As a kid, and well into my teens and university years, I always tied my shoelaces super tight. I never thought of it as anything more than a personal preference. That firmness gave me this sense of readiness, as if I were fully equipped, ready, standing at my peak, prepared for anything.

In my early twenties, after moving to San Francisco, this habit shifted. I began wearing sneakers with laces so loose I could slip them on and off without touching the knots. I tied them once, neatly, and left them like that forever. I didn’t like them hanging or messy, but I wanted them loose enough so I don’t need to constantly re-tie.

In the past few years, there’s been another shift. I’ve been wearing Birkenstock Arizona sandals whenever I can. It’s become such a thing that I almost only want to live in places where I can wear them year round.

I hadn’t paid much attention to these changes until recently, when something clicked.

I realized that the way I wore my shoes was mirroring my relationship with the world, and the baseline comfort I felt stepping outside my home.

As a kid, I didn’t trust the world. It felt unpredictable and dangerous. Tight shoelaces gave me a sense of safety, I would feel ready to run at any moment. Loose laces would feel reckless, I would feel vulnerable and not in control.

In San Francisco, the world seemed gentler. I felt safer, more at ease, so my laces loosened with me.

And in the last few years, doing a bunch of spiritual / somatic practices softened a lot of my anxiety and tension in the body. More and more, the world feels like my backyard. Being outside doesn’t feel much different from being at home and Birkenstocks are sort of like a confirmation of that.

I’ve been consciously working toward a life where I feel at ease everywhere, as if the world feels like my backyard. But only now do I see how my choice of shoes has been quietly reflecting this progress all along.

This is what I love about practices like meditation and somatic work, compared to something rational like CBT. You’re not dissecting every symptom individually. Shifts happen somewhere deeper. Some part of you already knows what needs healing, and it just starts rewiring itself. Core things shift and the symptoms just fall away… and then one day you wake up and you’re like wow, I’m not who I used to be.

A lot of people seem to approach all kinds of learning with the same strategy they picked up in school: extract the essential information, memorize facts, formulas, and frameworks, and then apply them wherever needed.

That kind of declarative, cognitive learning works well in a lot of areas. But for the most important things in life, like your worldview, your sense of self, and the way you interpret people and situations, the things that shape how you move through life, seem to require a completely different kind of learning: affective, somatic, lived. (and these are, of course, the very things schools have zero interest in teaching, for some weird reason)

I keep hearing people say, “I don’t want to read the whole book, just give me the main points.” They go for summaries, skim articles, look for shortcuts, conflating knowing the core ideas with actually absorbing and internalizing them.

For me, that’s not how it works, especially when it comes to things like growth, awareness, and how I live.

I’m very clear that it’s not enough to know something intellectually. I’ve "known" certain things for years before they actually clicked and became internalized.

Learning, for me, is less about collecting facts and more about prolonged exposure to a specific mindset. It’s about adopting certain frames of mind, trying them on for weeks or months or years, and letting them shape me, or rather, unlock the parts of me that feel most like me. I feel like we already have all the content we need. What we lack are the ways to actually internalize it.

And if I don’t stay with a frame long enough, apply it, live through it, feel it in my body, the insights don’t stick. They stay abstract, disconnected and eventually forgotten.

I sometimes read entire books that don’t introduce anything dramatically new. Most of it is material I’ve known for years, just reframed slightly differently. But I still find value in it. While I’m reading or listening to it, the book keeps it's frame alive. And as I move through the world, it seeps into how I notice things, how I make decisions, how I relate to others.

It’s a bit like putting on new clothes, wearing them for a while, and watching how my vibe changes.

The same goes for my writing. I don’t see it as a way of delivering groundbreaking new information. It’s more like expressing a certain vibe or frame, hoping someone might resonate with it, try it on, and maybe discover something in themselves along the way.

I’ve also noticed that some people are walking encyclopedias. They can quote endless books, podcasts, theories, and concepts. But when I talk to them, I don’t really feel like those ideas are embodied. I’m thinking of someone specific... we can talk about all these topics, and he’ll have way more references and names than I do, but I don’t get the sense that he truly knows what he's talking about on a felt level.

On the other hand, there are people who may not talk about these things, they might not even have a conceptual framework for what they’re living, but just by observing them, you can tell they carry a lot of embodied wisdom.

I’m the type who can finish a book and barely recall a single quote an hour later. I rarely retain any explicit “knowledge.” But these books still somehow help me subtly shift the frames through which I see the world.

For me, that’s what learning feels like. But because of this way of learning, a lot of the “knowing” I carry feels intuitive, and hard to explain to people who haven’t internalized the same frames. It’s not that I’m hiding my reasoning, it’s that my learning doesn’t happen in a school-like way. I don’t stack formulas and axioms on top of each other.

This kind of experiential knowing feels fragile when exposed to debate culture or purely rational argument, because those modes rely on explicit logic, not lived experience. But that doesn’t make it weaker. It’s just a different kind of knowing.

Some of the deepest emotional, perceptual transformations and changes in how I live didn’t come from being convinced by reasoned argument. They came from something subtle but powerful shifting through immersion and repeated lived experience.

One of the reasons I write is to learn how to put into words the things I’ve internalized, but trying to explain that kind of knowing is like trying to describe the taste of a fruit to someone who’s never eaten it.

Maybe the best I can do is offer the scent, and hope it draws someone closer.

I think whether we realize it or not, generally speaking we’re all looking for the same thing: presence. We keep chasing situations that get us out of our heads.

Most of the time though, our minds feel like a browser with 47 open tabs, thought loops, over-analysis, nonstop noise. And we’re stuck there.

It's wild how few people really acknowledge how much they’re run by their monkey minds. Days, weeks and months pass, and looking back, it’s like you weren’t really there. Like you didn’t really choose most of what you did, things just happened on autopilot. And I think deep down, we all feel it, so we keep reaching for something, anything, that might bring us back. Even for a moment.

There's so much anxiety, depression, and boredom in the world today. The mind is chewing on itself with no off switch. This is why people get hooked on things like weed or porn, not just for pleasure, but because those things quiet the noise. Most of us try a bunch of random things until something makes us feel present, embodied, alive. Even if just for a few seconds.

Look at the "life goals" boards on Pinterest. It’s always someone lying on a beach, sitting by a lake, or surrounded by silent mountain cabins. But it’s not the beach they want. It’s stillness. Peace. A moment to feel their body. To feel alive.

I think meditation and mindfulness are the most effective ways to access this state. But in my experience, the people who need it most are often the first to pull away from anything that even slightly hints at self-help or inner work.

I meet people who are clearly struggling, and for many of them, I know exactly what would help. I bring up meditation or mindfulness, and even if they’re curious enough to listen, they still shut down inside.

This pains me. How do you help someone without them tuning out the second you bring it up?

Even though meditation, to me is the most intentional and direct path, there are plenty of other ways people get glimpses of presence. Sports, cold showers, dancing, building things. These quiet the mind just enough, bring you into the body just enough, to let you taste the lightness of being present.

There’s one activity I keep coming back to. Something I genuinely love. Where presence isn’t just a side effect, it’s built into the experience. You can’t really do it without being present.

It’s drum circles.

Basically musical jams where you don’t need to be a musician. It’s not even about the music, it’s about syncing with yourself and the people around you, and when you do, it feels like a trance.

