How 10 Days of a Vipassana Meditation Retreat Changed My Life (and Helped Me Let Go of My Ex)
This is the Story of How During 10 Days of a Silent Vipassana Meditation Retreat, I Changed My Life Forever
Vipassana meditation is one of the oldest forms of meditation. It was taught by Gotama Buddha more than 2500 years ago. This mindfulness technique focuses on developing awareness of the present moment through observing your bodily sensations. It means seeing things as they really are. Benefits of Vipassana range from reduced stress and anxiety to greater compassion and self-awareness.
At meditations centers around the globe, you can practice this meditation practice for 10 days at a silent retreat.
Now, let me tell you the story of my first 10-day retreat I went on in September 2023 at Dhamma Sukhakari, the meditation center in Suffolk in the UK.
It was the hardest and most beautiful thing I have ever done in my life.
My 10-Day Course Starts with the "Gong" at 4 AM
A gong sounds. Aches in my ears.
I wake up, reaching for my cell phone only to realize that it is locked away for ten days. Instead, I grab the battery-operated alarm clock that last woke me up when I was in tenth grade.
It’s 4.00 am. For a moment, I think I'm at a school camp. Then I remember the gong again and feel my legs that definitely aren’t as agile as they were when I was sixteen and still working out.
I put on my sweatpants and hoodie, squeeze through the dorm door with my toothbrush in my hand, being extremely careful not to touch or look at anyone. Any form of communication is forbidden.
Minutes later, with my teeth brushed and my right temple aching, I am standing outside the meditation hall under the new moon, cursing my ex-boyfriend and thanking him at the same time.
It's been a year and I haven’t let him go - but I’m hoping that 10 days of silent meditation will do the trick.
Day 1: Getting to Know The Teacher Goenka and my Anxiety
We are let into the dimly-lit hall by the volunteers. The men enter the hall at the same time from their side, where they sit separately from us.
I have my own square of mat, allocated to me with the number twenty-four. I sit down on my meditation cushion and look around. Some of the women around me are already grabbing a second and third cushion from the pile next to the entrance door. Facing us is the teacher, who is easily over sixty and prefers the hardcore meditation version without a meditation cushion. A few of the older women, because all age groups are represented here, have wooden backrests.
I don't yet know that the longest two hours of my life are about to begin, because I've never meditated for two hours before and because my circulation isn't really stable at four in the morning.
The Vipassana Meditation Technique
The so-called assistant teacher sitting in the front presses on a device that plays an audiotape. I hear a deep male voice in English with a South-Asian accent. It is Goenka, the late senior teacher of the Vipassana technique, whose recordings and instructions on the technique have made him immortal. Goenka says that we should focus on nothing but our nostrils and the breath flowing in and out.
I struggle through thousands of thoughts about being tired and about the breakfast my stomach yearns for. About the people sitting next to me who keep moving to the left and right just like me, about my ex. Suddenly I feel dizzy. I open my eyes twice. Eventually, the nausea passes, but the first backache comes.
The Vipassana Course Schedule: Breakfast, Meditation, Walking, Lunch and Fasting
After meditation, I have breakfast. I eat my porridge with relish and am still full of anticipation, eagerly waiting for something special to happen.
Then, we meditate for another hour, which I somehow manage to get through, even though I have far too many thoughts again.
During the breaks, we can go for a walk in the large garden. We're lucky because it feels like late summer again in the fall. The sun shines warmly on my face. I watch the different types of butterflies flying around the garden and perching on the colorful flowers. The gong announces the end of the break and the next meditation.
During “dinner”, I inspect the orange in my hands and wait for it to look more orange or somehow more exciting. Nothing happens. Half a day of meditation is not enough for the great enlightenment or a change in perception. My social anxiety hasn't improved much either, I think, as I bite into my orange and a splash of juice and a piece of pulp land in the teacup of the woman with the prominent nose sitting opposite me, who always raises her eyebrows so critically and is now doing it again.
