15/05/2026
After 10 hours of meditation per day for 10 days straight, here’s what I discovered…
Oh and there was also no speaking, no eye contact, and no screens during this time.
240 hours of pure silence at Dhammakaya Temple.
This is Vipassana, a technique passed down from Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) and it is a method for seeing reality as it is.
The practice is simple in theory but it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Here are 3 lessons the silence taught me:
1. The mind is like a wild monkey🐒
The instruction is simple: sit and observe sensation.
But the reality can become chaos.
My mind spent days swinging wildly between the past and the future, chasing long chains of thought before I could catch it.
The work is to calm the monkey mind down and sober it up so that we can bring our attention where we want, when we want.
2. The external is a mirror of the internal 🪞
Nothing changed around me, yet some sessions felt like pure bliss.
Oberving the pattern on a leaf was enough to spark total joy.
Other sessions were pure anxiety, making me want to quit and run.
I was in the same place, in the same body.
The only variable was my internal state.
We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.
3. Time is a continuum, not a clock 🌀
Our linear understanding of time is a social construct.
During difficult sessions, the last 5 minutes of meditation felt like an eternity, while the entire 10 days vanished in a blink.
Time doesn’t move; we move through it.
Its “speed” is determined entirely by the quality of our consciousness.
I came out of this experience realizing that while the world is chaotic, the path to collective change starts within.
As they say at Dhammakaya: World Peace through Inner Peace.
When we purify the internal, we purify the world - one soul at a time.
Eternal gratitude to .official for organizing, and to every beautiful soul who shared the silence with me.
It was amongst the most difficult experiences of my life, but easily one of the most rewarding 🧘♂️✨
