Vipassana for Hackers [pdf]

Wow, thanks for sharing. Very interesting. Were you new to practicing meditation? I could definitely see why ten days would be harmful, its almost like solitary confinement.

I don't think they allow people who have depression to join this course as this is pretty intensive.

Some of the best long time meditators who stumbled upon this path and stuck with it had depression.

The benefits that a regular person gets initially while meditating are pretty cool but not life changing. Like, you tend to get up and clean your room, file for taxes way before the deadline, do your chores without them feeling like chores etc. You also don't react automatically with annoyance etc. Again, cool benefits but not life changing. This is the reason why its hard to maintain regular practice.

But if you have depression, the difference that meditation makes in your life could be large ( Hypothesising) so you have more incentive to stick to the practice and over the years it all adds up and your quality of life might end up even better than those who did not have depression in the first place. Again, this is just my thinking and I am not sure.

If you have depression, you might consider taking some other mindfulness course to get a feel for it.

I was not considered to be someone with a severe mental illness but ended up developing an intense depersonalization + somatoform disorder during a 10 day retreat that I am still struggling to recover from 2 years later. The staff there refused to let me talk to a doctor who was also at the retreat or to call my parents without listening in on the conversation, which made me extremely uncomfortable and caused me to stay there longer than I should have. By the end of it they continued to insist that the Vipassana was the way to fix my problems instead of advocating that I see a doctor.

My experience was an outlier but I feel that for many people an experience like this can do more harm than good. Isolation and sensory deprivation for 10 days is generally not healthy, when we do that to people in prison it can be considered cruel and unusual punishment. I don't think they did a very good job of encouraging those who were having issues to leave and instead made me want to try and 'power' through what I was going through rather than recognizing it as a serious issue.

The way the class is structured is fundamentally depersonalizing- every night they have you watch video lectures that I found to get increasingly bizarre and cult-like, subjecting you over and over to the notion that the Vipassana method is the way to deal with all suffering and eventually talking about how you can manipulate quantum energy in your body and other crazy shit. It was doubly disorienting to be doing this while eating a low-protein vegetarian diet for the first time

There are many, many others who have had negative, damaging experiences like me and the issue is waved away saying "they were already mentally ill and shouldn't have gone" but the fact there are many other ways to get the benefits that meditation offers in a way that doesn't present the risk of manifesting latent mental illnesses.

I really do not believe a 10 day retreat should even be offered to beginners and if so it should be less dogmatic and more sensitive to the possibility that it can be dangerous to certain personalities

I am quite certain there are a number of 10-day retreats that don't go into the cult-like/dogmatic aspects you describe here (that meditation is a cure and controlling body energy and all that) and would be more free about allowing anyone to leave and/or see a doctor.

I have not been to one myself, but I have read countless recollections of others' experiences, and a focus on caring for those attending is often a priority. Your experience sounds like the opposite of that, and as you've said, there are others with similar negative experiences too.

It's sad that it's out there, because I think there are plenty of 10-day retreats that wouldn't be such a problem, but maybe they should be required to be more upfront in setting expectations and better screen for potential hazards.

If you don't mind me asking, who was the speaker in those videos? Did your center have a specific "lineage" or "school" of Buddhism? Was it Goenka by chance?

I'm glad you found the course beneficial.

Regarding...

> "I'm sorry that you left on day 6."

..., just to clarify, I previously stated ...

"I stayed the full 10 days but the course didn't get any better by the end."

It was the GP who stayed for 6 days.

Regarding...

> "If you can't do Metta, then you will benefit from finding out why you can't do it."

I have no problem in accessing feelings of compassion, I just don't want to be forced to do it. In my opinion, obligation can take the joy out of anything, and forced love doesn't make any sense. As soon as we seek to control love we kill it. It's far better to be remove the barriers that hold you back from experiencing it, and just let it happen naturally (again, just in my opinion).

The main issue I had with the course was that Goenka was steering the experience towards a certain set of interpretations of the experience. What I wanted was to be taught the technique and then be left alone to find what it uncovered. In my opinion, meditation is a personal experience, and I did not think it helped to frame the experience in the way Goenka did, especially as the people going through the retreat are likely to be in a vulnerable position (isolated, limited human interaction, limited time to adapt to new experiences). For me, attending the course was a mistake, one that I only grew from as I overcame the damage it caused through finding other teachers that I could connect with, but that being said, if you found the course beneficial I'm glad for you, I'm not trying to diminish your experience. I hope you can continue to find personal insight through meditation.