Barefoot and wearing simple orange robes, an old monk and a young novice were watering orchids and other plants that lushly grew along the trunk of a wonderful tall tree standing in front of the temple’s library.

The temple, Wat Ram Poeng, had a beautiful garden with trees, bushes and flowers, but this tree in front of the library was particularly appealing for it stood alone in the open. You could clearly see the shape of its golden branches and leaves framed against the bright blue sky.

Each day, after long hours of meditation, I observed this tree and its wide leaves, looking like open parachutes, withering and slowly falling down as if carried by a soft lullaby. Who would have thought that the death could be as graceful and harmonious as the birth of new life?

These peaceful moments felt like the moments of utter perfection, and I started wondering what prevents us, humans, from being as light and free as everything else in nature. The answer to this question is, actually, the main focus of the Buddhist meditation practice – our mind! Its main principle is more or less based on setting yourself free from your mind in order to accept and live the present as it is, right here and right now.

The main temple in Wat Ram Poeng

I know that many consider that ”present moment” philosophy is just some Buddhist utopian teaching. I can’t really say I thought any different at the time, but when I came to Thailand, I was really attracted to learn more about it.

The temple life, unfortunately, soon revealed the same issues you find in other temples belonging to different predominant religions around the world – a  hierarchy of power, in which male monks sit on an elevated platform, as if on a pedestal, whereas female monks bow down to them.

Similarly, during lunch time, male monks eat different food, prepared especially for them, and they are served first. Women (in the back) and novice monks (closer to the pedestal) have to wait for them to start eating first and only then can they touch their food.

I imagined Buddhists wouldn’t allow for such separations and inequalities, especially considering how important modesty and abnegation is to them. I was dissapointed to see that Buddhism apparently fell in the same trap as all the other male-dominated religions. The trap posed by illussionary sense of power and dominance that feeds the ego, which seems to be the most widespread addiction in the history of the mankind.

Buddhism also tends to take pride in not being a religion, but rather a spiritual practice. However, from what I’ve seen, Buddhists are just as fanatic about Buddha and intimidated by his moral precepts as, for example, Catholics are obsessed with Christ and scared of his ten commandments.

So, although I hadn’t expected or prepared myself for it, I did feel like I was in another institutionalized religious environment, with strict rules and well-defined hierarchy.  However, returning to the aforementioned ”present moment” philosophy, in the light of my personal experience practicing meditation in Wat Ram Poeng, I have to say it’s much more than a simple philosophy.

The so-called Vipassana meditation technique I practiced during ten days in Wat Ram Poeng consisted in interchanging 15-minute sitting and walking practice for 6 hours a day, and each next day another 5 minutes and an additional hour were added to that, up until reaching 60 minutes of both sitting and walking sessions for 12-14 hours a day.

Upon entering the temple there is an opening ceremony where lotus offerings are given to Buddha and the monk says prayers in Pali. Around 20 people went through it but only half sticked till the closing ceremony ten days later.

The rest of the day was spent on eating (only twice a day, at 6am and 10am), cleaning your room (although there wasn’t much to clean every day), sweeping the leaves around the temple, chanting at 5.30am for half an hour (in Pali language, which absolutely amazed me) and sleeping (only 5-6 hours a day).

Each day I would report to a monk for no more than a minute or two. He would tell me how to breathe, what to repeat and where to center my attention during sitting/walking practice, and then he would ask if I had any doubts. Regardless of what I said or asked, his short and somehow extremely soothing answers would always  be reduced to repeating: ”Keep smiling.”, ”You think too much.” or ”Your mind thinks about the future and the past but time is an illusion. There is only the present moment.”.

In other circumstances, I would probably feel annoyed or frustrated for not getting a concrete feedback or detailed answers to my questions about the practice and the purpose of it. However, I didn’t feel that way at all. That short, simple, repetitive feedback, or perhaps the serene and smiling appearence of this monk after an exhausting day, would renew my strengths literally in an instant and I was ready to retake the practice again.

 

The Full Moon Ceremony is the most special event in the temple. The whole temple gathers to meditate together and chant in Pali. After we all walk around the Pagoda, with lighted candles and flowers as offerings, evoking the memories of our loved ones and sending them our best wishes.

Eventually, as I spent more hours meditating, I learned that all the answers I needed were always there, hidden inside of me. Me, my mind, was just too busy to perceive them. The secret is, actually, in abandoning every quest and letting that what’s necessary come to you.

