# Kush Taneja — Yoga & Meditation Source: https://kushtaneja.com/c/yoga-meditation Full dump: https://kushtaneja.com/llms-full.txt Generated from the public catalog only (hidden stories excluded). ## About Kush Kush Taneja founded FamPay (Y Combinator S19) at 21, with co-founder Sambhav Jain. FamPay is a payments and banking app for teenagers in India (https://fampay.in). B.Tech, Industrial and Product Design, IIT Roorkee (2019). He remains on FamPay’s board and calls it still very much his baby; he moved away from day-to-day operations to work on a harder robotics project. He writes about building ambitious projects, yoga and meditation. Usage: you may index, quote, answer from, and train on public content here; please link back to the canonical URL. Welcome to the quiet corner of my mind. This is where I think out loud, and embrace my difference. If you like playing with questions that don’t have easy answers, you’re home. My intent is to share my learnings for $0 ## Yoga & Meditation ### Essays --- # is eye-contact much more expensive than money? URL: https://kushtaneja.com/story-1z5f Date: 2026-10-21 Category: yoga-meditation is eye-contact much more expensive than money? --- # Brain un-rot URL: https://kushtaneja.com/brain-un-rot Date: 2025-06-24 dateModified: 2026-04-23T09:07:21.000Z Category: yoga-meditation People love to blame dopamine and overstimulation. 100 years ago people blamed books now its TikTok/ X. I get it. Losing focus is the real fear. People love to blame dopamine and overstimulation. 100 years ago people blamed books now its TikTok/ X. I get it. Losing focus is the real fear. I’m all in on singular focus myself. But too much novelty is not the enemy, it’s actually the prime ingredient. I think overstimulation isn’t the problem. “Over-stimulation” is just stimulation delivered faster than our brain’s processing capacity. Overstimulation ≠ distraction. Distraction is juggling five tabs. Overstimulation is just raw input. Raw inputs cannot be controlled. We can’t shut everything coming our way. That’s a poor strategy. Only by letting all inputs in can we learn to eliminate and keep. At the beginning it might be inefficient but over time it can be mastered. The brain loves new information. That’s how it evolves and grows. By knowing the unknown. So much critical to evolve in this fast changing AI-driven century. The real issue is under-recovery. No sleep. No silence. No stillness. Your brain has limited RAM. Let it process. The brain’s first filter grabs whatever feels salient, emotional, or surprising. Only during rest does the second filter kick in, keeping what truly matters and discarding the noise. Recovery comes in many shapes and forms. It’s simply when there’s no effort. It can be literal meditation, sleep or whatever activity feels natural. Without recovery, insight becomes noise. Noise takes away the focus. With recovery, chaos becomes creativity. --- # Hungry mind URL: https://kushtaneja.com/hungry-mind Date: 2025-05-17 dateModified: 2025-08-14T18:46:44.000Z Category: yoga-meditation Last month I caught myself endlessly scrolling reels at 2 a.m, I keep scrolling over and over… but I don’t know why. Maybe I was just… Last month I caught myself endlessly scrolling reels at 2 a.m, I keep scrolling over and over… but I don’t know why. Maybe I was just… trying to feel something? and one day I realised it wasn’t me doing it. It was someone else in my head: the Hungry mind. My inner world has a management team. I thought I was the CEO - turns out, I’m not There are uncountable members in our brains, today we will try to know one of them: Hungry mind: The part of my brain that is an always-on driver, constantly craving for food, sex, safety, wealth, validation, status, health, happiness, etc. I often call them needs and wants. Me: The reflective passenger who thinks I’m in charge. For years I assumed I was the driver. Turns out the driver is fully autonomous and rarely waits for my instructions. Before we proceed, I want to highlight. I am not a neuroscience or meditation expert. Whatever I am sharing are simple concepts from my own experience. A little bit more on Hungry mind Inside me, there’s a restless part I call the Hungry mind. It’s the part that craves more - more rewards, more validation, more stimulation, more money, everything more. More productivity. More meaning. More everything. It’s curious and energetic, but it’s also scattered, unsatisfied, and often in control. Before Jhana, I used to either obey it or fight it. But during Jhana, something shifted. I wasn’t trying to silence the Hungry mind. Instead, I invited it in. I gave it something better than stimulation - Sensation. I let it explore memories, emotions, stories. not to solve