Dear anyone who hasn't stopped long enough to be alone with themselves,
I spent ten days in silence. Everything got louder.
Vipassana is a silent meditation course — ten days, no phone, no contact with the outside world, no talking, no eye contact with anyone around you. Four-thirty in the morning until nine-thirty at night, close to a hundred and twenty hours of meditation over ten days. I did it because I knew a moment was coming where doing something like this would no longer be possible — no more disappearing completely, no more giving ten days to nothing but yourself. So I did it before that moment arrived. One final challenge, entirely mine.
The hardest part wasn't the meditation.
When you strip away the phone and the work and the conversations and every system you've built to manage your life — what's left is the thoughts you can't act on. The task list sitting open somewhere you can't get to. The relationship things you've been meaning to address. The question running quietly underneath everything: whether the world was still okay outside. Whether someone had gotten sick, whether something had happened, whether someone needed you and you weren't there. Not knowing. Not being able to know. And not being able to do anything about any of it regardless.
That's what got loud.
The meditation was almost the easy part. Twelve hours of sitting in silence — that was when everything went quiet. That was the peace. The hard part was the space in between, when the thoughts came back and there was nowhere to put them and nothing to do but sit with them until they moved on their own.
I had ten days to think about who I was and who I wasn't. Not who I performed as in the work and the meetings and the relationships — who I actually was when I had no ability to be useful to anyone. Who was left when the doing was taken away. There were many times I wanted to leave. I stayed. And what I found on the other side of all of it was something quieter and more mine than I'd felt in a long time. I also remembered things I'd forgotten how to notice — the sunrise, the way the breeze felt, what it meant to look up at the sky and actually see it. Somewhere in the last few years I had stopped doing that. Ten days of silence gave it back.
I'm pregnant. Going in, I thought this was the last thing I'd do entirely for myself before everything changed. What I didn't account for: the experience was never going to be mine alone. My baby's hearing had just developed in the days before I left. So while I was sitting in near-silence, the baby was hearing it too. On a full moon night midway through the course, I felt the baby kick for the first time. I don't know how to explain what that moment was except that it felt like confirmation — that we were doing this together, that it had always been for both of us. I went in thinking I was doing something for myself before becoming a mother. I came out understanding I already was one.
For two years, if you'd asked me my biggest accomplishment, I would have said Modern Mangal — the jewelry brand I built from scratch, that started as a side hustle and became a full company, that became more than jewelry and more than a business. It became a way for people to revive tradition and culture in a way that felt authentically theirs. I was proud of that and I still am. Coming out of Vipassana, I have a different answer. Not because Modern Mangal matters less. Because I understand better what it is among — one thing in a life that is full of things, not the thing that makes any day what it is.
What Vipassana gave me is not a framework or a system. It's a reminder of what I keep forgetting: that everything is impermanent, everything changes, and the only moment that has ever mattered is this one — because it's the only one that actually exists.
That's not a warning. It's the only instruction that matters.
The full version — what the ten days actually cost, and what I'm still sitting with — is on Substack.