learn · 2026-09-20
Every retreat I had sat before Wat Chomthong was in one of two traditions — S.N. Goenka's, or Pa-Auk Sayadaw's. This was a third, the Mahasi tradition, and the first thing they did when I arrived was hand me white clothes, show me a room, give me a timer, and teach me to bow.
I had never bowed to anyone in my life and did not understand why anyone would. I stayed three days. This is what I learned there, why it is probably the best format there is for a beginner, and why it was the wrong place for me that particular week.
The centre teaches satipaṭṭhāna — the four foundations of mindfulness — and works almost entirely on the first of them, the body. Where a Goenka course keeps you on a cushion with your eyes shut for ten hours, here the day is made of movement noted as it happens. Walking: the right foot goes like this, the left foot goes like that, and you know each step at the moment it is taken. Sitting: not the breath at the nostrils but the belly, rising and falling, rising and falling, each movement noted as it arises. Postures: the four main ones — standing, walking, sitting, lying — and the small ones between them, bending, reaching, turning, lifting, letting go. And before all of that, the bow, done slowly, kneeling, hands on the thighs, each movement of the hands and the body observed and named.
The assistants were there all day. They could knock on the door of your hut at any hour to ask how the practice was going, show you the bows again, sit with you and go through it. For a beginner this is ideal. It is the opposite of being left alone with an instruction; someone checks, corrects, encourages, and you can go to them — you are meant to go to them — whenever something is unclear. On the first morning breakfast was rice in water with raw ginger grated over it, and you were allowed to walk to the market for anything else, which I did every day after that.
Because my mind was restless, and I wanted the thing I already knew.
By the time I came to Wat Chomthong I had two or three years of hard sitting practice behind me and a ten-day satipaṭṭhāna course in Cambodia that had felt, at the time, like the most serious thing I had done. What I wanted that week was to close my eyes, go inward, and be quiet. What the centre offered was walking with my eyes open and a knock on the door. The knock was kindly meant and it was exactly what a first-timer needs, and to me it was an interruption. I found I was not interested, and I have learned to trust that: a mind that is not interested in the method in front of it does not practise it, whatever it tells itself. I needed the silence of a Goenka course and I went to find one.
That is not a judgement of the centre. It is the most useful thing the three days taught me. A practice needs to match the state of the person arriving. A restless mind cannot practise anything — that is why my own course spends a month on the breath before the body — and a mind that has already been quieted by years of sitting is not helped by being taught, again, to walk. The same method is right for one person and wrong for another on the same day.
The bows. I learned them from two Russian volunteers, who explained not only how but to whom. You bow to the Buddha, for the teaching, because he handed it on to us. You bow to the Sangha, the whole community of those who practise, because it exists and because it holds you up. And you bow to the Dhamma — the truth, the laws of the world, the laws of nature, the universal principles of ethics. I had thought bowing was submission to a person. It is not, and once I understood who it was for, I could do it.
And the four foundations themselves, which I now explain on my own course because a beginner should know the whole map even while walking one road. The body is first, and it is where most people should start: it is coarse enough to observe. The second foundation is feeling — pleasant, unpleasant, neutral — and it is deeper work that needs more time. The third is mind, the states of consciousness themselves, further in again. The fourth is mental qualities and processes: memory, perception, the hindrances, the factors of awakening, the four truths, the path. Each is subtler than the one before, and each needs the one before it to be steady. The Buddha's discourse gives all four; every tradition I have sat in chooses where on that ladder to put a beginner's foot.
If you have never sat, and you can get to a centre like Wat Chomthong, go. The walking, the noting, the bows and the knock on the door will slow you down until you can see your own mind moving, and you will have a human being to ask. If you have sat for years and want to go deep, choose the silence. And if you are practising at home with a recording, know that the recording is closer to the second than the first: nobody will knock. That is why the home course asks so much of you in the first days, and why, on it, the first three tracks of every course are open to anyone — so you can find out which kind of practitioner you are before you promise anything.
The Vipassana Path · Retreat and home, honestly · About the teacher