Bhen Sumandeep Ji on Vipassana, Samadhi and Living with Naam

Episode overview

This conversation, shared on the 1 TV channel, follows a Sikh sister, Bhen Sumandeep ji, as she describes a spiritual journey that moves through three very different streams: the devotion of Gurbani and Naam, the witnessing awareness she first met through Osho, and the long silent sittings of Vipassana meditation as taught in the tradition of S. N. Goenka.

She speaks plainly and without exaggeration. She describes overwhelming darshan at Sri Darbar Sahib. She describes the ordinary failure that followed — a month of Amritvela and Nitnem, and then the old habits returning. She describes ten-day Vipassana courses, hours of daily sitting, sleepless nights, a roaring inner sound, and unforgettable inner scenes. And she describes what she considers the real measure of all of it: the softening of ego, the loosening of the old impressions that keep a person trapped, and a growing capacity to love.

The conversation opens with a short clip from an earlier episode featuring Bhai Simranjeet Singh ji, which frames the wider theme — the bond beneath the navel, the counting of breaths, and the moment the knot is said to open.

This article is an English summary and reflection. It is not a verbatim translation, and it is not an endorsement or verification of the experiences and metaphysical claims described in the interview.

From darshan at Darbar Sahib to a month of Amritvela

Her story begins with a single darshan. She describes going to Sri Darbar Sahib before Amritvela, as she often did, and on this occasion arriving late enough to be standing in the line when the Palki Sahib was brought out. She was holding her young daughter's hand.

As the Guru's saroop appeared, she says, she lost all composure and simply wept. She does not dress this up. She says she had never cried like that before, and that she has no idea how long she stood there or what happened around her.

What followed is equally honest. She came home and, for about a month, rose at Amritvela and completed her Nitnem. Then the pull of ordinary life returned, and the routine slipped away.

She mentions other smaller moments from before that month — an aching devotion to Guru Granth Sahib ji, a love for Guru Ram Das ji and Guru Arjan Dev ji, and a particular tenderness toward Guru Nanak Sahib ji that only deepened later.

Meeting Simran, meeting Osho, and learning to witness

At one point, sitting in Darbar Sahib, a woman was distributing Sampat Simran and it was not given to her. She took the moment as an invitation rather than a rejection, and understood that Naam was something she wanted to take up — even though she had no habit of it and had never used a mala.

At the same time, she was searching for an explanation of her own experience. That search led her to Osho, and to his central instruction: remain in sakshi bhav, the witness. Watch things as they are, without immediately labelling, comparing, connecting them to yourself, or reacting.

She puts it simply. We usually look at things through the mind, and the mind builds a whole experience around them. Watch without that, she says, and look as though for the first time.

She later warns against mixing methods. Naam japa is one approach, Simran another, and meditation techniques another again. Blend them carelessly, she says, and the practice stops working as it should. Whatever path you take, stay with it.

Ten days of Vipassana: what is actually practised

She explains the technique as she received it. Vipassana, associated in this account with the time of the Buddha and said to be far older even than that, was revived in modern times by S. N. Goenka ji, who learned it in Burma from a teacher who was himself taught by a farmer, and who later brought it back to India.

The course is residential, and long. The daily routine runs to roughly ten and a half hours of meditation. For the first three days, the practice is Anapana — attention on the breath and on the area around the nostrils. On the third day the attention is narrowed further, to a small triangle between the nostrils and the upper lip. From the fourth day, Vipassana proper begins: a systematic scanning of the body.

She describes the scanning start point clearly. It begins at the top of the head, at the Brahmarandhra — the point compared to the Sahasrar chakra, and described as the place from which a yogi's pranic energy departs at the time of leaving the body. From there the attention moves through the whole head, then the face, then the body, and can also move in spirals or from the feet upward in reverse order. The rule she emphasises is that the attention must remain on the body itself.

The environment is also part of the method: complete noble silence for most of the course, no speech and no eye contact, a fixed hour in the evening for the recorded discourses, and the phone returned only on the final day.

She completed ten days as a student and also took on server duty, and returned for further sittings later.

Sensations, pain, and the release of old impressions

The most practically useful part of the conversation concerns what a person actually feels while sitting.

She describes two kinds of sensation. The subtle, suksham sensation is pleasant and settling — attention rests on a point and feels gentle, warm, even lovely. The gross, sthul sensation is pain, or heaviness, or heat and cold, or the sense that the body has grown heavier.

Her reading of it is psychological as much as spiritual. Grief, resentment, attachment, and aversion that were never released are held in the body as deep impressions. As practice deepens, they begin to surface — first as sensation, then sometimes as pain — and then they loosen and pass.

