Famous people who have practised Vipassana, in their own words

Famous people who have practised Vipassana, and said so in public, include the historian Yuval Noah Harari, the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the former Indian police officer Kiran Bedi, the psychologist Daniel Goleman and the neuroscientist Richard Davidson. Most sat the 10-day course taught in S. N. Goenka's tradition; others learned in the Burmese Mahasi lineage or at Western insight meditation centres.

Lists of "celebrities who do Vipassana" circulate widely, and many of the names on them come with no source. This page includes only people whose practice is documented in their own words or in reputable reporting, with a link to that source for each. It records only what they said or did about meditation, not their politics or conduct, and none of them is connected with this site.

Who has practised Vipassana: at a glance

Person	Known as	Where they learned
Yuval Noah Harari	Historian, author of Sapiens	Goenka tradition
Jack Dorsey	Co-founder of Twitter	Goenka tradition (centre in Myanmar)
Kiran Bedi	Former Indian police officer	Brought Goenka's courses to Tihar Jail
Arvind Kejriwal	Indian politician	Goenka tradition (Dhamma Dhaja, Punjab)
Daniel Goleman	Psychologist, author of Emotional Intelligence	Goenka, in India, early 1970s
Richard Davidson	Neuroscientist	Goenka, in India, 1974
Jon Kabat-Zinn	Founder of MBSR	Insight Meditation Society retreats
Aung San Suu Kyi	Burmese politician	Mahasi lineage, with Sayadaw U Pandita

Yuval Noah Harari

Harari is an Israeli historian and the author of Sapiens. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian he said a friend suggested Vipassana when he was a student at Oxford and he "couldn't make sense of my life at all". He added: "It's about letting go of all the different fantasies that fill up our minds. It transformed my life."

In 2015 he told Chatham House's magazine The World Today: "I meditate for two hours each day and on vacation, I go for long retreats of 30 days or 60 days; complete silence, without books, without Google, without Facebook." Pariyatti, a publisher in Goenka's tradition, describes him as "an Old Student of Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka". An old student is someone who has completed a 10-day course in that tradition.

Jack Dorsey

Dorsey co-founded Twitter and was its chief executive in 2018. That December he described, in a long thread on the site, the 10-day silent course he had sat for his birthday in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar. CNBC reported that he stayed at Dhamma Mahimā, a centre in Goenka's tradition that dhamma.org lists as Dhamma Mahimar, and that he had sat a course the previous winter as well.

He did not describe it as relaxing. CNBC quotes him calling it "extremely painful and demanding physical and mental work", and also saying: "The time I take away to do this gives so much back to me and my work." Some readers criticised the thread for encouraging visits to Myanmar given its human rights record, and he responded; CNBC reports both.

Kiran Bedi

Bedi was a senior officer of the Indian Police Service. As Inspector General of Prisons in Delhi she arranged the first Vipassana courses at Tihar Jail in 1993 and 1994, including a course for more than a thousand prisoners, told in full in the Tihar Jail Vipassana story.

In a 1999 conversation published by Inquiring Mind, she explained why she backed it: "Peace and harmony isn't created by the walls of a prison; it comes from the beings inside." Asked about her own practice, she said: "Now when I have time on my hands, I do my own meditation program."

Arvind Kejriwal

Kejriwal, a former Chief Minister of Delhi and convener of the Aam Aadmi Party, has gone to 10-day courses that were reported in the Indian press. In March 2025 The Tribune reported that he had arrived at the Dhamma Dhaja Vipassana Centre near Hoshiarpur in Punjab for a 10-day course, his second visit to that centre after December 2023. Dhamma Dhaja is a centre in Goenka's tradition. We found no published account in his own words of what the courses were like.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson

Goleman, the psychologist who wrote Emotional Intelligence, and Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, met in a psychophysiology class at Harvard in 1972. Both started with Goenka.

In a 2009 interview with Inquiring Mind, Goleman said of his time in India on a travelling fellowship: "That's where I first learned vipassana, on a retreat with S. N. Goenka." Davidson said his "first meditation retreat was in 1974 at the urging of Danny, who told me I should go on a vipassana retreat with Goenka-ji in India."

Davidson described that course on the Hidden Brain podcast in 2023. It was held in tents at Dalhousie, a Himalayan hill station: "I was 22 years old at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and it was really a hard-nosed kind of meditation bootcamp." He was also frank about what happened afterwards. Back at Harvard, "the first few days, the sense of calm is mostly preserved, but then after a few days, it honestly quickly wore off."

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Kabat-Zinn founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has sat retreats at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts "whenever I can since it began", in his words on the IMS website. In the same 2009 interview he said: "Years later, on a vipassana retreat in early 1979, I had a flash as to how meditation training could effectively be introduced into the mainstream of medicine." IMS quotes him on where that happened: "The vision for mindfulness-based stress reduction arose there one afternoon, while I was sitting in my room in the Catskills [now Karuna House] dormitory."

Aung San Suu Kyi

In interviews for Smithsonian magazine, published in 2012, the Burmese politician said she took up vipassana at Oxford in the 1960s and found it difficult at first. It was during her first period of house arrest, from 1989 to 1995, she said, that "I gained control of my thoughts". Of meditation she said: "It heightens your awareness." Spirit Rock Meditation Center names her teacher as Sayadaw U Pandita, of the Mahasi lineage.

Fame is not a reason to take a course

These are personal accounts. They tell you that people with demanding lives found the time for ten days of silence, and some kept practising for decades. They do not tell you what a course will do for you, and none of them is a study.

A 10-day course is hard work: early mornings, long sittings, no phone and no talking. Intensive practice can also bring up difficult experiences, as difficult experiences on meditation retreats explains, which is why the application form asks about your physical and mental health. If you are thinking of going, read the 10-day course, day by day, then find a centre near you in the centres directory.

Harari's two hours a day match what Goenka's tradition asks of students after a course, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, as keeping up the practice at home explains. For those daily sittings, Clean Pomodoro, a free meditation and focus timer for iPhone and Android, has a Vipassana timer: you set the length, sit in silence, and a gentle cue marks the end.