I had been meditating for over a decade. I started with Vipassana then a few years later switched to Dzogchen. My practice consisted of sitting between 10 to 30 minutes daily, originally in the evenings, but then I switched to mornings when I realized that is when my thoughts were the most scattered. Though my sessions were short, they were consistent with some weekend interruptions. If I don’t practice for a few days in a row, my mood and sense of happiness is viscerally felt.

Recently I realized that my instructions mainly derived from books and The Waking Up App, and that I had never sought in-person instruction for something that had become a fundamental part of my being. Looking around the Buenos Aires area, I found a vipassana center about an hour away from town that offered 10-day silent retreats. The daily schedule was intense: wake up at 4 a.m. daily and practice meditation 10 hours a day. I signed up with the intention of deepening my practice, but walked out of there with much more.

It turned out that what I had thought of as vipassana practice, which I had been doing for years, was the pre-training necessary to perform Vipassana, not the actual practice. Though I had been unknowingly stuck in that stage, I was still getting a lot of benefits. The first part of pre-training was training the mind to focus on the breath through the whole nose area. While doing so, maintain equanimity. Observe without aversion and without craving full of objectivity. The next part is training the mind to sense the subtleties that are manifesting in the nose area. Things like hot and cold air, electric sensations, pressure, numbness, and itching. Doing so while maintaining equanimity. The final step in the prep training is reducing the area of focus to the area under the nose and above the upper lip keeping awareness and equanimity as your guide. This reduction helps in increasing awareness and tracking subtleties. These first few steps are used to train your mind to learn how to focus, to train in equanimity, and expand the awareness of your senses. Vipassana meditation starts after you’ve trained enough in these skills.

Vipassana meditation is a collection of techniques that are meant to teach you how to communicate with your subconscious. Using the foundational practice, one technique is to pick a point at the top of your head and work your way down to the toes of your feet scanning each individual body part separately on the way there: back of head area, face area, neck, right arm and shoulder, right upper arm including elbow, right forearm to wrist, right hand. Same on the left limb. Continue down to front of torso, then back of torso, pelvis, right leg in parts, left leg in parts. You could then repeat in reverse or start over. Do not use your imagination to scan, rather, use sensations. This continues to be a challenge for me because my mind tends to imagine the body parts rather than sense them. As you’re doing this, you’ll notice three types of sensations, a vibrating one, a contracted one, or a mix of the two in the same or different body parts. With the vibrating sensations, your scan continues freely, while with the contracted one, you might have to stay with them for up to a minute so they loosen into a vibrating sensation. If it doesn’t then you may continue and when you come back to it in a later scan, you may find it to be very different.

After you’ve become aware of these three types, you may then perform a variation of this scan that is faster where you only follow the vibrating sensations carving paths between the contracted ones, if they exist. Once at your toes you may go back in reverse or repeat from the top.

Two versions of the above variations exist, one where you do part by part and another where you do the scan in simultaneous symmetrical scans. i.e. Head split in half through the nose, both arms together, torso in half, pelvis in half, legs together, etc…

For a non-practitioner this all sounds really strange if not useless. But as you apply these techniques, you are teaching your mind to sense what your subconscious is up to through bodily sensations before they manifest into action, like speech or movements. You are creating a gap in time between stimulus and reaction.

If you have a very stubborn contracted sensation, you may do a scan always starting from the top of your head and when you reach it, overlay a grid over it, and start to compare every square in the grid with the other in how they differ in sensation. You could then do that sideways and front to back. Then continue going down the body to finish the scan. Do not start at the contracted sensation to avoid agitation. Start from the top with equanimity and awareness of subtleties.

In some instances, you may have complete free flow. In those cases, you may go deeper below your skin into your body sensing anything that could be happening inside. Be sure to not try to imagine organs. Keep sensation as the source of movement. When done with that, you may end the scan by sensing your spinal cord from top to bottom.

In all these techniques, always start top to bottom, stay equanimous and aware of minute subtleties. End your sitting session with a few minutes of metta.

After learning all this and experiencing its power first hand, I have decided to follow the teacher’s recommendation of meditating two hours a day, one in the morning before breakfast and one in the afternoon before nightfall.

In addition to learning how to meditate in Vipassana, the retreat’s setting and environment completely took me out of my routines and habits and showed me that I can wake up at 4 a.m. without struggling throughout the day. I can fast a few hours before my first meal without feeling sluggish. And I can be satisfied with two vegetarian meals a day.