learn · 2026-09-20
A ten-day retreat needs no rules of its own. The gate, the bell and the silence are the rules, and you agreed to all of them by arriving. A home course has none of that. So the five-day course I teach is built like a game — with lives, with a challenge each day, with a score — and people sometimes ask whether that is a little childish for something as serious as meditation. It is not. It is the only honest answer I found to a simple question: at home, what stops you stopping?
Before anything else, the course asks for a notebook. A physical one; you can keep it digitally, but paper works much better, and I do not know entirely why. Six pages, one for each day. On the first you write Day 0, in your best handwriting, with a good pen — I say that on the recording and I mean it, because the care you take with the page is the first sitting of the course. On the same page, in your own words, go the five undertakings and your signature, and then a few questions that place you: where you are from, what you loved doing as a child, what your childhood dream was, what you do now, whether you have meditated before.
The notebook is where the game is played. Every evening it asks the same things: how many sittings have you missed so far; how many seconds could you hold your attention under the nostrils without forgetting it — less than ten, ten, twenty, and so on up to more than a minute; what time will you sit tomorrow morning, and what time in the evening. Honest numbers. Most people write less than ten seconds on the first night. The point is not the number but that it is written, because a number written down on day one can be looked at on day five.
You sit twice a day, morning and evening. If you miss either, that counts as one miss. You may miss three times in the five days. Miss a fourth and it is game over: you remove yourself from the course, and if you want to, you start it again from the beginning. On the first evening you write, under everything else: I take responsibility to meditate twice a day, and I accept the rule of three lives as part of the game.
Why three, and why game over? Because a missed sitting has to cost something and must not cost everything. If one miss ends the course, the first bad morning ends the course, and everyone has a bad morning. If misses cost nothing, the course is a suggestion, and suggestions do not survive the second day. Three lives make a missed day survivable but not free. You feel the loss of one — people tell me they feel it more than they expected — and that feeling is what carries you to the next sitting.
The second part of the game is the challenge. Each evening you write in capitals, What will I be able to do tomorrow?, and choose from eleven options. One: use the phone only for this course. Two: no social networks. Three: no music. Four: no films, of any kind. Five: no tea or coffee. Six: no sweets. Seven: no salt. Eight: no animal products. Nine: no flour — bread, cakes, biscuits. Ten: silence. Eleven: speak only when spoken to, and only to the point.
You may choose one or all eleven, depending on your strength and your state. And the next evening you write the other question — What was I able to do today? — and list what held. If something did not, you write why. Not as confession; as data. Over five evenings you learn more about your own capacity from those two lists than from any description of the mind, and by the fifth day most people are choosing more options than they did on the first, without having been asked to.
None of this is a diet and none of it is a rule of the course. The five undertakings are rules. The eleven options are a test you set yourself, to check what you are capable of. That is the line I use on the recording, and it is the whole spirit of it: not be good, but find out.
The sittings start at fifteen minutes and lengthen on the fifth day. After this course, the twenty-five-day one adds a little each day until you are sitting for an hour. This is the Japanese principle of small continuous steps, and it is there because ambition is the enemy of a practice: thirty minutes you abandon on day three is worth less than fifteen you complete for a month. If a longer sitting causes discomfort, stay at the previous length until you are ready.
There are two other pieces of the game. During the course you reduce your social contact by about half — necessary conversations only — which makes the days quieter both outside and in. And on the fourth day the notebook asks a different kind of question: write the one most important lesson of your life in a sentence simple enough for a child. Then, every evening after that, what good did you do today? A course that only measured seconds of concentration would be training the wrong thing.
Because deciding is work, and at home you would otherwise decide twice a day for five days whether you are a person who meditates. The rules take that decision away. The lives make it matter. The options make it yours. And the notebook makes it visible, which is what a retreat's bell and hall and silence were doing all along — not making you sit, but making it impossible to pretend you had not noticed whether you did.
On the last evening the course says: look back, and congratulate yourself on the difficulties you came through. Five hard days. That is not a small thing, and the game was only ever there so that you would get to say it.
The Vipassana Path · Where beginners stop · How the courses unlock