"Narrowing"

And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…

Wizard of Earth Sea

San Cristóbal de las Casas

Here in San Cristóbal everybody comes to “help”. Everyone has this amazing project, this amazing idea they see is going to improve the life of indigenous villages. Let’s think about it… what is an amazing idea? And what is “improving life conditions”? But better, what is “help”?

What in the end I see here are people trying to set up their utopia of “another world is possible”. In every street of San Cris there is, at least, a NGO. Most of people of NGO’s are foreign people, and a lot of the money in San Cris is in these NGO’s, which also means that plenty of jobs are here also. But these jobs are, at least, half for foreigners. First of all, this is most hypocritical. If people are here because they believe in the autonomous movement of indigenous people, shouldn’t most of the jobs be for them?

And then I ask: if you have a utopia, have you at least tried it in yourself first? Or at least in your most direct net of relations? And even if you tried it, do you really think that it applies to everyone? Who says that if you do A, people are going to answer B? I can see the beauty in a lot of social movements, but what I can also see is their arrogance. You have to ignore a lot of the reality to believe that communism/fascism/ anarchism/capitalism is the answer to all of us. Should we really be searching for an answer? Is that the way? And one answer? How many realities exist? Here I applaud zapatismo movement for their consciousness of not define a way – caminando preguntamos – and, more important, listen; that is one of the bases: listen the people. No one knows the answer, so just be conscious in your walk.

Another thing I don’t understand is projects for “improving life conditions”. There are millions and millions of Euros spent every year under this umbrella. Some of them come here to Chiapas. One that I’m now making part of the advisory board is the United Nations Program to “strengthen democratic and effective management of the water and sanitation in Mexico to support the Millennium Development Goals achievement”. I was most surprised to observe that the goal was to introduce the same water management “first world” has, the same that has 40% of water loss in supply and huge problems in what concerns residual water treatments. Plus, the project doesn’t consider the implementation of water treatment plants. Result? More water demand; more polluted water in rivers; and more dependency of people in a technology that could never be appropriated by the people. For now on, they will always be dependent in whatever matters water management.

I can think in millions of ways to “help” in this case: there are so many things they can do with local resources, by their own hands – biodigestors, dry toilets, water captation systems, systems for water re-use, etc. Technology that can be appropriate by people.
And also, I ask: isn’t it better to spend all this money in the “first world”? We are the ones who really need help to clean our water, air, and soils; we are the ones who really need help to reduce our water demand. The only help I can see that indigenous people really need is stop polluting their world; polluting it with contaminants, products, advertising, drugs, ideas. Is respecting AUTONOMY.

And another, do they really need help on the health system? And what about the “first world”? We have an huge amount of our population dying with cancer! Who says that is worse to die with diabetes than cancer? What about helping them by not taking away their indigenous medicine knowledge? Or taking away their biodiversity where there are all the medicinal plants? Who needs help?

I’m not saying that there shouldn’t exist NGO’s, I make part of a few and believe in them and in the people that work for them. Also, I really find amazing the amount of people that are here and are really engaged in helping, it’s an amazing atmosphere. What I think I’m trying to learn is to be conscious. Conscious in my walk, in the consequences of that walk. And learn to walk respectfully. Perhaps seeing it as a dance can be easier. Learn how to dance all together, to respect and enjoy other people’s movement. To adapt to new songs rather than try to teach everyone to dance your way: who told you it’s right?

In the end, as much as I learn, the least I known what to do. Is this a bad feeling? The most I observe, the most I see it isn’t. As Fernando Pessoa says, “knowing is the unconsciousness of ignoring”. I don’t want to ignore what surrounds me; I need to become aware of it if I want to learn. I think I am in a de-learning period, which I guess it can be most helpful.

Alternativas para vivir: Foro Nacional de Tecnologías Apropiadas

This last month I went to a Forum for Appropriate Technologies: ideas, equipment and attitudes for the good life (http://www.unitierra.org/foro/), held in Oaxaca and organized by, among others, Gustavo Esteva and Rolene Walker (the pilgrim for Walk with Earth, a walk from Australia to Chile, for the beauty of Earth). The purpose of this forum was return technology to the people, was human’s appropriation of technology.