It’s beginner-friendly. It’s social. It’s fun. It creates connection. It’s not about being good. Not competitive. It’s immersive, emotional, physical, and simple. And it has a built-in feedback loop.

When you’re present, it works. When you drift off or get lost in thought, you lose the rhythm and it’s instantly obvious. So you come back. Again and again. That direct cause and effect trains you to be present.

Most people don’t realize how accessible and fun it is. You don’t need any experience. Ten minutes of basic guidance and you’re in.

And this is why I’m starting drum circles in Armenia. I love people, I love drums, and I love natural daytime environments where you don’t need alcohol just to feel okay. Where you connect with others not through your head, but through rhythm. I’ve felt it many times in jam sessions, and I want my friends and community to feel it too.

If this sounds interesting, or even if you’re just curious, check out the Instagram page I made for it. I'll announce the meetups there. No experience needed. Just show up, and the rest will take care of itself.

For most of human history, survival meant manual labor. Hunting, building, fighting. That was the game. Now almost none of it matters. Machines do it better. Strength is outsourced.

Then came cognitive labor. Schools, universities, whole economies built around gathering knowledge, sharpening logic, producing stuff. It wasn’t about lifting more. It was about knowing more. Thinking better.

Now that seems to be going too. AI is not just storing information. It’s learning to reason. Connect dots. Create.

We’re moving toward a world where AI and robots will be able to handle most of what we used to do, the physical work, the thinking, policy, law, medicine, logistics, strategy.

The skills we spent lifetimes on are getting absorbed by systems that work faster, cheaper, and don’t get tired.

Imagine training for years to dig ditches by hand. Mastering your swing. Building your body. Becoming the best. Then one day someone rolls up with an excavator. Five minutes. Your week of work, gone. All your strength. Meaningless.

Feels like the same thing is happening with knowledge work. Most people don’t seem to realize the scale of this yet. But the ones building the future can already feel it. It just takes longer for the rest of the world to catch up.

So what’s left? Most people would probably say creativity. But even there, a lot of the thinking seems to be instrumental. Creativity as a tool to produce more, solve more, generate more, rather than seeing it as a form of existential exploration.

When manual and cognitive labor are outsourced, and the requirement for human output fades, the real shift might not be from logic to creativity, but from doing to Being.

The only thing left, the only truly human thing that doesn’t seem likely to be replicated is consciousness itself. The ability to be aware, to feel, to move within your own experience.

If survival is covered, we start climbing toward the psychological and self-fulfillment layers of Maslow’s hierarchy. Territory civilization barely had luxury to explore before.

The pursuit of deeply knowing yourself might not stay niche for long. It might move to the center. not as a productivity hack, but as a way of expressing and exploring Being itself. It could end up being the real work most people will have to face.

Of course, all of this assumes things go right. And a lot can go wrong.

But I’m hopeful. We need to look at what could break, but we can’t build a future by obsessing over Black Mirror prophecies. Our focus has to stay on what’s possible. If we can dream it, we can build it.

In the past few days, I talked to two friends who both said they’re suffering because they’re “too empathetic.” I think that’s a pretty misleading and harmful way to understand empathy.

When people say they’re “too empathetic” and that’s why they’re in pain, it sounds like they’re treating it as some kind of virtue. But my current understanding is that the pain doesn’t come from empathy, it comes from losing the boundary between you and the other person. That’s not empathy. That’s over-identification, and there’s nothing virtuous about that.

Empathy is the ability to feel with someone, while still knowing where you end and they begin. Over-identification is when you merge with their emotional state taking it on as if it were your own. You’re not just witnessing their pain, you’re internalizing it.

To be extra clear here, I’m not saying “don’t feel.” I’m not saying “build walls.” You can feel someone’s pain deeply without fusing with it.

Imagine watching a powerful movie. It moves you and maybe you even cry. You feel it fully, in the moment. But when the credits roll, you don’t carry that grief into the rest of your week. The hero’s wife was killed, but you don’t live as if it was your wife who died. You felt it, but you didn’t become it.

And most importantly, you knew the whole time that those feelings weren’t yours. They were a response to what you were witnessing, not a reflection of your own life. You didn’t get lost in the emotion or mistake it for your own experience.

That’s empathy. That’s being open without drowning.

But if you spent a week afterward living as if your wife died, that wouldn’t be empathy — that would be over-identification. And that doesn’t help anyone.

This has been a theme throughout my life: picking up the vibe around me like a sponge, without even realizing it. But that’s not just some deep sensitivity, it’s bad boundaries.

It took me years to recognize that a lot of what I was feeling wasn’t even mine. I’d absorb it from people and the environment around me. Some days I’d feel low or off with no clear reason. I’m only now starting to tell the difference between my own emotions and the stuff I’ve picked up from others.

If you think your empathy is what’s making you suffer, maybe sit with the idea that it’s not actually empathy. It’s probably over-identification. And that’s not compassion, it’s just getting lost in someone else’s storm. Not only you’re not helping them, but you’re also harming yourself.

It’s easy to mistake emotional absorption for empathy, especially if you’ve spent a lifetime tuning into others. But real empathy doesn’t require you to carry their pain, only to recognize it with openness and care.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but what helps me immensely is practicing mindfulness. It’s the only thing that consistently lets me notice when I’ve slipped out of myself and into someone else’s emotional world. The more aware I become in real-time, the easier it is to catch that moment when empathy starts turning into identification, and gently come back.

I made a little questionnaire with my friend ChatGPT to help figure out if you’re prone to over-identification.

I remember being a preteen, lying on the couch, closing my eyes, Pink Floyd’s Animals album washing over me in one go—how it’s meant to be heard. My uncle gave me that tape (this was before I’d discovered the expansive world of rock music). I didn’t get the lyrics. Didn’t matter. It stirred something raw and alive in me. Listening to music made me feel things—big, wild things—and I loved that rush. I was a sensitive kid, and I cherished that sensitivity. That’s what I wanted from life: not just to exist, but to feel.

But outside that safe little world, sensitivity felt more like a curse. Growing up in a post-Soviet country during the chaos after the Soviet Union fell apart, sensitivity wasn’t exactly a prized trait. The place was soaked in this brutal masculine vibe—social status didn’t go to smart folks or dreamers, but to thieves-in-law, tough guys kids my age and their parents idolized. Their values—or the messed-up, dumbed-down version of them—made everything toxic.

The mainstream fix was simple: toughen up. Sensitivity was a weakness. Real men didn’t feel stuff. But somehow, I knew toughening up meant something uglier—like putting calluses on my soul, numbing what made life worth living. When I got drafted into the army at 18, I vividly remember telling my mom my biggest fear was coming home less sensitive. Looking back, that’s what happened—not just from the army, but slowly over the next decade.

I completely rejected toughening up and instead leaned into a different, less heroic strategy: safety and wall-building (Roger Waters would get it). It wasn’t a calculated decision. Looking back, I was instinctively building a world where I could feel without fear of being hurt. I surrounded myself with respectful, like-minded people, built a stable life, and carefully avoided anything that might shake me up. And tbh I got pretty darn good at it. I built a successful tech career, met incredible people, and eventually moved to San Francisco—far from the post-Soviet harshness I’d known.

Yet no matter how carefully I built my external world, I was still changing in ways I didn’t want. Just existing was making me tougher—but not in a good way. It felt more like numbness. The sensitivity I’d tried to protect was slipping away.

