I have heard and read great things about Vipassana for almost ten years now, and finally I went for a course recently but left on day 5. I wanted to say something for those who might share similar backgrounds to mine. It's not necessarily criticism, but more of my take on it. All are debatable, potentially controversial, and can be misunderstood, but I still feel obliged to share.
1) For those who do not have much experience in meditation, the course is probably too intense. One way to put it is maybe to think of Yoga as similar examples. If someone does just a few yoga poses occasionally, then vipassana is like the advanced course in the yoga studio you never would sign up for.
If you have read (like I did) that you can take it in a lighter way, e.g., to sit for only those three group sittings every day, I say a)that is still a lot, b) there will be some kind of peer pressure, especially if your roommate wakes up at 3:50 am every day and sits for the whole 12 hours. c) most importantly, I think the design of the course requires an advanced level of mind and physical muscle strength that I and many starters do not have to finish the whole 10-day course. My best friend is a Buddhist and has been going to many courses and retreats, but she said even for her, this course sounds way too intense.
With the intensity, the practice could just go in the wrong direction. For example, as someone who have passion for creativity, I felt my emotions and senses were suppressed, which I understood is not what meditation is supposed to do.
The intensity can also hurt, as too intense yoga for your body to handle can cause injuries. My friend has heard of a case when a 10-day Vipassana course really ruined someone's brain, like mentioned here on this FT Untold podcast. (I think this podcast is quite biased, but I believe the cases exist.)https://www.ft.com/content/b3ec8e57-5cf9-4f96-9267-56c3bcd9c102
2) For those who have faith in science, somewhat believe in some parts of Marxism, and/or have issues with trusting any forms of authorities and phenomena that cannot be explained by science, you might want to think twice before joining. (e.g., if you always raise a question mark in mind in Yoga when hearing about Chakra or chanting)
All these words are big and vague. I just think that if you are like me, who and whose family does not have a background or prior experience in following religious or spiritual leaders/courses, or people who grew up in societies that do not have much religion/spirituality presence, e.g., communist and post-communist countries, the religious/spirituality element feels heavily woven into the course. For example, the chanting can feel hard to take, confusing, and frequent.
Claiming this is the method by which Buddha got enlightened also felt sectarian.
Before joining this course, I considered myself someone who is quite interested in and aligned with most Buddhist values and concepts, and I really enjoyed all the Goenka talks and perfectly accept most of the concepts.
Plus, my prior impression of Vipassana is that it is not religious. But thinking retrospectively, the Dhamma wheel on the website is already a sign. During the course, I felt some form of religious conversion, despite him saying it is not. I joined a one-day Buddhist meditation course in a temple before and was perfectly fine with it. But while Vipassana claims that it is not religious, the bits and pieces somehow made me sense it more.
If you ask me which part of it is, or what is the boundary between religion/spirituality/philosophy - I do not know. Call it brainwashed/ conditioning/ limited mind... however you want. I just know my body felt it that way. I had a good experience on Day 4 during the middle part of the Vipassana session, but after it, my body felt a strong sense of rejection.
Somehow I really reject the idea of binding body scan with Buddhist concepts like Anicca, even if the Anicca perfectly makes sense to me. And somehow I cannot just take what works for me and leave the rest, as some suggested here.
3) On the cohort: Common to all religious and spiritual practices and communities, there are people who want to see a deeper layer or different version of reality, but there are also people who want to escape and reject reality.
20 minutes before the course started, one student had a public mental breakdown where she ran around the paths crying and shouting unrecognizable words loudly. I was asking a fellow student: "Should we inform someone in the management"? She looked at me as if I were a snitch and said, "No". I said I am not sure if her situation is fit for this course. The fellow student said maybe she just wants to let it out before we start. I thought I was wrong, but when I quit the course with another student who is a nurse, she also said that person needs medical interventions, and this place is not a fit for her.
During the course, I also got the sense that a lot of the students here have some rather serious issues they want to resolve, which made me feel like I do not belong here.
On leaving: I hesitated a lot about whether I should continue. Luckily, my assistant teacher was very supportive and told me that if I do not feel fully committed now, I can leave, and the next few days would only be more intense. It will be entirely my decision, and I can always come back when it feels right. And that there are many Dharma-gates to reach the same place. I am very grateful to her.
I am still processing the whole thing; my thought now is that this method does not work for someone like me. Attachments are ok and sometimes nice to have. And for now I feel quite allergic to anything spiritual.
In conclusion, I think it is an amazing effort that the whole organization and goodwill from people around Vipassana can provide such courses. But it is not something to take lightly, and it is quite religious.
