I kept a Maun Vrat for 10 days and learnt a lot about life

About Vipassana Meditation, the subconscious mind and life lessons

I was in Hyderabad for about 12 days, 10 days of which were spent in complete maun vrat (vow of silence) owing to the rules at Dhamma Khetta, Vipassana International Meditation Centre.

This vow of silence is unique since it not only entails no talking, but no gestures too. It not only asks for no usage of electronic items (phones, tabs, earphones, etc) but also no reading of any material and no writing or journaling. This practice emphasizes on the practical learnings of Vipassana Meditation. No notes are required, they say. After spending these 10 days, I agree.

I first heard about Vipassana Meditation in 2015 from a 73-year-old Canadian man who was just returning from the centre at Igatpuri. I was intrigued but I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to not talk for 10 days. I used to be quite talkative then.

My Facebook post of 2015 after meeting that person

I still applied for a course at Igatpuri, and then got cold feet when I received a call from them. I backed out.

I later joined MDI Gurgaon that year for my PGDM in Marketing. I met people like Devesh and Anuj who had already pursued a Vipassana 10-day course before. They encouraged me to give it a try soon. Devesh suggested that I’d like it since I could lose weight this way owing to the vegetarian food there and their no-dinner policy. Ashish was then planning to go for Vipassana himself after our graduation in 2017. I was inspired by the three but afraid. I was attached to my chattering self.

Later in March 2020, I applied again for a Vipassana course in Karnataka. When I received the confirmation, I also received my visa and flight tickets for an official trip to Australia. I chose the latter.

Finally, after living alone for 2+ years owing to the pandemic, I am now habituated to being silent for long periods in the day, and comfortable to the idea of a maun vrat.

This time, Nidhi suggested that I apply for the course again since I have always dreamt of it. Now I have the time for it with no urgent work awaiting my presence. I was however, worried about the no-reading-or-writing part. Reading and writing are the only things I do when I am alone. I then pestered Harsh, Rithika and Saurabh, all of them had done this course before.

“It’s a lifetime experience. Go with an open mind and see,” Rithika motivated me.

“I easily lost 8-10 kgs. You may too,” Harsh gave me hope.

“Do this course and you’ll understand why no writing would be required at all,” Saurabh concluded. Saurabh’s an ardent follower of Anicca and has mentioned the same in his blog too.

All three of them also added that I could leave the course any time I want to without necessarily completing it.

I finally took the leap of faith.

Any Vipassana centre would never be too far from the city yet not in the middle of the city. It would be just in the outskirts but still easily accessible by the city transportation service providers. When I reached the premises in Hyderabad, I wondered if I was in the wrong place since there were so many residential houses nearby. When I walked further in, I realized they had space enough for about 150 students and miscellaneous trees and gardens. 7-acres.

I was prepared to stay in a dormitory but to my surprise, I got a single room with an attached washroom. Western commode. Pro-tip: Arrive in the first half of the day and you may get a single room too.

We were 40 women. Men have a separate section and we are not allowed to trespass on each other’s territories. Some women were too chattery. While I was completely quiet when I checked in, I ended up becoming one of them by the evening-

An elder lady, about 73 years old was asking one of the organizers if he never gets angry at all. He had done Vipassana 20 times, and he said his anger has reduced. She said it should be completely gone. I intervened saying that you are allowed to be angry in your regular interactions, you just don’t have to kill yourself in the anger. (Something Guruji later taught us on the ninth day). Other women then started talking to me and asking me more things.

The maun vrat began from 8pm on the day of our arrival. It included not touching each other too.

Some women didn’t take the maun vrat or no-touching policy seriously. They spoke in whispers and gestures. Some women would keep looking at me like peddlars on the street of France - if I may even a little eye contact, they would smile at me and eventually sell me some hashish, or in this case, some words. I was strict in maintaining my silence. I knew that it was important for our healing and growth of mental faculties.

