*6th October 2025* A lot of my friends have talked about their experience with Vipassana meditation and it has been something I've really wanted to do for a while. I never found the time (or maybe courage) to do it until I finally decided to take the plunge and took a 10 day course with dhamma.org to explore the technique as taught by S N Goenka. Here's a reflection on my experience with the course. I've tried to avoid going into details of the course and the teaching itself and this is intentional. While a lot of those aspects were amazing and worth mentioning it is my hope that those who read this will take the course themselves and I'd like you all to discover it and appreciate it the same way I did. Perhaps, this is my educator lens at work but the thing that struck me most about the entire course was how well designed it was. The 10 day course is an incredible lesson in pedagogy particularly with respect to creating the best environments for learning to happen. When I first heard the rules and schedule of the course I felt it to be quite draconian and with not enough freedom for participants. However, now in hindsight it's clear that each and every choice made was made with intention and lot of thought so that participants may effectively learn meditation. I've struggled with meditation and have hardly been able to spend more than 10 minutes at a stretch. At the course, the complete lack of communication, the routine and the diet all made it much easier to get started with meditating. Within a day I was able to get to a point where 30 minutes at a stretch was not too difficult. I initially thought that going to a ten day meditation retreat is diving into the deep end to learn swimming but now I realise that actually the real world is like trying to swim in the ocean and a course like this is the shallow end of the pool. The course has one hour of instruction and discourse every day about the technique, and the philosophy behind Vipassana. The discourses were beautifully structured and S N Goenka delivers them brilliantly. The [[Praxis]] works absolutely brilliantly here. I was also incredibly taken in by how well communicated the philosophy was. I've often struggled with explaining what I'm working on and hearing the discourses gave me a lot of ideas on how to express ideas in their simplest form for anyone to understand. Unsure if this is the brilliance of Buddha or S N Goenka but the universality of the communication was incredible. Coming to the actual meditation, I felt that Vipassana is a really good technique that worked quite well for me. I've always found body scans to be the most effective for me and Vipassana takes that to a whole new level. When I thought of meditation I always imagined that it would come with - focus, compassion, purpose, calmness, sharpness and relaxation. From my perspective I felt Vipassana helped a lot more with compassion, calmness and purpose more so than focus, sharpness or relaxation. I was a tad disappointed in this regard since I went in with more expectations of focus and sharpness but I will say the jury is definitely still out since it remains to be seen how life goes post the experience. Expectations for the course were set quite well for me from my friends who I spoke to before signing up (perhaps a bit too well). I went in thinking it would be the hardest thing I would do and that it would be incredibly life changing. While I wouldn't say either of those ended up being true for me, Vipassana was a beautiful experience and one I'm really glad I did.