Essay 8: Andrew Huberman Just Gave My Vipassana Practice a Vocabulary

It has been eight years since I resigned from my job. In that time, my laptop and a good internet connection became my teacher and, honestly, my best friend. I read what I wanted, watched what I wanted, followed one curious thread into the next one, with nobody assigning any of it to me.

In 2020, one of those threads led me to Andrew Huberman. I remember the exact feeling of listening to him for the first time, hearing scientific names for things I had already been doing since 2014, quietly, without knowing there were names for them at all. I am not a trained scientist. I don't have a deep background in neuroscience. But between Huberman, and later a good amount of Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, I started to see the shape of my own Vipassana practice from a completely different angle, a laboratory angle, not just a spiritual one.

A Practice That Disappeared and Came Back

Vipassana is old. The Buddha taught it in India roughly 2,500 years ago. What most people don't know is that the technique itself did not survive in the country where it started. Over the centuries, it disappeared from India almost completely. It survived somewhere else instead, preserved carefully in Burma, passed from teacher to student without much change, while the land of its birth mostly forgot it.

The man who brought it back was S.N. Goenka. He was Indian by descent but born and raised in Burma. As a young businessman he suffered from severe migraines, bad enough that he depended on morphine for years just to function. In 1955, somewhat reluctantly, he agreed to sit his first ten-day Vipassana course under his teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin. By the end of it, the migraines that had followed him for twenty years were gone. So was his dependence on morphine. He later said his anger and his ego had quietened too.

He stayed with his teacher for fourteen years, learning the technique properly. Then in June 1969, he flew from Yangon to Kolkata, at his teacher's request, to teach Vipassana in India. His teacher could not travel himself, so he sent Goenka instead, and told him something close to this, that it wasn't Goenka who was going, it was the Dhamma itself. Vipassana returned to India that year, after being absent from its own homeland for more than two thousand years. Goenka thought he'd stay a few months. He ended up staying for the rest of his life, teaching millions of people across more than 45 years, in a country that had almost entirely forgotten the technique it once gave the world.

I think about that history every time I sit for my own practice. It isn't a new wellness trend. It's a very old technology that went missing and eventually found its way home.

What Happened in January 2018

I want to tell you what this practice actually did for me once, not what I believe it can do, what it actually did.

In the cold dusk of January 2018, somewhere around two or three in the morning, I was in Gurgaon for work when my brother called. Our father, who had been ill for a long time, had passed away. It wasn't a shock. I had known it was coming for months. But knowing something is coming and being ready for it turned out to be two completely different things. I was shattered. I cried, booked the next flight home, and headed for the airport.

Something was different in me on that drive, something that wouldn't have been there before 2014. I was more mindful than grief alone would have made me. At the airport, and through the 45-minute flight home, I kept doing the only thing I knew how to do with a feeling that large, observing it in the body instead of being pulled under by it. There was a group of college students on that same flight, ten or fifteen of them, headed to my city for a trip, laughing and singing the entire way. I didn't ask them to be quiet. I didn't need to. I sat with my own grief, watched what it was actually doing to my body, breath by breath, and let their noise pass through the cabin without needing it to stop. I don't think I could have done that before I'd sat a single course.

The Year I Didn't Want to Live

I'm not going to describe the details of what I planned to do the year I resigned from my job, because I don't think those details belong in something strangers will read. What I'll say honestly is this. I was lost in a way I hadn't been before. I didn't know what the future held, and for a while, I didn't want to find out. It was the closest I've come to choosing to not be here anymore. Vipassana held my hand through that period in a way I still don't have full words for. The fog didn't lift all at once. It thinned, slowly, the way morning fog actually does, until I could see far enough ahead to keep walking.

I want to be honest about something more recent too, because pretending otherwise would make this essay dishonest. The second half of 2025, through to now, has been the hardest stretch of my life, harder, strangely, than losing my father, harder than the year I nearly didn't make it through after resigning. I don't fully know why. Maybe I've simply forgotten how the old pain felt. Maybe this one is just genuinely harder. I've lost touch with a relationship I once thought was the best thing life had given me, and there have been days inside this stretch where I've quietly lost my belief in life itself. What has kept me upright through it isn't certainty that things will get better. It's years of sitting, and a good number of philosophical lectures, and the specific, practiced habit of observing a feeling instead of being ruled by it. I chose life over death, again, not because I was sure life was worth it, but because I've trained myself, one sit at a time, to stay with a hard sensation long enough to find out what's on the other side of it. I became slower because of this. Less opinionated. I speak now mostly when it actually matters. That, as much as anything I've read or heard, is Vipassana.