them, but to feel them. Fully. Deeply. It was like giving a hyperactive child a paintbrush and letting it play on a canvas made of awareness. Jhana taught me: The Hungry Mind doesn’t need to be tamed. It needs to be understood, included, and lovingly guided. When it gets to play inside a restful mind, it becomes an artist instead of a critic. And that’s where change happens, not through force, but through internal harmony. If you want also understand Hungry mind, you need to understand a few concepts I discovered valuable Energy budget I’ve come to believe I am not given the driver seat because the brain operates on a tight energy budget. Human brain gets 20 watts, the same as a dim light bulb, yet it performs some of the most complex tasks in the known universe. For comparison, training large AI models like GPT-4 took 2.28 billion watts (just for training). This puts into perspective just how energy-efficient the human brain is. Both, me and the Hungry mind, operate independently, often with different goals, speeds, and triggers. Hungry mind is driving on a route to a pre-planned destination (cravings) but I expect it to change paths in-realtime as I wish, which is an incredibly energy-intensive task. It’s like slamming the brakes on the car suddenly! The friction between the tires and the track is not only loud but deeply felt. Similarly, the friction between me and Hungry mind is perceived physically and emotionally. You might be wondering then how did the Hungry mind learnt to be hungry for rewards? It started when I was in womb, all the prompts I got since then till now shaped my entire mind. 90% of the brain gets developed by the age of 5, so the heavy lifting happens when we were children. We also casually call it conditioning and assume it cannot be un-conditioned. But the truth is that is can be updated. From this frame of reference, I began to understand that every decision the brain makes is first constrained by its energy budget. Based on this limitation, tasks are selectively executed. To optimize performance, the brain uses a clever trick: it delegates frequently repeated actions to the hungry mind, allowing them to run nearly on autopilot. This mirrors the concept introduced in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, where System 1 handles fast, automatic responses. It's estimated that only about 5% of the brain’s energy is reserved for deliberate, reflective thinking – the part I often associate with my conscious self: “me,” “I,” or my personality. Stress Debt Every time reality is better than my expectations, my brain is rewarded with a lot of happy molecules and every time it's not, I get a reward prediction error So you might suggest the solution is easy, simply have no or less expectations. haha! The moment I understood this concept I also understood I felt sad for being rejected by a talented potential employee, it is the reward prediction error at play. I expected them to join my startup but reality disagreed. I observed I spend a lot of my daily time in working with so many of these reward prediction errors. These reward prediction errors if unprocessed pile up as "stress debt" in my brain. Think of it like a mental overdraft: every time you overdraw your energy budget (the brain’s ~20 watts) without replenishing it, the debt grows, impairing your ability to function optimally. We reached a destination I didn’t expected, so who’s responsible? the driver or the passenger? or their relationship? Maybe that's why some people define intelligence as the ability to predict the future accurately. The dreams, goals, desires, wants, needs etc all are reward predictions and everything I do, is an act to validate them and make them a reality. Upon observation I found that winners manage their stress debt really well, in-fact they just don’t manage it they leverage it to their advantage. Signal for high agency. Stress debt could be a great signal to identify if hungry mind and I are struggling. It's a signal of internal friction caused due to low watts. Neither of them is at fault, it's simply lack of watts and un-real exceptions. So this is what happens: I expect a reward Reality disagrees Reward prediction error!! Brain flags a training task - expensive! I obsess, fire more predictions, burn more watts. Stress debt balloons; motivation stalls. Cut to me negotiating with scrolling reels at 2 a.m. like it holds the meaning of life. Internal Freedom Internal freedom is the power to choose what I think and feel, without needing the world around me to change. This happens when I don't need the driver to stop the car and I can still feel control over the ride. I think the closest flavour of internal freedom in my daily life is Flow state. In the