Practice note · 20 September 2026

Before your first 10-day course

I sat my first ten-day course in July 2012, at Dhamma Neru outside Barcelona. Since then I have sat or served twenty-five courses in Spain, France, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Thailand and Sri Lanka. The first one is the hardest, and most of what makes it hard can be prepared for.

By Ocean DYNN·3 min read

Sit every day for two weeks before you go

The most useful preparation is a daily sitting before the course begins. Two sittings, even fifteen minutes each, teach the body to be still and the mind to come back to the breath. Then you arrive with something to build on instead of starting from zero at four in the morning on day one.

Part 1 of this course was built partly for that: five days of Ānāpānasati, the same practice that opens a ten-day course, with the five precepts. Sitting it once or twice beforehand is a fair rehearsal.

Prepare the seat before the technique

Find the seat you can hold for an hour. A cushion, thinner and firmer than you would choose for comfort; a yoga mat folded in two works; a chair is fine if the floor is genuinely hard. Keep the spine straight — of all the physical instructions, that is the one to remember through the whole sitting. Change which leg is in front from one sitting to the next. A cloth over the legs helps you stay still, and stillness is most of the work.

Prepare for the silence

A ten-day course in the tradition of S. N. Goenka keeps noble silence: at the gate you hand over your phone, your conversation and your choices, until the last day. Finish what you can finish before you arrive, tell the people who depend on you that you will be unreachable, and leave them the centre's emergency number. The fewer open loops you bring, the quieter the mind gets.

What the days are actually like

The bell is at four. Roughly ten hours of sitting, broken by meals, rest and an evening talk, until about nine. The first three days are the breath; Vipassana is taught on the fourth; mettā on the last. New students eat breakfast and lunch, with tea and fruit in the evening.

At Pa-Auk, where I sat fifteen days in Myanmar in 2019 and three longer courses since, the day begins around three, and the hard part is not the hours. It is doing nothing. An ordinary mind, set down with nothing to do, starts to worry that something is wrong, because everyone outside is running. A monastery is a place where nobody is running, so the worry has nothing to feed on.

The second day

People stop on day two. Not day one — interest carries almost anyone through the first sitting. On the second day the interest has gone and the habit has not arrived, the sitting is exactly the same as yesterday, and the mind begins to negotiate: later, tonight, tomorrow properly.

On a residential course you cannot act on that negotiation, which is one of the reasons to sit one. Knowing the pattern in advance is still worth a great deal: when the second day turns flat, nothing has gone wrong.

When it gets hard

Restlessness, boredom, pain in the knees, old memories, strong emotion — ordinary on a first course, and the instruction is the same for all of them: observe, do not react, return to the object. Use the midday interview; a teacher can see in two questions what is invisible from inside your own practice.

Difficulty is not danger. If you cannot sleep for days, feel detached from yourself, or panic will not settle, tell the teacher or the course manager the same day. Stopping is not failing.

Apply early, and think about serving later

Places go quickly — waiting lists of around three months are normal. My own first place came by phone, when someone dropped out a day before the course, and I packed a bag without really knowing what I was going to. Apply earlier than feels necessary.

Once you have sat a course you can come back to serve one. I have served several, and serving puts you somewhere sitting does not: you are awake in the kitchen and the halls, you see a floor that needs cleaning and you clean it without being told, and the mind has nowhere to hide. For me those are the most honest rooms of my own mind.

Who should wait

If you are being treated for serious depression, psychosis, bipolar disorder or PTSD, or you are in an acute crisis, speak to your doctor first and answer the application form honestly. The centres ask for a reason.