For a long time, I thought the choice was between being sensitive and fragile or tough and numb. Even as I tried to stay sensitive, I felt myself dulling anyway. It wasn’t working. Then, in my 30s, I stumbled into what I now see as the real answer.

Rooted in Eastern philosophy and now gaining traction in Western psychology, this path showed I could be both exquisitely sensitive and unshakably strong—not by avoiding pain or numbing it, but by letting everything in without pushing back. This is equanimity.

Equanimity means experiencing emotions fully without being consumed. It’s not about suppressing feelings or being ruled by them—it’s about letting emotions flow through instead of getting stuck. This matters because emotions that aren’t processed don’t just vanish. They linger in the body and mind, distorting perception, influencing behavior, even showing up as physical illness.

This isn’t some voodoo—it’s an established field with lots of science (see this, this and this). Feeling emotions fully isn’t just about resilience—it’s about keeping a clear, open system where emotions move through instead of piling up.

Turned out the real answer wasn’t in perfecting the outside world (good luck with that) or suppressing emotions. It was about feeling everything—fully, openly—letting life move through me without resistance or running away.

It’s not intuitive. Why would feeling everything help? Why would anyone try to fully face the bad stuff—pain, fear, all of it—when every instinct says run? Most of us dodge that stuff for a reason. That was my reaction too, but at some point, I leaned into it anyway. I spent real time on this, trying, failing, unlearning. The more I stopped resisting, the more it clicked: it actually worked.

At this point you might be thinking, Well, sure, maybe this guy just has a lot of emotions. I don’t have that much going on. Everything feels pretty chill. I’d ask: How exciting is your life, really? Could it be you’re dull and don’t even realize you’ve bottled things up? A flat emotional landscape might not mean peace—it might mean you’ve gone numb without noticing. Me, for years.

So anyway, I’m still pretty new at this, but life’s getting sharper, more real. I’m sturdier, but not in a dead-inside way—I bounce back better. I’m handling messy emotions easier, and I’m okay stepping into stuff that might sting. It’s wild—I feel more alive, more in it, and the hard stuff doesn’t hit as deep. It’s like opening a window in a room where the air’s been still and stale—that fresh air rushing in.

And honestly, the fact that I’m able to talk about these things publicly is to me a good pointer that this is working. A few years back I would definitely not talk about these kinds of super personal and sensitive topics publicly.

Do you ever think about how you felt as a kid—when everything was fresh, new, exciting, like the world was bursting with color? I’ve missed that. I don’t think it’s natural for adults to just lose it. We act like going dull is normal, but I’ve seen people who still glow with that kid-like excitement. So I knew it’s possible. I’m pretty sure I’m figuring it out.

And now that I’ve got this window cracked, I can’t unsee how that old tug-of-war is everywhere. We’re always sold two extremes: toughen up and harden yourself, or seek safety and remove discomfort. Woke culture, love and relationships, parenting—you name it, it’s there.

Like, take woke culture—it’s all about making everything “safe” by policing language, canceling anything offensive, setting up spaces where no one’s allowed to disagree or push back, all to keep discomfort out. I’d been doing my own version of woke culture my whole life—controlling my world to avoid anything that might shake me, thinking it’d keep me safe. I get where it’s coming from, but it doesn’t work. The safer you try to make things, the shakier you feel. Even if you block every outside threat, your own worries sneak in. But toughening up isn’t the answer either—that just leaves you dull or worse.

Love and relationships show it too. People shy away from the deep stuff because getting hurt sucks. They build walls, keep it light, and at the first sign of pain, many walk away. But love needs you to open up. Equanimity flips that—you can love hard, go all in, and if it falls apart, it’ll sting, but you’ve got tools to deal. You’re not drowning—you can handle it.

Parenting’s maybe the clearest example. You’ve got the overprotective mom, shielding her kid from every bump, and the tough-love dad, thinking struggle’s the only way to build a spine. Mom’s kid ends up scared of the world; Dad’s kid just goes dull or worse, traumatized. Neither’s the full picture. Kids need to learn to face challenges head-on without losing their capacity to feel deeply and connect with the world.

You know that old paradox: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” vs “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” I disagree with both. They’re incomplete. The reality is, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger if you can handle it—but if it’s too much, it breaks or numbs you. The real game’s not flipping between pushing through or staying safe, but growing your capacity to take in life without shutting down.

And the way to do that is through equanimity. Instead of adjusting how much adversity we face, we build inner strength to meet it all—pain, fear, joy—without resistance. Mindfulness and meditation are key tools here. They train us to stand steady in life’s intensity, not by toughening up or running, but by expanding our ability to feel without breaking.

I now try to sit with every feeling, every ache, and not fight it (I talk about it here). I can’t pack it all into words—it’s taken books and hours of meditation to get the basics. I just wanna say: you can be sensitive and strong. It’s real. If that sparks something in you, you’ve got a few pointers to dig into on your own.

That’s the work I’m in now. And I won’t trade it for safety ever again.

I’m not a writer. Like, not even close. I haven’t read a ton of fiction or exquisite writing (I hope to fix that), and I’ve never studied the craft. Writing and expressing myself in words is actually super hard for me. Every few paragraphs you see from me is hours of writing and rewriting.

Today, I want to share my new-ish writing process with you. This version of my blog is heavily supported by ChatGPT. Now, before you purists roll your eyes at the mention of AI in writing, let’s step back for a second. I’m not using it how you might think.

Writing is a tool. Like art or music, it’s a way to transfer your mental state, lived experiences or whatever else you want to say to someone else. But it’s super inefficient. Even the best writers can only capture a sliver of what they feel. Try putting a psychedelic experience into words—it’s IᗰρاşŞIBℓË. Writing always loses something in translation.

So isn’t it natural to use whatever tools we can to make that transfer more accurate?

The criticism of using AI for writing mainly comes from the inauthenticity angle, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Obviously, if you give a topic to ChatGPT and ask it to generate a piece and then put your name on it, the content will not only fail to represent your voice but will also come out flat as fuck. No seriously, try to get ChatGPT to generate an interesting piece—I dare you.

But that's just the most basic way of using it. You didn't think I used it like that, did you? It's pretty obvious my writing is mine. I think my tone and temperament translate in my writing, RIGHT??

I use it in a more nuanced way, and I’ll talk about it below, but even then, when I told about it to my friend Alec a few days ago, he was basically like man, I wanna read your raw stuff, not robot stuff. That stung. This criticism is kinda expected until I can clearly explain how I use AI, but even then, might it still be valid? idk, I’m not 100% sure, tbh. My friend Alec is a really really good writer, and I respect him a lot, so talking to him made me think for sure. I’d love to hear your thoughts too and so with this post, I aim to clarify how, in my head, what I do actually feels more "raw."

I approach using ChatGPT by focusing on one question: How can I improve the accuracy of what I'm trying to say? How can I convey my thoughts more effectively? It's not about writing a better piece or sounding smarter or more polished. It's about making sure that what I say aligns as closely as possible with what's inside. Both the content and the vibe.

I think it's a misconception that my unedited and unpolished writing represents the "raw" me. It's not the "raw" me because my writing skills heavily influence and limit it. If I'm not a painter and see a beautiful woman, and I try to paint her but end up with a stick figure, is that really how I see her? Is that truly the "raw" me? I think it's just a product of my painting abilities, or rather, the lack of them. If I had a tool to help me paint what I see more accurately, wouldn't that be more "raw" because it better matches my internal state?