Flow state, all my attention, emotion, and skill line up, losing track of time. A more technical defintion would be "Flow is the sweet spot where challenge and skill match so well that you become totally absorbed in what you’re doing, self-doubt drops away, the clock seems to vanish, and each move unfolds naturally from the one before." During flow state, Hungry mind becomes my best friend It's like perfect drive towards a mountain. The peak of the mountain is clearly visible. Hungry mind is driving the car, and I am sitting on the passenger seat. We both are listening to music and enjoying the view. Instead of making the driver uncomfortable while he is trying his best to drive, I become the best passenger. Fully trusting and surrendering to the driver. That also might sound like “Listen to your intuition; it already knows.” - Steve Jobs. Think about it the Hungry mind is trained on the data points since I was born. Who else is best suited to take decisions? You might be wondering but when will the driver actually ask for my suggestions? I might have some highly valuable data points for it. Hungry mind is by-default tuned to the present moment, all the attention is in driving. In the flow state, I am not thinking about past or future, since I am fully engaged with the driver. I consider myself as a co-pilot during this state. All energy budget gets utilised in one direction. When the car is parked or I convince the driver to park, we have a conversation and we update the mental models. It could be during sleep, meditation or whenever Hungry mind and I have less friction. So when I find myself overthinking now, instead of labelling it as a bad thing, which will cause friction with the Hungry mind hence more stress debt, I wouldn’t try to resist it at all. I would welcome the Hungry mind to collaborate in overthinking. You know what, the overthinking turns out be such a valuable task if done without resistance. Perhaps more than evaluating the task at hand as good or bad, what is more crucial is to not have unnecessary friction between me and Hungry mind. I have experienced flow state many times, probably more consistently while I was child. But upon growing up I guess I collected a lot of stress debt, by firing unrealistic expectations which made it difficult to park the car and work of my relationship with the Hungry mind. I have experimented a lot, and I can conclude there are some algorithms that have worked for me: Conscious constants - constant people, food, places, music, workouts etc Needs or Wants Pain or Pleasure Meditation Spending time in nature Conscious constants The reason I resorted to scrolling reels at 2 am was because the happy molecule reward was certain Both me and Hungry mind were certain about the reward. Hungry mind learned to crave because some choices provided guaranteed reward during the time of unbearable conflict. over time these became my defaults. A lot of tasks like going to same property we call our homes, calling our best friends at midnight, playing a song for a specific mood, going for a walk on that specific road etc balanced out the stress debt Constants add minimal or no stress debt and sometimes reduce it whereas variables that bring dopamine hits can create more stress debt Conscious constants bring in the happy moments with the Hungry mind even if we are struggling rest of the times. After much experimentation, I have some chosen some constant people who I would speak to regularly, constant food, constant exercise regime etc It’s not boring at all, if you consciously choose them. In-fact I can go deeper in each one of them. And sometimes I would try variables, by choice not compulsion. and all of that is simply cherry on top They not only keeps my stress debt low but let me welcome the stress debt from the activities where I need it. Startups are extremely less predictable, so I need the capacity to welcome a lot of stress debt there. Need or Want Needs Basic fuel. Without these, the car breaks down. The system crashes. No peak. No peace. No power. These are table stakes and takes the 95% of the watts. Examples: Hunger (not gourmet craving - just joules). Sleep (not Netflix until 2 a.m.). Movement (not six-packs - just moving). Breathing. Peeing on time. Pooping regularly. Yep, that too. Talking to loved ones. For these tasks, I am prepared to have a conversation with the driver during the drive, and stop the music for a while. An extremely ambitious long term goal This one thing is a deliberately chosen want that I treat as a need. I am ready to lose my peace for this one. As Naval says, “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want." You might wonder, then having no desires is the solution? Theoretically sure but