She is careful to say that a deeper, calmer practice is not always better. She notes that for someone entirely new to practice, the technique is often easier, because there is no habit of inner repetition to compete with it; for those accustomed to japa or Simran, the mind keeps chanting on its own while the instruction is to scan the body. That inner repetition, she says, can even be regulated with practice.

Sleep, alertness, and a body that no longer tires the same way

She speaks about sleep in a way that many long-term practitioners will recognise and many beginners will find reassuring.

During her first course, sleep simply stopped on the fourth day. She was not disturbed by it; she had not yet learned what it meant. Later she understood it differently: the physical body needs sleep in order to relax, but when the inner, subtler dimension of the body becomes active, the need drops, and a person can remain awake in the body or even feel as though they are outside it.

Her second sitting had a different quality. The inner sound, the naad, became very loud — a sound that seemed to fill the entire body. Vipassana does not discuss the naad, she notes; teachers say only, experience it. Nothing is explained, because explanation itself creates more construction.

The inner scene, the broken statues, and memories of another time

She then describes an experience she clearly still holds with care. As the naad grew intense, her surti seemed to travel, and she found herself in a place she describes as containing broken statues, in a red or stone tone, resembling the Buddha figures that were destroyed in antiquity. Nothing large or dramatic happened. But when she returned, knowledge of that place came with it — where it was, what it had been. She connects it to centuries-old memory, and to practice connected with that same period.

She also speaks about the earlier frames of reference she carries. She says Maharaj ji showed her something of her own past births, including a life in which she had left her home and kept silence, like a renunciate — a life, she notes with some humour, in which the wish to speak had still not ended.

Samadhi, Sunn, and the fourth stage

Asked about samadhi, she draws a line between two things that are often confused.

The first is the momentary stillness that comes and goes — a brief sunn, a short silence, after which ordinary mind returns and the practice must be resumed. The second is a far deeper absorption in which the mind goes genuinely quiet.

When the mind becomes quiet, she says, the state she would call the fourth pad opens: there is no separation left, no sense of a small self moving through a big universe. In that state there is nothing but the One. Ego cannot enter, because there is no one there to carry it. Everything hidden becomes plain, and knowledge of that dimension becomes complete — the full awareness of a place one simply could not reach before.

She is also candid about the after-effect. That depth does not stay. It does not drop away quickly either, but it recedes, and further effort is required. She notes with humour that once the state passes, a person can even forget that it happened at all until they recognise, in retrospect, what it was.

The fear that stops people meditating

One passage addresses something rarely said out loud. Many people, she says, start meditating, feel attention deepening, and then become afraid — often because the sense of self seems to be dissolving. Some quietly step away and flood themselves with phones and social media to break the current.

She names the fear plainly: it is the fear of dying. And she answers it just as plainly. What dies is the ego, the sense of "I" that believes itself to be the one who is born and the one who dies. The Guru says that only by dying in this way can we truly live. This is not a reason to run.

She also addresses the negative experiences that can appear during deep sitting — frightening impressions or presences. Her advice is calm and practical: do not feed them with attention, do not treat them as special, and do not build a story around them. Ignore them, and they pass. In her own case, she says, she was shown only as much as she needed and no more, and she credits that restraint to grace rather than to her own doing.

She then touches on something more ordinary: her practice of covering her head. She describes it not as a rule she was given by others but as something sensed from within — a pressure and an energy that asked for the head to be covered, and which settled once it was. She connects it to a broader point: conditioning comes to us from other people, and much of what we take to be our own preference is simply what we saw someone else do.

Baba Baldev Singh ji of Bulandpuri Sahib, and the HKLV wave

A long and affectionate part of the conversation concerns Baba Baldev Singh ji of Bulandpuri Sahib, whom she first encountered in Calgary, where a place had been established near her son's home.

She describes arriving and finding the whole sangat dressed in white, unsure where she had come to, and feeling she had walked among liberated souls. She describes the tenderness of that community and the moment, on Baba ji's final day there, when Amrit was served and the sangat waited for his bachan before he moved on to the next stage of his tour. She notes that a meeting is not granted simply by asking, and that when she returned the following year she spent the whole period with that sangat and had the chance to speak with Baba ji about the spiritual journey.

What Baba ji carries, in her account, is the wave of HKL — Humility, Kindness and Love. His message, she says, is Guru Nanak Sahib ji's: the Guru's wisdom is not for the small number of people who happen to be born into Sikh families. It is universal, meant for the whole world, and it has to reach people. In a world growing more materialistic and less tender, that contribution is not small: the wave has now joined nearly a hundred countries, and Baba ji speaks at international gatherings of religious leaders several times a year.