For a piece of writing to truly resonate—to successfully convey not just the content but the vibes—it needs an emotional or cognitive friction, a unique take or an idea that makes the reader stop and think or feel. This is what sparks the writing in the first place. The resonance of writing comes from veering off this beaten path, deviating from the flat, mainstream understanding of things.

AI tools, though, do the opposite. They polish things, make them broadly digestible, and smooth out the edges (it's really hard if not impossible to get anything edgy out of AI). At the extreme end of this, they turn whatever seed you had in the first place into the most digestible mainstream framing. What you end up with is a flat piece that doesn’t create any kind of resonance. AI can deliver the ideas in their most generic form, but it misses the nuance. It informs but doesn’t connect. And connection is the whole point.

This is also why starting with an AI-generated draft doesn’t work. AI might produce a polished piece, but because it’s so flat, trying to reverse-engineer emotion and nuance into something that wasn’t designed to hold them feels forced and doesn’t click.

There’s an upside to its writing, though: clarity. AI is really good at polishing and making things more digestible.

And so, when I use ChatGPT, I always keep this dichotomy in mind. We’re partners in crime: I bring the nuance, edge and emotion, and AI helps me frame things in a more understandable way. My job while writing is to know when to lean into the nuance and when to follow the polished thread to keep everything clear and cohesive.

My writing starts messy—a stream-of-consciousness draft full of scratchy, repetitive ideas, angles and half-baked metaphors. Once I’ve got everything down, I organize it and bring in ChatGPT.

I give super specific instructions: keep my tone, my phrasing, my everything. I don’t just take whatever it spits out, because most of what it generates doesn’t really match my vibe, no matter how much I prompt it. I go back and forth, see what it comes up with, and occasionally pull out a phrase, a word here, or a sentence there that better translates what I’m trying to express. Ten, twenty iterations later, I’ve got this fusion of my framings with AI-polished bits.

Then I comb through it again, making sure every single word feels like something I’d actually say. It’s not fast or easy, but it works.

I say I use AI to get my writing as close as I can to what I have in mind, but the reality is that I don’t just use it as an editor. I have conversations with it about my piece, and sometimes it brings up ideas or angles I hadn’t considered. Maybe it points out a blind spot in my writing or highlights where I need to add more context. After hours of back and forth—clarifying my ideas, questioning my assumptions, exploring new angles, and filling gaps I didn’t even know were there—I come away not only with a better piece of writing but also with a changed, deeper understanding of the topic itself.

By the end, the “raw me” has evolved. Is the final piece what I initially wanted to say, or is it the new me that grew during the process? Probably both. Spend enough time with any idea, and it’s gonna change. That’s just how it works. Impermanence, baby!

Writing is inherently imperfect. I never feel like I’ve captured exactly what I want to say or how I want to say it. But at some point, around the 80/20 mark, I have to stop and call it done. Working on the same piece gets really annoying after a while. Like this one… it’s the 3rd day I’m working on it, and I’m so sick of it already ahah.

So, anyway… this hybrid approach is still evolving. It’s natural to take the “Black Mirror” angle with all the new tech and frame them as inorganic and disconnecting. I’m usually the one fighting for keeping things organic. But maybe, just maybe… there’s another angle to this. If we learn to use these tools the right way, they can help us amplify our authentic expression and allow people like me—and so many others—to say what we couldn’t before, share more, and connect better.

We all want to live fully—to experience life in all its richness and beauty. But there’s always something in the way. Some point to responsibilities or the constant chaos of life. Others recognize their own unresolved issues but feel paralyzed by fear or exhaustion. Some choose to blame luck or fate. Then there are those who manage to push past all that, choosing to face all the discomfort if it means getting to a better place.

For most of my life, I’ve been known as an extroverted optimist. I love people, the energy of being in vibrant social settings. But even in the liveliest moments, there’s often this subtle, frustrating barrier—a sense of not fully being there. It's like watching a sunset through a fogged window – I see the colors, sense the beauty, but can't feel the warmth on my skin or smell the evening air. The world is right there, yet somehow just out of reach.

It’s not just social settings, either. This detachment follows me even in nature, where I claim to feel most alive. When I’m out there, I’ll have brief moments where everything aligns—when I feel completely present, part of the landscape itself—but they’re fleeting. Most of the time, I’m just… there. Not fully present, as if I’m pressing my hands against glass, yearning to touch something I can’t quite grasp.

It’s like watching a live concert through a phone screen. You see the lights, hear the music, and feel some of the energy. But when you’re actually there the bass vibrates in your chest, the crowd’s energy pulls you in, and every moment feels electric. Living with this “film” between me and the world feels like I’m stuck watching the concert on a tiny screen, knowing full well how alive it could be if I were actually there.

And I know this because I’ve had some rare, profound experiences where that barrier dissolves. It felt like I woke up and for the first time, I felt truly alive, where I was like this is it, this is real life, this is what it's supposed to feel like. Everything else before that felt like a 2D video game on an old console—flat, muted, almost lifeless. Once I've tasted these vivid and real moments, it’s impossible to settle for less.

Naturally, the question becomes: how do you get there more consistently? How do you peel away the layers that separate you from fully being in life? Where do you even start when there are so many systems, frameworks, and psychological modalities out there? It’s overwhelming to even try to engage. What’s true? What’s not? And which of the ten million contradicting approaches do you even follow?

For me, the answer has been surprisingly simple: Mindfulness! The ability to fully engage with the present moment without judgment. That’s it. It works deep, right at the foundation of how we experience life. It doesn’t require logic and rational analysis—which is just so unintuitive for a nerd like me. But that’s the beauty of it. You can practice it anywhere, anytime.

The practice boils down to two things:

1. Be aware: Notice your thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and environment—without getting caught up in the stories your mind layers on top of them.
2. Be non-judgmental / equanimous: Accept what you observe without resistance, without trying to change, suppress or cling to it. Fully allow what arises to exist without holding on or pushing it away.

Describing mindfulness is like trying to explain love. You can say it’s a feeling of deep affection, but that barely scratches the surface of what it’s like to actually be in love. Mindfulness is kind of the same, that’s why it’s so hard to "sell" it. Until you’ve practiced it and felt the shifts, it just sounds like another self-help cliché.

When you practice mindfulness, you’re retraining your entire mind, body, and nervous system to engage with life in a new way. The first step is awareness: this sharp, clear noticing of your thoughts, emotions, and sensations. It’s like flipping on a light switch in a dim room. You start to realize just how much of your life has been running on autopilot, driven by habits and patterns you didn’t even know were there. For the first time, you create a pause—a moment of stillness where you can actually see what’s happening beneath the surface.

As you observe without judgment, you stop clinging to the highs and fighting the lows. Emotions and experiences flow naturally, like waves rising and falling. That resistance, the constant effort to control or avoid, begins to fade. What’s left is space—room to breathe, to feel, to exist without being overwhelmed. Over time, your nervous system adapts. The fight-or-flight mode calms down, and you find yourself more grounded, more present. Life stops feeling like it’s happening to you. Instead, you’re in it, choosing your path moment by moment.

And then, at some point you're like WOW. You feel completely reset, like you’re starting from scratch. The old patterns and identities aren't driving you anymore. You realize you can be whoever you want, do whatever you want. The filters are gone, and what’s left is pure, unfiltered life. For the first time, you’re not just surviving—you’re fully alive.

