Vipassana for students: courses for children, teens and schools

Students can start young. In S. N. Goenka's tradition, children aged 8 to 12 and teenagers aged 13 to 16 learn Anapana, awareness of the natural breath, on free courses of one to three days; 15- to 19-year-olds can take a 7-day Vipassana course; and college students old enough to count as adults join the ordinary 10-day course. In the Indian state of Maharashtra, Anapana has also been taught inside schools since 2011, through a government programme called MITRA.

This article covers the courses in Goenka's tradition as dhamma.org and the Vipassana Research Institute (VRI) describe them, what students have said, and the few published studies. What the breath practice involves is described in Ānāpāna: awareness of breathing.

Courses for children and teenagers at a glance

Course	Ages	Length	Where
Children's Anapana course	8 to 12	1, 2 or 3 days	Schools, camps and meditation centres
Teenagers' Anapana course	13 to 16, sometimes up to 18	1 to 3 days	Mostly meditation centres, often residential
7-day Vipassana course for teenagers	15 (completed) to 19	7 days, residential	Established centres in India, Myanmar and Nepal
Adult 10-day course	18 and over	10 days (12 calendar days)	Any centre

Age ranges vary from place to place, and every course is free: they run on donations from people who have already completed a course. On the adult age limit the two official sources differ. dhamma.org's site for young people says "Teenagers 18 years and older may apply to join a 10-day course for adults", while VRI's teenagers' page says 10-day courses are open to adults "above 19 years of age". If you are 18 or 19, ask the centre.

What happens on a children's Anapana course

On a one-day course, children practise Anapana in sessions of 30 to 40 minutes, mixed with discussion, stories, drawing and quiet games in small groups. VRI's sample timetable runs from 9.30 am to 4 pm, though this varies. The instructions are recordings of Goenka. A children's course teacher, trained at a workshop, leads the course with group leaders who each look after a few children.

Children first undertake five precepts: not to kill, steal, lie, commit sexual misconduct or take intoxicants. They also learn mettā, goodwill towards all beings, which Maharashtra's school circulars list as the last step of the course. Two- and three-day courses are usually held at centres, with boys and girls in separate groups and more time to meditate. Afterwards, VRI recommends that a child be given the chance to keep practising "for a short period of 10-15 minutes each day".

The 7-day Vipassana course for teenagers

Until 2004, teenagers could learn only Anapana. VRI says the first 7-day Vipassana course for teenagers was held at Dhamma Giri in April 2004, and that such courses have since been held "all over India, Myanmar and Nepal".

The technique is the same as on the adult course: breath awareness first, Vipassana from about the third day, and mettā on the last full day. VRI lists the differences. The course is for ages 15 to 19, the evening talks are "more suited to teenagers", the timetable is "more relaxed", and each course is for boys only or girls only. A parent or guardian signs the application form.

A college student once told Goenka that a teacher had said, "You are too young to practice meditation." Goenka's reply, published by VRI, began: "You are not at fault; your teacher is mistaken." He went on: "Actually, yours is the age when one should start practicing meditation because it is an art of living."

How Anapana reached schools

VRI traces children's courses to a challenge. In the 1970s Goenka met Vinoba Bhave, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, who told him: "I will believe this is worthwhile only if you can show that it works with hardened criminals and undisciplined school children." The first formal children's course followed in 1986, at a school in Juhu, Mumbai, near the Goenka family home. VRI's teenagers' page gives the year as 1985.

VRI says that over six months in 2007, more than 120 courses were held in 48 Mumbai schools in six languages, for about 9,000 pupils, most of them 15-year-olds due to sit board exams in 2008. It reports that the pass rate "was higher than it had been in many years". That is an observation, not a controlled comparison, and it cannot show that the courses caused the change. The organisers drew practical lessons: schools must be committed, and pupils need time to practise every day after the course.

