Vipassana with SN Goenka: Pros & Cons

“Do not meditate to get the right attitude—get the right attitude, then you’re meditating.” – Tuck Loon, Cambodian meditation teacher

“Meditate to understand, not ‘because of gong’.” – paraphrasing Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Burmese monk

My First Retreat

In 2015 I attended my first meditation retreat, at a small centre on the prairies of eastern Alberta. Going in, I knew what to expect: ten days of total silence, physical pain, and little to eat. In this sense I was more prepared than some of my fellow meditators. Basil, a University of Alberta medical student, was shocked to learn that he’d just signed up for ten dinner-free nights. Hino, an Eritrean immigrant living in Fort McMurray, didn’t know that we would have to give up our phones. Hearing Basil ask others whether they knew about the no-dinner policy, and watching Hino flaccidly protest the removal of his phone privileges, I felt a bit smug. The retreat hadn’t even begun and people were already suffering.

But not me. Yes, I knew that suffering lay ahead, but—having read Dan Harris’s 10% Happier, in which he recounts his first ten day retreat—I also knew that it would be worth it. After a few days of pain and misery, my mind would calm down, the pain would subside, and I’d find something life-changing on the other side of a few days of silence. Maybe, like Dan, I would feel enough love to bring me to tears. Or perhaps, like Dan’s friend Sam Harris, my body would feel like it was made of light. Of course, I wasn’t so naïve as to think that my experience would be identical to Sam’s or Dan’s, but I’d read enough to know that a silent retreat is a reliable route to bliss—of some form or another.

Then the retreat began, and it took a long time to end. Over those ten days, I grew to dread meditation: I dreaded the self-imposed pain of the incessant sitting, I dreaded the lack of reading and writing with which to keep stimulated, I even dreaded the future dread that I was bound to feel in the long days ahead. So severe was my dread that I often woke up and prepared to meditate, only to realize that it was still the middle of the night, and I’d once again hallucinated the sound of the meditation gong.

As advertised, meditation brought the timeless nature of the present into stark relief, but in a way that felt more confining than consoling—and with little bliss in sight.

Eventually, of course, the retreat did end. And as I approached the final day, some of my dread dissipated, replaced by excitement at the thought of returning to the world with a mind greatly improved by ten days of meditation. So it was with dismay that, when “Noble Silence” ended, I found myself more anxious than I’d been before the retreat. How could this be? Aren’t retreats supposed to make life less effortful, as a matter of course? But after a few minutes of talking, I felt compelled to retreat to my room, lest I shatter the awareness that I’d worked so hard to accumulate.

SN Goenka’s Technique

The meditation technique taught by the late SN Goenka—who led my first retreat via audio recordings, with a video lecture each night—is as straightforward as meditation gets. For the first few days, you pay attention to the breath in and around your nostrils. Then, after building some concentration, you focus on physical sensations, repeatedly scanning attention over every part of your body. The goal of the practice is to simply notice sensations without getting caught in their pleasant or unpleasant tenor. When pain arises, greet it with indifference. If bliss appears, just be aware of it without growing attached. By noticing, in a dispassionate way, how bodily sensations arise and pass away, you’re working to even out your emotional keel. In Goenka’s words, you’re developing “perfect equanimity”.

Goenka emphasizes silence and stillness. Talking with other meditators is forbidden, and you’re expected to carry out all meditation sessions seated, with eyes closed. This much sitting gets painful, especially from the fourth day onward when you’re asked to spend three one-hour periods each day without shifting your posture. But in Goenka’s view, coming to terms with pain is key to one’s practice. In his nightly lectures, he repeatedly apologizes for the “torture” but claims that it is “the only way”.

And the technique works, if you do it well. But many meditators—my 2015 self included—do it badly, gritting their teeth as they grind towards equanimity, yo-yoing between brief delight and deep despair, all the while mistaking the peaks of their manic-depressive-type oscillations as blissful proof that, indeed, the practice must be working.

Many of us come to Goenka retreats hoping to shed our hang-ups and neuroses, to blast them away in awareness’s clarifying light. It is therefore unfortunate that so many people leave these retreats with newfound neuroticisms—about the serious attitude, perfect conditions, and dogged perseverance which they perceive as essential to proper meditation, and thus to a good life.

Few of this fault lies with Goenka per se, though we’ll explore his foibles shortly. If you interpret his instructions as intended, and can relax within the confines of a disciplined meditation schedule, retreats can greatly improve your moment-to-moment existence. But it’s easy to misinterpret the man. Many of us come to retreats with highfalutin misconceptions about the practice, and we also tend to believe that discipline is synonymous with difficult work. In essence, people expect too much from a ten day retreat and, as a result, they give too much of themselves.

