<aside> 🕰️ Archived newsletter
This is a past issue of the newsletter, and therefore may have references and commentary that are no longer accurate. This website is iterative and evolves week on week, so just keep that in mind. The latest newsletter is at the top of the homepage, here. Happy reading!
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👋 Hello everyone!
This week, I'm not actually here. I'm actually on day 5 of a 10-day meditation retreat, and so here I am on the morning of the Tuesday before, writing this for you in advance, from the past. 👻 Can't miss a day on our arbitrary deadline of once-per-week on Sunday, can we?
<aside> 🤔 I wonder how it's going? I wonder how I'm doing? I wonder if I've kept track of the days or if I've lost count. I wonder if I'm suffering, if I'm having an excellent and productive time, or if I'm equanimous.
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Rest assured I will tell you next week. 😁
This week though, I thought it would be topical to provide something of a hypothetical window into what this intensive retreat experience is like for me as I'm currently experiencing it (or as I will be, from the POV of Tuesday-me, writing this in advance 🥴 ).
You may recall a newsletter from earlier this year: What a meditation retreat is like.
Funnily enough, that was also a newsletter I wrote in advance because of a meditation retreat.
In any case, it’s very pertinent this week and something I wanted to re-draw attention to so that I don't need to repeat myself on the details. If you want to learn more about what a retreat is like and in some detail, have a look at that newsletter again - it covers a lot.
The 10-day retreat I'm currently on is actually mentioned in there too: it's a "Vipassana" retreat (a meditation technique, sometimes known as "insight" meditation) taught in the style of the late S. N. Goenka, which is run as part of an international network of meditation centres that all run with the same format (i.e. same duration, same timetable, same instructions etc.).
This is the first time I will have been at a retreat like this, and it's also the most intensive and of the longest duration as well. I've been anticipating it for months, as I have been looking forward to what I know will be a challenging experience and taking it for what it is.
You guessed it: chances are reasonably high that I'm meditating right now, unless you're a night-owl-newsletter-reader-er.
As you can see from the posted schedule here, there's a cumulative 10 hours a day of meditation practice in there with 4am wake up times and an early-ish night. Eeesh!
10 hours for 10 days makes a nice clean number of 100 total hours of meditation if you stick to the schedule, which you're encouraged but not forced to do.
Stay tuned next week, where I'll go into the details of how I prepared for the retreat, whether that preparation was useful, what my experience was like, advice I would give to others, and more.
Because the format of this retreat is so consistent among the many centres worldwide that run it, there are numerous blogs and articles of peoples' experiences and struggles. In the lead-up to this retreat I spent a lot of time reading these, and found that among all the tips-and-tricks and expectations-tempering, this "brutally honest" account is my favourite: