learn · 2026-09-20 · 4 min read
Can you really meditate in a city?
There's a comment I get under every video recorded somewhere warm. Of course you're enlightened in Bali. It's easy for you there. Come and practise in a city. It's a fair comment and I want to answer it properly, because the answer isn't that a city is the same as a rice field. It isn't.
I once flew straight from a long run of retreats in Asia (months of it, in the easy flow that travelling between centres gives you) into Moscow in winter, and went down into the metro. I remember the exact moment. I understood, standing there, that if you took any monk from any monastery and let him loose in that station, within a week he'd stop being a monk. Not from temptation. From the sheer speed and noise of it, the number of signals arriving every second, the impossibility of keeping attention on yourself when everything around you is designed to take it. Holding a practice in that is very hard. Holding attention on yourself, which is what a practice is, is nearly impossible.
So no, it isn't the same, and anyone who tells you the city is only in your mind hasn't sat in that metro. But the conclusion people draw from this is wrong. They conclude that practice needs a mountain. It doesn't. It needs a door.
A city does two things, in my experience.
The first is that the mud rises. In the course I use the image of a pond: left alone, the water is clear; stirred, everything on the bottom comes up and there's nothing to see through. A city stirs a mind all the time (the crowd, the screens, the pace, the hundred small collisions of a day), and so the impurities that are in every mind rise more often and settle more slowly. I noticed something else too, which I didn't expect. In cities, thoughts arrived in me that weren't mine. Stupid ones, alien ones, words I'd never use, and I'd sit down to meditate and find them there. I came to understand that a mind picks up signals; it's always reading its surroundings, and in a dense place it reads a great deal. That's why where you live, and among whom, isn't a detail of practice but part of it.
The second is anxiety. A certain share of it exists in every city and always will; the life is fast, the noise is constant, and nobody entirely escapes it. People ask me whether the worrying thoughts can be got rid of completely. Honestly, in our time, no. They're always there, under the surface. What changes is how much importance I give them on a given day, and that depends directly on whether I practised that morning.
I don't pretend to be above the city. I do three plain things.
I know my points. A city is manageable if you decide in advance where you go and where you don't, which streets, which hours, which people. I go out for a purpose and come back. That sounds joyless and it's the opposite: the energy a city takes goes on switching, and the fewer switches, the more of the day is mine.
I interact less. Not none (I'm not a hermit, and didn't want to be one), but I keep the conversations that have a point and let the rest go, and during a course I ask people to halve their social contact for exactly this reason. Every unnecessary exchange is a handful of mud.
And I keep a small place. Not a room in a monastery: a corner. The same corner, dark or dimly lit, devices off, wifi off, household asked for silence at two fixed times a day. Since a share of anxiety always exists, the answer isn't to defeat the city but to carve out a small place inside it where you can calm down, and to go there at half past four before the city is awake.
The home Vipassana course was built for people who live in the rhythm of a city, because I did. Barcelona, in the years the course was made, was as fast as anywhere. You don't need to be a monk in Tibet to develop yourself. It can be done inside an ordinary life, between ordinary errands, on the condition that some part of the day isn't ordinary and isn't negotiable. The retreat does that with a gate. The city practitioner does it with a door, closed, at the same hours, in the same corner, whether the day was kind or not.
When we ran two weekend retreats outside Moscow, in a rented house with ten people and noble silence, what surprised the people who came wasn't how far the city felt. It was how near it was, an hour away, and how completely two days with the door shut removed it.