She doesn't touch the tea again and I spend the next two meditation sessions thinking about this awkward social interaction and resolve to peel the orange next time so that I don't splash anyone when I gnaw on it and ruin any more “dinners” consisting of tea and two units of fruit. Although I don't talk to anyone here and have hardly any social interactions, I think about the few that do exist. About when I join the food queue, whether the others think I'm always in the front third. About the fact that the woman with the gray, shoulder-length hair and the stern look, who reminds me of my former history teacher, doesn't like me and that I therefore take a different route when she comes towards me during our walks so that I don't think about it anymore.
That's the first big emotion that comes up. The emotion that has been stuck in my subconscious since my childhood: Anxiety.
It's the last meditation of the evening. I no longer think about the orange or my history teacher doppelgänger. I only feel the breath touching my nostrils. The way it flows in and out. And for a moment, it's quiet in my head. Then my heart starts to beat faster. The nerve endings in my fingertips feel as if they want to discharge but can't. I feel like I'm standing at the S-Bahn stop in Berlin again, where I waited for my ex on our first date. Or like I’m meeting his best friends again. They're asking me lots of questions, I'm blushing as always and my ex looks away instead of taking my hand.
Anxiety. I fall asleep with the feeling I know so well. Praying it will be gone the next day.
Day 2: Sitting with Anxiety
I sit in the meditation hall. The anxiety is still there. My stomach is grumbling and screaming for a (peeled) orange. I'm supposed to sit here for two hours and calm down. Although calming down is wrong. Goenka says that I should observe my sensations and not react to them. Regardless of whether what comes is neutral, pleasant or unpleasant. Observe and accept everything that is.
But I don't want to accept it. I want to get rid of it and my ex too and I want to be angry and yell at him that he could have been there for me more in front of his friends instead of leaving me alone because he didn't know any different. At the same time I think to myself that it would have been nice, but it's not his responsibility, it's mine, and I'm just afraid to show myself as I am in front of others. To love myself completely as I am, even with the blushing and nervousness in my stomach.
And after spending a day with my Anxiety and watching it and the last gong of the day sounds, some kind of energy wave rushes through me starting in my stomach and discharging through my fingertips.
I am free. I am finally free. The anxiety is gone. Probably not forever. But something inside me feels different.
I want to hug and love little Marie, who is standing at the blackboard, trembling with a red head, looking at her classmates. At that moment, I have a lot of compassion for her and whisper in her ear that she's great the way she is. She stops shaking, her head is still half-red. She looks at her history teacher and delivers her presentation without fear in her stomach. I don't avoid the history teacher doppelgänger since then either. I still peel the orange out of consideration for the others.
Day 3: The Day During my Vipassana Retreat I Feel Anger the Way I Have Never Felt it Before.
I wake up with the worst back pain of my life and an anger that feels like all the PMS aggressions I've ever had combined.
I'm angry at everything today. At the pain, which towards the afternoon also moves into my legs and burns like I'm meditating on a pile of stinging jellyfish. At the teacher who won't give me the backrest even after asking twice, even though I'm sure my right shoulder is swollen. I'm angry at the other women who got a backrest from her. I'm angry at myself for being angry, even though I'm never actually angry.
I'm angry with my ex. At last. It's taken more than a year. Now, in my head, I can finally tell him why he makes me angry. Because he never fought for us. Because he didn't love me enough to put any work into the relationship. Because a goodnight was too much for him or a response to my I miss you. Because he made promises that he never kept.
Day 4: Still Angry.
At some point, I stop being angry at him and start being angry at myself. At the fact that I've put up with all this for so long. That I lost sight of myself. That I loved the potential of a person and not the reality. That maybe, it wasn't love at all, but dependency. That I didn't let go of him for so long.
Day 5: Days of Silence also Make me Grateful.
I fall asleep and wake up. Without the anger. Without the bad back pain, the shoulder swelling and the fiery legs.
I am no longer angry. I am grateful. That I was allowed to get to know him. That we had a wonderful time and also a bad one and also for everything that came afterwards. For the one year of not being able to let go. Because otherwise I would never have arrived within myself the way I have now.
