Hello again, everyone! Well, I just want to start by saying that I miss each and every one of you. I have been away now for 5 months. It’s been great. I’m not ready to come home. I AM ready to hang out with my friends again!! I am more and more appreciating the connections that I have to people, to friends, the joy of sharing. My emotions really seem to be heightened on this trip. I have been staying in the same place, in Dharamsala, for the past 2 months now. What a change, not to be on a hot, rolling train or bouncing, crammed in, sweaty bus, careening into uncertainty….where will I stay tonight in this new place I’m on my way to? (For those that don’t know, this budget traveling life is not about making reservations.)
So, after my 2 weeks staying on the Tibetan side of Dharamsala, I decided to do a vipassana meditation retreat. Vipassana is a style of meditation. It’s how the Buddha got enlightened,…..so pretty good credentials. It’s a fairly rigorous plan, 10 days of meditating 10 hours a day. Wake up gong at the retreat center was 4 AM, which made the Sivananda ashram seem posh with their 5:20 wakeup call. The rules are strict, but the results are amazing. The idea is that you are totally into your own process without distraction. No talking, including no communication by eye contact, no books, no writing, no phone, no camera, nothing. Sparse accomodation, hard beds, no dinner. Just you and your mind, together on the mental wrestling mat. The schedule is 2 hours of meditation after wake up, breakfast, 3 hours of meditation, lunch and rest, 4 hours of meditation, then chai and fruit, one more hour of meditation and one hour of watching a video of meditation instructions from the main teacher of this method, then bed. Our lights were always out 15 minutes early, by 9:15, because every minute of sleep counts in that gap between 9:30 and 4 am!! And as many of you know, I generally have my hours of sleep somewhere between 1 or 2 and 9, so this was quite a change for me, BUT: I loved it.
Really I loved the whole thing. The vipassana center was up in the middle of these beautiful super tall pine trees, with filtered mountain views, blooming periwinkle hyacinths and a roving band of monkeys providing us silent people with brief moments of entertainment, when we came out of the meditation hall to stretch our aching legs, as they were swinging from the trees, roving on the paths sometimes just right next to us, adolescent monkeys constantly playing and scampering and chasing each other from tree to rooftop to tree, mothers with babies clinging to their bellies, big, old grandpa monkeys….But back to the meditation, it really was amazing, I don’t know if I can do the concept justice here, but it was all about heightening your awareness of your physical sensations as your guide to reality. And coming to realize that all sensations come and go, it’s the mental creation of attachment to the pleasurable ones and our aversion of the painful ones that create our problems in life. So if we can detach ourselves from the pleasure or pain association, we can realize that our selves, our bodies, our minds, all of life, is constantly in motion, constantly changing…. (now I’m envisioning one big, throbbing planet). But it’s true, it’s a big swirling…..swirling swirl. A big impermanent swirl. Experienced vipassana meditators please feel free to comment here. Anyway, it was just lovely to come out of the meditation hall for a stretch at 5:30, just at dawn and listen to the birds chirping away in the trees, feeling so calm. AND, the food was delicious – healthy, Indian veggie, yum. Craving.
So, after my wonderful meditation time, I went to go stay in the next little valley over, beautiful and green, more of a western hippie hangout. No roads. Little paths all over, rock stairs, a bit of concrete path here and there with a “streetlight” for nighttime, that lead by all the houses that are scattered up the valley. I shared a room with my sweet Korean friend, Chae-Yun, from vipassana, in a little family guesthouse with 4 rooms. The whole family lived there: a young couple and their baby, grandma and grandpa, their 14-yr-old neice, Meenu, and their 10-yr-old nephew, Rahul, who loved to come up to me and breathlessly spell out my name, “A, double-L, I, S, ….U? O! N!!!!” He was proud of his accomplishment in English. Every morning we would get some fresh milk from their cow for our coffee. No fridge, so in two days our extra milk would be yogurt. There were three other super nice guys staying there with us, two Austrians, and an Italian. We had a community kitchen there, so every morning we’d get up and make chai and coffee for each other, run to the local baker 4 houses away and buy a big fresh loaf of bread or some cinnamon rolls and hang out and talk about life on the veranda. We started to be like a nice little family, everyone sharing their dinner cooking with each other……after a while, none of us wanted to leave, and everyone stayed together for almost a month! We had a big flat roof, and quite a few warm nights, we threw the blanket out with a candle and all just layed out watching the stars and tripping out about the nature of the universe. Was good. So I bought some books and a tiny watercolor set for 16 rupees (32 cents) and relaxed for a few weeks :) I went to a kundalini yoga class every morning and also got two very interesting Tibetan massages. One guy at the end of his massage put a blanket over my body, then put something like warm hackey sacks under the soles of my feet, in my palms, under my neck, and on my temples and throat. Then he placed about five Tibetan singing bowls on my body, all different tones, and gonged them. Wow, it was really nice.
But, I realized that even though life was lovely, turns out I am not an Indian resident and India was about to kick me out–my visa was up in a few days. So I tore myself away from my beautiful friends who had become family, and got on yet another creaking Indian bus for a 7-hour journey to the tiny holy town of Rewalsar. Built around a lake, it’s a town that is holy for Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs and each one of them has a big temple around the lake. I stayed with the Buddhist monks in a monastery and relaxed again for another two days. — would love to finish this story, but I have only one minute left on this internet so, will publish this for now, and get back to you soon! LOVE!!! A