I wish that I had known more about how I might go wrong on my first retreat. Such knowledge may not have spared me pain (which is inevitable on Goenka retreats), but it could have spared me suffering and made my practice bear more fruit. But it took a trip to Asia before I would get this knowledge.

Two Months in Burma

One and a half years after my first Goenka retreat, I went to Burma for a two-month stay at a meditation centre. I spent much of the first two weeks there recapitulating the misery described above (exacerbated by the longer time horizon, which often caused the dread to crest into a panic). After fourteen days of eternity, I eventually decided to follow the head monk’s instruction—which I’d initially resisted, as his advice to “simply notice nature” seemed less like a meditative prescription, and more like spiritual licence for laziness. As he put it, meditation is simply noticing what’s happening, with no more effort than what’s needed notice your foot touching the floor, or the sight of these words.[1]

This technique—or perhaps more appropriately, this absence of technique—felt a world removed from Goenka’s. Where Goenka forces you to sit, here we were encouraged to sit, stand, walk, or even lie down as we pleased. Where Goenka emphasizes a serious attitude and rigid schedule, here we were instructed to use as little effort as possible and to meditate not because of the timetable, but because of a heartfelt desire to better understand our minds. Where Goenka underscores pain, silence, and a narrowly focused attention, here we were told to move if the pain got intense, speak if we could remain aware while doing so, and focus on the quality of noticing more so than the content being noticed.

And, briefly put, this new technique worked. I left the Burmese meditation centre equipped with a stable, resilient awareness which didn’t instantly give way, even to the frenzied streets of Yangon and later Bangkok.

In the years since my time in Burma, I’ve sat multiple Goenka retreats. Fortunately, I’ve learned that the hardship of my first retreat is not intrinsic to the Goenka experience. By bringing the attitude I learned in Burma to Goenka retreats, I’ve found them bearable (and even pleasant). At the same time, I’ve spoken to many meditators who have not had the benefit of such insight. For them every Goenka retreat is a crushing ordeal, even on the fourth or fifth time around.

What are the mistakes that caused my 2015 self, and others like him, to struggle so badly, thereby missing much of the point of practice? And how might we avoid these mistakes, so that Goenka retreats (and life in general) are more easeful and fulfilling?

i. Silence and Stillness are Useful but not Obligatory

I sat my second Goenka retreat on the heels of my time in Burma. When it ended, I gave a fellow meditator a ride to my hometown in British Columbia. He had just spent two months at the Goenka centre, alternately sitting and volunteering through multiple ten-day retreats. It just so happened that his cushion was in front of mine in the meditation hall, so I’d noticed his shoulders creeping toward his ears, tension visibly accumulating as the retreat progressed. I wondered what was distressing him, and while passing through the Rocky Mountains he told me.

It was the noise, he said, which kept him from finding equanimity—the noise from the assistant teacher who, seated at the front of the hall, had a habit of breathing heavily and shuffling around. And to make matters worse, the teacher enjoyed opening the window, letting in distracting birdsong and other sounds. Now, I never noticed the teacher’s laboured breathing, which may indeed have been annoying, but I did notice the birdsong and found it quite pleasant. Rather than distracting from the task of meditating, the birdsong offered a meditative interlude into hearing, which receives no attention on Goenka retreats.

This brings up the first problem with Goenka: by stressing the need to meditate in silence, stillness, and with eyes closed, he instils the idea that anything which pierces this mental veil must be a distraction. And when you’re trying to meditate, distractions are, well… distracting. But for better or worse, they’re bound to occur. Since they are inevitable (and since the Dharma is about coming to terms with the inevitabilities of life), it makes sense to view distractions not as obstacles, but as fodder for mindfulness. In fact, by understanding how every distraction presents a path to presence—offering insight into the nature of experience, however it manifests—distractions lose their power to distract.

Given the right attitude, few things in life are distracting.[2] Yet with the attitude propounded by Goenka, nearly everything is. (Leo Tolstoy described this attitude in The Death of Ivan Ilyich: “[H]e said that he needed peace, looked out for anything that might disturb that peace, and at the slightest disturbance became irritated.”)

That said, silence and stillness are useful tools, especially at the start of one’s practice. In this sense, learning to meditate is like learning to read: both are easiest in quiet, low stimulation settings. But even though reading is harder amidst the bustle of everyday life, no teacher suggests that it can’t be done, or that one must first shut out the rest of the world. If teachers expressed concern about reading in public, what might students think? Far from helping, it would breed strange attitudes when reading in anything but the most pristine of settings.

