“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit …
Surrendering to Jealousy
If it’s true that a lesson will keep returning in various forms till we've learned it, there must be something big jealousy has yet to teach me, because I’ve had serious spells of it at least once a year for the last five. By serious spells I mean crying daily, sucking on crisis cigarettes, and …
Going around the Sun and the sunny connections!
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!
Seeing Old
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. …
Working with elderly people and the dying.
Elderly people are a big mirror into the human mind - and they all deserve a kind word. This is what I wrote to my friend when describing my current work. I have in front of my eyes the face of my client, the old lady, who looks at me with a trustful child-like acceptance. There are …
I Only Love Myself
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 …
Background Static
"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, …
Watching the show
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’s Your Meaning?
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 …
Practicing Gratitude
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 …
Living Vipassana 