Day 6: Bliss or This is What MDMA Must Feel Like.
I feel like I'm back at school and like back then, I'm an overachiever. I want to get everything I can out of this technique. I want to see results. Success. I want to meditate my ex-boyfriend out of me molecule by molecule.
I want. I want. I want.
During the lunch break, a butterfly lands on my arm. I don't move and just look at it, sitting there on my cardigan sleeve, looking beautiful. After the retreat, I google it and find out that it's a red admiral. It has black spots on its orange-brown wings. I imagine that, like ladybugs, I can make a wish. I wish my ex-boyfriend out of me.
I never thought I would feel so High on Life during a 10-day Vipassana Course
The butterfly flies away, I stretch my back once more against the brick wall of the hall and get ready for the sixth meditation session of the day. As I sit for a while and Goenka begins to sing while I scan my big left toe millimeter by millimeter, it happens: I am overcome by the most beautiful feeling I have ever felt in my life. This is probably what the drug MDMA feels like (I have never tried it), or true love or becoming one with God, if they exist, and at this moment they exist for me.
I lose sense of time. I lose sense of myself and my body. I have no more pain.
I am a rush of glittering molecules. I am stardust and I am aware of it for the first time. I am a summer meadow under auroras surrounded by colorful butterflies and the taste of kinder chocolate on my tongue. I am my ex-boyfriend and me kissing when our love was still light, only a thousand times more beautiful. I am cherry blossoms in the spring wind and the city at night after the first summer rain. I am the world as it will be when we all wake up and love each other and there is finally peace.
Then I'm back in the meditation hall with my face covered in tears and my mouth and eyes open. Because I can no longer meditate. Because I don't understand what has just happened, and yet at the same time I do. At least my heart understands, only my head lags behind.
The gong sounds.
I run out of the hall into the summery fall air and cry. I look at the trees and the blue sky and the butterflies landing on the lavender.
During the evening meditation, I have half-forgotten the feeling. I crave it. I want it again.
Day 7: Craving.
I find myself waiting. I'm waiting for something big to happen again. For another great feeling to rush through me. This incredible happiness.
I want it right now. I become impatient. I don't accept what's there. But nothing happens during meditation. I get annoyed. Frustrated.
And then I panic.
The Meditation Technique: Observing your Sensations on and inside your Body
Goenka explains the next steps: “Some students manage to move into their body with their attention. Once they have explored every millimeter of their body and skin, they explore their insides. Until the whole body is just sensations on the outside and inside. Until they only feel atoms that vibrate and they finally dissolve and become one with their environment and thus one with everything. Those who succeed in this can release the deepest blockages.”
My heart is racing. I want to dissolve too. I want to dissolve my ex and all my fears. I need to work faster.
I start at my face and try to work my way inside and feel something behind my eye sockets, but I don’t feel anything. My right shoulder hurts, my legs are burning like stinging jellyfish again. When you're in pain, Goenka says, you can't and shouldn't go inside.
I open my eyes, stretch out my aching legs and look around the hall. The older students in the front row, who have been on at least one retreat, are probably already in the process of going inside.
I close my eyes. My legs start to hurt again. Frustrated, I move my attention into the pain, which turns into a pulse that disappears and comes back seconds later. Then my right shoulder hurts. I sigh and try to feel the spot behind my eyes. Nothing.
I'm running out of time.
Day 8: The Butterfly and Letting Go.
I am frustrated. I am nervous. I am impatient. I'm not moving fast enough.
I can feel a few spots behind my face, my heart and, if I assign it correctly, my lungs, but I haven't gotten to at least ninety percent of the inside of my body yet. I won't be able to dissolve at this rate in three retreats.
I no longer waste any thought on my ex, but only on the fact that I want to feel this great feeling again. I am a little amused by my thoughts because I never thought I would want to dissolve and that that would be my biggest problem in life. But most of the time, I'm frustrated.
During lunch break, I let the fall sun shine on my face and keep on meditating because I'm a good student and I finally want something to happen again.