Goenka does something similar, suggesting that merely opening one’s eyes is a dangerous foray into distraction. To his credit, he does emphasize the importance of remaining aware between formal sitting sessions, and says that given enough practice, it is even possible to meditate in the outdoors. But he repeatedly counters such sentiments by saying, for instance, that serious meditation cannot take place once talking is reintroduced, or that the still, silent practice he espouses is “the only way” to achieve liberation.

Essentially, Goenka doesn’t trust us to be responsible stewards of our minds unless we’re sitting down, rigidly following his prescription. And his prescription is fine, as far as it goes. But in life as in meditation, other stimuli will arise, and he does not equip us to build equanimity through meeting them. If anything he does the opposite, leading students to resist or regret the arising of anything other than sensations of the breath or body.

Ultimately, fetishizing stillness makes it hard to integrate meditation into daily life. And, at least for me, that is the goal of the practice: to transfer the equanimity found on the cushion into daily affairs. Although I love silence, stillness, and the quality of mind that comes from sitting for hours with little movement, I also recognize that these are luxuries, not necessities. By failing to make this clear, Goenka trains us to reject much of life as being beside the point.[3]

I tried explaining this to my fellow meditator (who, even when expressing irritation, made for great company). I suggested that he pay attention to the arising of sound just as he might pay attention to the arising of sensations. (Not wanting to blaspheme too badly, I framed this as a means to get his mind back on sensations, rather than as an end in itself.) But he struggled to see the merit in this, since he’d been taught to view the breath and body—and nothing else—as the way to equanimity. This brings us to the next problem with Goenka.

ii. Sensations can Lead to Equanimity, but so can Anything Else

Breath and body sensations are favoured by Goenka for good reason: they are ever-present, relatively obvious, and tend not to trigger distracting cascades of thought. Compared to seeing, hearing, or thinking, they have little power to distract. (Try looking at something without thinking about it, listening to something without visualizing it, or thinking about something without getting lost in thought—it’s hard!) It therefore makes sense to use the breath and body to focus one’s mind.

However, this does not mean that other experiences must be excluded from meditation.

Many meditators believe that life’s problems could be solved if only they meditated more. In some sense this is true, but it’s dangerously close to missing the point. For most dedicated meditators, their problem is not that they haven’t spent enough time on the cushion—it’s that they haven’t yet transferred their cushion consciousness into daily life. Normal life consists of much more than just the breath and body, so if you believe that these are the only ways to achieve liberation, you will be left forever trying to escape most forms of experience. Which, of course, is not meditation.

This is what happened when I started talking after my first retreat. Instead of bringing a meditative mindset to unpleasant feelings of agitation, I withdrew to the cushion, where I could firmly place my mind back on the breath and body.

None of this implies—as Alan Watts half-jokingly said—that you should crank open the tap and start meditating in construction yards. What it does suggest, though, is that you should open your meditation to the world wherever possible. And the easiest place to start doing this (though by no means the only place) is on the cushion.

But instead of opening up awareness, Goenka tells you to shut it down, restricting it to a narrow band of experience. I’ve now spent hundreds of hours diligently following his instructions, and, as promised, I’ve reached states of serene equanimity where pain and pleasure both lose all power to sway experience. On occasion, though, I’ve drawn back and noticed that this equanimity, along with the awareness it grows out of, is limited and fragile. By venturing away from the breath and body, awareness quickly starts to waver.

For many, this common experience lends credence to Goenka’s instructions: if we lose equanimity when we drift away from sensations, shouldn’t we do as he says and not drift? No, for a few reasons.

By focusing on bodily sensations to the exclusion of all else, you miss what’s happening in the background. And the background is the bridge to a more expansive, robust awareness. Throughout my many hours of body scanning, I’ve frequently realized that I’d been thinking. But, being so preoccupied with sensation, I had no idea what I’d been thinking about. Other than a dim sense of thoughts coursing through the background, I had no awareness of them.

Now, if thoughts were present, they were undoubtedly affecting my experience (as we all know, few things can throw a person off kilter like thought). Had I been aware of them, I could have directly applied equanimity, rather than hoping for it to eventually seep out beyond my sensation-oriented awareness. As I learned in Burma, you need not wait for a more encompassing equanimity, biding your time with sensation—you can begin applying equanimity to a range of experience right now. To do this, however, requires the right attitude, which can be tough to acquire under Goenka’s tutelage.

