--- title: "Practice Notes — Ocean DYNN on Vipassana at Home and on Retreat | Vipassana.Life" description: "Practice notes by Ocean DYNN, the teacher of Vipassana.life: preparing for a first 10-day course, keeping the practice after a retreat, and why the course spends thirty days on the breath." url: https://vipassana.life/notes/ lang: en author: Ocean DYNN site: Vipassana.Life modified: 2026-09-23 --- # 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. 14 October 2026 ## [Stillness: why not moving is most of the work](https://vipassana.life/notes/stillness-in-meditation/) 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 →](https://vipassana.life/notes/stillness-in-meditation/) ## October 2026 - 12 Oct — [The lapse after the first course, and what brought the practice back](https://vipassana.life/notes/the-lapse-after-the-first-course/) After 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. - 11 Oct — [How to set up your meditation seat](https://vipassana.life/notes/setting-up-the-seat/) A 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. - 9 Oct — [Why sit at 4:30 in the morning](https://vipassana.life/notes/why-sit-at-four-thirty/) A 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. - 7 Oct — [The monkey mind, and who is the “I” that watches it](https://vipassana.life/notes/the-monkey-mind/) By 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. - 5 Oct — [Serving a ten-day course: what it teaches that sitting does not](https://vipassana.life/notes/serving-a-course/) Helpers 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. - 2 Oct — [Marks in water, sand and stone: what saṅkhāras are](https://vipassana.life/notes/sankhara-marks-in-water/) The 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 - 30 Sep — [The five precepts as hygiene of attention](https://vipassana.life/notes/the-five-precepts-as-hygiene/) An 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. - 28 Sep — [Fifteen days at the Pa-Auk Forest Monastery](https://vipassana.life/notes/fifteen-days-at-pa-auk/) At 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. - 21 Sep — [The pond and the stick: why not reacting settles the mind](https://vipassana.life/notes/the-pond-and-the-stick/) Meditation 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. - 21 Sep — [My first ten-day Vipassana course: Dhamma Neru, 2012](https://vipassana.life/notes/my-first-ten-day-course/) At 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. - 21 Sep — [Long breath, short breath: where breath practice begins](https://vipassana.life/notes/long-breath-short-breath/) You 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. - 21 Sep — [S. N. Goenka and Pa-Auk Sayadaw, and what this course takes from each](https://vipassana.life/notes/goenka-and-pa-auk/) In 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. - 20 Sep — [Thirty days on the breath, and what they look like](https://vipassana.life/notes/why-thirty-days-on-the-breath/) Why 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. - 20 Sep — [Practising in a city](https://vipassana.life/notes/practising-in-a-city/) Keeping 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. - 20 Sep — [Food and the sitting](https://vipassana.life/notes/food-and-the-sitting/) How 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. - 20 Sep — [Before your first 10-day course](https://vipassana.life/notes/before-your-first-10-day-course/) How 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. - 20 Sep — [After the retreat: keeping the practice at home](https://vipassana.life/notes/after-the-retreat/) What 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. [Open the course →](https://vipassana.life/)