How Vipassana Meditation Entered My Worldview
A Personal History
Sometimes a teacher enters our life without either of us knowing that a lesson has begun.
A Chance Encounter on Rapa Nui
Who has not heard of Easter Island and its legendary moai?
Because of the island’s extreme isolation, getting there is not easy. I have been fortunate enough to visit four times since 2003, and over the years I have made friends with several Rapa Nui families.
The Japanese have long been fascinated by Rapa Nui, and Japan has played an important role in the restoration and preservation of the moai.
On one visit, I was fortunate to stay in the home of a local guide and his Rapa Nui wife, Fatima. We set out in his van to see, feel, and learn the history of the island—a history that, for him, was not something learned from a book but something known by heart.
The ceremonial stone platforms on which many of the moai stand are called ahu. They are sacred, and visitors are not supposed to step on them.
Despite the signs, I would still see tourists climbing onto the ahu, especially the more isolated ones.
One day I saw a young Japanese woman, a daypack on her back, wandering around an ahu. I hurried over and said in English:
“Please, these platforms are sacred. Please don’t climb on them.”
Embarrassed, she quickly climbed down. Then she said to me:
“If you want, you can speak Spanish to me.”
I was amazed. Here was a young woman with no English and only rudimentary Spanish, travelling alone around the world. She told me she was heading to Europe and then to India.
One of the things she hoped to do in India was Vipassana meditation.
I had heard Vipassana mentioned before in Myanmar and Cambodia, but this chance encounter on a remote island in the Pacific brought it into sharper focus for me.
And so, quite unexpectedly, Vipassana entered my world.
From Rapa Nui to S. N. Goenka
My curiosity deepened through the writings and talks of Yuval Noah Harari. He has spoken often about the importance of Vipassana in his life and how meditation became a regular part of it.
Harari was introduced to Vipassana in the tradition of S. N. Goenka, a Burmese-born teacher of Indian descent who had himself learned the practice in Burma.
Whenever I have the opportunity, I like to listen to Goenka’s short introduction to Anapana—the practice of observing the natural breath. It takes only about ten minutes, yet it offers a remarkably simple way of returning attention to the present.
More recently I came across William Hart’s The Art of Living, based on Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka.
Some of what follows was prompted by that book, by Goenka’s teaching, and by a Blinkist summary I listened to. I have woven those ideas together with my own reflections and experiences.
Philosophy Must Be Lived
No amount of study can replace practical experience.
This, for me, is one of the most important lessons of Buddhism. Teachings become meaningful only when they are lived.
The same is true of yoga. If we perform the postures without understanding anything of the philosophy behind them, yoga can become little more than stretching.
Buddhist and yogic thought share profound concerns: the nature of the mind, suffering, attachment, awareness and liberation. They emerged from the same broad Indian intellectual world, although the Buddha and Patanjali did not live at the same time.
For me, the central lesson is simple:
Philosophy becomes useful only through practice.
The practice is here and now—being aware of what is happening in this moment. In this regard, I often think of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and his insistence on returning to the present.
If You Have a Faith, Live It
I have often encountered people who describe themselves as spiritual or religious while allowing that identity to remain separate from the way they actually live.
A faith or philosophy has meaning only when it shapes our conduct.
If you have a faith, live it. Do not measure a life only by money, status or achievement. Measure it also by kindness toward others.
A Qatari friend of mine, Ahmed, once said something that has remained with me:
“Do not be impressed by superficial things such as money, titles or degrees. Be impressed by kindness, empathy, generosity, humility and integrity.”
Those words have stayed with me.
What Am I Without My Labels?
When I was a junior doctor in Melbourne, I began thinking about the attachments from which I wanted to free myself.
I even wrote them down.
First came country and nationality—the strange importance we attach to a passport, even to its colour.
Next came profession.
“I am a doctor” is an easy identity to adopt. But medicine is what I do; it is not the entirety of what I am.
Then came attachment to the body: skin, gender, appearance and all the labels society places upon them.
In recent years, societies East and West have become increasingly divided by caste, creed, colour, nationality and identity. I look the way I do and ask for no privilege because of it.
To loosen attachment also means loosening its mirror image: aversion.
Family attachment may be the hardest of all. In my own case, being sent to Australia while young—painful as aspects of that experience may have been—also gave me the freedom to become my own person in thought.
I came eventually to a simple formulation:
Love deeply, but do not confuse love with possession or attachment.
For that freedom, I remain profoundly grateful to Australia.
We Are Not Written in Stone
Later, when I began reading Buddhist and yogic literature, I recognized many of these intuitions in traditions that had been asking similar questions for more than two millennia.
One idea especially resonates with me: the individual is not a fixed, permanent entity but something continually in flux.
We change physically, emotionally and intellectually from moment to moment.
