I went to one of these and got freaked out because it's an unmistakable cult.

The teachers on the podiums up at the front is a creepy psychological hack, the recorded chanting they play while you meditate is hypnotic programming, the 2 hour video lectures of the great leader convincing you of his religion being your only stimulation, the bowing and mindless chanting from the regulars being passed off as "optional for first timers."

Many of the people there mentioned they go several times a year, with that glassy eyed obsessed stare. At least one person mentioned they had moved their home to be near the group.

I tried to skip a session because I didn't get enough sleep and the management came and got me out of my room. That's when I knew it was time to leave.

Also, if you leave early, you get excommunicated and blacklisted.

The point of all this is to make you unquestionably loyal to the group and to become an evangelist, which is how these things become so popular.

The danger of cults is that if you go for long enough you can permanently lose your identity and self respect. It's probably not actually possible to 100% master the skill of meditating painlessly, which undermines your confidence and makes you more determined to achieve the enlightenment they promise, which exposes you to more brainwashing and makes you more submissive to the great leader, etc.

They do at least provide a source of protein and the food was pretty good.

The technique itself is pretty useful, and after the 4 days of silent nonstop meditation reality felt really weird and everyone in the outside world looked like an impulsive idiot being emasculated by their smartphones. This feeling lasted a few days and then wore off.

I'm sure the effect lasts much longer if you do the full 10 days. I'm pretty sure you would get that same effect going through any very intensive and stressful course and avoiding anything fun or distracting, and the culty brainwashing stuff is totally unnecessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4-Hms7bHqY

YMMV I guess. I did a similar course and the religiousy aspects did put me off a bit (bowing and prostrations), but the leader did explain there was no worship involved and that the practices were to remind you of what you wanted to aspire to. He offered the techniques and said they worked for some people but not others, and to take what worked best for you. Maybe your videotaped guy was too pushy?

We did have to read some Buddhist verses every morning which was incredibly boring, but hey ho, it was a Buddhist retreat so I expected something along those lines. And anyway, it provided a chance to be aware of the resistance I have to organised religions.

> the recorded chanting they play while you meditate is hypnotic programming

I probably wouldn't put it like that, but if the chanting didn't induce some sort of effect it would be pointless to do anyway. "Programming" isn't it though.

> I tried to skip a session because I didn't get enough sleep and the management came and got me out of my room. That's when I knew it was time to leave.

I got tired with the 5am starts, but the discipline is something I find lacking on a normal weekend so overall I found the experience valuable.

> Many of the people there mentioned they go several times a year, with that glassy eyed obsessed stare. At least one person mentioned they had moved their home to be near the group.

Yeah, some people can get a bit over-excited - but the benefit of it being a silent retreat is you don't have to listen to them go on about it :-)

TBH if you found a decent teacher you'd probably form a different opinion. I think these retreats need to be taught very delicately to emphasise the practices while not pushing a dogma or religion on you.

Yeah. One of the smartest things I heard is from Huston Smith. Somebody asked him the relationship between religion and spirituality. He said, "Religion gives spirituality historical traction."

I'm pretty antireligious, so I get why bobsgame was creeped out by the historical-traction aspects of their practices. (People tried to force me to be Christian in my teens, so I've got a bucket of fuck-you ready whenever I feel the slightest religious pressure.) And if one doesn't feel safe, one should get up and go. But many people teach meditation in ways that are either low on religion or consciously eschew it.

I'd add that it is worth playing with some of the practices regardless. Chanting, for example. The mock religion "Church of the Subgenius" have redone the hare krishna chant to use the Three Stooges:

    Larry Curly Larry Curly
    Curly Curly Larry Larry
    Larry Moe Larry Moe
    Moe Moe Larry Larry

Meditative chanting like that (which, for clarity, I do at home, not in somebody else's temple) is a really interesting experience. It made me more open to occasionally joining in with other people's religious practices; knowing the experience I was less worried about getting sucked in.

I did a full 10-day course and it was everything but a cult. I can see how one can perceive it as such, but my impression was entirely opposite - there is strong, effective and well-tested self-improvement methodology dressed into a tiny sliver of Buddhist religion. The dressing makes it easier to digest for some people and is easy to ignore for others.

