Into the Silence: My First 10-Day Vipassana Retreat

I'm leaving today for my first 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat at a Dhamma center. For more information look up

www.dhamma.org

For the next 10 days, I'll have no phone, no email, no books, no pen, no journaling. Complete silence—no talking, no discussion, no guided meditation, no sign language, not even eye contact with other meditators. Just the Vipassana meditation techniques: breath awareness and body awareness, practiced for about 10 hours each day. Three vegetarian meals, a bed, a bathroom, and a daily discourse in the evening. Days start at 4:30am and end at 9:30pm.

The structure is intentionally austere. You surrender your phone and valuables upon arrival. Men and women are segregated throughout the retreat. You're assigned a meditation cushion that becomes your spot for the next 10 days. The teaching is donation-based—you pay nothing upfront, though you can contribute at the end if the course has been valuable to you.

This is my first time, so I'm no expert. I'll share when I'm back.

When frustration builds, we close our eyes and release a deep sigh. To stay grounded throughout the day, we might take a yoga class, go for a walk, grab coffee with a friend, or lose ourselves in a favorite hobby. But when I need space to truly think, I take a small break to travel.

Right now, as I seek clarity for the next stage of my life, being completely silent and listening to my thoughts seems like what I need.

Why This, Why Now?

I've been practicing yoga for 15 years, teaching for 13. In 2017, I made a conscious change to craft my life around minimalism. Not the trendy kind where you count your possessions or live out of a backpack, but something deeper—removing material things, social activities, and work that didn't align with being peaceful, or that I was doing from fear of missing out.

It's been a very slow journey with more failures than successes. Some years I've backslid entirely. But that journey gave birth to what I now call my life's work. I teach yoga, host dinner events at my home, write recipes, lead wellness retreats, garden, and build physical community around all these activities. It's modest, it's local, and it's mine.

I have a regular meditation practice—usually 20-30 minutes in the morning. But I also have a tendency to let my creativity pull me in all directions. I'll get excited about a new recipe series, then pivot to planning a retreat, then dive into garden redesign, then want to restructure my entire teaching schedule. It's joyful and rewarding, yes—but it can become too ungrounding. I lose the thread of what I'm actually building.

So from time to time, I take on challenges where I carve out a big chunk of time to reevaluate and correct course. This time: the imposed challenge of not doing anything.

Silent Meditation at This Stage of Life

There's something particular about doing this retreat as a woman in my late 40s.

For so much of my life, I've been in motion—building, adapting, performing, caretaking, responding. Even my creativity, which I love, can feel like another form of productivity, another way of proving I'm valuable or relevant. At this age, I'm less interested in adding more to my life and more interested in understanding what's actually true underneath all the doing.

Silent meditation offers something unique: the chance to sit with yourself without distraction, without the narratives you tell others, without even the narratives you write in a journal. Just raw experience—breath, sensation, boredom, resistance, whatever arises. In the silence, you can't perform your identity. You can't curate it. You just are.

For women especially, so much of our conditioning is about attunement to others—reading the room, managing emotions (ours and everyone else's), keeping things smooth. Vipassana asks you to turn that attention inward with the same rigor. To observe your own patterns without judgment. To notice where you habitually contract or grasp. To see, perhaps for the first time, how much energy you spend maintaining a certain image of yourself.

At this stage of life, with hormones shifting, with cultural invisibility starting to creep in, with the question of "what comes next" becoming more urgent—there's value in stripping everything away and asking: Who am I when I'm not performing? What do I actually want? What is the difference between my conditioning and my truth?

I don't expect to emerge with answers. But I'm curious what happens when you give yourself no escape routes.

My student asked if I'll come back wiser.

"Wiser or crazier," I said. "Not sure... we'll see."

Maybe I'll return with clarity about my next chapter. Maybe I'll just return very, very tired. Maybe I'll realize I need more silence, or maybe I'll realize I need more of the messy, creative chaos.

The not-knowing is part of why I'm going.

Back in 12 days.

Namaste,

Savitha