By Day 7, the silence no longer felt like a restriction—it had become a companion. The absence of speech, eye contact, and distractions had created a space so still that the mind had nowhere left to hide.

Today’s meditation work was deep. We continued the body scan through Vipassana—moving attention slowly from head to toe and toe to head, observing every sensation with equanimity. The technique hadn’t changed, but something within me had. I was beginning to experience layers I didn’t know existed.

There were moments of intense clarity—when the body seemed to dissolve into vibrations, and awareness moved freely, smoothly. And then there were moments when that flow would abruptly hit a wall: a patch of pain, a place of numbness, or worse, a surge of emotion I couldn’t explain.

Old memories floated up out of nowhere—a word someone once said, a face I’d forgotten, an old guilt, or a long-buried resentment. Goenka-ji had warned us: “When you go deep into the mind, old sankharas—past reactions—will rise up to be released.”

And that’s what it felt like. As if old emotional wounds were rising to the surface—not to torture me, but to be witnessed and let go.

I cried today.

Silently, during one of the afternoon sittings. There was no trigger, no story playing in my head. Just a release. A strange combination of sadness, relief, and softness. I didn’t run from it. I didn’t label it. I just observed.

And eventually, like everything else—it passed.

By evening, I was exhausted, not just physically but emotionally. Yet there was a strange peace in the exhaustion. As if something heavy had been lifted, even if I didn’t know exactly what.

In the nightly discourse, Goenka-ji reminded us that this is the purification process: the surfacing of the old, the hidden, the stored. And that the only way out is through—not by resisting or analyzing, but by watching, patiently, with balance.

As I lay in bed that night, I could feel sensations dancing all over my body. Tiny pulses, tingles, aches. Nothing was still—but my mind was more still than it had been all week.

I was beginning to understand—not intellectually, but in my bones—what it meant to observe without reacting.