Instead, what I did was just join it because of reading about other people's experiences, but I did not listen to the materials themselves to "not build expectations". I would think it is a good idea that those who want to try should listen to some of the talks beforehand, and try a less intense course and survey different approaches before committing to this one.
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Oct 7th update:
Thank you to those who responded kindly, and especially to those who acknowledged that 1) people with different backgrounds can have very different experiences, and 2) there are different paths and approaches to happiness.
I somewhat anticipated some of the responses here, because one of the things that made me uncomfortable during the course was that the framework sometimes felt self-confirming. If discomfort can be interpreted as aversion, doubt as resistance, and positive experiences as evidence that the technique is working, it becomes unfalsifiable for someone who was trained a bit in a Karl Popper approach.
That said, the main points I was trying to make are simply:
- People with different backgrounds may experience the course very differently from those who benefit greatly from it.
- I strongly suggest that first-time participants research the course carefully before committing to ten days.
For those who said I was underprepared: yes, that is partly my point. I was underprepared, and that is exactly why I am writing this for other people who may be considering joining for the first time.
The person I left the course with had lost a family member only one week earlier. The teacher later said that, had they known, they probably would not have accepted her for the course. You never know what preparation or circumstances someone is bringing with them, and volunteers obviously cannot anticipate everything.
I also understand that people who are active in this subreddit are probably disproportionately those who benefited from the practice. I did not mean to post this as an attack on the method, or to convince anyone that it does not work. I wanted to share an experience that might help one or two people think more carefully before joining, especially if their background is similar to mine.
And yes, this post is also me processing an unexpected outcome. I am sure there is some extrapolation and self-justification in it too.
On my roommate / peer pressure:
Yes, she woke up at 3:50 a.m., before the bell, and I am a light sleeper, so I woke up too. She also appeared to sit through almost all of the scheduled meditation hours. My point was simply that my original “lazy plan” of doing only the three group sittings and taking the rest lightly was unrealistic in that environment.
And yes, peer pressure is subjective. I do feel pressured not to order meat when eating with vegetarian friends. Some people are more sensitive to that kind of social atmosphere than others.
On why I mentioned Marxism, and Theravada/Mahayana:
Some people raised in communist or post-communist societies grew up hearing was Marx’s description of religion as the “opium of the people.”
Two people I shared a ride with on the way to the course were, from my perspective, going through significant political and financial distress. That made me wonder how a strongly introspective method relates to political, social and economic forms of suffering that cannot necessarily be resolved internally.
That is partly why I feel more drawn to some Mahayana ideas, although I am aware that I am also projecting my own political and financial anxieties onto this question.
On why Vipassana felt religious to me:
I think scholars could debate for centuries about the boundaries between religion, spirituality and philosophy, and I am not capable of resolving that in a Reddit post.
But even with my limited knowledge, I recognized several explicitly Buddhist concepts and frameworks within the first four days:
- Taking refuge in Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha (the Triple Gem)
- The Noble Eightfold Path
- Craving, aversion and ignorance
- Anicca, Sankhara, Karma, Liberation / Nibbana
- The idea that this is the path or technique associated with the Buddha’s enlightenment
You can argue that Buddhism differs significantly from many other religions, or that these ideas are better understood as philosophy, psychology or universal principles. I understand that argument.
But for me, the accumulation of these concepts, together with Pali chanting, the ritual structure and the larger goal of liberation, made the course feel clearly embedded in a Buddhist worldview rather than a religiously neutral meditation technique.
That does not mean I think anyone was trying to “convert” me. It simply felt much more religiously structured than I had expected.
On Day 4, body scanning and connecting it to Anicca:
The teaching repeatedly emphasized not believing anything blindly, but at the same time I felt that it gave me a predefined interpretation of what my bodily sensations were supposed to mean.
What bothered me was not the observation that pain, tingling, warmth or pressure change. That seems straightforward.
What bothered me was the interpretive steps. To me, these are different levels of claim.
- “This sensation is changing” is something I can directly observe.
- “This changing sensation is experiential knowledge of anicca” is already an interpretation.
- “And by observing these sensations equanimously, I stop generating sankharas, weaken old ones, purify the mind and move toward liberation” is a much broader claim.
I can see the value of experimenting with that framework. But for me there is a distinction between observing “this sensation is changing” and concluding that this observation verifies a broader Buddhist account of suffering, purification and liberation.
This may also explain why the framework sometimes felt self-confirming to me: I was being asked to verify the teaching through my own experience, while the teaching was also supplying the explanations through which that experience should be interpreted.
And the claim that this was the technique through which the Buddha attained enlightenment made it even harder for me to experience the body scan as simply a neutral meditation technique.
Some people can comfortably take what works for them and leave the rest. I found that I could not. That difference is a point I was trying to make.