10-Day Silent Meditation reflection

29 palms, California, Dhamma Vipassana Center

Earlier this summer I attended a 10-day silent meditation course. I learned about this course through natural conversations with friends. From what I gathered this meditation course was challenging and transformative. I was determined to attend and stick it through. I wasn’t sure what I would learn and I had no results driven expectation going into the experience.

What did you learn?

Aside from learning how to do this technique, its origins, and its purpose I mainly learned about myself. I learned that I had a lot of muck built up in my physical body, the muck of life, the cumulative stuff that your body remembers while your conscious mind puts aside in order to simply remain functional in day-to-day life.

Some important context that is difficult to share, in my past I’ve had traumatic experiences. Without going into detail about what they were, I felt that I had mostly put these experiences behind me. But what I found in these 10 days is how these past experiences were deeply buried but not gone. I realized that these experiences still affected me silently. The thick mud of my life was buried inside, and through these 10 days this muck was rising to the surface and slowly being dissipated