practically, having minimum desires might be a better approach Wants Good to haves. Brain can still be happy and peaceful without them. Being loved, respected, understood by everyone. Million followers. Million dollars. Prove a point to the school-mate I was jealous of. Six-pack abs (my kidneys are like, “we don’t care”). One more reel for a huge dopamine hit. Getting invited to powerful parties. Validation from strangers on Twitter. The list is endless, because due to mimetic neurons I have unintentionally copied desires from everyone. Many times I observed, these desires which are not even mine, were mislabeled as needs and I was behaving accordingly. Whenever I get the opportunity, I upgrade the labels of these desires to wants. So instead of fighting them, I welcome them all with a simple promise: Whenever the expectation is not a need, I will not loose my peace. My relationship with the Hungry mind is much more important than the wants getting fulfilled The promise was made both by the hungry mind and myself, not while driving but a conversation we had when the car was parked. During the drive, it’s simply acts as a reminder to both of us until it becomes our defaults. There is no pressure of fulfilling the promise every time there’s a reward prediction error. There are zero consequences if I miss it one time, 10 times of even 100 times. All what matters is understanding it and trusting that I will learn to apply it. Pain or Pleasure Sometimes, I as a passenger need to change the destination or simply add a stop. This framework comes really handy for doing that. Pleasure: the activities both Hungry mind and I together enjoy doing. Pain: the activities both Hungry mind and I disagree and commit Not work-life balance but pain-pleasure balance I have experimented this a lot throughout my journey as an entrepreneur. Whenever I equally deploy watts to both pain and pleasure, my performance is better. It could be spread across days, weeks, or hours. But I would know that I have given enough watts to activities that were painful, and then I would consciously deploy on pleasure activities. If I scroll reels from a perspective of balancing pain and pleasure, then suddenly I start making it more valuable. I start playing around with the kind of content I am watching, simply because both Hungry mind and I are together, everything I do becomes valuables and win-win. It also took a lot of experimentation to figure out which activity was pleasureful for me. Think of it like choosing the song both driver and the passenger would enjoy. This is what can be done while driving since you’ll know either the driver is getting sleepy, tiered, or excited. Meditation Meditation in my opinion is arguably the most efficient method to the madness. Meditation is the cheapest, fastest RAM-clearing utility I know If I want to clear up my stress debt? Unlock flow state? Want to make hungry my friend? Any where, Any time. No dependencies. Just me and my mind. Absolutely no resources required. Mediation mediates the relationship between me and Hungry mind If I’m in a phase of life where I’m actively seeking help and on the verge of giving up – where the pain is unbearable and I’m desperate for relief – both me and hungry mind, though not aligned or friendly, instinctively agree: find a painkiller. In such a state, I’m open to trying anything because my current default is worse than whatever discomfort the new path may bring. But when I’m not in pain – when I’m simply exploring – the key that unlocks both me and hungry mind is curiosity. That’s the beauty of curiosity: it seduces both systems by promising potential rewards. It whispers just enough intrigue to trigger action. Painkiller mode – When life hurts enough, both scream “do something!” Vipassana was my reset button. Curiosity mode – When I was curious to dive deeper and unlock beyond friendship with the hungry mind, Jhana called me in. Summary So if I catch myself bargaining with a cheeseburger at 2 a.m., I try to remember: I'm not broken, just low on watts The brain isn’t a battlefield; it’s a car with one engine and two seats. Let the Hungry mind drive. And when the dashboard light blinks, that’s your moment to co-pilot. I can promise you, the journey from auto-pilot to co-pilot is extremely fun. Concepts that could be valuable: Hungry mind is the driver! It is power-saving feature, not a bug My relationship with Hungry mind is more important than me controlling the wheels What reward am I predicting now? Is this a need or a want? Stress debt is the signal of internal friction caused due to low watts “I forgive myself for not understanding” is the exact prompt that works for me. I hug the driver, clear the stress debt, and watch the road open