The freak-out is not unusual, a friend of mine left in a hurry reporting something remotely similar to claustrophobia. She never mentioned being banned or anything like that, and I'd surprised if it happened. My other two friends shrugged off the whole experience. Yet another acquaintance reported permanent reduction in anger, and completely giving up alcohol, which was previously a problem. Myself I became less "jumpy", less likely to be frightened by a sudden noise or such. There were otherpositive effects like reduction in compulsive eating, but they worn out in about 6 months. None of us ever went back, and I only get an occasional email from them.

> I went to one of these and got freaked out

That's the problem, you freaked out and left, even though they ask everyone multiple times at the beginning whether you are ready to stay for the full 10 days.

As someone who took more than one of these courses I can say that the single most important thing you should do during your first course is not quit. Strange things start happening to people when they are put into an environment where they can't do anything but eat, sleep and meditate. Your mind starts playing tricks on you and you start reacting to your thoughts. Wave after wave of anger, joy, confusion, happiness, sexual fantasies, tranquility, fear, etc, come and go. It's like your mind switches to different modes. You don't notice this during normal life, and that's the real beauty of these courses and centers. To give you an opportunity to observe all that is happening in your mind.

Although I experience this before, it still happens to me when I take a course and start wondering what am I doing here, this is a waste of time, this is all a cult, a scam, etc. Nope, it's just my mind reacting :) That's how you learn, I don't think there's another way to silence the mind.

>I tried to skip a session because I didn't get enough sleep and the management came and got me out of my room.

That's their job. It's not a holiday and you are there to work hard. In fact I can easily say that my first course was the hardest thing I've done in my life, it was just brutal. But my mind felt much clearer, I had way less anxiety and just felt kind of happy.

You have two comments on HN, one linking to one of these ten day courses, and now this one defending it, nothing else. You may want to be a bit more active, and on other topics, if you want to be seen as credible.

Here is a write-up of my experience doing that particular 10 day meditation course, which I'm surprised to discover wrapped up almost 10 years to the day: http://weblog.squareapple.net/archives/2004/11/26/art_of_liv...

Uh, that's exactly how brainwashing works.

Which one did you go to?

Theres a lot of different people offering 10 day courses, and most I've heard of don't force the religious aspect on you.

You can go and not give a damn about it, and just do the mindfulness part, which is pretty intense in itself. (IF you are doing a vipasna course)

10 days of not speaking to anyone else, (really, even avoiding eye contact) - its rough on a lot of people.

Video lectures during the meditation? That sounds bad... the only things that I think would be acceptable are guided meditations, where you focus on different parts of your body, or moving your energy or whatever. If they legitimately had video lectures unrelated to instruction or chanting that seemed to have an agenda, I would also have left.

Personally, I think the only thing you should hear during meditation is nothing. A guided relaxation process is fine for a half hour but after that you need to leave people to their thoughts (or lack thereof :). I wonder if you would have felt better at a more Zen-style meditation where anyone talking gets hit with a stick? That's the kind of place I would want to go.

There are no lectures during meditation. There are some instructions given prior to meditation sessions the first few days of the course, and then again on the final day where "metta" meditation is introduced. There are video lectures every evening which are more or less based on the 4 Noble Truths.

I have attended two of these courses, and have benefited extremely from them, and I know they try very, very hard to make sure that they do not become a cult. They are very anti-cult, and I think it is important that this remains a priority.

I was diagnosed with panic disorder and no treatment worked, but after attending a course I was able to get it under control.

The responses here are very interesting. I would think mindfulness would increase empathy, but many of them appear to be sidestepping your experience.

Was your course at one of the centers listed on dhamma.org ?

Isn't it strange that people are using meditation to make more money, achieve material success, perpetuation of "self". The very idea of self that meditation is supposed to examine.

I will never understand western obsession with finding meaning in everything materially. Idea that if it doesn't give you something in return then its meaningless.

Good instructors start with people where they are. If someone is greedy, then you have to explain to them how what you want them to learn will help them satisfy their greed. Otherwise they'll just ignore you.

Here, for example, you'll note the pitch is that it's easy to improve one's brain, of great appeal to nerds. And it's backed up with high-tech science, a great draw to we technical people.

As a long-time meditator, I could happily talk about how it has improved my ability to make software. Deep awareness of my sensations and subtle reactions has made me very good at understanding exactly what parts of user interfaces work and what don't. The increased patience and focus is great for dealing with complex software. The greater self-awareness has helped me avoid things like gold-plating and architecture astronautics because I'm better at sorting out my motivations. I'm way better at noticing when I'm really too tired to be coding, so I create a lot fewer bugs. Et cetera, et cetera. If somebody starts because of that, great.

