Practice notes
Short notes from the teacher on the questions students actually bring: before a retreat, after one, and about how this course is built. Plain advice, from practice since 2012 and more than twenty residential retreats.
Stillness: why not moving is most of the work
The course allows one movement: straightening up when drowsiness makes you slump. An itch or an aching knee is what the sitting is there to watch.
Read the note →October 2026
- The lapse after the first course, and what brought the practice backAfter a ten-day course the technique stays; the decision to sit is what goes. A fixed time chosen the night before and ten minutes you can finish bring it back.
- How to set up your meditation seatA firm seat beats a pile of cushions: you need contact to feel the body. Sit on the sitting bones, cover the legs with a cloth, and keep one position.
- Why sit at 4:30 in the morningA mind busy digesting won't concentrate, and at half past four nobody wants an answer. If that hour isn't your life, a fixed time you keep beats an ideal one.
- The monkey mind, and who is the “I” that watches itBy the fourth day most people find the mind jumping like a monkey. The same day asks what the “I” is, and the answer comes slowly, by watching the breath.
- Serving a ten-day course: what it teaches that sitting does notHelpers sit three hours a day and work ten, and the ego shows faster in the kitchen than on the cushion. On day six, Ocean DYNN started smiling on purpose.
- Marks in water, sand and stone: what saṅkhāras areThe harder you react, the deeper the mark: a line in water, a groove in sand, a carving in stone. That mark is a saṅkhāra, and not reacting cuts no new one.
September 2026
- The five precepts as hygiene of attentionAn unwholesome act stirs up the mind, and an hour later that agitation is what you sit with. So the course opens with five precepts, written by hand and signed.
- Fifteen days at the Pa-Auk Forest MonasteryAt Pa-Auk the monks rise around three and sit like statues. What Ocean DYNN carried home from fifteen days there in 2019 was smaller: a fixed hour, twice a day.
- The pond and the stick: why not reacting settles the mindMeditation doesn't make the mind clear; it stops making it muddy. A pond in Thailand, stirred with a stick and left alone, shows how a sitting settles.
- My first ten-day Vipassana course: Dhamma Neru, 2012At twenty, Ocean DYNN sat ten days near Barcelona and stopped wandering in the past and future. Ten months later, almost none of that concentration was left.
- Long breath, short breath: where breath practice beginsYou don't slow the breath or deepen it. You only know it: long or short, coarse or fine. Fifteen minutes shows why that simple instruction is a practice.
- S. N. Goenka and Pa-Auk Sayadaw, and what this course takes from eachIn Goenka's courses the breath gets three days, at Pa-Auk weeks or months. This course gives it thirty days, then takes body scanning from the Goenka tradition.
- Thirty days on the breath, and what they look likeWhy the course gives the breath thirty days before any body-scanning, and what those days actually look like: the seat, the nostrils, not counting, the natural breath, and when you are ready for Part 3.
- Practising in a cityKeeping a daily meditation practice in a city: why practice that works in Bali collapses in a metro, what the noise actually takes from it, and the few things that hold it together.
- Food and the sittingHow food changes the next morning's meditation, what the Detox edition of Part 1 actually adds, what "purification" honestly means, and where eating experiments go wrong.
- Before your first 10-day courseHow to prepare for a first 10-day Vipassana retreat: sitting daily beforehand, the body, the silence, what the schedule is really like, and what to do when it gets hard.
- After the retreat: keeping the practice at homeWhat happens after a 10-day Vipassana course, why the practice usually drops, and what keeps it going: two sittings a day, the precepts you can keep, a journal and company.