June 25, 2026

What Vipassana Taught Me About Control

What Vipassana Taught Me About Control I went to my first ten-day Vipassana thinking I would learn to focus. I came out realizing I had spent most of my life g...

What Vipassana Taught Me About Control

I went to my first ten-day Vipassana thinking I would learn to focus. I came out realizing I had spent most of my life gripping — meetings, outcomes, people, even my own breath. The strange part is that I only noticed the grip once I was asked, quietly and for many hours, to put it down.

The Question I Keep Returning To

How did we come to believe that leading means controlling?

I ask this without irony. I run a company. I sign contracts. I make decisions that affect people's mortgages and mornings. And yet, the longer I sit — literally, on a cushion, with a spine that complains — the more I wonder if the thing I was trained to call "leadership" is often just a well-dressed fear of what happens when I stop steering.

I don't have a clean answer. I have a question that keeps returning, and a practice that keeps softening the edges of it.

The Grip We Inherit

Somewhere between our first performance review and our first promotion, most of us learn a specific reflex: when something feels uncertain, tighten. Tighten the plan. Tighten the timeline. Tighten the tone in the email. It works, in the short run. Companies reward it. Investors reward it. Our nervous systems, unfortunately, remember it.

Vipassana, as taught in the tradition I sit in, is deceptively simple. You watch sensation. You do not push it away when it is unpleasant. You do not chase it when it is pleasant. You observe, and you notice — sometimes with real surprise — that everything you were fighting was already leaving on its own.

The Buddhist word for this is anicca: impermanence. But the more interesting discovery, for me, was not that things pass. It was that my attempts to hold them in place were the source of most of my suffering as a leader. The board meeting was not the problem. My grip on how the board meeting should go was the problem.

I started to notice this reflex has many names, across many traditions. And they are not all saying the same thing, but they rhyme.

Tradition	Concept	Rough Meaning	What It Suggests About Control
Vipassana (Theravada)	Anicca	Impermanence of all phenomena	Holding on is fighting reality itself
Taoism	Wu wei	Effortless action, non-forcing	Lead by aligning with what wants to happen
Stoicism	Dichotomy of control	Some things are up to us, most are not	Direct energy only to what you can actually move
Bhagavad Gita	Nishkama karma	Action without attachment to fruit	Do the work; release the outcome
Ayurveda	Prakriti / Vikriti	Innate nature vs. current imbalance	You cannot micromanage a system you did not design
Christian mysticism	Kenosis	Self-emptying	Leadership as pouring out, not accumulating

I keep this table on a note in my phone. Not because I have mastered any of it, but because it reminds me that many careful people, in many centuries, have arrived at a similar suspicion: the thing we call control is often just resistance in a suit.

What does this look like in a Monday morning?

For me, it began with small experiments. Before Vipassana, if a client escalated, my first move was to draft a reply within ninety seconds. Now I try to wait — not to seem calm, but because I have learned that the first draft is almost always written by the part of me that is scared. The second draft, an hour later, is written by someone who has more of the picture. The third draft, sometimes the next morning, is written by someone who has let the situation be what it is, rather than what I feared it was becoming.

I lose money, occasionally, by waiting. I also, I think, lose less trust. I am not sure yet which trade is better. I suspect it depends on the day.

There is a deeper piece here that I am still turning over. When I grip, I am not only trying to control outcomes. I am trying to control who I am inside the outcome. The tight email is not really about the client — it is about me needing to be the kind of CEO who responds fast. The overprepared deck is about me needing to be the kind of founder who is never caught unready. Underneath every act of control I can find, if I sit long enough, a small identity trying to survive.

That is uncomfortable to write. But it seems true.

The Body Knows First

The thing no one told me about meditation is that the insight usually arrives in the shoulders before it arrives in the mind.

In Vipassana you spend hours moving attention slowly through the body. What you find, if you are honest, is that your body has been keeping a record. Every deadline you white-knuckled through is still stored somewhere — in the jaw, in the low back, in the strange tension around the eyes. And when you stop bracing, even for a moment, the body exhales in ways the mind did not know it needed.

This is where Ayurveda and Thai massage entered my life, almost by accident. Both traditions treat the body not as a machine to be optimized but as a landscape to be listened to. In Thai massage — which is really moving meditation for two people — you learn very quickly that force does not open a body. Attention does. Patience does. The body opens when it feels safe, not when it feels pressured.

I began to wonder if teams work the same way. If organizations work the same way. If the reason my best people were leaving, in one particular year I do not romanticize, was not that I was pushing too little but that I was pushing at all, in places that only needed to be listened to.

I don't want to overstate this. Companies need direction. Deadlines are real. Payroll is real. But somewhere between direction and domination is a line I keep discovering I have crossed without noticing.

What I Am Still Learning

I am still learning that letting go is not the same as not caring. Some days I confuse the two, and my team can tell. I am still learning that surrender is a practice, not a personality trait — I do not become a person who has let go. I become, at best, a person who notices the grip a little sooner each time.

I am still learning that the ancient traditions were not offering me productivity hacks. They were offering me a mirror. And the mirror, when I actually look, shows a man who has spent a lot of his life afraid of what would happen if he stopped holding everything together — and who is slowly finding out that most of it was holding itself together anyway.

I do not know if this makes me a better CEO. I know it makes me a quieter one.

FAQ

Q: Did Vipassana make you a softer leader? A: I don't think softer is the right word. Maybe less reactive. The decisions still get made — they just arrive with less noise around them.

Q: How do you reconcile "letting go" with running a business that requires accountability? A: I don't think they are opposites. Accountability is about clarity of what is mine to do. Letting go is about releasing what was never mine — mostly other people's reactions and the future.

Q: Do you meditate every day? A: I try to sit each morning. Some days it is an hour, some days it is ten minutes with a cup of tea. The streak is less important than the returning.

Q: What would you say to a founder who thinks meditation is a luxury they can't afford? A: I understand the feeling — I had it too. I would only ask, gently, what the cost of not sitting has been. For me it was measured in relationships, not calendar hours.

Q: Is there a Vipassana teaching you disagree with? A: Disagree feels too strong. There are teachings I am not ready for. That is different, I think.

Q: How does Ayurveda fit into your work life? A: Mostly through rhythm — when I eat, when I sleep, when I stop. It has taught me that ignoring my constitution is a slow way to make bad decisions.

Q: What is one small practice a busy leader could try? A: Before responding to anything difficult, take three slow breaths and notice where you are gripping in the body. That is often all the information you need.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

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