What attracted me to Vipassana meditation?
I’ve always been an ambitious person. I was motivated to excel in school so that I could have a positive impact on the world. I decided to study computer science in 2013 after researching what are the best majors for people who want to become entrepreneurs and change the world.
After graduating in May 2017, I was set up for the next step on my entrepreneurship journey: becoming a software engineer at Facebook.
In the fall of 2017, I was deciding what team I wanted to work on during my time at Facebook. When you start there, you go through a bootcamp period during which you explore different teams in order to find the right fit.
At that time, I was talking with my friend Ryan about this process and how I couldn’t decide what to work on. I really wanted to choose a team where I could make a positive impact on the world, one where I could transform lives and have a social impact.
Thinking back now, I remember the connection to Vipassana meditation came from my desire to eliminate suffering in the world. I shared this with Ryan, who then told me that this is one of the core aims of vipassana — to eradicate suffering. He shared about his experience sitting a 10-day meditation course and the profound impact it had on his life. That’s all I needed to hear.
As a computer scientist, I was very intrigued by the idea that there is essentially an algorithm that a human can follow in order to come out of their suffering. And here was an organization attempting to scale that algorithm and spread it to humans around the world. I had to try it.
When I got home, I looked into when the next 10-day course was that I could sign up for. Lucky enough, the wait list was still open for new students to join the course next month in November. The timing was perfect, I was already planning on taking that time off and traveling home for my grandpa’s funeral. As an employee at Facebook, you get 2 weeks of bereavement leave, so I was able to fit both the trip home and the 10-day course in.
My experience at that first course was both challenging and profound. Every day, every hour, every moment was a novel experience. It was an up and down rollercoaster ride of emotion and motivation. One day I wanted to share this practice with everyone I knew, and the next day I wanted to leave and never come back.
It was illuminating to me how my emotions would ebb and flow despite unchanging external circumstances. Like the emotions were happening to me, rather than being created in response to anything in particular. I found my mind making up stories about the other students to justify the way I was feeling. I was sharing a room with a man about my age and each night before bed there was a light coming out from near his pillow. I assumed he was on his phone making trades on fantasy football. When the course ended, I found out he was using a small flashlight and journal to create a plan for how he would propose to his girlfriend the following week.
I found myself mixing meditation techniques with what they were teaching, despite clear warnings and instructions not to do so. I was frustrated by the difficulty of the practice and found calm in my ability to count breaths and visualize warm golden light filling my body in order to relax and silence my mind. I realized afterwards that this was doing myself a disservice, and I made sure to avoid any of that during my second course.
It has been about 5 and a half years since that first course, and a lot has changed. However, this post is about what initially attracted me to Vipassana, and I have communicated that, so I will end it here.
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May my loving-kindness be a beacon of hope and healing for those lost in the sea of suffering.
— David 💎❤️🔥