MITRA: Anapana in Maharashtra's schools

MITRA stands for "Mind In Training for Right Awareness". It is a joint programme of the Government of Maharashtra and VRI, and it rests on three government circulars:

• 5 October 2011 (No. Sankirn 2011/296/11/se-3): a one-day Anapana course of 5 to 6 hours for all pupils in standards 5 to 10, in batches of 50 to 100, then 10 minutes of practice at the start of each school day. It also gave teachers, officers and staff 14 days' leave treated as duty, once in their service, to attend a 10-day Vipassana course.
• 27 January 2012: a second circular repeating the instruction to all primary and secondary schools.
• 12 July 2012: instructions for schools. At least one teacher in each school completes a Vipassana course and Anapana training. Pupils learn from recorded instructions lasting about 70 minutes, then practise for 10 minutes at morning assembly and at the close of the day.

The stated aim was to reach 2.5 crore (25 million) children and 1 lakh (100,000) teachers. By December 2014, according to VRI, more than 25 lakh (2.5 million) children had learned Anapana and more than 10,000 teachers had sat 10-day courses. We found no later official totals.

What studies of students found

Few peer-reviewed studies look at Anapana in schools. The most detailed is a 2026 study in Frontiers in Public Health by Oswal, Jagtap and Dasarwar; the first and third authors work at VRI. It followed two 8th-grade classes at a private school in Pune through the 2024–25 school year. One class of 44 pupils was meant to practise for 10 minutes every school day; the other, of 45, waited a semester before starting. In practice, the first class's sessions were held on fewer than half the school days.

• Sustained attention, measured by a figure cancellation test, improved more in the practising class by the end of the year (effect size d = 0.61).
• On a sentence completion test, the practising class gained more in "adjustment with self" by the midpoint (d = 0.43).
• Pupils, teachers and parents described better focus, calmer reactions, and pupils using the breath to deal with stress.

Other results were flat or went the other way: pupils' psychological well-being scores did not improve significantly, and on working memory the waiting class gained more by the midpoint. The authors list the limits: a small sample, whole classes chosen by the school rather than assigned at random, and pupils who attended different numbers of sessions.

A 2025 study in Annals of Neurosciences taught breath meditation (Anapanasati) for three months to 54 adolescents living in orphanages in Pune, and analysed what they wrote. It reported better regulation of emotions and more sharing with peers, but it had no comparison group. VRI's own pages also describe surveys of school programmes that have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Research on Vipassana in adults is reviewed in what research says about Vipassana.

What students and teachers said

The MITRA study quotes pupils and teachers, including the less flattering parts. Some pupils first took the practice as a punishment, because only their class had started it. One girl remembered: "Initially I used to feel, we are so young. This is our time to play and have fun. Why are they making us meditate?"

Others described using it. A boy said that during exams, "My mother advised me to practice ānāpāna and I did ānāpāna for 5 minutes and then I felt better and was able to follow what I was studying." A language teacher said: "When they meditate in the morning, changes can be seen in the immediate class. There is more calmness then." The class teacher also reported that "Some were bored and reluctant to practice."

VRI publishes accounts from children's courses too. One child wrote: "Although it is no fun to meditate, I want to try anyway. When I start sitting, I have painful back and neck, then numbness in both legs. I want to walk out from the meditation hall. But I stay, fight and my mind gets calmer." A teenager began: "Frankly speaking, I laughed at the idea of a meditation course before attending it. I thought it to be a painful course and it would be simply a wastage of time and energy. But when the course started, I began to realize that I was wrong." Both are on VRI's page of children's experiences. The organisation chose these accounts, so read them as what some students felt, not as typical results.

Children's and teenagers' courses in Nepal

In Nepal, several centres run children's Anapana courses, among them Dhamma Birāṭa, Dhamma Jananī, Dhamma Pokharā, Dhammāgāra, Dhamma Nandana and Dhamma Suriyo, according to their dhamma.org listings. Two centres list 7-day Vipassana courses for teenagers aged 15 to 19. As of September 2026, Dhamma Shringa near Kathmandu had one from 31 October to 8 November 2026 and separate courses for boys and for girls in 2027; it registers children's and teenagers' courses through its city office at Jyoti Bhawan, Kantipath. Dhamma Jananī in Lumbini listed a course for boys from 15 to 23 April 2027. We found no official school programme in Nepal like MITRA.

Where to go next

Every course type, from one-day courses to long courses, is explained in Vipassana course types. College students old enough for the adult course can read what happens on the 10-day course. To find a children's or teenagers' course, check the schedule of a centre near you from the list of centres.