison and solitary confinement. I felt absolutely enchanted seeing people around me and the landscape outside the train. The colors, sights, smells, textures…everything felt richer and more wondrous - especially the huge greasy portion of Pommes (french fries) I bought at the Munich train station as my first meal in the outside world.
I was still dressed in all white, which got me some funny looks, but I spoke with some strangers on the train, recounting my experience. They were impressed and horrified, and I guess I am, too.
Arriving in Berlin, my husband was on the platform waiting for my arrival. I jumped into his arms shrieking with glee – human touch is an amazing thing. We embraced in the richest, warmest way, tears streaming down my face, making up for the deprivation I’d just experienced.
Since that day, about two weeks ago now, it’s been a slow and strange process to integrate the experience. I’ve felt pretty disconnected and have gone into somewhat of a rebellion, throwing myself into the Berlin party scene on the weekends for some mild excess and enjoying all kinds of pleasures. So swings the pendulum sometimes. I’m now feeling more grounded and reconnected with myself and the world, taking things slow, seeing friends and meeting clients again.
I have no regrets about leaving early. I had originally set out to do 10 days and achieved that. I do feel proud of myself for honoring my boundaries, speaking up, standing up and advocating for myself in the face of great pressure. This was not easy and as a recovering people-pleaser, this was a major “win” for me.
I have a lot more overall reflections about Vipassana and some mini-stories which I’ll save for another blog post, but overall, I do recommend it and think everyone should try this at least once in their life. I believe the world would be a radically different place if a 10-day retreat (I think 15 is a bit much, to be honest) were a rite of passage for everyone.
Would you ever go on a Vipassana meditation retreat? Have you done so already? Would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to drop me line if you want to talk about it.
