Vipassana meditation...

  Having the experience of overcoming exhausting multi-day ultramarathon distances and covering over 53 kilometers daily for 19 days, I already understood the principle of the body's functioning, its mental and physical states under extreme loads, and sometimes the process of the brain "shutting down"...But Vipassana interested me with its diametrically opposite approach... Here, there are no physical overloads, here the body shuts down and the brain turns on fully...
  A ten-day experiment... When you are completely deprived of routine tasks so that you can stay alone with yourself as much as possible... By agreement, you refrain from any contact with other people - physical, verbal, eye contact, gestures... You leave your multifunctional smartphone with your favorite music, books, and various forms of social communication in a storage locker for ten days... You refrain from writing, reading, working, and doing other physical exercises... All you need to do is follow the course schedule... And this means 10-hour daily meditations, following instructions on the technique, and having two meals a day with an afternoon tea and fruit... The gong sound invites you to all events...

  Why all this? Why does registration for such courses fill up within an hour? Why is everything free and organized through donations from people who have once completed the course? Everyone has their own path... For me, the main driving force to enroll in the course was to find out for myself what a meditative state is, and Vipassana was perhaps the best fit with its format... Although meditation is a fairly common and popular phenomenon nowadays, it seems that many people use this term without understanding what it really is... Because until you personally experience the doors to a meditative state - a state of equilibrium, meditation will remain for you just a set of letters, a trendy word, or simply sitting with closed eyes... At the Vipassana course, all conditions are created for you to quickly experience something entirely new - to learn the meditative state and the Vipassana technique itself, which is quite difficult to describe in words... The main goal of the technique is to eliminate suffering (restlessness, dissatisfaction, depression, etc.) by eradicating patterns of reaction to various factors...

The popularity of Vipassana courses is probably due to the completely unusual format and its results... They don't take your money, they don't proselytize, in fact, they warn you not to register for the course if you are not sure you can follow the schedule and agreements... They warn about all the details... At the same time, they offer a condition that is completely different from the one we live in... For people who so desperately want to change something, and there are plenty of such people in our depressive society, they offer not empty words and faith in some "truth," but pure practice of observing the surface of your own consciousness, gradually descending to its depths...

The free nature of the course is intended to make it as accessible as possible to both wealthy and poor members of society... Essentially, the main idea of the donation is to completely erase this boundary... Everyone lives on the alms of predecessors... They live with what they have, not demanding anything more... You need to turn off your Ego as much as possible... 

  The hall for group meditations...  

  I attended the Vipassana course in an extraordinarily beautiful and secluded place near Lake Bebrusai in the Lithuanian settlement of Molėtai... Over 100 students participated in the course... The course territory was bordered by a rope, beyond which, by agreement, one was not allowed to go... Women and men lived and ate separately during the course... Women were allocated rooms in a complex of two-story cottages...    

   Men lived in houses for 6 people, located among huge pine trees...

   The house that became my home for 10 days...

  You only needed to bring bed linen, a plate, a mug, a spoon, and hygiene products to the course... Bringing your own food was not allowed... Two meals a day in the dining room at 6:30 and 11:00, and tea with fruit at 17:00, were absolutely sufficient...  

  Inside the house, there was everything necessary - a bed, a toilet, and a shower... 

  Lake Bebrusai... The same landscape, changing its colors depending on the weather and time of day, reminded daily of the impermanence and transience of events in our lives... Anicca...      

  During this "experiment," I clearly saw all the trash generated by my consciousness... When you are alone with your thoughts and can objectively observe them thanks to meditation practically all day long, you realize how absurd these thoughts are... In everyday life, they work in the "background," while our brain is busy with urgent problems, but here everything is in plain sight...

The clarity of understanding that most anxieties come from thoughts related to hypothetical forecasting of life events, of which there can be millions of variations... That all fears are the same hypothetical forecasting - what if... This is the main experience I gained during the course. Meditation became a new tool that helps to exit any social game - conditioning (family, work, favorite activity, hobby...) in which you might be deeply immersed and forget that it is just a game and that worries are absolutely meaningless... Someone plays the role of a father, someone a son, someone a boss, and someone a subordinate... We have created millions of different games to give meaning to our existence, and we have become so engrossed in them that we have completely forgotten - the secret of happiness is not in the game and its outcomes, but in the balance and calmness of your own universe... Everything is simple...