Life Lessons Learnt From My First 10 Day Silent Meditation Retreat (Vipassana)

29/05/2018 (1) Life lessons learnt from my first 10-day silent meditation retreat (Vipassana) | LinkedIn
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Amit Somani 3,569 136 256

Early Stage VC | Product Guy | Emerging Blogger | India
Life lessons learnt from my first 10‑day

silent meditation retreat (Vipassana)
Published on May 22, 2018
Caveat - This blog post is NOT intended to teach you how to do Vipassana or
elaborate on the technique. You can ONLY do that by attending the course. I'm
focussing on the life lessons learnt by doing something like this.
About 4 years ago, during my self-imposed jobbatical, I read up a lot of books. In particular,
I explored literature on happiness, mortality, and art of living. I stumbled upon the technique
of Vipassana meditation whose basic premise is to help you see things as they really are.
This technique was "invented" by Siddhartha Gautam Buddha (the "Enlightened" one) and
taught in India about 2500 years ago. While it is a meditation technique, the premise is to
help you get started on the path of becoming a better human being.
The technique was lost for a few millennia. But fortunately, Shri S N Goenka, a
businessman turned meditation teacher from Burma brought it back in the 1970s to India.
Goenka re-created a 10-day silent meditation retreat/program to teach Vipassana. Lots of
material available on Vipassana at dhamma.org.
I started researching this 10-day program in 2014 and realised it seemed quite audacious. It
was a 10 days of complete silence - no talking, no phones, no connectivity, no
reading/writing, no dinner and more. You live in "complete" isolation with other fellow
students while you learn the technique of Vipassana. While it all seemed daunting,
Follow
psychologically and physiologically, I couldn't get past the no dinner. Here, I'd never even Write an a
fasted a day in my life and what was this? No dinner?! This was not happening!
Lesson # 1 Signing up is the first step to any life goals.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/life-lessons-learnt-from-my-first-10-day-silent-retreat-amit-somani/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BUjFu%2F1qGQSmMnic
Search Time progressed and I started 1

mustering some courage to try it
out. I wanted to push myself to
capture my fears and to push my
limits. I wanted to improve my
mental and physical strength.
What's the worst that could
happen? I may not be able to
complete the course. Well, so be it! I decided in February 2018 that I was going to do this
and went ahead and registered for the course in early May.
Lesson #2 Preparation leads to Self‑Confidence

7 days before the retreat.
The fight is won or lost far away from
witnesses behind the lines, in the gym, and
out there on the road, long before I dance
under those lights Muhammad Ali
About a week before that I decided that I would start preparing for the retreat. I listened to
lots of talks, blog posts and other material about preparing for Vipassana. Since lack of food
esp. dinner was my biggest "fear", I decided to start doing only a soup and salad for dinner
about 5 days before D-day. I knew that there would be long meditation sessions involved, so
I decided I would start doing meditation for 1 hour a day, sitting cross legged on a floor.
Since the schedule involved waking up at 4am every day, I started sleeping early and waking
up at 5am. I tried "clearing" my mind of as much of the urgent and important stuff before I
left.
Messaging
I spoke to all my near and dear ones both to let them know that I would be off the grid for 10
days but also to hear their voices (and as it would turn out later, even to hear my own
voice!). It also helped in another big way - I had now made a social commitment to so
many folks so this quest was no longer about just me. I had committed to lots of other folks
that I would make this happen. By the way this is one of my favourite hacks to accomplish
Search any audacious goals. Make a semi-public resolution and then you owe it not just 1to yourself
but also to your friends and family to make this happen.
As it turned out, all of this preparation helped in terms of being mentally prepared. But,
there was more to come!
Lesson #3 We have become prisoners of our own mind, body and spirit
The last 48 hours before the retreat
Now, the real fun began.
Your own selfdoubt - can I really do this? This is now showtime. Will I survive?