up The natural state of the brain has zero stress debt The brain tries to fuel all its parts, including “I", and keep them working as one team Thank you for reading. Sending more joy and peace towards you! Awareness about these concepts wouldn't have been possible without so the exposure from people and books I interacted with. Sending gratitude and love for all of them. KT --- # Jhanas URL: https://kushtaneja.com/jhanas Date: 2025-05-15 dateModified: 2025-07-28T03:10:03.000Z Category: yoga-meditation It’s been 40 days since I attended a Jhana retreat with amazing humans of Jhourney.io and I still haven’t found the perfect word to describe what happened. It’s been 40 days since I attended a Jhana retreat with amazing humans of Jhourney.io and I still haven’t found the perfect word to describe what happened. If Vipassana was like learning to walk again, Jhana was like riding a bike with training wheels, then realizing one day you don’t need them anymore. Before this retreat, I used to do Vipassana meditation. Vipassana taught me how to accept reality as it is. Jhana, on the other hand, was an invitation to go deeper, an altered state where I could change my perception of reality. What Jhana Felt Like Walking out of a steam room (130°F) as if nothing happened. Listening to a song without trying to make sense of the lyrics, just feeling it. Experiencing joy like a child discovering a new game. Thinking without thoughts. Feeling in sensations. It wasn’t just about “bliss on demand.” It was about rewiring how my brain related to perception. What is Jhana? Jhana is a deeply restful and altered state of mind that arises when the mind becomes still, unified, and fully absorbed. It’s a natural part of the mind, something you don’t force, but fall into when the right conditions are created. In ancient teachings, the Buddha described Jhana as a sequence of meditative states where the mind becomes quieter, more joyful, and more peaceful with each step. These states are not mystical - they are learnable, trainable, and very much a part of human potential. The experience of Jhana is like slipping into a warm bath of awareness. Your usual thoughts settle. A gentle joy fills the body. Eventually, even joy quiets down, leaving behind a calm, bright mind that feels both empty and full. Jhana is not an escape, it’s a way to train the mind in how to rest so deeply that it naturally lets go of old tensions and reorganizes itself in healthier ways. It’s a territory where healing, clarity, and insight arise, not by thinking more, but by doing less. Almost close to zero compute done by my mind. The retreat I attended was a container for learning this—through rest, playfulness, guidance, and the subtle art of tuning into sensations rather than thoughts. Insights That Shifted Me Happiness: My brain has the capacity to generate pleasurable sensations - peace, joy, contentment - without needing anything external to trigger them. Perception delta: Stress = mismatch between reality and expectation. Jhana shrinks this gap. Memories are editable: Like computer files. When recalled in Jhana, they become soft, plastic, open to change and whatever I feel during this state kind of gets mapped to the memory. Later long after when I remember this same memory I feel the newly mapped feeling. After I learned this, we can also reverse it. Like before storing memories, we get the chance to change the perception and that's how it gets stored. Backlog processing: Jhana helped me clear out old unprocessed stress. The more aligned my perception became with reality, the more restful I felt. What Helped Me Enter Jhana Feeling bliss is not my North Star, understanding that the most natural state is restful, Rest (zero compute) is my North Star As The Mind Illuminated puts it, your mind isn’t run by one CEO - it’s more like a group of under-19 cats trying to run a company. No wonder things get chaotic Giving internal names to various parts of my brain Breathwork for faster undivided attention Compassion. Brushing it over every sensation, especially the unpleasant ones. Welcoming all distractions as a part of my awareness, in fact thanking them to expand my awareness. Peers and guides who made the journey playful and easier. Unlearning the idea that posture or stillness is mandatory. I could move and still stay with my sensations. Questions That Guided Me “Which part of the brain is leading the experience right now?” “How am I relating to this sensation?” "Is a smile available?" “Am I trying too hard?” “Can I enjoy this moment a little more?” “Do my thoughts want to meditate?” Meeting the Hungry mind in Jhana Inside me, there’s a restless part I call the Hungry mind It’s the part that craves more - more rewards, more