This is a special year and the day this post goes online, I celebrate my 40th birthday. I have so much going on as I reach this milestone of a year. It makes me quite humble at the thought of rounding the Sun forty times already 🙂 I am happy to realise that I am …
Continue reading Going around the Sun and the sunny connections!
The other day I was in the kitchen with my brother. We were cutting some vegetables and I said to him, “You know the Mirror Song by Live?” “How does it go?” “I know that I should be giving, should be helping out, should be living, but I can't seem to rescue myself,” I said. …
I only love myself. Sounds rather selfish, but when the king and queen in the old age tale that Goenka tells ask themselves, “Who do you love the most?” They realize, “I only love myself.” When they go to the Buddha he replies, “Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.” It's been an increasing fascination that I control my …
"Awareness and Equanimity are the only measurements along this path," repeated our Dhamma doot (translation: messenger, ambassador), aka S. N. Goenka. I remember hearing the words awareness and equanimity on the speakers every day, multiple times a day during long and short Vipassana meditation courses. Understanding it is still a work in progress. For the most part, …
I just wanted to be away. And I indeed was away for some time, away from pretty much everything and it was planned. It is important not to do anything sometime. Yes, you read it correctly and I was in that kinda phase - a very frugal existence, cut off from everything, waking up on the lap of nature with chirping birds, watching moments pass by, feeling your breath, and being aware about the 'you', enjoyed looking at colorful flowers and dancing peacocks and looking at the sky and how cloud skirted around the mountains....yes, there was mountain and there was water - a lake and there was peace. There is PEACE still and I love the feeling!
What would you do if everyone was very aware and equanimous? When everyone is Buddha, when everyone is clothed, sheltered and fed, would you do anything different? I was feeling somewhat inadequate, negative, depressed, like-a-loser one day. For some reason, one of the people I was around that day was getting to me in a …
Two weeks ago was my last day at my last job. Night before the last day, while meditating, an idea bulb went off in my head - "thank you cards!". I cashed in. I wrote a personalized note for every single person. Most of them I only saw briefly as we changed shifts. But as …
Written by Jessica Wright I was very grateful to find this blog recently, after sitting my third course. At times on the course, I thought that I wouldn't overcome the doubts and resistance that I was struggling with and continue to practise, so I was keen to read about other people's experiences of establishing long-term …
A few days ago I was facing a couple of situations that I considered to be rather difficult. In my care-giving job my client, an old lady, was creating problems with just about everything – she refused to take the pills, and she behaved completely irrationally, which she showed by verbal accusations. There were also …
I started this blog 2 years ago, and I'm proud to say that I've written at least once a week for 104 weeks straight. I started writing because I needed a way to process through my Vipassana experience. Shortly after I started publishing my blog because I felt so alone in my journey, and I …
Living Vipassana 