But knowing a lot of other meditators, I think the reason people start is relatively unimportant. As with almost anything deep (e.g., fitness, science, math), serious study and practice change you more deeply than you intend. More deeply than you can even understand when you start. For example, many people take martial arts classes because they crave the power to beat people up. But we don't have a problem with karate students roving in packs and attacking people because long study teaches them self-control, teaches them the limits of violence, the proper use of power. Similarly, even if people start meditating in pursuit of self-enhancement, they can't help but be changed more deeply.

We start with people where they are.

Seems to me me you're juggling several straw objects here. Obsession? What's your evidence for this? Who knows what people are finding meaning in, and not necessarily reporting that finding to you? People's internal life sometimes remains internal with certain elements permanently so.

I may be wrong but I suspect that you don't want to understand; rather you want to find fault in a raw naive meme that you think is held by a group of people - 'westerners'.

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. I was just criticizing western thought that so dominates our world today. Why do you identify yourself as a "westerner" instead as just someone who subscribes to western way of thinking? Why does a way of thought have to be defended instead of examined?

There have been many ways of thinking before our current materialistic western thought that were not merely primitive forms of current thought. For example in Vedic thought 'life-after-life' is just a fact and meaning in life is the lasting benefit we can accomplish for our consciousness. Can you imagine the transformational change in our society if we go from current view of life as "end all be all chance" to a "continuum".

In my view, meditation is examination of thought, not something that helps you make more money.

> The very idea of self that meditation is supposed to examine.

Meditation is 'supposed' to do something?

It changes your brain for the better. There is a lot of research into the subject. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12661646 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/

After 10 days of meditation, the change for me was dramatic. Regular meditation gives more lasting results though.

no?

Thank you for sharing your experience. If you're new to mindfulness meditation, you shouldn't even consider a hardcore, 10-day Vipassana retreat—you should begin by meditating for 20–30 minutes a day at home.

Don't see why this should be the case. I got into MM through a similar Vipassana Course and there couldn't have been a better start for me. Only meditating in this style for 10 days did a few things for me that 20-30 minutes a day would not have helped with : 1 - It helped me understand the power of this sort of meditation 2 - It REALLY motivated me to keep at it ever after I left 3 - I got to learn how to meditate properly as opposed to trying something on my own for 30 minutes a day without someone to guide me through it

Honestly it wasn't as brutal as people would like to think - all you need is an open mind.

It's basically the same reason people shouldn't sign up for marathons as their first race: most people aren't prepared. That it worked for you is great, but you shouldn't mistake your experience for the general case. I have a lot of friends who do retreats like this, and they universally recommend that most people work their way up.

Regarding point #3, for those who would like guidance, I recommend finding a local meditation group. There are lots, and there are many different styles.

It's not like a marathon - preparation isn't really going to help you much. It's much more like "meditation bootcamp" - breaking down is part of the building process.

It might be better to recommend a 1,2, or 3 day retreat which are also common and more approachable (and possible) to many people.

That's definitely a more reasonable recommendation, although it's probably not the one I'd make myself. Some people take to meditation quite naturally; for some it's a real struggle. For the inexperienced but curious, about the most I'd generally recommend is stopping by some meditation group for a single sit.

As an example, the San Francisco Zen Center's farm, Green Gulch, has a Sunday program that's quite nice:

http://www.sfzc.org/ggf/display.asp?catid=3,123&pageid=239

Gentle instruction, a short lecture, and then the option of casual tea and conversation.

If people find themselves comfortable enough with a single sit that they're saying, "Gosh, I want 3 days of this," then more power to 'em. But that definitely wasn't my first experience. I needed a more gradual path.

I think each one has their own mileage - I was just refuting the parent's claim that you "should" do x or y - I think if you've considered it for a while and think you can stick through it - there's no harm in trying a 10 day retreat. Just as there's no harm in trying a marathon if you're generally fit. Worst case you drop out / slow down.

That is an interesting theory, but you are definitely wrong about the marathon part. I know a number of people who have harmed themselves by attempting a marathon as their first race, a couple permanently.

My concern about the harm of an unprepared person taking a 10-day class is different. Most of the people I know who went from doing nothing to trying a marathon are no longer runners. Either the difficulty and pain or the experience of failure were enough to dissuade them from taking up a regular running practice. If someone jumps into a 10-day retreat with no prior experience, I would be concerned about something similar happening to them.