What the Science Actually Shows

Here is where Huberman and the wider world of neuroscience earned my attention, and I want to slow down and explain one study properly instead of listing numbers.

In 2005, a Harvard researcher named Sara Lazar scanned the brains of twenty experienced meditators and compared them to fifteen people who had never meditated, matched carefully for age, gender, and education so the comparison would actually mean something. She found that two specific regions of the cortex were measurably thicker in the meditators, the insula, which handles awareness of what's happening inside your own body, and the prefrontal cortex, which handles attention and focus. The difference was small in absolute terms, a few thousandths of an inch, but it scaled directly with how long a person had been practicing. The longer you sit, the thicker those regions get. The effect was most visible in the older participants, because those are exactly the regions that normally thin out with age. Meditation seemed to be pushing back against that.

Other researchers, working separately, have measured similar things in the rest of the body. Heart rate dropping after mindfulness training. Sustained attention improving over a matter of weeks. Perceived stress falling in people who meditated regularly compared to those who didn't. None of these studies involved monks who'd spent thirty years in a cave. Most involved ordinary people with jobs and families, meditating for around 40 minutes a day. That detail matters to me. This isn't a result reserved for the exceptional.

What struck me most, once I understood the science, is how much of the ten-day course's structure lines up with it without ever explaining itself in these terms. You wake at four in the morning, not because it sounds spiritual, but because it puts you in sync with your own cortisol rhythm, the hormone that naturally rises after waking and helps set the whole day's alertness. You stop eating solid food after midday, which gives the body a long, undisturbed stretch without digestion pulling energy away from everything else it's doing. The constant instruction to return attention to the breath is, in plain terms, a way of working directly on the vagus nerve and the autonomic nervous system, the same system that governs heart rate and the body's stress response. Huberman has a name for a short version of this, NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, lying still with your eyes closed, moving attention slowly through the body while breathing slowly. The first time I heard him describe it, I almost laughed. It's a short Vipassana sit with the word Vipassana removed from it.

What Osho Gave Me, and What He Didn't

I found Osho early, while I was still searching for language to describe what I already sensed. He was brilliant to listen to, funny, sharp, willing to say things nobody else would say out loud. I want to be fair to him here, because he did build real institutions, an ashram in Pune, a whole commune in Oregon, complete with its own schedules and work and therapy programs. He wasn't only a man with a microphone. He built places.

But what he built was communal architecture, not personal architecture. He gave you a place to belong to, not a technique you could carry alone into an ordinary Tuesday. When he talked about children being raised by a whole commune instead of two parents, shared food, shared care, shared everything, it sounded wise the first time I heard it, and I still think there's real insight buried in it. But it needed his commune to actually exist. Take away the ashram, and the idea has nowhere left to live.

Vipassana doesn't need an ashram. It needs ten days once, and then a cushion and twenty minutes a day for the rest of your life, wherever you happen to be. Huberman doesn't need one either, his protocol fits into a bedroom before sunrise. I think that's the real difference between a philosopher and a teacher. A philosopher can build you a beautiful place to believe something. A teacher hands you something small enough to carry out the door and keep doing on your own.

Come and See for Yourself

I used to be a poet. I say used to on purpose, it's been a long time since poetry knocked on my door. But the way of seeing that came with it never left. I don't look at a tree and see a tree anymore. I see whatever metaphor it's quietly offering that day. If someone tells me the grass is green, I don't fully agree. I tell them, the grass is green for humans. It isn't green in the same way for a snake, or a dog, or most of the other eyes looking at it right now. The truth that grass is green is a human truth, not an ecological one. Vipassana didn't teach me that fact. It just slowed me down enough to notice it.

There's an old word in the Buddha's own teaching, ehipassiko, which roughly means come and see for yourself. Not take my word for it, not believe it because I said so, but test it in your own experience and trust only what you find there. That's the real point underneath everything I've written here. I didn't need Huberman to tell me Vipassana works. I already knew that from eight years of sitting. What he gave me was a second language for the same discovery, a way of explaining it to people who trust a brain scan more than they trust a monk.

We don't actually need to borrow anyone else's experience, not Goenka's, not Huberman's, not mine. The instruction was always to sit down, pay attention to what is actually happening inside your own body, and find out directly. Everything else, the history, the studies, the podcasts, is just other people pointing at the same door and confirming that it opens.