Vipassana Meditation in Nepal

I recently completed 105 consecutive hours of silent meditation over 10 days, breaking only to eat and sleep. It was the most challenging and bizarre experience of my entire life. Here’s the story.

In late August I emerged from a month-long mountaineering expedition, and checked into an Islamabad hotel with no plans for the remaining few months of my travels. On a whim, I booked a flight to Kathmandu, figuring I’d eventually want to return to the mountains, and Nepal is the place to do so.

In Kathmandu, my days were filled with proper cold brews (finally), gin and tonics on the patio of my rented apartment, frequent outings to Sam’s Bar, and a healthy dose of boredom:

After two weeks of the above I was ready to move again, but September is monsoon season in Nepal, so mountain-based activities would have to wait. I had heard from other travelers about the infamous Vipassana meditation course, which is free of charge and conducted worldwide, and decided that it was time to try something new. The course is notoriously difficult, which was immediately apparent as I agreed to the Code of Discipline while registering online. Here are a few elements of the Code of Discipline:

• “Noble Silence,” meaning no speaking, gestures, or eye contact with fellow participants, was to be maintained for 10 days

• Reading, writing, music, cell phones, and even physical exercise (apart from light stretching) were all prohibited

• Dinner was nonexistent. After 11AM, only small portions of fruit could be eaten

The Code of Discipline was somehow less concerning than the course schedule, which was also presented in the registration process. Below is a photo of the course schedule. Note that the option to occasionally meditate in our room, as indicated in the course schedule, was false advertising. We were given no such option.

Once registered, I had serious reservations about actually attending the course. I was afraid that I’d struggle immensely, leave early (which is highly discouraged but incredibly common), and feel a great sense of failure. However, I eventually concluded that trying and failing was a lesser failure than not trying at all. So I departed Kathmandu for the town of Lukla, which is both the gateway to a vast network of trekking trails (including the route to Mount Everest), and the site of the meditation center.

There are two ways to get to Lukla: a 30 minute flight or three days of jeeps and hiking. Naturally I chose the latter option, as I had plenty of time and sometimes enjoy overland travel. Lukla also holds the title of “World’s Most Dangerous Airport,” which was perhaps factored into my decision as well.

Despite the safety record of the Lukla airport, I may recommend to fly. The first jeep was 16 hours in duration, the second jeep continuously got stuck in mud and was an 8 hour affair, and the hike was legitimately challenging and took a full day. I didn’t see a single other foreigner throughout the journey. Some photos:

Even from Lukla I was hesitant to actually show up to the meditation course, and was hoping I’d be presented with a valid reason to bail, like some cool people who’d invite me to do literally anything else instead. Unfortunately I was presented with the opposite: a Russian guy at my guest house who had completed the same meditation course in Taiwan, and had a large tattoo related to his learnings in the course. It was a sign, so I set off for the meditation center with two other foreign participants, Jenny and Franzi, whom I’d met in town. The center was a 30 minute hike from Lukla:

I was able to take photos of the meditation center when my phone was eventually returned. Here’s the women’s house:

Here’s the meditation hall, and the kitchen and dining compound:

There were 12 participants in the course, with an even split between both men / women and foreigner / Nepali. We were able to speak to one another on the day we arrived, and they were universally horrified to learn that I was attempting the infamous Vipassana course having never meditated before. After briefly meeting the others, the Noble Silence began at 8:00pm of “Day 0”.

There were two exceptions to the Noble Silence concept: we could speak with the meditation teacher at specified times, and we could write to the staff on a note pad. Most wrote trivial things, like “can I have toilet paper.” Meanwhile, I got into heated arguments with the staff via the note pad. For example, a jar of peanut butter was left on the condiments table, and I’d eat spoonfuls of it at “dinner” time, since we were only served a few pieces of fruit. The peanut butter mysteriously disappeared one day, and a brawl to return the peanut butter ensued on the notepad. I was not victorious.

On the morning of Day 1, we were awoken by bell at 4:00am to assemble for the first meditation session of the day: a two hour, pre-breakfast sitting. No more than 5 minutes into the sitting, I was questioning whether or not I’d last until the end of the first day. Two hours later, I placed my odds of finishing the course at less than 5%. I couldn’t fathom 103 more hours of physical pain (sitting on the floor for extended periods hurts badly), let alone the mental pain induced by the circumstances. However, to the great surprise of many, myself included, on the last day I was the only foreigner remaining at the center, apart from an Iranian meditation instructor.

I wish I could say that the desperate urge to quit subsided with each passing day, but it did not. Every moment of every day, until the very end, I was overwhelmed by the desire to leave. But I managed it in two ways:

1. In the beginning, I repeated to myself: “you’re not a quitter and you will complete the course.” Ironically, this didn’t actually work in my favor. Completing the course felt like far too great of a challenge, so this rhetoric resulted in a significant amount of psychological angst. I learned that if I could acknowledge that I may not be there at the end, and instead simply tell myself “today is not the day you leave,” I fared much better mentally. In other words, I completed the course by telling myself that I’d leave the next day, but not the current day, every day for 10 days. It may have been unorthodox, but it worked.

2. I learned how to meditate. One conceptualization of the course is as follows: the circumstances induce insanity through silence, physical pain, boredom, and sleep deprivation, and through meditation, you are taught to endure these circumstances by focusing your mind intensely on the present moment. The meditation didn’t make the circumstances any easier, but it did allow me to occasionally curb my desire to walk out, since this desire usually arose when my mind strayed from the present moment to think about how many days, hours, or even minutes were left.

On the last day, we broke the Noble Silence and I learned that every person at the center thought I’d be gone by Day 2. Nope!

We took this group photo with the volunteers, the teachers, and the participants who completed the course (about half of those who started):

I then hiked back to Lukla, went straight to the airport, caught the next flight to Kathmandu, ate dinner for the first time in 10 days, and returned to Sam’s bar for gin and tonics.

Would I do it again? While it is relatively common to take the course multiple times, I would not even consider such a thing. Am I glad that I did it? Absolutely. I learned two important things: how to meditate, and the strength of the human mind.

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