Last week I shared about Metta. This week, the Vipassana practice itself.
Vipassana is deceptively simple. You sit. You scan your body. You observe whatever sensations arise. Tingling, pressure, heat, pain. You do not react. No scratching. No shifting. No chasing pleasant sensations or trying to escape unpleasant ones. You just watch. Sounds easy. It is not.
The core teaching is that suffering comes from two habit patterns: craving (clinging to what feels good) and aversion (pushing away what feels bad). Every time we react, we deepen those grooves. Vipassana is about breaking that loop.
Day 6 was rough.
I had intense pain in my back and knees during a determined sitting, where you commit not to move for an entire hour. Everything in me wanted to shift, to escape. My brain was basically screaming at me. The teacher kept repeating one word: anicca. Impermanence. This sensation, like all sensations, will pass.
So I stayed with it. I watched it. And something strange happened. It dissolved. Not because I forced it, but because I stopped fighting it. I don’t fully understand why that works. But it did. After that, even the painful sits felt different. The pain still showed up, but my relationship to it had changed. Less panic, more “okay, here you are again.”
What struck me later, once the silence lifted, was realizing I was not alone in struggling. Grown men had been crying through those same sits. We were all facing forward, suffering quietly, not knowing everyone else was going through it too. There’s something both humbling and relieving about that. I’ve been meditating about an hour a day since I got back. I feel more emotionally balanced. Not because difficult feelings don’t show up anymore (they absolutely do) but because I catch myself a little faster before the old grooves take over.