For me, at this point, these realizations are still just momentary—they come and go. They don’t stay with me all the time, and I mostly slip back into old patterns. But that’s part of the journey. The goal is to continue the practice to have these moments more and more, to stretch them out, until eventually, I’m always there—living in that raw, unfiltered reality, fully awake, fully alive.

The most unintuitive part for me—someone used to fixing everything through logic—has been realizing that mindfulness doesn’t deal with traumas, psychological blocks, or barriers at an intellectual level. It doesn’t ask you to dig into your past, dissect your childhood, or untangle every knot in your psyche. Instead, it works beneath all that. The practice gradually melts those things away, like ice dissolving under the sun.

This simplicity feels radical in a world that equates complexity with progress. Our culture prizes adding more—more techniques, more theories, more frameworks. Even people seem to get more credibility the more complex they appear. Mindfulness flips that entirely. It’s about stripping away the excess, and focusing on the essence of what it means to be alive.

A lot of people dismiss mindfulness, saying, “I can’t focus,” or “My mind doesn’t work like that.” But the harder it is, the more you have to gain from it. Saying, “I don’t meditate because I can’t focus,” is like saying, “I don’t go to the gym because I’m out of shape.” You don’t start with focus—you build it. Meditation is the training. Many people with ADHD, for example, become excellent meditators and gain the most from it. It’s not easy for anyone at first—that’s the point. It’s a skill you develop over time. You don’t have to believe in it upfront. Just practice, experience it, and see the results for yourself.

I’ve also heard people say these things feel too self-centered, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. This isn't just about you. Presence makes us more compassionate and attuned to our interconnectedness. It’s not about retreating inward, instead it's about showing up more fully for the people around us, with empathy and an open heart.

Psychology has gone through so many stages. Early on, psychoanalysis focused on digging into the past and uncovering hidden memories. Then behaviorism emphasized conditioning and observable actions somewhat ignoring the internal world. Later, cognitive psychology shifted the focus to the thought patterns. And now we’re at this fascinating point where psychology, spirituality, and even religion are converging on a shared understanding: mindfulness is where it’s at. It isn’t just another tool; it’s the foundation of a rich, connected life.

You see it everywhere: in therapies like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy in spiritual practices like Zen and Vipassana, and even in Christian contemplative prayer. Yoga, Sufi meditation, and Taoist traditions are based on the same principle: be present, observe without resistance, and connect with reality as it is. Across cultures and philosophies, this practice emerges as a universal truth.

As Rumi said, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." Mindfulness is my way of dismantling those barriers—each step peels back another layer of separation, bringing me closer to that raw, vivid experience of being truly alive.

P. S. There are so many books on this, and I feel like it's very individual who connects with which book, but I'll give you some to consider.

Introduction Level

The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh

Discover the art of mindfulness with the help of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful and practical guide. Through gentle anecdotes and exercises, learn to be fully present in everyday moments and work towards greater self-understanding and peace. From washing dishes to peeling an orange, find opportunities for mindfulness in everything you do.

www.readthistwice.comThich Nhat Hanh

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer

Unlock your inner potential and discover inner peace with The Untethered Soul - a #1 New York Times bestseller. Author and spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer takes readers on a transformative journey that explores the source of thoughts and emotions, and provides simple yet profound solutions for releasing limiting beliefs. Through meditation and mindfulness, Singer shows how to live in the present moment and release painful memories that keep us from achieving happiness and self-realization. This book offers a life-changing perspective for anyone looking to let go of mental and emotional limitations, and is now available in a special hardcover gift edition.

www.readthistwice.comMichael A. Singer

Practice Level

Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

Explore the world of mindfulness and meditation with renowned meditation master Bhante Gunaratana in this step-by-step guide. Learn the myths, realities, and benefits of mindfulness as well as techniques for cultivating loving kindness. Perfect for beginners, this expanded edition offers a complete text and valuable insights into living a more productive and peaceful life.

www.readthistwice.comBhante Henepola Gunaratana

The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness by John Yates

Learn how to start or improve your daily meditation practice with “The Mind Illuminated.” Neuroscientist and meditation master John Yates provides an accessible, step-by-step toolkit based on ancient spiritual teachings and the latest brain science. Using a groundbreaking 10-stage program, this guide teaches you how to overcome mind wandering and distractions, extend your attention span, and achieve deep states of peace and mindfulness. With illustrations and charts to help you through each stage, “The Mind Illuminated” is perfect for beginners and seasoned meditators alike.

www.readthistwice.comJohn Yates

The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young

Discover the true nature of enlightenment through the scientific inquiry of Shinzen Young. In his bestselling book, now available in paperback, The Science of Enlightenment, Young combines his understanding of spiritual teachings with scientific precision and analogies to provide a clear guide to mindfulness meditation. Explore how mindfulness can enhance cognitive abilities, increase compassion, and lead to happiness independent of external circumstances. This insightful book is perfect for both novice and experienced meditators.

www.readthistwice.comShinzen Young

A couple of my other relevant posts on this – here and here.

It feels like the mind is like an intellectual labyrinth where each twist and turn is some kind of a thought, principle, rule, strategy, mental model, a social game, a worry or an anxiety.

Navigating this maze is incredibly intellectually stimulating for some of us, and it feels like you’re making so much progress and gaining so much understanding. But somehow, counterintuitively, the deeper you get, instead of solving it, you’re actually expanding and complicating the labyrinth, and then you're like wtf, I'm so advanced and I have so much figured out, so much knowledge and so many concepts in my arsenal, yet I don’t get any kind of a resolution. And then, you’re joking with your friends about how much easier life would be if you were dumber.

The deeper you go in this maze, the more invested and trapped you become. You cling to this illusion of control and understanding so tightly that it becomes extremely hard to even see the world outside the maze. The actual world you’re supposed to live in.

I’ve started getting glimpses of the solution. Instead of trying to solve the ever-complicating maze, I step out into the open, sunlit field of the present moment. Mindfulness is a great tool for this. Focus on the actual sensations in my body and the world around me, not the mental models of things, but the real, tangible experience of them. The more I stay in the real world, the more the maze dissolves as a side effect.

The “present moment” has a marketing problem, though. You don’t tell an intellectual stimulation addict to turn into a monk. The present moment is actually rock ‘n’ roll. It’s where the most intensity and fullness of life are. It’s about feeling every move, every twitch of a muscle when you dance. (Thich Nhat Hanh has a lot of great practical advice in his books.)

It’s incredible how little music I’ve been listening to in recent years compared to my younger days, especially for someone who has always considered music one of the most profound aspects of their life. I only recently realized that music had taken a backseat because it was basically a distraction from my intellectual rat race. I’ve started listening to a lot of music again, and I’m beginning to feel the feels. It’s incredible.

This is also why I am so irresistibly drawn to fluidity, people, things and experiences that flow effortlessly, dance gracefully, and radiate the feminine. These qualities embody the essence of the present moment and counterbalance the rigid complexity of my intellectual labyrinth. Observing and embracing the feminine (qualities that unfortunately seem to be on a steep decline in the modern Western world) brings me to a state of presence and, in a way, also stillness.

I’d heard about Vipassana for years and always thought it was kind of the next step in my meditation journey—a bucket list thing. For some reason, I never really researched it much. It just seemed like one of those things I’d eventually do, like it was meant to be part of my path anyway.