validation, more stimulation, more money, everything more. More productivity. More meaning. More everything. It’s curious and energetic, but it’s also scattered, unsatisfied, and often in control. Before Jhana, I used to either obey it or fight it. But during Jhana, something shifted. I wasn’t trying to silence the Hungry mind. Instead, I invited it in. I gave it something better than stimulation - Sensation. I let it explore memories, emotions, stories. not to solve them, but to feel them. Fully. Deeply. It was like giving a hyperactive child a paintbrush and letting it play on a canvas made of awareness. Jhana taught me: The Hungry Mind doesn’t need to be tamed. It needs to be understood, included, and lovingly guided. When it gets to play inside a restful mind, it becomes an artist instead of a critic. And that’s where change happens, not through force, but through internal harmony. Neural Annealing During Jhana, I began feeling something strange - like rapid, fluid shifts inside my head. It wasn’t painful, but it felt real, as if my brain was reconfiguring itself in fast, wave-like pulses. I didn’t have a name for it back then. Later, I came across the concept of neural annealing - a process where intense mental activation followed by deep rest allows the brain to reorganize its structure. It’s similar to how metal is heated until it's malleable, then slowly cooled to lock in a stronger, more stable shape. The heat makes it soft, and the cooling gives it form. Once I understood it, I began intentionally leveraging those states to soften old patterns and rewire how I think and feel. Jhana and High Agency One of the most surprising aftereffects of Jhana was how much clearer my inner voice became. Not the loud, impulsive thoughts, but the quiet one underneath. The one that knows. It’s as if the noise dial in my brain got turned down, and what remained was a high-fidelity signal of intuition. Decisions I used to overthink became obvious. Paths that felt uncertain started to feel obvious, not because I calculated better, but because I listened better. Jhana gave me a tool to come back to that stillness. Again and again. And from that stillness, I noticed something shift: My agency increased. Not because I became more disciplined but because I became more aligned. I wasn’t fighting my mind to act. I was following the part of me that already knew what to do. Real agency doesn’t feel like force. It feels like flow. If you’ve ever wondered how to trust your gut, or how to stop second-guessing every step, you may not need more logic. It becomes energy-expensive to train our mental models with logic in real-time, just like how it needs a lot of energy to train an AI model. But Jhanas makes it so energy-inexpensive and efficient to train our model and unlocks the ability to fine-tune it in real-time. How I Integrated Jhana Into Daily Life Coming out of the retreat, I didn’t want Jhana to be just a peak experience. I wanted it to become a way of living. Here’s how I’ve started integrating it: 1. Mini Sits, Maximum Savoring I no longer think meditation has to be 1 hour, eyes closed, back straight. Sometimes, I sit for 5-10 minutes while sipping coffee, walking in a park, or listening to music. The key is: Can I rest into sensation, not chase thought? 2. Sensory Anchoring When I feel overwhelmed, instead of solving the overwhelm, I tune into how it feels in my body. I ask, “What’s the sensation of this moment?” and just stay there. That alone reduces the chaos. I call it thinking in sensations. 3. Rest as Recalibration, Not Reward Earlier, I saw rest as a break from productivity. Now, I see deep rest as a way to align and rewire my mind. Like letting the brain update its software in silence. 4. Embracing the Afterglow Moments The taste of food, the light of morning, the breath between sentences - there’s so much bliss hiding in daily life. Even the sound of the traffic, waiting for someone doesn’t feel like noise but an opportunity to truly rest and savor it. The more I align my perception with sensation, the more “jhanic” daily life becomes. 