First-hand writing on practice

What three traditions say about nimitta, the light in meditation

Around the twentieth day of steady breath practice, some people start seeing light with their eyes closed. Pa-Auk calls it mental light, Goenka's course points to subtle vibration, Ajahn Brahm speaks of a shining mind. All three agree on one instruction.

5 October 2026

Why a retreat goes deeper than practice in the city

The hardest retreat I ever sat still went deeper than a month of sittings at home. Not because of the place: because of an empty evening, a day with nothing to decide, and a sitting you don't get up from.

21 September 2026

What meditation can and can't do for anxiety and panic

Panic is old fear surfacing, and meditation doesn't argue with it; it trains a space between the sensation and the reaction. When attacks are frequent, a doctor comes first.

Attention is the thing you are actually training

People come to a meditation course to be calmed. What the five days actually train is attention, the one skill that everything else people notice afterwards grows out of.

Don't tell anyone you have started meditating

On the third day of my home course I tell people not to tell anyone they've started meditating. I learned why from my own practice: the more I talked about it, the less of it was left.

Five promises before the first breath

Before the first sitting, my home course asks you to write out five promises, sīla, in your own hand and sign them. They come first because you can't see into water that's churning.

Ten years of eating experiments, and the monastery kitchen that ended them

From sausage sandwiches to weeks on one fruit and seven days without water: ten years of going too far with food, and the question about well-fed monks that brought me back to the middle.

What I brought back from the golden land

In Myanmar, where I recorded the talk for the second day of my course, I went to Shwedagon first. A man who has sat there six hours a day for fifteen years, cigarettes on an altar, and a calm I'd only known on retreat.

Why the course asks you to sit at half past four

Morning between half past four and seven, evening before nine, on a stomach neither full nor empty. It's the least popular instruction in my home course, and the one that changes the most when you keep it.

How I found Vipassana

In 2012 I had a comfortable life and a growing emptiness. Two years of searching ended with a lecture by a rock singer and a Vipassana centre near Barcelona, and I've practised ever since.

Can you really meditate in a city?

"It's easy for you in Bali," people write. I once flew from months of Asian retreats into the Moscow metro and saw that a monk let loose there would stop being one within a week. Practice in a city doesn't need a mountain. It needs a door.

Why serving a course went deeper than sitting one

On a ten-day course, people who've already sat one come back to cook, clean and keep the schedule, and sit three hours a day instead of ten. It looks like the lesser role. It's where I've gone deepest: rooms of the mind you only enter when you're completely honest and nobody is watching you mop.

Why my home course is built like a game

You may miss three sittings; the fourth ends the course. Each evening you choose from eleven things to give up tomorrow, and each night you write down how many seconds you held the breath. A practice at home needs rules a retreat doesn't.

Three days at Wat Chomthong, and why I left

Three days at a Mahasi-tradition centre in northern Thailand: white clothes, a timer, bows noted movement by movement, assistants knocking on the door. It's the best format I know for a beginner, and it was wrong for me that week.

Why the guided sittings mostly stay quiet

A meditation teacher who took my course wrote that at first he was baffled: the recording says sit and observe, and half an hour later says get up, with no voice leading every breath. That's deliberate. The instruction fits in a minute, and the rest is doing it.

Tantra · 4 min read

Which of the 112 Vigyan Bhairav Tantra techniques a beginner can actually do

Shiva answers Devi with 112 techniques, not a philosophy. Making every one into a fifteen-minute guided sitting taught me which a beginner can do on day one, and which have to wait.

Stoic · 5 min read

Reading Marcus Aurelius as a Vipassana practitioner

I turned twenty-five themes from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations into talks and guided sittings. Read with a Vipassana-trained mind, the emperor agrees with the meditator almost everywhere, and parts company on method.

Vipassana · 6 min read

Ten days on retreat, or the same technique at home

Twenty-five courses sat and served since 2012, and years of the same technique at home. A retreat gives silence, a teacher and compression. Home gives the habit, and the habit is what decides whether anything changes.

Vipassana · 6 min read

Why the course gives the breath thirty days before anything else

On a ten-day retreat the breath gets three days. My home course gives Ānāpāna a month before any work with body sensation, because without concentration there's nothing to observe with.

Vedanta · 4 min read

What I had to unlearn to practise Advaita after years of Vipassana

Vipassana trains a doer: sit, observe, return, endure. Advaita asks who the doer is. When I came to self-inquiry after years of ten-day courses, three things had to go, and three turned out to be the same practice seen from the other side.

Why most beginners stop on the second day

After fourteen years of sitting and ten of teaching, I know where beginners stop: on the second day. Most of how I build a course follows from that one fact.