For example, before coming to the temple, I didn’t know anything about mantras, chakras or the so-called ”kundalini”, the primal energy. I had never practiced meditation before that nor read anything about it. In the temple we had no access to any information either because the use of mobile phones or books was prohibited, as well as talking to each other.

However, after a week in the temple, I had a strong necessity to say prayers to myself. They were coming to my mind in a such fluid way as if I had said them so many times before. These prayers contained numeours self-encouraging statements and I just felt I had to repeat them to myself over and over again. They felt so empowering and liberating. They felt like the burden of something unknown that wasn’t forgiven to me was finally lifted.

After an hour of continuously repeating these phrases, coming from me for myself, I felt warmth and palpitations in between my eyes, that lasted for two or three days. During those days I observed how my body tended to move in circles both when I was sitting and walking, and at one point, during sitting meditation, I could see a fast-spinning spiral inside of me, moving from my pelvis to my head.

Me in one of my profoundest introspective trance :D. On the contrary of what you would normally expect, the meditation didn’t have a calming, peaceful effect on me. It was more like as if there had been thousands of thin layers of piled-up leaves laying at the bottom of my being and suddenly they all started whirling up, leaving me completely disoriented.

When I left the temple, I started reading about meditation and I stumbled across a list of healing mantras which contained the same expressions I used in my ”prayers”. I also read about chakras and how one of them, the third eye, can be felt precisely in between the brows, whereas the primal energy ”kundalini” manifests in our body as a spinning spiral.

What I’m trying to say is that we have all the answers, regardless of their name or label. As if the collective (spiritual) knowledge was stored inside of each one of us and we just have to make space for it to reveal itself to us. Be attentive and receptive. We can be our own guides. Perhaps we are our own best spiritual guides. This is my most important revelation.

I understand now why the monks didn’t want to give us any theoretical introduction to the practice or any explanations of it. In that way they would have fed our mind with labels and expectations, and this could have set us back. In my case, at least, since I have a very analytic mind, it was much better to not have a lot of theory at my disposal.

That’s why I believe you don’t need any preparation or prior knowledge to practice meditation. You just need to train your mind to do the basic steps, which are actually very straightforward – just inhaling and exhaling, rising and falling, and focusing your attention to every rise and fall. No mind, no thinking, no worries, no questions, no projections, no expectations.

”And if you don’t achieve anything, at least you learn patience”, said the monk in his speech.

The patience is something I don’t think I’ll ever achieve, but what I did learn is that mind isn’t as omniscient as it likes to believe. It can never fully grasp the depths of our being or our suffering because it’s function is to think, not to feel. There is a limit to our mind and I felt, as I approached that limit, that beyond it there is a vast limitless space.

The label for it is not important. The point is that it’s there. It’s not outside of us, it’s inside of us. It’s not something you grasp intellectually (because your mind is probably already telling you that you shouldn’t believe this), but you see it (maybe with your third eye :D?) There is so much to explore in that forgotten space. You realize just how much you’ve had yourself abandoned.

That’s why on my last day in the temple I felt so fragile and vulnerable, as if a slightest blow could finish with me in a second. I felt extremelly tired and confused with everything that I had experienced during those ten days. I felt much more responsible for my (spiritual) life because I learned that I was actually the only one who controlled and influenced it. Of course, intellectually, I knew it before, but then I felt it, and it was scary.

It still is, but I’m eternally grateful for having discovered meditation as a powerful tool that helps me to take care of myself. To get in touch with myself and explore those darkest corners that need light, that need my attention.

Welcoming the main monk upon his short visit to China was the most awaited moment in the temple. (Also the most amusing and funny one for us foreigners.) The monk brought small gifts for everybody. It has its downsides, like everything else in this world, but the life in the temple, at the end of the day, inspires a warm feeling of belonging, peace and acceptance.

Honestly, it’s not easy. The outside world sucks you in so quickly and you find yourself doing whatever you can on the outside so that you don’t have to deal with that what’s awaiting light on the inside. Personal willpower and determination seem like a joke when faced with the consuming nature of the material world.

However, when I find myself desperately spinning in the meaninglessness of the mind-based world we’ve created to distract ourselves, I remind myself that there is no promise of any lasting relief or happiness in that world. There is nothing real to achieve in the external world that would suddenly ”heal” or fix our inner insatisfactions. The real change, in order to be lasting and to have a real positive impact on our experience, has to come from within first. So all the focus and efforts should be directed in that way.

So stay focused, breathe and have faith that every rise and every fall will guide you precisely where you need to be.