A flutter. I open my eyes.
The ladybug wish butterfly aka the red admiral is sitting on my cardigan sleeve again. I don't move and have to grin. I wonder if wishing my ex-boyfriend out of me has already worked. When I feel inside myself, it's hard to tell. I can't think of anything except dissolving. Should I wish for that too if I can't manage it myself?
I sigh and the butterfly flies away.
The gong sounds. My heart is a panic heart again. The next meditation begins in ten minutes. I close my eyes and start again.
Learning To Trust Changes Everything
And then I become aware of what I'm doing here and what I've been doing all my life. Even with my ex. I didn’t trust.
I don't trust life. I don't flow with it, I fight it. I want everything to happen the way I want it to. I want to be in control of what happens tomorrow. In control of my partner still loving me tomorrow. Everything going according to plan. According to my plan. I can't let go. I can't let go of my ex because I don't accept what life gives me. I want to change everything - even the things I can't change. It’s incredibly exhausting. And it doesn't have to be. Life can be so beautiful. It can be so beautiful not to fight and to be patient. To let yourself be surprised.
And suddenly the magical rush that once flowed through my body and unloaded at my fingertips comes back. It's not that blatant feeling of happiness, but I'm free. Free from this feeling of having to control everything. Free from my ex-boyfriend.
Because this is the moment when I finally let him go.
Day 9: Feeling Forever Changed after the Vipassana Meditation Course
I'm lying on the meadow next to four other women, watching the morning dew glisten on the blades of grass. How the grass sometimes sways to the left and sometimes to the right, not fighting the wind but blowing with it, and I cry because I’m deeply happy.
It's a morning in October, I have no more back pain, no more anger inside of me and no more anxiety in my stomach. No more of my ex-boyfriend in my head and no more in my heart.
I'm full of something I can't name. Maybe it’s love. Love for this experience that has changed everything in me forever.
Day 10: How a 10-Day Silent Meditation Retreat Brought Me Peace and Love.
The familiar gong.
I wake up and don't turn to the side for another five minutes like I usually do. We humans get used to everything, including getting up at 4.00 am.
I am as full of anticipation as on the first day. I look forward to every single meditation, because with every meditation I am more in the moment and feel more of the love that I felt sporadically throughout the year before this retreat. This energy rush of love or spiritual chills (I don’t know how else to describe it) that I now feel every day. The rush that flows from from my heart over my thighs and upper arms and at some point takes over my whole body. I really feel as if I am no longer matter, but millions of glittering atoms.
Fuck, I've become spiritual. And for the first time, I'm owning up to it. For the first time, I want to shout it out into the world. I finally want to share with others what has happened to me here.
I jump out of bed and flick on the light, not thinking for a moment about what my three flatmates might be thinking or whether I'm blushing as I squeak into the room: “How are you?”
Breaking the Silence
On Day 10, we are allowed to break the silence. Day 10 is the transition day into the real world, which will hit me like a shock and which I have forgotten is very different from the peaceful meditation retreat world.
We talk about what we thought of each other, because we haven't all met before, and share our experiences and the sometimes psychedelic experiences we've had during meditation. No matter who I talk to, I have goosebumps of energy when I look at them and listen to them. They look different somehow. I see more details in their face. I have become more aware of them.
Today we are not doing a typical Vipassana meditation in the sense that we consciously perceive and scan our body, but we are doing a so-called metta meditation or loving kindness meditation. We meditate for all other living beings in this world to be happy and peaceful.
Tears stream down my face as I think of my family and friends and all my ex-boyfriends and the people who have touched my life in some way. I think of all the people sitting here with me and feel deep inside myself and know that there is this love in everyone. In some it is buried much deeper than in others, but I know with absolute certainty that if we become quiet with ourselves, and sometimes that means ten or more days, and listen to the silence, we will find love.
And I have to cry again, because the world would be a different place if we meditated instead of waging war, which sounds silly and naive, but it's the truth. I wish everyone this feeling that I feel right now and dream of a world as peaceful as this retreat.