Vipassana is a meditation technique designed to boost your concentration, awareness, and equanimity through observing your bodily sensations, cultivating of wisdom or insight into the true nature of reality. You sit in silence, observing these sensations and learning not to react to them. Over time, you’re supposed to "see things as they really are" and gain an experiential understanding of how the body and mind are interconnected. They say Buddha reached enlightenment with this very technique, or at least he taught it to his students. But that was like 2500 years ago, so idk if we can be certain.

Last year, I spent almost the whole year traveling and at some point felt ready to dive into Vipassana. So, I signed up for courses through Dhamma.org in France, the UK, and Sweden, but I got waitlisted for all of them—none of it worked out.

Then this year, my friend Arshak, who had done it before, and I found a course in Armenia. I was surprised there was even one here. I had this vague idea of what my days would look like: waking up at 4 am, meditating for 10.5 hours, eating vegetarian food, no stimulants, no phones, no reading or writing, and not even making eye contact with other students. It all sounded pretty good to me.

Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t dig into it more. For some reason, I didn’t fully grasp what 10 hours of meditation a day would actually feel like. I mean, it sounds intense, but I guess I just didn’t really acknowledge the weight of it.

We get to the center, register, hand over our phones, watches, and all our electronics, and sign a paper agreeing not to leave for the next 10 days. I don’t think much of it at first, but it turns out this is just the start of a whole set of tactics aimed at keeping you from bailing.

Then the silence kicks in, and we get our instructions. They hammer home again that leaving during the 10 days is a big no-no. They make it crystal clear: if anyone wants to bail, now’s the time.

There are only three people I’m allowed to talk to: two managers who handle logistical and technical stuff, and the assistant teacher, this old and wise guru dressed in all white. He’s the only one with any formal training; the rest of the volunteers, including the managers, are old students. To talk to him, you have to sign up for a Q&A session. He's called an assitant teacher, because THE teacher is S. N. Goenka, who has died 11 years ago, but who we hear through the audio recordings.

We get to the group meditation hall, and the whole floor is divided into these 80cm squares where each student (there are around 70-80 students) is assigned a spot to sit for the next 10 days. It feels a bit claustrophobic, and I can already tell this is going to be uncomfortable.

After a few hours of meditating, my legs are killing me. I cycle and run pretty regularly, so my muscles are tight and my legs aren’t very flexible these days. Plus, I messed up some leg muscles / joints on my right leg in the gym a week or so ago. None of this is an issue for my usual 20-30 minute meditation practice, but after meditating here for a few hours, my legs start hurting pretty bad. It never even crossed my mind that it would be an issue, but it gets brutal.

Every day at 7 pm, there’s a discourse—an audio recording from the founder of this specific Vipassana course, S.N. Goenka. On “day one,” he encourages us to stay for the entire course, saying that “it can be harmful to leave in the middle of a course.” Harmful? That’s weird, I think. And then he straight up calls people who leave early “weak-minded.” I’m like, WTF? Are you serious? I look around, trying to gauge other people’s reactions.

I notice a pattern forming—a series of tactics that seem questionable to me, aimed at discouraging people from leaving. I get that you’re supposed to get the most value by sticking it out for the whole 10 days, and I trust the intentions are good, but do they really have to resort to shaming and guilt-tripping to make it happen?

I wake up the next day with a lot of pain in my joints, and it only gets worse during the meditation sessions. This isn’t the usual back or shoulder discomfort from sitting too long, which I can usually handle. Maybe I’m being a bit of a hypochondriac, but I can’t shake the feeling that pushing through this pain might actually be unhealthy and mess something up in my legs.

Pain isn’t just a useless sensation to be endured; it’s a signal from your body that something’s wrong and needs to change. One of the key ideas of the course is equanimity—observing sensations without developing cravings or aversions, recognizing the impermanence of everything. So, basically, you’re learning not to turn pain into suffering.

I believe in this concept, and I know that working with pain is a necessary part of this practice. But I’m conflicted about which pain is okay to endure and which isn’t. It’s tough to figure out when to accept discomfort as part of the process and when it’s a sign that something is genuinely wrong. If you do any sports, especially if you’re over 30, you know this well. So anyway, I sign up for a meeting with the assistant teacher to get his guidance.

When I finally see the assistant teacher and try to explain my situation, mentioning the right knee muscle/joint inflammation, he basically interrupts me and says something like, “Yeah, it’s fine, it’s your first Vipassana, just endure the pain.” Honestly, that’s a super unsatisfying answer even if delivered with a joy and smile on his face. He doesn’t even try to understand what’s going on. For all he knows, it could’ve been something serious.

Now, to stress the above point and how disappointing the teacher’s response was, I got Peroneal Tendonitis last year on my right foot because one day I went out for a run and did three times my normal distance and maybe my shoes were a bit worn out. I started feeling pain at some point but ignored it. Got home and a few hours later realized I messed up my foot. Was toe-walking for a week and couldn’t run for two months after that. It was super annoying because things like these set you back a lot, and you lose a lot of momentum, so you start being more careful and paying more attention to the pains in your body. And now, suddenly I get here, and the teacher is like, “You’re fine, it’s all in your head.”

I have a hard time trusting the teacher. He doesn’t really listen; he just talks and interrupts without fully hearing me out. I notice the same thing happening in the group Q&A sessions. His answers often don’t address the actual question, or he misquotes Goenka. Some of his advice seems downright harmful, like telling a woman who hasn’t slept for two days due to intense, disturbing thoughts that it’s a good sign and means her meditation is working, or when a guy with horrible back pain from a hernia is told to just keep sitting through it. Two days later, the guy comes back with, “Teacher, the pain is way worse, I can’t tolerate it,” and then the teacher is like, “Okay, give him a chair.” Argh… you don’t tell someone with a hernia to just keep sitting and enduring the pain.

The guy wasn’t even sitting with the right posture—I know because his spot was right in front of me. They didn’t comment on posture at all. They just tell you to sit however is comfortable, without any guidance on proper alignment or anything. It’s frustrating because proper posture is crucial for avoiding injury, but that doesn't seem to get any attention.

So anyway, on “day two,” I tell the teacher I want to leave, and he’s like, “No, you can’t. What are you talking about? This is your first time here; you’ll be fine in two days.” Then he adds, “You leaving will be bad for the morale of others.” This triggers another WTF moment for me. Like, is it normal to get this kind of guilt trip from someone who’s supposed to be our guru here? He must realize how inappropriate that sounds because he quickly backtracks with, “Not that you need to think about other students; you should focus on your own journey.” Then he tells me to just go and maybe see him again tomorrow. So I leave, feeling even weirder about the situation.

At this point, I’m feeling kinda meh about some of the things going on here. There’s the weird Goenka chanting, the slight culty vibes, and the living conditions, which brought all the memories of my two years in the army. Shared rooms, bunk beds, shared squat toilets, and showers—except for the food. The food here is really good, no complaints there. Oh, and the nature is amazing. The center is surrounded by mountains and trees, really beautiful, but we only spend maybe an hour or so outside each day.

Goenka’s lectures, which run for like 1.5 hours a day, include reflections on the day’s meditations and explanations of various concepts. They feel kinda slow and pseudoscience-y at times for my taste, but I generally agree with the things he says. His comments like, “this wonderful technique, the wonderful Dhamma, so scientific, so non-sectarian, so rational,” definitely make me giggle. If you’re so non-sectarian, you don’t really need to point that out every five minutes.