It's like "I've never run before, hey let's go run a marathon right now."

I recommend starting with 15-20 sessions once a day. Just like a startup, you can always attempt to scale things up later once you get a handle on things.

comparing it to a marathon is a bad analogy, but everyone likes to do it - I've already responded to two others in this thread who said the same thing.

I think you could just as well make the opposite argument: a retreat can be an easier way to get started, because it takes you away from your normal, everyday surroundings, and by really making it the main focus, and purpose of this time, it becomes easier to do, rather than to try and squeeze it into your existing schedule. There's a beautiful meditation retreat in Northern Thailand http://www.wetours.com/meditation-retreat-in-northern-thaila... (relatively meaning: get up early, no meals after lunch, very regimented day... but nobody will give you evil eyes and the people - especially the head monk - are very relaxed, easy going and have a great sense of humor). Not saying one way is better than the other, just that both are feasible choices :)

I disagree - I think doing a 10-day Vipassana retreat is a great way to start (it's how I started). I've heard this argument before, though, but it isn't like doing a marathon - you don't need to train beforehand. It is more like what I call "meditation bootcamp" - you break down from no distractions for 10 days, and then you build yourself back up, stronger.

Meditating 20-30 minutes a day at home is fine, too, but I think it would be a mistake to not participate in a course just because you haven't been meditating.

Thank you for such a good description of what you are doing. I am also trying to do mindfulness meditation but am only managing 15 or 20 minutes a day just now. It can be frustrating but occasionally (rarely for me) you notice something (almost) happening that makes it worthwhile. I think persistence is key. Reading this type of post helps me persevere.

I should also mention a good book I read recently about meditation, helping the author Tim Parks overcome increasingly chronic pain. The book is not only very funny in parts, it is also a beautiful description of mindfulness practice :

http://tim-parks.com/non-fiction/teach-us-to-sit-still/

Why and in what way is thinking about sensations and one's body different from thinking about past or future?

Aren't there other ways to condition mind to bring back its thoughts away from the Past or Future, why is focusing on breathing the only way that meditation teaches?

Not thinking about, as much as observing the current sensations.

> why is focusing on breathing the only way that meditation teaches?

It isn't. You can focus on whatever you like, and there are descriptions of using pretty much anything you can think of as meditation objects. What you focus on is not the most important part, but that you focus your attention and your ability to go of thoughts.

Breath is often recommended because it is always available (takes away the excuse of "oh, I can't mediate because I need X and I don't have it here"), it is simple yet it has many qualities for you to observe; it has distinct phases (in-out) that are cyclical, and that have distinct pauses (when you shift from breathing in to out). It also has the property that it calms as you get more relaxed and more concentrated, so that the more you focus, the more you have to focus to keep attention on the breath.

At the same time, as you get deep into concentration, the fact that the breath calms lets you (if that is your goal) more easily shift the breath into the background, to focus on other things (e.g. your emotional state; observing fleeting thoughts; other bodily sensations or whatever else).

For a lot of forms of meditation, focusing on the breath is considered an important part developing "access concentration", that is, your ability to easily and rapidly calm yourself and enter into sufficiently deep concentration to focus on your desired meditation object.

For vipassana / mindfulness meditation, for example, the goal is not to endlessly focus on the breath, but to observe various aspects of reality (including the breath, but not limited to it) in a "detached" state where you are not engaging or reacting to them but simply paying attention to them. E.g. notice a thought arising, notice how your body reacts to it, but don't "respond" to it with a new thought - just observe the qualities of it, until it fades, and wait for the next one.

Meditating on breath then is a method of getting into deep enough concentration to enable you to do that without constantly "waking up" to realise you got caught up in some strand of thinking and spent the last 10 minutes thinking about what to do about your taxes.

(You can certainly observe the breath as the focus of your mindfulness meditation, but if you limit yourself to the breath you are

When I meditate, I usually notice my feet, for example. I notice my feet if I get a little bit jittery, and for me that's sufficient to cut a lot of the whammy out of strong emotion, agitation, moderate amounts of panic, pain.

I haven't noticed increased concentration skills, except as could be wholly explained by learning the skill "calm down on demand", but I'm not willing to write off that as a possibility without testing (a little late for me to test on myself, anyway!)

> Why and in what way is thinking about sensations and one's body different from thinking about past or future?