If this is so, perhaps we should be cautious about carving permanent judgments of other human beings “in stone.”
Traditional Buddhist thought describes reality in terms of continual arising and passing away. Modern physics uses a very different scientific framework, and I would not equate modern physics literally with ancient Buddhist cosmology.
Yet the comparison remains evocative.
Both challenge our everyday intuition that everything—including the self—is as fixed and solid as it appears.
Between Sensation and Reaction
Another framework I have found extraordinarily useful describes four linked processes:
CONSCIOUSNESS → PERCEPTION → SENSATION → REACTION
Yesterday, an older woman said something to me that immediately produced a physical sensation in my body.
I noticed it.
And I resisted the impulse to react.
Had I reacted automatically, I suspect I would only have made the situation worse without resolving anything.
Beauty can produce warmth or joy in the body. A harsh word can produce tension, nausea, heat or a tightening of the muscles.
When we are ungrounded, we may react to that sensation before we have understood either the event or ourselves.
This is where I find Vipassana particularly useful.
Vipassana creates a space between sensation and reaction.
One notices sensation simply as sensation—without immediately transforming it into anger, fear, craving or aversion.
And within that small space lies an extraordinary freedom: we do not have to react.
The Kleshas: Disturbances of the Mind
I have found the yogic concept of the kleshas—the afflictions or structural disturbances of the mind—extremely useful:
Ignorance
Ego
Attachment
Aversion
Fear of change
Attachment is a major source of suffering, while ignorance lies beneath many of the mind’s distortions.
Simply learning to see these forces operating within ourselves begins to loosen their hold.
Morality, Meditation and Equanimity
The practice of sīla, or morality, seems to me almost like ethical common sense: live in a way that protects both yourself and others.
It brings me back to Ahmed’s words:
Kindness. Empathy. Generosity. Humility. Integrity.
The practice of bhāvanā—mental cultivation through meditation—aims toward equanimity.
It is easy to talk about ending the suffering of the world.
It is much harder when we ourselves are suffering.
Yet much suffering begins as turbulence in the mind. Meditation is therefore not merely an escape from action; it is a way of training the mind from which action arises.
Begin With the Breath
How does one begin?
Simply.
Sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Observe the natural breath.
Almost immediately the mind will wander.
That wandering is not failure. It is part of what we discover when we begin looking inward.
The mind travels to yesterday, tomorrow, a conversation, a sound in the room, an ache in the leg.
Notice that it has wandered.
Then gently bring it back to the breath.
Again.
And again.
And again.
So much suffering is amplified by replaying the past or rehearsing an imagined future. The breath gives us something immediate and real to which we can return.
From Intellectual Wisdom to Experiential Wisdom
I find it useful to distinguish three kinds of wisdom:
Received wisdom — what we hear from others.
Intellectual wisdom — what we acquire through books, reflection and teaching.
Experiential wisdom — what becomes known directly through living and observing.
Vipassana places particular emphasis on this third kind.
In the Goenka method, attention gradually moves from the breath to bodily sensations, which are observed as objectively as possible and without judgment.
Pleasant and unpleasant sensations arise.
And they pass away.
By watching this repeatedly, we begin to experience impermanence rather than merely think about it.
Sensations change.
Moods change.
Bodies change.
Relationships change.
And the self we defend so fiercely is changing too.
The wisdom I take from Vipassana is not that we should become indifferent to life. Quite the opposite.
It is that perhaps we can love life while holding it a little less tightly.
When ego, craving and aversion loosen, there is more room for equanimity—and perhaps for peace.
When the Student Is Ready
I hope this hybrid essay—part travel memory, part personal history, part philosophical reflection—is useful to someone who wishes to begin meditation.
I keep returning to an old saying:
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
In my own life, teachers have often appeared unexpectedly.
A young Japanese traveller wandering among the moai on Easter Island.
A woman I met at the airport in Siem Reap in 2008 who later became one of my closest friends in Asia.
Vandana Yadav, a yoga teacher from Bombay who also taught philosophy and whom, by 2010, we had invited to teach us in Kuala Lumpur at the home of the erudite Indian expatriate Brijesh and his lovely wife, Aparna.
Books.
Friends.
Chance conversations.
People encountered in airports and on distant islands.
Perhaps the teacher does not always arrive looking like a teacher.
Sometimes we recognize our teachers only retrospectively. At the moment of encounter, we may think we are merely having a conversation, reading a book, meeting a stranger, or travelling through an unfamiliar place.
Only afterward do we realize that something in us shifted.
And perhaps that is how Vipassana entered my worldview—not through a single revelation, but through a succession of people, places and encounters that slowly taught me to pay attention.
To the breath.
To sensation.
To the present moment.
And, perhaps most importantly, to that small space between what happens to us and how we choose to respond.
— A personal reflection on travel, friendship, Vipassana and the teachers who appear along the way.
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