Honestly, all of this is really minor; it just adds to my frustration of not being confident about whether it’s healthy to endure the specific pains in my legs. But yeah, I’m basically not in the “surrendered” state a student should be in to gain the most benefit from a setting like this. I take some time to think and assess.

I don’t talk to him on the third day, deciding to give it a few more days. I keep meditating and trying to be equanimous with all the sensations, including the pain, and to be fair, it does work. I’m able to meditate for a whole hour without moving at all. Instead of ignoring or “enduring” the pain, I sometimes narrowly focus on the exact sensations in the exact parts of my body that make up this pain. When you go narrow enough, you see how all the sensations constantly change and there’s no singular, constant pain, which somehow leads to the pain disappearing somehow.

I actually went a bit ahead at this stage; you’re not supposed to focus on anything but your breath. But I already have experience with both Anapana and body scanning techniques, so I just went ahead to fix the leg pains and then come back to the breath, haha. But as soon as the meditation is over, it’s hard for me to get up because all the pain comes back, and I have to be careful walking as things are stiff.

Now I notice another thing: most of the new students aren’t even meditating half the time. They’re just sitting there, looking at the clock on the wall behind us, waiting for it to end because they’re in so much physical discomfort or maybe just bored and dealing with mental chatter, idk. To be fair, the “old students” (the ones who have been through this before) are much better at handling it. They seem more focused and less fidgety.

So now I start to question the efficiency of the course since I’m really only meditating about a third of the time. I feel like I’m wasting so much time that I could’ve used way more efficiently. The rest of the time, I’m just dreading it and waiting for it to be over. Wouldn’t it be better if I could meditate the whole time without being totally derailed by my leg problem and physical inflexibility? Maybe it worked for Goenka’s early students if they were like yogis or something, but it doesn’t seem to make sense as a one-size-fits-all approach, especially for newbies who have to jump from 10 minutes a day of meditation to 10 hours.

Why can’t we just practice in shorter chunks and maybe limit it to a few hours a day, at least to begin with? Going from 30 minutes a day to 10 hours is like deciding to run a marathon every day for 10 days when you usually jog a few miles. Of course, you’re going to be miserable and injured! It seems so inefficient to me, sitting through hours of pain and distraction for a few minutes of actual quality meditation. What’s the reasoning here? This intensive approach feels counterproductive, as it turns the experience into an endurance test rather than a meditative practice.

They do offer chairs if you can’t handle the floor, but idk, a chair doesn’t seem to be the answer either. They gave me a basic chair, but it was even harder to sit on it for some reason. The chair made me sleepy, plus it wasn’t that comfortable, and my knee would still hurt. I ended up putting a couple of cushions under my feet to raise my knee a bit and somehow manage the pain, but later I went back to the cross-legged position. At least there I was able to get some quality meditation.

Just for context, it was surprisingly easy for me to focus and meditate without mind chatter before the pain in my legs would make it hard to sit. The initial moments of meditation were quite focused, and I was good at being equanimous with other discomforts like back pain and shoulder tension. However, as the physical discomfort in my legs grew, maintaining that focus became challenging.

So at this point, I have two main issues: One, is it even healthy to sit with this level of pain for so long? Could I be damaging my joints? The teacher’s vague “you’ll be fine” answers aren’t very reassuring. And two, isn’t it a huge waste of time if at least half of the room is just watching the clock, unable to meditate because they’re in agony? Intuitively, it seems like I would go way deeper if I weren’t so physically uncomfortable the whole time. But I don’t really have anyone to ask. The managers are there for logistical stuff, and the assistant teacher is unhelpful.

It’s Q&A time again, and one woman, who sounds distressed, asks why Goenka said quitting is so “dangerous.” The assistant teacher compares it to stopping brain surgery midway through and leaving someone’s brain exposed. Again, I’m like, WTF, dude? Do you really have to make that kind of unnecessary and exaggerated analogy in a situation where the person is already in distress?

You need to understand, we’re not at a party where everyone’s wearing a mask and not really affected by anything. These meditation practices and the super thought-out structure and environment are designed to get you into a psychologically vulnerable place, which is definitely necessary for doing any meaningful self-work. But I feel like the language both Goenka and the assistant teacher use isn’t very empathetic. It has huge “Whiplash” / tough love vibes to me, which to some is probably good, but I don’t know… I feel like it may not always fit the audience. In such a vulnerable state, a more compassionate approach might be more appropriate and effective.

Diligently. Seriously. Ardently. Patiently and Persistently. Goenka uses these words to describe the attitude he wants you to bring to the meditation. Hearing these words repeatedly might give one the impression that meditation is a grave task, demanding extraordinary effort. Personally, these aren’t the words that come to mind when I think of a mind free from agitation. Nor do they seem to align with what selflessness would feel like.

When you consciously apply effort, you tend to feel more self-aware. Think of times when you’ve felt self-conscious—maybe during public speaking, fretting over social media, or criticizing yourself for your flaws. These moments are far from effortless. Now, think of times when you’ve felt less burdened by a sense of self—perhaps after great sex, a walk in nature, playing a musical instrument you’re good at, being in the flow. These experiences feel a bit more like what the absence of effort would be.

You can tell a lot of the people asking questions are genuinely looking up to the assistant teacher, who, to be fair, is this charming guru with a smiley face and a joyful vibe to him.

I go up to the teacher with a question again, and this time I ask, “Teacher, let’s say I had practiced yoga for a year before coming here, so it was way more comfortable for me to sit without all the pain. Wouldn’t I be able to go way deeper in my practice?” I’m trying to imply that if I didn’t have these intense pains and could concentrate more, I would be able to gain more benefit from the practice. But again, the teacher just gives me his usual, “This is your first Vipassana, you’ll be fine in a few days.” So I leave without getting any real answers, feeling unheard once again.

Update: Here’s something I think a lot of practitioners get wrong. After reading this post, many people have told me, “pain and discomfort are necessary components of this practice.” I agree that some pain and discomfort are inevitable, no matter how well-prepared you are physically, and it’s part of the process. But your body should be as ready as possible before diving in. This is actually the whole point of Hatha Yoga (known in the mainstream simply as "yoga"). Hatha Yoga has historically been viewed as a preparatory stage for higher forms of yoga—like Raja, Bhakti, Kundalini, and others. The primary goal is to create a stable, healthy body and mind, free from distractions caused by physical discomfort. Physical yoga itself isn’t the end goal; it prepares you for deeper spiritual work. The asanas are designed to open the body and make sitting for long periods easier. So, while mainstream yoga often focuses on flexibility as the end goal, the real purpose is to ensure your body isn’t a barrier to your spiritual practice. The more prepared you are physically and the less pain and discomfort you experience, the deeper and more subtle you can get in your Vipassana experience.

We’re at day 4 now, which is when the actual Vipassana practice starts. The three days before that, we were practicing Anapana, a breath awareness exercise that helps prepare you for Vipassana. But Vipassana starts in the afternoon, and before that, we still have several hours of Anapana. An hour before Vipassana begins—and Vipassana is a two-hour meditation—we have another meditation session. I manage to sit the whole hour without moving a single millimeter and have a really good experience being equanimous with my pain. But then, when we start the Vipassana session, just 20 minutes in, I can’t handle the pain anymore. I get angry, open my eyes, and start looking around. Again, half of the room is just chilling there, waiting for it to be over.