The sensations are actually happening, right here, right now. Thoughts about the past or future are just mental constructs and have no reality beyond that. It's all about being present right here, right now, in this moment.

> The sensations are actually happening, right here, right now. Thoughts about the past or future are just mental constructs and have no reality beyond that.

Except, those sensations might not be 'actually happening'.

> The sensations feel like tiny extremely weak electric currents zapping through on the surface and disappearing. Or it could be a weak throbbing and itching sensation. Sometimes you get the feeling of the area under investigation being in a state of tension. It doesn't matter what the sensation is like. What matters is that you are aware of these sensations.

It doesn't surprise me at all that, after concentrating on a particular body area in silence for 8 hours a day for 3-4 days, people would associate various sensations with that area. For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paresthesia

If meditation has helped you personally, that's great. However, I take issue with preaching dubious advice.

> Except, those sensations might not be 'actually happening'.

The sensations, as in what impulses you observe in your mind, certainly are happening. Whether or not the sensations are a result of actual physical stimuli is both the point and besides the point. If they are invented by your brain, that makes them no less valid to observe. Yet if they are invented by your brain, then observing the qualities of those sensations is still fascinating and just as valid.

> It doesn't surprise me at all that, after concentrating on a particular body area in silence for 8 hours a day for 3-4 days

You don't need to spend more than 1 second focusing on your body to pick up some sensation or another. He is not suggesting you should try to pick up something unusual, but observe what you already notice thousands upon thousands of time every day, but which you normally do not pay attention to.

E.g. that itch on my left elbow, the way my glasses press down on my nose, the pillow pressing against my neck, my tongue pressing against the top of my mouth, the dryness of my lower lip, the sensations of my fingertips against the laptop keyboard, and so on.

Of course, from a purely philosophical standpoint you could argue those sensations also could be just illusions. But that's irrelevant.

> I take issue with preaching dubious advice.

What is the dubious advice being preached you take offence to?

There are certainly many, many meditation teachers that are teaching religious nonsense.

But the basic principles of meditation boils down to practices to learn to concentrate, and practices to learn how to observe your thought processes and physical sensations well within the scope of what is actually physically possible, verifiable and repeatable.

As an atheist and sceptic, meditation is something I think everyone should engage in, because, while there certainly is the possibility of "mystic" experiences because of the nature of prolonged concentration, you also have the potential to learn a great deal about your own thought processes that we usually ignore (and to learn how to dissect anything unusual you might "observe", alongside how to dissect other broken thought patterns)

> If they are invented by your brain, that makes them no less valid to observe. Yet if they are invented by your brain, then observing the qualities of those sensations is still fascinating and just as valid.

I agree, but that completely undermines your argument for dismissing thoughts about the past or future, ie. that they're "just mental constructs".

You miss the point.

Thoughts, whether about the past or future, or anything else, are perfectly valid objects of meditation, as long as you observe them rather than getting caught up in them.

The thoughts after all, occur here and now.

Consider the difference as one of engaging in an argument vs. watching someone else engage in an argument. When you are caught up in an argument, you attach emotions to it in a whole different way, and you attach importance to the arguments in a whole different way, and you get caught up in the flow in a whole different way, and you fail to notice all kinds of things that you notice as a passive observer.

This here was exactly the key to mindfulness for me. Learning that I don't need to suppress my thoughts and have a blank mind mind. This was my mistake before. I got frustrated when new thoughts inevitably came up, and ended up either focusing on my frustration or the thought.

But then I learned to just observe my thoughts non-judgmentally and without delving into them. Just let the thought be, just as I just let my breath be. Let the thoughts come, acknowledge them without grabbing hold, and let them float by. This is just the constant flux of the mind, just as the constant sensations I get from my body.

> This here was exactly the key to mindfulness for me. Learning that I don't need to suppress my thoughts and have a blank mind mind.

Yeah, suppressing doesn’t work that well. For me one of such keys was a trick where you try to visualize your thoughts like clouds in the sky. Another was the recommendation, not sure if I remember the exact phrasing, to “look between two thoughts”. Deadly efficient, this one.

Thank you very much for such a clear explanation! The example about engaging in vs observing an argument works great.

I've had very little success keeping up with a meditation schedule and have "seen" some positive result in my anxiety levels when I restart after a broken chain of sessions.

It would seem, much like diet and exercise, you have to force yourself for the initial habit-forming phase for meditation to benefit you. All boils down to will power (to keep to the schedules).

I'd say breathing is sort of a two-way binding mechanism.

