10 Days
of Silence.
Someone told me about Vipassana ten years before I did it. He said he cried. I thought that was strange. Now I understand what he meant.
What is Vipassana.
Vipassana is one of the oldest meditation techniques in the world, taught in a 10-day residential course. No religion, no chanting, no mysticism. Just a structured, disciplined method for observing your own mind. For ten days you sit in silence. No phone, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no talking. You wake at four in the morning and meditate for roughly ten hours a day. Two meals. Lights out at half nine. That’s it.
One of the things that stands out most about Vipassana is there’s no cost. The whole idea is that if you put a price on something, whether it’s expensive or cheap, you create an expectation. And if that expectation isn’t met, you’re naturally disappointed. So they remove the expectation entirely by offering the experience for free. If you feel you got something from it, you can make a donation afterwards. Completely up to you. Nobody chases you. You’re essentially paying for the person behind you. Paying it forward. I love that concept.
Why I Did It.
About ten years before I actually sat Vipassana, someone mentioned it to me. A smart, entrepreneurial, successful guy. He told me that during the process, he started to cry. I remember thinking that sounds really strange. At the time, I didn’t get what he meant or why I should do it. But because he mentioned the crying, it always stuck in my head.
At some point I felt I needed to go and explore it. It was one of those things I kept meaning to do, and life kept getting in the way. Eventually I just locked it in and went. I did mine in Suffolk, around April.
Turning Up.
The place looked like a farmhouse that had been converted. The accommodation was basic, but that’s the point. You’re not there for a fancy Soho Farmhouse retreat. People were pulling up into the car park on a nice sunny day. All kinds of people, all walks of life, turning up with a rucksack or a duffle bag. Nobody really spoke.
You have to book well in advance. Every three to six months, new dates become available, and you have to move quick to secure a place. I remember texting my brother and my business partner Kevin a few minutes before we had to hand over our phones, which felt a bit strange. Then we went into a room, someone gave us a talk about what was likely to happen over the next few days, and then we went into silence. Phones locked away. No more talking.
At that stage, it was all fairly okay for me. It reminded me of when I did the training session for the Royal Marines selection weekend. Everything basic, turn up, meet lots of random people. The only difference this time was we weren’t able to talk to anyone.
The First Twenty-Four Hours.
The most I’d ever meditated before this was about twenty minutes of transcendental meditation. Before that, maybe three or four minutes on an app. So going from three minutes to ten hours a day for ten days felt like a big jump. The same kind of jump as going from a mile in a pool to training for the English Channel.
The first twenty-four hours were really difficult. My mind was racing. It didn’t want me to sit there. I felt agitated, almost like a junkie going cold turkey. Who’s texted me. Who’s emailed me. My mind kept drifting off. The level of actual focus I had on observing myself and the sensations in my body was probably about five or ten percent. The rest was just my chimp brain panicking and racing.
All the external distractions we carry around, phones, social media, all of it. You felt like you were coming off a drug. Dopamine Nation covers this well. And then thinking I’ve got another nine days of this just felt overwhelming. You almost want to project yourself into the future to skip the suffering.
It felt like coming off a drug. Five percent focus, ninety-five percent chimp brain. That's what day one looks like.
The Room.
I was in a dorm room with about ten or twelve guys. Never met any of them. All from different walks of life. Didn’t know anyone’s name. The initial few days felt strange. You’re just observing people getting up, getting ready to meditate, walking to the hall. The whole day is very structured.
You’re not allowed to make any notes. It’s just you and your thoughts. But you can observe the people around you, and it’s interesting what happens when you can’t talk to anyone. Over the course of ten days, you feel like you start to get to know the people you’re sharing a room with. You pick up on all their small habits. What they wear, their body language, how they go about their day. You try to build a picture of who that person is without a single word being exchanged. By the end, you’ve spent ten days forming a detailed impression of someone and you don’t even know their name.
What Happens When You Sit.
The day starts at four or half four. You meditate for two hours. Then breakfast around half six. After that you have an hour or two to yourself to walk around the gardens, which are beautiful. But in those first few days, your mind is racing and you’re almost wishing the ten days away.
The physical challenge surprised me. Sitting in one position for an hour at a time, your feet and legs get very uncomfortable. Pins and needles. Stiff backs. Lots of people in the room used pillows and foam blocks to take some of the weight off their body. That physical discomfort carried through most of the ten days.
After about two or three days, I felt a lot of emotion come up. There were moments where I was overwhelmed and became tearful. A short cry. You’d see other people on the walks around the gardens doing the same thing. Walking and releasing. I remember somebody breaking into tears during a meditation session, getting up and walking out. After a few days, you definitely feel something is working in the body. You start paying attention to things you’ve probably dismissed or masked with distractions for years.
You also get a lot of time to reflect. Relationships in all aspects of life, things you could have done better, people you may have hurt, or people who have hurt you. As the days progress, your ability to actually focus on observing the body slowly improves. On day one, maybe ten minutes out of an hour of real focus. The rest is your mind wandering. By day five or six, most of the session you feel genuinely focused, and maybe ten minutes of the monkey brain getting distracted. That progression is one of the most tangible things you notice.
The Shift.
