learn · 2026-09-20 · 5 min read
How I found Vipassana
In 2012 I had a comfortable life. I was young, building websites and selling the advertising on them, which paid well. I designed, I filmed, I made music, and I still do. I was free to go where I wanted. And underneath that there was a growing sense of emptiness that I couldn't explain to anyone, least of all to myself. At night I'd quietly pray, not for more of anything, but to understand whether real happiness was even possible, and who it was that was asking. I was bored with the whole of it: the earning, the simple entertainments, the alcohol, the parties. Nothing was wrong. That was the problem.
I looked for two years. I read, I watched, I listened, I searched for a glimpse of something true about existence. If you seek you find, eventually, and what I found came from an unexpected direction.
One evening I was watching yet another talk by a rock musician, Ilya Knabengof, a singer who also gave lectures on how he understood existence, and he described a meditation technique. He said that people who practised it came away with a different taste for life, a new perception, and learned what he called the art of living. Ten days, in silence, watching your own breath and then your own body, until you saw for yourself how thought becomes sensation becomes reaction.
I didn't put it off. I went to the website to find the nearest centre, and it was in my own town: the place I grew up, sixty kilometres from Barcelona, nine thousand people, and a Vipassana centre in the hills above it that I'd lived beside for years without knowing. I phoned. They said the waiting lists ran to months and they would call if a place opened, and the next day they called. I packed a bag without the faintest idea what I was going to, and a few days after the lecture I was sitting in the hall at Dhamma Neru with a room full of other silent, slightly unhinged people, exploring reality through their own bodies. That was the end of July 2012.
I've since described what happened in that course in the only way I've ever found accurate: my mind was somehow formatted, and reinstalled its operating system. The colours were different. The first thing I saw was that I'd been assembled out of other people. I identified myself through my friends, through society, through my parents, and I saw that I could do something about that myself: I took a part of the responsibility for my own life back, and I haven't put it down.
The second was stranger: every scene I'd ever recorded was still there, and I could work with it the way I worked with footage — review it, cut what was useless, archive it, free the memory. I began to understand myself, to notice what I ate, how I spoke, who I spent time with, what my days were for. The discipline the course gave me has needed maintaining every day since, and it is the spine of my life.
The years after
Since then I've lived in more than twenty-five countries and sat or served courses in ten of them, and what I noticed on each new retreat was the same thing described differently: a new state of mind that let me go a little deeper. It was as if I'd been given a set of lenses I could turn on different parts of the body and the mind, and each lens made visible a cause of suffering that had been invisible with the previous one. With each new lens I could get closer to the root levels of the mind and see where a particular suffering came from. Over the years that became a kind of cloud of knowledge inside me, and the home course was eventually built from it, for people who live in the rhythm of a city, as I did in Barcelona, and cannot get to a retreat every year.
The teachers
The technique I practise and teach comes from the Theravāda tradition through S.N. Goenka, who learned it in Burma from U Ba Khin and, from the late sixties, taught it to more than two million people through a network of centres in the East and West. It's his ten-day course I sat in 2012, and have sat and served many times since. Since 2019 I've also sat in the Pa-Auk tradition, first at the forest monastery in Myanmar under Pa-Auk Tawya Sayadaw, then at its centres in Indonesia and Thailand. Its teaching is known for depth and precision, and its work on ānāpānasati (the breath, taken much further than most courses have time for) shaped the long foundation my own course insists on.
I am informed by both traditions. I am authorised by neither. Goenka's organisation authorises nobody outside its own courses, and I wouldn't want a chain of transmission drawn on a page that ended with my name, because it would claim something that isn't so.
Beyond the Theravāda I owe debts I'm glad to name. To Nisargadatta Maharaj, whose I Am became a sitting on the Vedanta Path and whose questions ended my first way of practising. To the Bhagavad Gītā. To the Bhakti teachers I met in India, and to Hatha yoga, which I've practised since 2017, and Ashtanga, since 2020. And to Ilya Knabengof, who didn't know he was sending anyone anywhere.
I'm not a guru, and not an enlightened student of the Buddha. I don't present myself as a teacher in the traditional sense, and I didn't originate a method. What I am is a link between traditions that have been tested for a very long time and the needs of people looking now. Nothing in the home Vipassana course is mine. It's assembled with care from those traditions, and tested on my own experience before it was recorded. What I teach online is the foundation (ānāpānasati, and the discipline that holds it up), and I say on every page that the deep work of Vipassana wants a retreat and a teacher who can see you. For two years the course sat on the internet for donation, because I couldn't bring myself to sell it; what finally made it a course was not the technique, which was never mine, but the discipline I put into it, which was. I share it as a practitioner who's simply walked a little way ahead, and the course isn't meant to make followers. It's meant to serve anyone sincerely looking for clarity, and then to become unnecessary.
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