When you're at peace, it's slow and deep. And when you're stressed, exhilarated or angered it's turbulent and erratic. So when you're, say, stressed, you can transition to a peaceful state by deep-breathing; and as you are relaxing you find yourself not needing that much focus/energy to keep the breathing that way - the binding automatically happens.

One can use almost any object to meditate upon - visual image, mental image, sound, music, whir of a motor, randomness of objects around you, tick of a clock; just about anything; the more rhythmic, the better. But for us inexperienced ones, breathing works the best.

Also, we should not think about breathing, rather feel it, granted it starts with thinking :) Thinking is what meditation shuns, at least when we're practicing

Focussing on breathing is one particular instance but not the only thing you can do. Essentially you are practising focus and learning things about your mind you might not have noticed before

> Why and in what way is thinking about sensations and one's body different from thinking about past or future?

Being aware activates a different part of the brain to thinking. See https://www.coursera.org/course/meditation and "The Science of Happiness" on edx.org for more.

It's funny, I heard about this type of meditation from Rivers Cuomo on a podcast and I can't stop thinking about it. I like that it's not tied to any sort of religious belief.

Thanks for the excellent description! Beyond the ten days, have you done any other retreats?

Can you offer some background on why you decided to attend? How much experience with mindfulness did you have beforehand?

I'm not OP, but I attended the same 10-day course last year and will likely attend another one at some point in the near future.

I started experimenting with meditation after listening to Howard Stern talk about transcendental mediation around seven years ago. At the time, I was struggling a lot with anxiety and bouts of depression. When I discovered Mindfulness and Acceptance Therapy, I started to move away from mantra meditation(TM) and towards mindfulness meditation. Over the years, I became more and more interested, not only in meditation, but in Eastern philosophy, and studied everything from Vedanta to Zen to Yoga to Tibetan Buddhism.

I meditated anywhere from 20-40 minutes a day, but I was never very consistent. Sometimes I would skip a day, and sometimes a week, but I always came back to it. The anxiety and depression eventually went away, but I still was a very unhappy person, and I didn't understand why.

Enter psychedelics. After a psilocybin trip last spring, I wrote about 40 pages worth of advice to myself. It was all very practical, very pragmatic, almost fatherly. Part of that advice was something along the lines of, "If you really want to figure out what's going on, you need to study your mind, study your thoughts." I signed up for the first available course.

Has Vipassana helped you further?

Absolutely. I practiced for 2 hours a day for many months after the course. Life circumstances forced me to take a several-month hiatus, but I'm now back to sitting for about 90 minutes a day. I can't attribute it to my meditation practice alone, but there have been some huge changes in my life since doing the retreat. I've become a lot more compassionate and accepting of myself and I've started to gain some major insight into the patterns of negative thinking and self-sabotaging behavior that I've engaged in for most of my life. It's like I finally found the end on the ball of yarn of all my negative bullshit, and I'm slowly starting to unravel it.

I got kind of out of the practice after a few months post the 10-day workshop (life), and this is really encouraging me to get back into it. "The end of the ball of yarn" - really hits the nail on the head. I feel like there's some deeper reason for a lot of the stupid thought patterns I know I have that don't help me - but never managed to get deep enough to find the root-cause. Maybe sitting again will take me there, or at least let me realize its impermanance and move on. It's weird how I can discuss this but feeling it is a whole other thing. :) Metta to you!

What was your experience with the course?

It was one of the most difficult things I've done, mentally, physically, and emotionally. It was also very rewarding. It completely changed my understanding of meditation and instilled a belief that meditation really can be life-changing if practiced in earnest.

How about all the things that unsettled redmaverick?

The cult stuff? It's somewhat understandable. I think timeofgifts summed it up pretty well. You're essentially giving up your freedom for 10 days and are asked to do some things that may seem rather strange (e.g., bowing and chanting). It's normal to freak out and to want to leave, and you'll come up with a number of reasons to do so. I was miserable for a majority of the 10 days and desperately wanted to leave. But I also recognized this urge as just more "mind stuff", and the reason I was there was to learn to stop reacting to this stuff.

Another point that hasn't been mentioned is that these courses are funded entirely by donations. This is why they want you to work hard and take your time there seriously. This is also why they really discourage people from leaving early. There are typically long wait lists for these courses and they don't want to "waste" spots on people that are going to leave early or not take it seriously.

That was very helpful and succinct. Thank you.