During these ten days, we are allowed to speak to the teachers though, and the administration for any requirements. Speaking to the teacher, made me understand a few things by the third day-

1. It’s about strengthening our will power to sit for long hours and trusting the process without giving up hope in the initial days.

2. Our skin is the largest sense organ. We invariably feel minute sensations on our body throughout the day and the night. Our subconscious mind feels them but doesn’t send the message to the conscious mind since the conscious mind needs to handle bigger things outside the body, like my fingers need to sense the keys on the laptop, look at the screen, interact with people, etc. We call it Gross Reality. And hence, we can’t sense the blood flowing in our veins, and a microscopic particles on our skin. It’s about strengthening the mind enough to receive signals from the subconscious mind about those sensations - the Subtle Reality.

3. It’s about building our patience by waiting to feel those subtle, momentary sensations. As we wait, we simply observe our breath. One continuous sitting lasts for one hour. For about 40 minutes, I could sit still like a statue. Post that, I kept changing postures every 10 minutes.

Emotionally, as I live in the present, I often forget a lot of things about the past. Some hurts and incidents remain deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind but we hardly remember them consciously. On the sixth and seventh day, these memories started emerging. I even shed a few tears but didn’t feel a lot of anguish. Since, I am a counselor myself I have always worked on my past hurts and griefs myself using different psychological methods to eventually let go of them. But we are not allowed to practice any other methods there in the centre. So, I didn’t practice any deliberate methods or tried too hard to overcome them.

But by the ninth day, a lot of good memories automatically started replacing the sad ones. These too were long lost and deeply ingrained in my subconscious. Since I had taken therapy before, a lot of my inner child healing work had already been done. With Vipassana, a whole new level of inner child healing was being done in the course. I had never seen that coming.

Here are a few lessons I learnt over these ten days--

1. There’s absolutely no merit in arguing about our religious beliefs. Similarly, there’s no merit in arguing about our philosophies too. Case in point: When a monk asks Guruji for his time, Guruji says he has no time to discuss philosophy, but only the meditation technique. I had a few arguments with Mr. B before this on our drastically different philosophies. I realized it was just a waste of our time. I keep telling people- All Roads Lead to Rome. In the heart of every philosophy is unconditional love, compassion and letting go of resentments. Choose whichever method works for you. Choose whoever (Coach / Counselor / Healer) works for you. If you don’t like a philosophy entirely, just take what you like and ignore what you don’t.

2. Anicca - everything changes. Even at a celestial level, the planets are changing positions every moment. At a cellular level, our cells are shifting positions, degenerating, regenerating every moment. The weathers change and so does life. The hard days, the soft ones, the good days, the bad ones. Everything. Saurabh wrote the same in his blog as ‘This too shall pass’.

3. Pleasure is not happiness. We often feel like our momentary pleasures are real happiness but they are not. So that Netflix series you watched, that dinner party you hosted, that brief romantic encounter you had, the beautiful vacation you had with your loved ones - these are all sources of pleasure, not happiness. If they were real happiness, you wouldn’t feel bad to go back to work on a Monday morning. When you are really happy, you live in the present, you look forward to tomorrow. Acceptance. Allowance. Happiness is constant because it is accompanied with inner peace. It’s when you know that externalities cannot break you.

4. Externalities cannot bring you down when you are peaceful internally. Case in point: An angry priest instigates Buddha for a physical fight. Buddha says - You have brought me a gift. But I don’t want to take it. So, you can take it back with you.

5. No Craving. No Aversion. This is the central message of Vipassana meditation- to observe our sensations but not generate any craving towards them or any aversion against them. We usually like things and then we overthink the liking enough to crave for it. Or we dislike something and generate enough aversion against it. We end up creating misery for ourselves. Misery is the obsession towards the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. To overcome those miseries, we need to learn not to crave for things desperately or to averse them enough to create rage.

