--- title: "My first ten-day Vipassana course: Dhamma Neru, 2012 | Vipassana.Life" description: "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." url: https://vipassana.life/notes/my-first-ten-day-course/ lang: en author: Ocean DYNN site: Vipassana.Life modified: 2026-09-23 --- # My first ten-day Vipassana course: Dhamma Neru, 2012 *Practice note · 21 September 2026* I was twenty. I had heard about Vipassana in an online lecture and knew almost nothing about it. The nearest centre turned out to be in the small town outside Barcelona where I lived, a kilometre from my mother's house. **By Ocean DYNN** · 3 min read I phoned. They told me there is usually a three-month waiting list, but since I lived so close, someone might not come and a place might open. Three days later they called back. I picked up the bag I had already packed and went. It was August, heavy and hot. On the way the mind would not leave me alone — images from the past, the same thoughts on a loop. It was not nerves about the course. It was the ordinary clutter every mind carries, twenty years of it. By five in the afternoon the form was filled in on a kitchen table. The code of discipline asked us to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual activity, lying and intoxicants. Food, a bed and hot water for ten days, and no fee: at the end, if the technique had helped, you could give whatever your situation allowed. A voice in my head said this was all very strange, while my hand passed over my wallet and my phone. There were about thirty men. At seven the gong sounded, and from then on the days belonged to it. Up at four, sitting from half past four until nine at night, with meals and a rest between. A blue square cushion held me for ten days. For the first few days the new students, sitting behind the old ones, were burned alive by sleepiness and by a back that could not stay upright; I rocked forwards and back. An hour with closed eyes, not leaving the half-lotus, made no sense to my mind at all. But everyone around me was sitting, so I sat. The first days were Ānāpāna: watching the natural breath under the nostrils. That is when I met, for the first time, the habit of being anywhere except here — the mind jumping from the past to the future and back. From the fourth day we were given Vipassana itself, observing sensation in the body. Pain went through me from the back to the legs, and I learned to make friends with it. In silence you can watch how the mind reacts to everything. Walk barefoot on grass and each step makes a sensation in the heel; the sensation is pleasant or unpleasant, and the mind leans towards it or away. On that course I learned that there is a middle: not reacting. You can watch craving or pain and not cling to either, and train the mind to keep its balance. On the tenth day noble silence turned into noble chatter. A wall of fears had gone somewhere during the ten days, and in its place was the resolve to act. I only had to walk one kilometre home. Every look was a new, vivid picture. At home I gave my mother a lecture on Vipassana that lasted the whole day. At one point she asked whether it was a sect. No, I said: it is a technique for seeing things as they are, not as we want them to be, and it is not a religion. After that course I stopped wandering in the past and the future. That is how I described it then, and it is still the most honest description I have. It did not hold by itself. I kept practising at home for three months and was still, as I called it, in the Vipassana state. Then I flew to see friends and the drinking came back with the company. Back in Barcelona an old friend handed me a beer as usual, and I heard myself ask for tea — and I began, slowly, to change who I spent time with. By the time I sat my next course, serving in France about ten months later, almost nothing was left of my concentration, and I had to start again with the breath. That is the lesson I would pass on: the course is the beginning of a practice, not the practice. What keeps it is the two sittings a day afterwards. New here? Start with these - [What is Vipassana meditation?](https://vipassana.life/what-is-vipassana/) - [Practising Vipassana at home](https://vipassana.life/vipassana-at-home/) - [Thirty days on the breath, and what they look like](https://vipassana.life/notes/why-thirty-days-on-the-breath/) ## Related - [Before your first 10-day course](https://vipassana.life/notes/before-your-first-10-day-course/) - [After the retreat: keeping the practice at home](https://vipassana.life/notes/after-the-retreat/) - [The teacher](https://vipassana.life/about/teacher/) ## More practice notes - 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 — [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 — [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. [All practice notes →](https://vipassana.life/notes/) - ← Older note: [Long breath, short breath: where breath practice begins](https://vipassana.life/notes/long-breath-short-breath/) - Newer note →: [The pond and the stick: why not reacting settles the mind](https://vipassana.life/notes/the-pond-and-the-stick/) [Open the course →](https://vipassana.life/)