If Goenka told students to simply notice thoughts before returning to sensation, he would be in good company. Nearly all meditation teachers highlight the point that noticing thought—or really, anything at all—is not a problem. In fact, it’s excellent, because the act of noticing means that you are already aware of what’s happening, and therefore well situated to view experience with equanimity. But instead of framing such noticing as an opportunity, Goenka frames it as an interruption. In this way, he doesn’t just miss out on an important piece of instruction, but actually undermines it.

In my early days on retreats there were countless times when, upon noticing that attention had drifted, I uttered a silent “fuck” before scrambling to reconnect with sensation. What might otherwise have been moments of clear mindfulness were muddied by the thought, “I’m doing this wrong.” This is unfortunate, because I was actually judging myself when doing things right. I was successfully waking up to thought—but since Goenka had taught me that focusing on sensations was right, noticing anything else felt wrong.

On longer retreats, Goenka apparently says that all experience is fair game for mindfulness. It’s too bad he doesn’t make this clear on ten day retreats, since this is all most students will ever do. If they never seek out other teachers, they’re apt to wind up like my carmate, their fixation on sensation causing them to disregard or disdain the beautiful and banal alike.

iii. When “No I, No Me, No Mine” Doesn’t Cut It

I was first introduced to meditation via a series of Jon Kabat-Zinn recordings. On perhaps my third time ever meditating—long before hearing of Goenka or the concept of a silent retreat—Kabat-Zinn led me to ask a simple but profound question: where do thoughts come from? By dropping this inquiry into the space of mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn made me wonder, for the first time in my adult life, what I really am. Over the course of a few minutes, it became clear that I don’t consciously think my thoughts. Rather, they just appear, like sights or the sound of birdsong outside an open window.

So it was that within my first few hours of meditating, I was directly introduced to the fact of selflessness. No effort, no struggle, no years on the cushion (or, back then, a desk chair), it was just there, an unexpected insight which has since redefined my understanding of what it means to be human.

If Kabat-Zinn had felt that thoughts were not appropriate for beginner meditators, I would not have made this realization so soon. In fact, I might never have made it, since the strange absence of a tangible self was part of the reason I found meditation so intriguing in the first place.

Goenka tries to teach his students about selflessness, but unlike Kabat-Zinn he does not adeptly guide experience to this fact. Instead of clearly pointing out the mind’s selfless nature, he simply repeats the phrase, “No I, no me, no mine”, and hopes that students get the message. And while students may leave retreats confidently asserting the truth of selflessness, I’ve noticed that for many of them, their belief in the self is actually alive and well. After all, they say, if it’s not me, who’s doing the meditating?[4]

It’s not surprising that students get confused. Despite Goenka’s oft-repeated refrain about selflessness, it’s hard to notice the absence of self solely by zooming in on sensations. Combined with the effort he expects when meditating, it often does feel like there’s a self in the system.

If you wanted to sit down, close your eyes, and try to falsify the notion that you have a self, where might you look? Well, you should probably start with the place where you assume yourself to be. You wouldn’t look in your toe, nor would you search through your leg, because your sense of self was never enmeshed in these to begin with—you could pay attention to your toe for a dozen years, and while this might prove interesting, there’s no guarantee that it would illuminate your selfless nature. Would you look in sensations? Paying attention to the ones in your face might work, since most of us feel like we exist behind our faces. But we don’t really feel like we exist within sensation, so can we do even better? If you drill down on what people mean when they say they have (or are) a self, you eventually triangulate on (you might have guessed it) thought. People may feel like they’re many things, but at their core they’ll likely tell you that they’re the thinkers of their thoughts.[5]

To many people the act of thinking is proof that some sort of stable agent resides in our core. By turning mindfulness towards thought, Kabat-Zinn shook my conviction that I even have a core, let alone one that can pick and choose thoughts. Had Goenka chosen to do the same, I suspect that far more students would have firsthand encounters with selflessness, and would better understand the liberating import of “No I, no me, no mine.”

And, to be honest, he needn’t have even invoked thought. You can notice selflessness in any experience, meaning that sensations could also do the trick. All it takes is a shift of perspective, and selflessness is readily apparent.[6] But this shift must be accompanied by a relaxation of effort, which is something Goenka does not seem eager to condone.

Diligently. Seriously. Ardently. Patiently and persistently. These are the words Goenka uses to describe the attitude he wants you to bring to meditation. If you’re like me, hearing these words on repeat for ten days might make you think that meditation is a solemn task, requiring near-Herculean levels of effort. Maybe I’m an outlier, but these are not the adjectives I’d use to describe a mind free from agitation. Nor are they ones I’d use to describe a mindset primed to spot selflessness.