And so, after the meditation, I go straight up to the manager: “Okay, I’ve decided I want to leave. This is not working out for me.” He’s like, “Well, you can’t just leave. You have to talk to the teacher, and the teacher is only available at 9 p.m. for the Q&A.” The course is setup in a way where it's logistically hard to leave. And not only that, but because there’s so much implication that quitters are weak-minded, imagine having to go to a Q&A and announce or ask permission to leave in front of all the other participants (and this is not just my experience, see this). It feels like some kind of weird tactic to make you stay. If I were in my 20s, I probably wouldn’t have left. It would’ve been too big of a blow to my ego. But this time, I almost want to leave as a rebellion and be an example for others who may have wanted out but couldn’t because of all this stigma.

The second manager finds out that I want to leave, and he literally tells me, “If you leave, you’ll suffer forever, and you will always regret it.” He says things like, “You’re gonna think your whole life, ‘Why didn’t I stay those five days?’” I’m like, WTF dude? That’s a pretty heavy trip to lay on someone who’s already struggling with the situation. It feels like another weird guilt trip, and it doesn’t sit right with me at all.

To be clear, all of these people seem genuinely well-intentioned, and I don’t question their motives at all. I’m just not really into the whole vibe.

By this point, I’ve had enough of the weirdness and I’m so ready to bail. With all the pressure to stay, it kind of turns into a game of rebellion in my head. Everyone else is all focused on sticking it out to the end, but I’m like, “How can I make the biggest scene while leaving?” I know I’ll have to deal with a bunch of “Oh, weak-minded Vahe couldn’t hack it” comments when I'm back and people find out I left Vipassana halfway through and to be perfectly honest, part of the motivation behind this writing is to redeem myself.

I wait for the 9 p.m. Q&A. I go up to the teacher and, with a proud and loud voice, say, “Dear teacher, I quit. I love what you guys are doing here, but I decided to go home. My legs want me to go back to a 30-minute-a-day practice.”

The teacher starts again with his “you’re making the wrong decision” spiel and guilt-tripping me about how this would affect the other people (without correcting himself this time). But I’m like, “No, teacher, I’ve already made up my mind. There’s no way to convince me to stay.”

And he’s like, “Well, okay, we’ll talk tomorrow at noon.” I’m like, “No, teacher, I am leaving.”

So we start some kind of weird negotiation on what time we need to meet the next morning to get the final “approval,” and we agree on 7 a.m. Just to be clear, there’s no tension in this conversation; we’re almost laughing through it.

Interestingly, the last two days, I actually had a very joyful mood and a smile on my face the whole time, despite the pains, which was kind of weird and unusual. I still don’t know what it was—might have been some kind of side effect. But I talked to a friend yesterday who also had a Vipassana experience, and he said he had a similar reaction the whole time. It’s really interesting because most of the other people I saw there seemed extremely contemplative and serious.

Anyway, so I leave on the fifth day.

I think some people take pride in enduring pain, but that isn’t a huge motivator for me in this situation. I get enough of that from endurance sports, lol. I know I can take the pain—this isn’t my game here. I just don’t trust that it’s the best way to spend 10 days or deepen my practice. I don’t trust the process or the teacher. It feels inefficient, like I’m wasting precious time. I worry about integrating any insights when the conditions are so extreme and unrealistic compared to daily life. It seems geared toward inducing a dramatic experience to hook people, but I’ve already had spiritual openings—that’s not what I’m after. I want to develop more moment-to-moment mindfulness in a sustainable way.

That said, I have mad respect for the volunteers. It’s amazing that they devote so much time and energy to helping others for free. All the food was prepared by volunteers, the managers, the assistant teacher, the people who clean the bathrooms—no one gets paid. Everyone’s here because they’ve gained something meaningful from this experience and want to help others. And when I try to make a donation on my way out, they won’t even take it, saying they only accept money from people who complete the course. I think that’s really admirable.

I really enjoyed speaking with Ruzanna, the woman who brought Vipassana to Armenia. She seemed like a wonderful woman. I also really liked both managers, despite the second manager’s intense messaging. I could see myself having a great time with them outside of this context.

The course undeniably makes a bunch of people rave about how life-changing it is, even if they didn’t do things properly or learn big lessons but simply made it to the end. With sensory deprivation and hours of physical and mental strain, it’s bound to feel dramatic and might even induce some spiritual experiences. As Goenka says, “You’re bound to be successful.” But I don’t know if that’s the same as real, long-term transformation.

Most of what I see is a lot of people pushing through, then zoning out because they can’t handle meditating for that long. It seems so obvious that there’s got to be a better way.

Neuroscience studies show that concentration meditation strengthens a region of the brain called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). With continual practice, the ACC grows stronger, allowing us to meditate for longer periods. When inexperienced meditators push beyond what their ACC can handle, their minds start wandering. They mentally ruminate, pick up bad meditation habits, and end up wasting this precious time (see this and this).

Maybe not statistically and for scale, but certainly an individualized approach should yield much better results. I understand and appreciate the donation/volunteering angle, but honestly, I’d be down to pay for an experience where I get a more personalized approach. Turns out some Vipassana courses do just that.

I don’t want to knock the whole thing. I’m sure it helps a lot of people make breakthroughs, and I’m so grateful to the volunteers. My issues are more with the format than the intention. I do agree with most of what Goenka says. His delivery? Not so much. But the content? Definitely.

I actually had a moment while sitting in pain, thinking, “How am I gonna do another six days of this?” But then I thought, if I only had to endure this for five more minutes, it wouldn’t be so bad. This realization was proof that the physical sensations weren’t that terrible in the moment. My mind was exaggerating that pain and turning it into suffering by stressing about the future.

I realized that if the pain is tolerable now, it’ll be tolerable tomorrow and the next day (unless it intensifies significantly, which it was doing in my case, lol). In the moment, it’s not that bad. It gets overwhelming when you think about enduring many moments like this. But really, in each moment, it’s mostly okay. Eckhart Tolle explains this well in “The Power of Now.” It’s all about staying present and not letting your mind create suffering by projecting into the future.

What Vipassana gives you is an experiential learning of this, not just an intellectual understanding. And I wholeheartedly support experiential learning.

Having said that, I think for me, the best practice is something I can weave into my daily life, not some grueling marathon. Maybe I’m too stubborn and lack the humility to go along with their way. I’m open to that possibility. But deep down, it just doesn’t feel right for me. I’m all about those small, sustainable shifts rather than big dramatic plunges (although, okay, they might be needed to shake things up once in a while). I’ve already had those intense, full-body experiences of the bigger reality (documented in a private post, ask me about it), so now I want to practice in a more gradual and organic way to get there without forcing it.

So that’s where I’m at. As you can see, I’m still a bit conflicted, still processing it, and still have a lot of questions. Please take everything I said with a grain of salt. It’s possible that if I didn’t have the intense pain in my legs, I might have had a completely different experience. This blog post might be a complete 180 from what it is right now. The internet says that most breakthroughs and value actually come after the fifth or sixth day, like on the seventh to tenth days. I wouldn’t know because I haven’t been there.

I feel a bit envious of the ones who stayed, but I also don’t really regret leaving when I did. I’m glad I tried it, but I think I’ll stick to my regular practice for now. Maybe I’ll be back there someday. For now, I’m going to restart practicing yoga to get a bit more flexibility and up my meditation game a bit.

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