She describes how he teaches: hour-long evening bachan in which Gurbani is explained in depth, the older compositions and the essence rather than the surface, and Naam japa with the sangat using lines from Gurbani, repeating key words until the whole gathering is chanting. When she was told that Baba ji's word had reached her — that a very small number receive such attention, and that others must wait many births — she took it in the spirit it was offered, and she adds her own note of caution: no promise is guaranteed in this body, and no one should assume the outcome for themselves.

Om Swami, and what long effort actually looks like

She also refers to the writer and monk Om Swami, whose life she has read about. His early life, as she describes it, was one of sharp ability and business success, driven from childhood by a single aim: to attain the Divine. He gave up his property, donated what he had, and went to the Himalayas. There he undertook tantric practice and mantra recitation on an extraordinary scale before his final attainment, which came after thirteen months of intense practice in the mountains.

Her point in raising it is not admiration for the numbers, but perspective. Grace and effort are not opposites. Grace supports, but effort is required — and by the standards of such a life, our own efforts are small. She says that whenever someone tells her how much they do, her first question is how much, precisely; and that however much it is, it is still little.

What she would tell someone walking this path

The interview closes with practical counsel, and it is worth setting out plainly.

Keep walking. Let the Guru show the road, and keep the heart open. All of sadhana, she says, is the work of opening a heart that has shrunk. Read the lives of complete mahapurush rather than half-knowledge, because incomplete knowledge can trap a person inside the game rather than freeing them.

Do not mix paths, and do not keep changing them. Explore at the start; see what genuinely flows without strain; then settle and go deep. A life spent switching between methods is a life that never arrives.

Stay in chardi kala. Do not sink into despair when devotion feels flat, and do not become careless either, assuming grace will do everything. Habit, food, discipline and honest observation are part of the practice — old habits that cannot survive on this path have to be released, and faults have to be seen before they can be dropped.

Do not chase two things at once. What is truly valuable has to be chosen over what merely shines.

Do not compel anyone. No one can be forced onto this path; change comes from within a person when it comes.

Watch for fault-finding in yourself and let it go, because the practice is not the outer performance of devotion but the remaking of old impressions and wrong habits. Our own tendencies are what make our days sweet or bitter; grace gives the fruit of what we ourselves do. Gather virtues, and blessings follow.

And, above all, love. Love with an open heart, in relation to the whole of existence, and remember Waheguru through everything you are doing all day long. When the mind is genuinely quiet, the inner sound is always there and always already present; we are simply far from it, and the work is to come near.

A safety and discernment note

This interview describes practices and states that are intense, and it is worth saying plainly what a careful listener would want to hear.

Long silent Vipassana courses and long hours of sitting can bring up strong emotion, old grief, frightening imagery, changes in sleep, unusual body sensations, or the sensation of leaving the body. These can have many possible causes — psychological, physical, or simply the ordinary effects of fatigue, hunger, illness, medication, or intense concentration. They are not proof of spiritual attainment, and they are not a diagnosis of anything.

If practice brings persistent insomnia, severe anxiety, low mood, confusion, disorganised thinking, frightening perceptions, flashbacks, or difficulty functioning in daily life, pause the intense practice and speak with a qualified healthcare or mental-health professional. Anyone with a history of trauma, dissociation, psychosis, or an eating disorder should get professional advice before undertaking a long silent retreat. Physical pain during sitting may also need a medical opinion rather than an interpretation.

Do not interpret inner scenes, sounds, memories that feel like past lives, or old impressions surfacing as instructions about health, money, or family decisions. And do not use forceful breathing or extreme techniques to produce states. A teacher's instruction, however respected, does not replace clinical care.

Questions for reflection

• What am I actually practising, day to day — and am I staying with it?
• Am I exploring many paths, or am I avoiding settling on one?
• When attention deepens and I feel afraid, what exactly am I afraid of losing?
• Do I give my inner experiences attention and meaning they have not earned?
• Is my practice making me more loving and more truthful, or only more interesting to myself?
• What old habit is being shown to me now, and am I willing to release it?

A simple daily practice

Nothing described here requires a Himalayan cave. It asks for consistency and honesty.

Keep one practice and stay with it — Naam, Simran, or a meditation method you have actually learned from a competent teacher. Sit daily, even briefly, at a fixed time. Include Gurbani: read it, or listen with a translation or katha. Keep the company of Sangat. Guard your sleep, your food and your habits, since the body is the instrument. When a fault shows itself, note it without drama and let it go. And keep the heart open — toward family, strangers, and the whole of creation.

As she puts it herself: do not sink, and do not become careless. Keep walking, with love, and keep Waheguru in mind through the day.

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