What is Vipassana Meditation?

Vipassana is a technique, which was taught by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) in India 2500 years ago. This is the technique discovered by him and through which he reached enlightenment. This is the technique, which he later taught to all people for free and till his last breath of life. It was later lost, but kept and passed on from generation to generation by monks in Birma. It was brought back into the world and taught to everyone in the 1980s by Shri S N Goenkaji. Since then Vipassana has spread throughout the world and is being taught as a 10 day meditation course.

The Buddha taught that all misery in this world comes from our desires. Not enough that our desires almost never come from out true selves, being brought onto us by the illusionary world around us, but they also never leave us satisfied, keeping us wanting more. Even if something is being fulfilled, it is still never enough and our built up expectations are never fully met. To be truly happy and see ourselves, and the world for what it truly is (this is what Vipassana means) we have to free ourselves from false desires and learn to live in truth.

What Buddha discovered is that all of our actions, needs and wants, before they are acted upon, take start in a sensory form in different parts of our bodies. First, we get a sensation in our body, which in return triggers a certain action, or behavior. By practicing Vipassana, we learn to scan for and observe sensations in our bodies, thus shedding our old habitual behaviors, unwanted desires and needs. With time we become our true selves, who understand clearly what they need and what they don’t need. Using the technique is like moving a magnet around our body, which attracts and pulls out all of the unnecessary clutter. This technique is known to change lives in just 10 days, not to mention cure dependencies.

Our present day lives are filled with sensorial misery. Take food and drink for example. We crave them, because of the sensations they give us, not because of their nutritional value or ability to satisfy hunger and maintain our bodies. Whether it is taste during the intake, or the effect afterwards (in case of coffee) – it is a dependency on sensorial stimulation. Masturbation is the same. We want the “feeling' part of it. We are dependent on the physical pleasure that comes from doing it. By doing Vipassana we clean our bodies from the stored up need in such types of stimulation, making ourselves sober. When we are sober, we can see and feel more clearly the non-necessity of a certain behavior and the need in repeating it. That is another point of the technique. It cleans us up, but it’s up to us to not contaminate ourselves again and to not create new misery, by going back to and repeating whatever we cleaned ourselves from. But I guarantee that once your old misery goes away, you’ll think twice before creating new one.

And the opinion of a NoFapper regarding this meditation and how it helped him:

Thanks to this technique I was able to even further develop myself. By practicing it everyday for several months – I started to gradually loose interest in any type of sexual entertainment and in any type of self stimulation. Recently, I almost completely stopped looking at sites and thinking about masturbation, even though I spend a good amount of time on the net. I am able to avoid sexual thoughts, or at least discern them as being illusionary. And this is what Vipassana is all about. Realizing, that our actions, thoughts, desires and needs do not belong to our true selves. We learn how to sort out what’s ours and what’s not. My everyday life also changed immensely for the better.

Vipassana is taught in many centers all around the world. The meditation itself is a 10 day course. If you really are serious about dropping your old behavioral patterns – take a 10 day vacation and give yourself a gift of a new life, free from misery. It will change your life (I guarantee).

You can find the 11 day course on youtube, starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ii9vjW9BwU

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