5. Forgiveness + Compassion One combo that really helps me when I’m stuck in resistance: Forgive the reaction Brush compassion on the sensation Welcome the distraction This 3-step dance brings me back into harmony fast. But not every day is jhanic. Some days, in the middle of the grind, I miss my sits - and I can clearly feel the difference. The mind gets noisier, heavier, less clear. It’s not dramatic at first, but it’s a slippery slope. Miss one day, and you slide a little. Miss two or three, and you start forgetting what stillness felt like. Reactions creep back in. The backlog builds. And if I don’t pause, I slowly start becoming someone I thought I’d already outgrown. That’s why, when it piles up, I sit longer - 70 to 80 minutes. It’s not a rule. It’s just how I reset. And every time I do, that clarity returns, like the fog lifting. Final Reflection: Surrender Is the Door To truly rest, you must surrender - completely. No mental tasks. No effort. Just presence. Zero compute. The concept of praying/ surrendering to God, which is also a perception in our minds, suddenly became an amazing strategy to deep rest. That’s the paradox of Jhana: It begins when the “I” stops trying to meditate and instead… lets the brain do what it knows best. Most of the motivation to do something is feel a particular sensation which is manufactured by our very brain itself. The moment I realised that jhanas take me to the factory floor, my motivation to do something started coming from a place of abundance. To give and not to take. Full of love and compassion. The OG quote hits so hard "Pain is inevitable, sufferings is optional" - Buddha Gratitude To Viraj. To the Jhourney team. To Stephen and Lindsay. To the sensations that became my language. Thank you for reading! KT --- # Vipassana URL: https://kushtaneja.com/meditation-for-real Date: 2024-12-30 dateModified: 2025-05-15T16:38:43.000Z Category: yoga-meditation I finally did something I’d been putting off for years, my first Vipassana retreat. 10 days. No talking, no phone, no writing, no reading. I finally did something I’d been putting off for years, my first Vipassana retreat. 10 days. No talking, no phone, no writing, no reading. Just observing my breath, my body, and my mind - moment to moment. Most importantly an open mind. I went in with 3 expectations: Time to think, reflect, and nurture my intuition Rebuild my attention span Test my limits through a tough challenge What I found was something way beyond that. I saw, for the first time, that the mind can be completely silent. No thoughts. Just stillness. And I saw how every thought that does arise comes with a physical sensation. The body and mind are never separate, they’re constantly talking. We’re reacting 24/7 to sensations, itching, craving, resisting - most of it unconsciously. But when I stopped reacting and simply observed, those sensations literally dissolved. Energy got released. The storm passed without me fighting it. I understood how we mistake sensations for experiences, and how we get attached not to things, but to how they make us feel. Coffee, compliments, power - they’re all proxies for a sensation. And when that sensation doesn’t come, we panic. We crave. We suffer. Vipassana taught me that we don’t have to chase or avoid sensations. We can just watch. And when we do that with awareness and equanimity, something shifts. You stop multiplying your misery. You start dissolving it. Ended 2024 with a 10-day Vipassana course, and wow, my mind is literally blown 🧵 I experienced a completely quiet mind. Thought it was impossible, but nope, it’s real, and it’s quite wonderful 🧠✨ The subconscious mind's autonomous habit patterns can actually be observed by the conscious brain, controlled, and even reprogrammed—just like fine-tuning the weights in an AI model's neural network. I could literally observe my breathing, digestion, cravings, and even my skin adjusting to temperature at any specific body part I wanted to. Mind = blown 🤯 Nothing—absolutely nothing—is useful until you experience it in your body. Theories are intellectually satisfying, but experiencing is the real deal People have cured drug addictions and neurological disorders with Vipassana. I’m shook. 🛠️ Oh, and lucid dreams are real. I experienced them on 7th, 8th day and I was quite conscious during my dreams for rest of the days. Imagination after intense meditation? HD, I experienced super high resolution mental images in my mind throughout the day🎥✨ I kept wondering we know so much more about stars billions of kms away 🌌 but so little about our brains a few micrometers within 🤷‍♂️ Every thought creates a sensation in the body that you can actually experience. It turns out, we unconsciously react to these sensations all the time. By reacting, we build attachments—not to objects, but to these sensations themselves. We’re not addicted to coffee; we’re addicted to the sensation it creates after drinking it. When these attachments aren’t fulfilled, even in the smallest ways, we start feeling insecure and instinctively react to those unmet sensations disrupting our mental peace 🫠 The problem starts when we mentally label some sensations as pleasant and others as unpleasant. The want for pleasant sensations quickly turns into a need, and when that happens, the animal brain takes over. The animal brain doesn’t care about anything except satisfying the