6. Paraphrasing Guruji’s words - ‘Anyone who hears of Vipassana for the first time, knows that it is for them. They end up taking the course some time or the other.’ Such is other life decisions too from a spiritual perspective. If you know something is for you, you know it the first time you see it. You may then fill yourself with doubts and queries. You may even delay the process. But in the end, you do what you were meant to do. You do what you really wanted to do, even if you wanted it in a momentary spark of true and deep desire.

On the 10th day, they allowed us to speak to each other after 10am. That’s technically 9.5 days of complete silence. Guruji said it is a shock absorber. I could understand why.

By the 10th day, I had started feeling vibrations in my body. The vibrations I keep talking about from a spiritual awareness which is very intuitive in nature, were finally felt in the physical sense at a molecular level. Yes, our skin and body shakes and often so. We just don’t realize it in our regular lives until someone puts a large speaker in front of us and plays it in top volume.

So, on the 10th day when we spoke to each other, every word they spoke created vibrations on my body, especially on my arms, each of different intensity. It made me corelate the physical proofs with my intuitive knowledge. Every word creates a different vibration in the body. This is why the words we hear, speak to others and to ourselves are important. Conscious living involves being careful of the words we choose. I was grateful to have this experience. It only strengthened my belief in the energy work, the work with the subconscious mind and the work around regulating the nervous system that I do.

As I traveled my way back to Bangalore from Hyderabad, I realized I was calm even though I hadn’t used any of my regular psychological methods. I handled things calmly even though unplanned incidents tested my patience and calm. So, I guess the meditation worked.

My overall take on it?

1. I am usually a highly optimistic person. While some people call me positive, a handful of elderly people might think of me as delusive. Vipassana, on the other hand, has a very realist approach to life. To the point, I sometimes wonder if it is actually pessimistic. Just after Vipassana, I got a few reality checks in the form of incidents with people. It gave me good life-lessons without making me cry. Those reality checks were important. But I am still on the fence about not being optimistic since I don’t operate that way. My optimism has always worked for me. Only time will tell what sticks and what doesn’t.

2. We are supposed to practice this two hours a day in our regular life. Do we have that kind of time? My deliberate thought work is fast. My Angel therapy is much faster. My limiting belief clearings are even faster. I do intend to practice ‘shila’ though -the first part of the meditation technique where we observe the breath. It’s the same practice Aditya sir taught us as restful sleep method a few months back.

3. Overall, I found that the technique is very masculine in nature. When I say masculine, I talk of the dominant energy in the practice. It talks of hard work. It talks of remaining still for the entire one hour. It makes you feel grounded. While, even though I may look like a cool / manly / aggressive / broad shoulders / masculine figure (I mean how people call me a bro), my default energy is very feminine in nature. Feminine energy talks of love, compassion, dreams, spiritual energy, etc. This is something called Metta that they teach in Vipassana but very briefly and on the 10th day itself. I doubt that other people learnt this well in just one day. While I found out that I have been practicing this from the time when I was 11 years old without actually knowing that it was Metta. So, I am again on the fence on how my energies will unfold in the near future. I doubt that I would go to a predominant masculine energy, while the ideal scenario would be to nurture a good blend of both masculine and feminine energy. Only time will tell.

4. But overall, the last 10 days were brilliant for my healing regarding many important matters of my life involving all my affairs from relationships to health to career. I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.

   P.S. I didn’t lose an inch or even a kilogram. The hopes given by Devesh and Harsh were all false. :-D

   The management fed us all well. Breakfast from 6.30am to 7am. Rest from 7am to 8am. Lunch from 11am to 11.30am. Rest from 11.30am to 1pm. Tea and a light meal from 5pm to 5.30pm. Rest from 5.30pm to 6pm. And meditation at all other times, from 4.30am to 9.00pm.m

Did you too have a Vipassana experience? If yes, I would love to hear your insights.

Also, what did you guys think of my pre-scheduled mails while I was gone? Let me know what you think.