The GREATEST Gift to Humanity

3 mins read

This new edition of Panacea took more time to be delivered than Godot to show up at his date. Your email was about to take a pregnancy test, BUT…

Fear not, I did not stop randomly typing weekly rants.

I was in a place in the middle of the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, to attend a Vipassana course. My 3rd one so far.

The course, with centres all over the world (all ran and funded by donations) is designed to teach people a special kind of meditation technique created by Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) 2500 years ago and reintroduced to Burma 500 years ago and then India by a teacher that received the original technique by his master (and the ones before him) and brought it back to India in its original form as taught by the Buddha.

The name of that teacher is Goenka and at the end of each day of the course you will watch his recordings (recorded in the 90’s and used in each centre, he passed in 2013) that will help you implement the lessons learnt in the day.

This was my 3rd time attending Vipassana and although it might feel like something in between Hare Krishna and Kim Jong Un prison camps at first, I still believe that this is a present to humanity and if each living being was introduced to this at a young age, the human race would be at a different level of consciousness now.

The first course you are allowed to attend goes for 10 days (after that, since you learnt the technique correctly, you can attend shorter courses, 1 to 3 days, and longer ones, up to 60 days) in which you meditate for around 9.5 hours a day: you start by waking up at 4 am with the sound of a gong and for the next 10 days:

• Meditate from 4.30 to 6.30, have breakfast, meditate from 8 to 11, have lunch, a break till 1pm, then meditate again till 5pm, have a tea break till 6pm, meditate from 6 to 7, listen to Goenka discourse till 9pm and after a quick meditation go to bed to repeat all over again.

• You will not talk, touch others and look at them in the eyes, write, read, exercise, use your phone or any technology, leave the retreat boundaries, conduct sexual practices and eat outside the given times.

  In exchange you will be taught a technique that helps you focus on you sensations and not reacting to them.
  
  You will leave on the 10th day and you will realise that the way you react to anything before has changed.

• The course goes by donation, you can donate how much you want, and on top of providing a teacher, accomodation, meditation facility and a quiet place for ten days, you will get 2 meals a day.
  
  But I’m not here to spoiler anything for you, so if you feel the time has come, you can check the MAP of closest centre close to you HERE and book a retreat HERE

The one above is not an endorsing or a sale’s pitch, on the contrary it’s an opportunity. I wish I had access to the information I now consume and write about when I was younger so I hope that by reading this you will get curious and start looking into it, because meditation and Vipassana definitely changed the way I think, act and interact with the world on a daily basis.

You know how the saying goes: if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself.

Vipassana is a gift and I kept thinking how incredible it is that this technique survived 2500 years without being polluted and altered.

If you end up attending one course, reach out to me and tell me your experience, I would love to know how it went for you.