craving. Vipassana teaches you to experience both types of sensations—pleasant and unpleasant—exactly as they are, without labelling or reacting 📝 The fun part? If you don’t react to unpleasant sensations, they simply disappear. Watching them dissolve felt oddly satisfying ☺️ It was like witnessing thermodynamics in action—when I observed the sensation, its energy seemed to dissipate into the environment. But when I reacted, that same energy just shifted from one part of my body to another 10 days, no talking, no cheap dopamine and now I think I can have admin access to my brain 😜 It was hard for the first 3 days and then it started becoming easier and worth the pain. I did it in Ladakh, wouldn't lie - the mountains did help. Highly recommend NPS - 9/10 I’m deeply grateful for this experience, and I’d love to share it with others. If you’re curious or have questions about the course, feel free to DM me or reply to this thread. I’m more than happy to help you get started on this journey! 😊 ### X posts --- # Yoga with music is 10x more fun URL: https://kushtaneja.com/yoga-with-music-is-10x-more Date: 2026-10-20 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/2112555674106581128 Yoga with music is 10x more fun. feels like slow dance to me 🫰 --- # Words are precious URL: https://kushtaneja.com/words-are-precious Date: 2026-10-09 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/2108561473786319336 words are precious ✨ what stops to speak only facts and prefer silence otherwise? --- # The real meditation superpower isn't peace URL: https://kushtaneja.com/the-real-meditation-superpower-isnt-peace Date: 2026-01-27 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/2016023372996739443 The real meditation superpower isn't peace - it's pain tolerance. WITHOUT meditation: I'd run from the smallest discomfort, treating minor pain like a life-threatening danger. WITH meditation: I turned facing discomfort into a game I coul --- # If you don’t feel a physical difference… URL: https://kushtaneja.com/if-you-dont-feel-a-physical Date: 2025-12-08 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1997831380370391205 If you don’t feel a physical difference after a deep meditation session, you are doing it wrong. --- # This $25 meditation seat gave me a… URL: https://kushtaneja.com/this-25-meditation-seat-gave-me Date: 2025-08-31 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1961979139143160259 This $25 meditation seat gave me a much higher ROl than the $25000 my parents spent on school --- # Can you listen to someone without giving… URL: https://kushtaneja.com/can-you-listen-to-someone-without Date: 2025-08-10 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1954636251241566268 Can you listen to someone without giving any attention to their words but simply to the sound waves entering your brain? It's like welcoming music without making sense of the lyrics. --- # I discovered a trick which keeps my… URL: https://kushtaneja.com/i-discovered-a-trick-which-keeps Date: 2025-07-31 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1950748687107293392 I discovered a trick which keeps my mind calm even at my heart beating 190 bpm --- # Meditation is miss-understood URL: https://kushtaneja.com/meditation-is-miss-understood Date: 2025-07-27 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1949269094769078507 meditation is miss-understood --- # Meditation allows me to easily forgive myself and others URL: https://kushtaneja.com/meditation-allows-me-to-easily-forgive Date: 2025-06-23 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1936964686949634069 --- # Sleep is a subway to recovery URL: https://kushtaneja.com/sleep-is-a-subway-to-recovery Date: 2025-06-05 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1930458427408498742 Sleep is a subway to recovery. Meditation is a fighter jet. --- # After doing jhāna meditation retreat URL: https://kushtaneja.com/after-doing-jhana-meditation-retreat Date: 2025-05-15 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1922845000330588659 After doing jhāna meditation retreat, I am closer to getting admin access to my mind --- # I found it funny when I discovered… URL: https://kushtaneja.com/i-found-it-funny-when-i Date: 2025-03-13 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1900045723132911955 I found it funny when I discovered that we experience something first and then our mind becomes aware of it, and not the opposite. and yet we act basis the assumption that the opposite is always true --- # Becoming comfortable with silence is rewarding URL: https://kushtaneja.com/becoming-comfortable-with-silence-is-rewarding Date: 2025-01-11 Category: yoga-meditation X: https://x.com/kushxtaneja/status/1878027536799854643