Apparently 5-10% of people quit. If I don't and come back "early", will that be a matter of
shame or pride (that I tried)?
The doubts of everyone else around you.
Everyone who didn't know what this was or how hard it was started looking into it. While
the journey had been going on in my mind for months, if not years, the well wishers were
thrown into the eye of "self-created" mental storm. Everyone's fears started multiplying -
someone was worried I wouldn't be able to stay quiet for 10 days. Someone was worried that
I'd never stayed hungry for a meal. Someone was worried that I would have no internet
access! Even my physiotherapist said that I had a nerve compression issue around my knee
and he would strong discourage me from doing this for 10 days or risk 2 months of physio
after coming back. That was literally hours before me leaving for the course! With much
reluctance, he suggested I change my posture every so often during the meditation session
and request a chair for as many sessions as possible.
I was determined. I was going. I was going to find a way to make this happen.
First 24 hours at the retreat: first reactions!
The evening before, one took an oath of "Noble Silence" and signed up for the code of
discipline through the 10 days. The journey had started. First, it was novel. Yes, one's mind
and emotions were a bit animated but one was calming down. The next morning the first
meditation session starts at 430am. That was fine too! As the day progressed, the reality
started kicking in. Each hour of meditation felt long and hard but one was doing fine. Lunch
was served at 11am. That went well too.
As the day progressed, body started "reacting" and the mind started questioning what you
were doing there? Perhaps all the fears were right after all. What about dinner? The moment
of truth is about to happen. No, wait, I've prepared for this. I'm resolute in my belief. I will
make it happen. Ignore all this self-talk. The mind would throw a counter punch - mate, just
wait till dinner! Oh , wait, there's no dinner. My worst fears might happen. Then came one of
the big LEARNING moments in the early days.
The 5pm tea break.
Search As I was walking over 1to the

dining hall, my heart was racing
Amit Somani 3,569was pounding.
136 256
Early Stage VC | Product Guy | Emerging Blogger | India and my mind
Turned out I was partly right but
MOSTLY wrong. I was
anticipating a piece of fruit and
tea. It turned out one got that and
some puffed rice. I've never been
more happier to see puffed rice.
Even a little crutch like that and I
never worried about dinner for the
next 10 days. It was all in the mind!
Lesson #4 Stay in the moment and execute one step at a time

All that said, it is still a hard
program with all the precepts you
sign up for. So, you do need to
have a plan of action.
I remember reading about the

Stockdale Paradox from one of
Generals who was a prisoner of
war. It is a good maxim to
confront tough situations in life
(this is nothing like being a POW
to be clear). It states that you have to have belief and conviction that you are going to prevail
at the end but you have to take it one step at a time.
Another interesting learning that came was in the early days one was computing 10% done,
30% done and so on. However, as the days progressed, that got harder. By day 5, one
realised, it was futile to go beyond the present moment, the present hour, that session.
If you think too far ahead, you won't get through today.
If you won't get through today, you won't get to far ahead.
BEST TO STAY IN THE MOMENT!
Lesson #5 Give serendipity a chance.

Serendipity (n) The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or
beneficial way.
Search Only when you expose yourself to paths less traveled, even if it ends up being for1 the wrong
reasons, you end up learning so much! While I had gone there to push my personal limits, I
had no idea that I was opening some amazing doors to learning about a great technique
about meditation and an even better set of learnings about Dhamma, Buddha's Eightfold
path towards enlightenment.
Last but not the least the bit, the 10-day Vipassana is an experiential learning learning
program where you are taken through all 3 of the above steps. Sila - where the focus is on
living a good moral life, Samadhi - which helps focus on improving your mental
concentration and lastly Panna, which helps you purify your mind and experience your own
wisdom.
Buddha was a big believer of only learn as much theory as you practice and only practice as
much as the theory you know! You experience both the practice and the theory (in that
order) daily during the retreat, typically thanks to the much awaited 1-hour evening
discourse by the teacher, the late Shri S N Goenka.
While Vipassana may not be for everyone, what I learnt about myself if you have something
you really want to do but your "mind" is holding you back, find a way to go for it. Do the
next step. You may just surprise yourself. I know I did.
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Lots of people helped and supported me in this quest to try this out. Special callouts for
former Vipassana meditators who were particularly inspiring and encouraging - Ajay Sethi,
Shanti Mohan, Prasanna K, Pankaj Risbood and Mayank Bidawatka.
(Amit is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture
Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating,
early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership
positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early
stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and
NASSCOM. Find his other blogs on LinkedIn and tweets here @amitsomani)
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kunjay kumar 49m
H.O.D at TMS { A & B fashion PVT Ltd}
It's only YOGA & SAATWIK lifestyle through which one can conquer oneself....!!! Only 20‑
30min deep meditation can bring transformation of thoughts that creates action that leads
to once behavior.....!!!!
Like Reply 1 Reply
Tarun shukla 12m
business development manager

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29/05/2018 (1) Life lessons learnt from my ﬁrst 10-day silent meditation retreat (Vipassana) | LinkedIn

Amit Somani 3,569 136 256