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The general theme I'm seeing in this thread is that vipassana is not for beginners, not a panacea, and not representative of buddhism/meditation/mindfulness as
by lhorie 5y ago
The general theme I'm seeing in this thread is that vipassana is not for beginners, not a panacea, and not representative of buddhism/meditation/mindfulness as a whole. There are multiple people downthread comparing intensive vipassana retreats to diving head first into high impact sports.
The problems that the OP experienced appear to be directly related to this dynamic (doing a 10 day retreat a mere two years into meditative experience, and characterizing his practice as gateway drugs), whereas several comments are pointing out the importance of the eightfold path (a system aptly named after eight pillars of conduct) as a prerequisite, or suggesting less "hardcore" east asian traditions.
On a more fundamental level, I'm actually surprised nobody brought up yet the basic fact that sitting on your ass for 12+ hours per day for days on end gets physically painful. Just google "vipassana back pain".
My takeaway would be: don't assume all meditation techniques are the same. Vipassana retreats in particular strike me as quite extreme commitments.
- denton-scratch 5y agoVipassana is not like a week at a spa. No ten-day meditation retreat is for beginners. I had been meditating daily for ten years before I ever did a seven-day retreat. You certainly don't need a ten-day retreat. Even a one-day retreat is rather extreme, for a beginner. A two-hour session, starting with instruction, and ending with 30 minutes of practice, is a reasonable way to approach Vipassana as a beginner.
- lhorie 5y ago> Vipassana is not like a week at a spa. Right, I was conflating two separate points there: one is definitely about lengthy extreme programs, but another is that some people mentioned that it's better to spend more time with other forms of meditation (e.g. samatha) to develop other aspects of the eightfold path first, before getting into vipassana.