My Vipassana Experience: From Equity to Equanimity

My Vipassana Experience: From Equity to Equanimity
How a Stock Market Trader Discovered Peace – and the Wisdom of Index fund Investing

For years, my life moved tick-by-tick.
Price quotes, positions, P&L, news flashes – my mind was a live market terminal. As a trader, I was trained to react: enter fast, exit faster, never miss a move. It was exciting, but also exhausting. The market closed at 3:30 PM, but in my head, it rarely closed at all.

At some point, I realised something uncomfortable:
my mind had become more volatile than the market.

That’s when Vipassana entered my life.

After a long persuasion by my well-wishers, Dr. Jitu-bhai and Chirag bhaiShah (deeply committed practitioner and strong promoter of Vipassana) I finally attended a 10-day Vipassana Sadhana in February 2025 at Dhamma Narmada Vipassana Centre, Bharuch.

Initially, I had several doubts and non-agreements. I was in constant argument with my Vipassana teacher, Shri Deepuji Nair. How can just focusing on the breath help me control my emotions? Instead of sitting without doing anything, why shouldn’t I just get good sleep?

But he handled me calmly and helped me see the connection between emotions and physiology – and how making an active effort to remain passive (not reacting) can bring the peace I was actually searching for.

From doing to observing

Vipassana is often described as a “passive” practice – just sit, observe your breath, observe sensations, don’t react. From the outside, it looks like non-action. But anyone who has completed even a 10-day course knows the truth:

Doing nothing, consciously, is hard work.

To sit without moving, to watch pain rise in your knees or back, to notice restlessness or boredom, and not react – this requires intense, moment-to-moment effort. Not a dramatic effort, but a disciplined, silent effort.

Vipassana is not laziness.
It is systematic mental training.

As a market person, that struck me very deeply. And a thought arose quite naturally:
“This is exactly what a good Index Fund looks like.”

The “passive” investor who is actually very active

Index Funds are called “passive” because they don’t try to beat the market. They simply track an index – Nifty, Sensex, etc. No star fund manager, no clever stock picking, no big opinions. From the outside, it looks… boring.

But behind that apparent passivity, there is a lot of activity:

• Continuous rebalancing as index weights change
• Periodic inclusion and exclusion of stocks
• Corporate actions, dividends, splits – all absorbed into the structure
• A clear, rules-based process running quietly in the background

You don’t see the effort.
You only experience the calm outcome: broad diversification, low cost, no need to chase every story.

Just like Vipassana, index investing looks passive but rests on deep discipline.

Trading vs. meditating vs. indexing

As a trader, my mindset was:

• “I must act. If I don’t act, I’ll miss out.”
• Every move had to be my decision, my prediction, my skill on display.
• The market was a puzzle to solve every single day.

Vipassana taught me the opposite:

• “I don’t have to react to every sensation.”
• My job is not to control every wave, but to watch the ocean with equanimity.
• Peace comes not from eliminating disturbance, but from changing my relationship to it.

Index investing sits beautifully in between:

• You act once in a thoughtful way: choose a simple index fund, set up a monthly SIP.
• After that, you practice non-reactivity:

• No jumping from fund to fund
• No panic exit in every correction
• No greed-driven switching when some thematic fund is trending

You’re not inactive.
You’re actively practicing restraint, supported by a system.

The real shift: From ego to equanimity

There is also an ego element here.

As traders and active investors, we love to believe:

• “I can beat the market.”
• “I can time this move.”
• “I know when to get in and out.”

Sometimes we are right, sometimes spectacularly wrong. But the emotional roller-coaster is constant.

Index investing, like Vipassana, asks you to release that ego:

• You accept that markets are complex.
• You accept that missing some moves is okay.
• You accept that long-term compounding matters more than short-term brilliance.

This doesn’t mean you never trade or never take active bets. But it means you recognise the value of having a calm, disciplined core in your portfolio – just as Vipassana gives you a calm, disciplined core in your mind.

In my own work at Growth Avenues, this realisation is one of the foundations of what we call Behaviour-First Investing and strategies like the 3% Signal – where the focus shifts from fighting the market to managing our own behaviour.

From equity to equanimity

Vipassana didn’t make the world peaceful.
It made me more peaceful in the same world.

Index funds won’t make markets less volatile.
But they can make your experience of the markets far more stable.

• When you meditate, you commit to a process and let the results unfold.
• When you invest through index funds – or behaviour-first frameworks like the 3% Signal – you commit to a process and let compounding unfold.

In both journeys, the magic happens when you stop trying to control every tick and start trusting a disciplined framework.

That, to me, is the real movement:
From chasing every move in equity
to cultivating equanimity – in markets and in mind.

It was my journey from ક્ષમતા to સમતા