For me, something clicked within the first twenty-four hours. The anxiety and discomfort I’d felt just disappeared and left my body. After that, I felt really content with myself. Calm in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The anxious edge was gone.
One of the things that sticks with me most is how your mind replays old arguments and negative experiences on a loop. Like a Groundhog Day of the same movie, over and over. You know the ending, but your brain keeps playing it. Around day four or five, I started to feel those loops shift. Instead of being in the movie, it felt like I was becoming the director. Seeing it from a slightly different perspective. And then the loop just stopped. There was a sense of emotion being released from the body, and that particular movie didn’t play again.
I’d tried psychotherapy before as a way to understand myself. Talking therapy is great, and it did a lot for me. It helps you contextualise and intellectualise the stories you tell yourself about certain experiences. Sometimes that really helps you process things and move forward. But sometimes, even though you can rationalise why things went the way they did, the feeling, the trauma, the emotion, doesn’t leave the body just because you’ve talked about it. There’s a brilliant book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk that explains this far better than I can.
The biggest takeaway from Vipassana over talking therapy was this: you didn’t necessarily know what was being released from your body, but you felt the emotion leaving. That’s a completely different thing. And when it did release, there was a huge sense of relief. Like a weight had been taken from you. There were days where I’d walk around between sessions feeling genuinely light and happy about life.
Talking therapy helps you understand it. Vipassana lets you actually release it from your body. That's a completely different thing.
The Structure.
At the end of every day, you watch a recorded video of S.N. Goenka, the teacher behind the entire Vipassana tradition, giving you context to the day. What you might have learned, some of the teachings. I found that useful, especially in the early stages when you have a lot of questions and aren’t sure if you’re doing the technique right.
One of the reasons you don’t talk to anyone is to stop people from comparing their experience. If you started sharing, you might think you’re doing it wrong and somebody else is doing it right. So the silence removes that. If you needed to, you could speak to someone in a private room to ask clarifying questions about the technique. I did this once or twice over the ten days when I wasn’t sure I was doing something correctly.
Only one person left after the first twenty-four hours. I think if they’d given a better overview of how the ten days is structured, it might have kept them. You don’t just sit and do the same thing for ten days. In the first three days, you learn a breathing technique called Anapana. Then on day four you learn Vipassana itself. And on the last day, you learn another technique called Metta. Knowing you’re learning different things across the week might have made that person stay. Not knowing makes it feel like ten days of the same thing, which is harder to commit to.
Getting to the halfway point on day five felt like a good accomplishment. Knowing I had the same distance again to go made me feel more relaxed. I never wanted to leave. The more I got into it, the more comfortable I felt in myself.
The Food.
The food was great. Dhal, pulses, vegetarian. No meat. The evening meal was mostly fruit and tea, so you fasted through to the following morning when you’d have a big breakfast. I never really felt hungry. I lost about four or five kilos over the ten days. It felt very healthy. A good detox of wholesome, organic food. A big contrast to the Channel Swim training where I was force-feeding myself marzipan and told to gain a stone.
Breaking the Silence.
At the end of the ten days, when you’re able to talk to everyone, there was a sense that you didn’t really want to break the silence. It took a little while to get back into it. It was interesting to finally learn the names of the people I’d spent ten days sharing a room with. And interesting to see how the perceptions I’d built up of people, based entirely on what they wore and how they moved, were completely wrong. You spend ten days constructing a detailed picture of someone without a single conversation, and then you find out none of it was accurate. That says something about how we judge people in everyday life.
Driving Home.
When I got into my car and started driving, my senses felt heightened. Everything seemed louder. Cars going past, movement, noise. Ten days of silence makes you very aware of your senses, and the real world hits you hard when you come back to it. I felt very calm and positive about life, but I also had this slight anxiety about getting my phone back. At the beginning, I didn’t want to hand it over. At the end, I almost didn’t want it back. There was a nervous feeling about opening WhatsApp and email and watching everything come flooding in again.
What Stayed.
I managed to keep the meditation going for quite a few months afterwards. Then slowly the discipline faded. I’m planning to do it again within the next six to twelve months, probably abroad this time just to add to the experience. The first time you have no expectations. The second time will be different because you know what’s coming in terms of the commitment. But the biggest impact since doing it isn’t the meditation practice itself. It’s my perception of life. I really do feel a degree of change in how I think. Less desire to chase things for the sake of it. More content. More calm. More patient. Less frustrated. It’s not dramatic, but it’s there.
The guy who told me about Vipassana ten years before I did it. The one who cried and I thought that was strange. I understand what he meant now. Things come up that you’ve been carrying around for years without knowing it. And when they leave, you feel it. Since doing it, I’ve mentioned Vipassana to quite a few founders and people going through challenging times. Every one of them who’s done it has said it made a real positive impact on their life. Some said it changed the direction they were heading in entirely.
There’s no religion, no dogma. It’s just a complete experience of learning about yourself. Where you need to let go and what you need to work on to feel more fulfilled and happy. Courses are available worldwide and run entirely on donations.
The mental discipline from Vipassana connects directly to physical endurance. I previously spent a year training to swim the English Channel, and I’m currently preparing for the Marathon des Sables. The ability to sit with discomfort and not react is the same skill, whether it’s cold water, a desert, or your own mind.