When you consciously apply effort, you tend to feel like a self. Think of times when you’ve felt self-conscious—perhaps when public speaking, fretting over social media, or berating yourself for your social, professional, or physical shortcomings. These are times that feel anything but effortless. Now think of times when you’ve felt less confined by self—perhaps after great sex, a nature walk, or while falling asleep. These are times where effort plays no part.

One of the trickier aspects of meditation is dropping the effort to meditate, and one of the most coveted outcomes of meditation is a fuller realization of selflessness. Thus, many meditators spend tremendous effort pursuing a state that is, in many ways, the antithesis of effort. To cut through this Gordian knot, it helps to accept that, ultimately, one’s mind is out of its own control, and sometimes the best approach in meditation—as in life—is to step aside, do nothing, and simply watch events unfold.

In Burma, my two weeks of suffering came to a close when I started following a simple instruction: “Do nothing.” Until then, I’d been trying (as diligently, ardently, and persistently as I could) to be aware, as if awareness could be accumulated through sheer strength of will. But when I heard those words—do nothing—articulated by a trusted figure in the meditation world, I let them in and found great relief.[7]

Goenka never suggests that by merely allowing the mind to rest—that is, by relinquishing all effort—you can succeed at meditation. Instead, he says that you should pursue equanimity with “ardour”, perhaps not realizing that the word literally means “intensity, or extreme vigour.” Needless to say, ardour and equanimity make strange bedfellows. If Goenka softened his rhetoric around effort and eased his sanction against thought, meditators could see that equanimity and selflessness need not be hard-won. Then, they’d be better poised to reap meditation’s liberating fruits—both on and off the cushion.

Loosen Up

Reading this, you might think that I dislike Goenka. Maybe even that I despise him. But actually, I am so fond of him that after finishing a retreat, I get teary-eyed whenever I bring him up. (Which is simultaneously a testament to his character, and a sign of our species’ susceptibility to cults.)

I love Goenka retreats. I love the forced sitting, which builds equanimity through dispassionately observing pain. I love the injunction against speaking, which lets me indulge my inner introvert. And I love the rigid structure, which saves me the trouble of deliberating over how much meditation might be best.

And because I love these things, I have to be careful in how I relate to them. It would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that I must simply meditate through more pain, stay silent for longer stretches, or feel just a bit more sensation if I am to remain firmly on the path to liberation. I suspect that, for the most part, the people drawn to Goenka retreats are a lot like me: introverted, anxious types who pursue meditation intently, but struggle to lay their neuroses to rest so that they can find peace. For people like us, we don’t need constant admonishments to dig deeper; we need gentle reminders that it’s okay to loosen up. I hope that these words can help a meditator or two to do just that.

[1]This noticing is distinct from merely thinking about your foot, or simply cognizing the meaning of words. This noticing offers a path out of conceptual meaning, which inclines the mind towards a wonderful freedom.

[2]Arahantship (the complete cessation of suffering) can be thought of as the perfection of one’s attitude, where nothing can distract—not even being burned alive.

[3]He also fails to warn of the real dangers associated with ignoring discomfort. Knee injuries can and do occur on retreats. I’ve found that sitting cross legged (instead of kneeling) helps. As does asking the question “Can I walk normally within 4 or 5 minutes of getting up?” (if the answer is no, consider changing your posture).

[4]This is not to say that beliefs are all-or-nothing affairs. All of us, whether we’ve meditated or not, believe in the self at some times and not at others. But skilled meditation teachers can point out, fairly clearly, how meditation is not an act performed by a self.

[5]This has been made vivid to me on the occasions when I’ve been stupid and annoying enough to try arguing people out of a belief in free will. When I ask people where thoughts come from (hoping to really stump them), they often exclaim, “I think my thoughts! Me!” And when I ask them what they mean by “I”, they typically respond in a way that makes me think I should probably learn how to talk about sports instead.

[6]Check out Rupert Spira, Richard Lang, or a host of other meditation teachers for guidance on this shift. Just don’t expect anything mind blowing—if you do, you’ll almost certainly put in too much effort and just brew a stronger feeling of self. And for more of my thoughts on selflessness, see here and, to a lesser extent, here, here, here, here, and here. (I kind of think it’s worth thinking about—but much more importantly, it’s worth noticing).

[7]Incidentally, at a Goenka retreat these liberating instructions would have been contraband, since they were in a set of Steve Armstrong recordings shared by my roommate.