Since industrial revolution technology somehow changed the role to serve humans, it went from a tool to a goal; was transformed into the salvation, the wellbeing, rather than a mean to achieved that. The result? We forgot that the goal was wellbeing for all and replaced it by access to internet or a shopping mall right outside our door.

So in this forum you could touch technology and take its arrogance away by transformed it into the tool. When you do this you can actually see the goal – ex. clean water – and then see the opportunities in your environment, your resources. After, you have several ideas that will be leaded by the attitudes of who will benefit from the technology. In the end we all need clean water but that doesn’t mean that we all have to have the same water management, rather, you should think about how to do it with respect to the environment. As different ecosystems have different abilities to deal with the same problem – water management – we also should think that different societies act likewise. What are the dimensions of this obsession for uniformity? What are the other faces?

The western society is obsessed by uniformity – we should all eat the same, do the same, hear the same, feel the same, see the same; in the end, buy the same, since that is the goal, that’s what we are. It is an unhealthy behaviour and this is clear when one can see we are ecosystem, we are earth, and we all make part of the same thing. And like “monoculturing” earth is killing it, do the same with societies is also destroying them. We should rather be cultivating biodiversity.

Only a biodiverse world can provide the conditions for all life, including human life. Whenever we try to do otherwise we create diseases. Social systems aren’t different. Whenever we try to make everyone be the same all over the world, we create diseases as anxiety, unhappiness, violence; we are creating negative externalities, as we do with our economy. But there’s no such thing as externalities, since we are all in the same earth. So we’re living with these externalities, in other words, we are poisoning ourselves.

So we should grow biodiversity – of nature, of ideas, of dreams, of people, of movements, of costumes, of common sense (as Descartes amazingly identified as the most best distributed thing in the world, since we all have it, but each one have its own!). So we should stop wanting everyone think the same, fight for the same, react the same, dress the same, judge the same. We have to grow integration, integration of us all, of all our differences and stop poisoning ourselves by uniformity and exclusion.

But how it is a world that we all make part of it?

Project aside

Of course I don’t even know where to start!

As expected, community didn’t accepted very well the project – the house, the ecotechnologies, the backyard, in the end, what were we doing there. On top of that, the person that was supposed to live with me in the house never arrived. The best scenario to start over and do it the way it feels right to me.
The house the committee gave us is just beside the secondary school teacher’s house. There are three of them living there: the teacher of agronomy, farming and manual work; one woman, two men, from Monday to Wednesday. So I decided to stay with them, those three days, every week.

Since I arrived the community there was something I couldn’t bare: garbage everywhere. You cannot walk in the woods without seeing a coca-cola bottle. And this isn’t only in this community. Why? What happen to the concept of respecting Nature?
I realised then that there was a new recycling project in the secondary school so I went to present myself to the director and volunteer myself to make part of that project (after all I’m an environmental engineer!) and started to get involve in this problem. So what is happening?

Beverages such as coca-cola where introduced in communities something like 30 years ago. It seems like they have more sugar content than in other markets and also they are cheaper. Nowadays these communities (even in the middle of Lancadona jungle) really believe that Coca-cola makes part of the culture. As well coca-cola bought several water supplies (I can’t drink any water from México that doesn’t belongs to the coca-cola company) and they don’t allow governmental campaigns against beverages and “junk food” since they give job to an important percentage of population. Older indigenous people of Lancadona jungle tried to implement a project where whatever bottle that comes in, has to go out by whoever brought it. Coca-cola Company didn’t accept it so it was a failure.

So we have an average of, minimum, one bottle per person per day. Where can I recycle my PET bottle? Where can I recycle other types of plastic, aluminium, batteries, etc? Well, I cannot! There’s no recycling in Mexico at all. The most you can have is selling PET and aluminium to people that then sell to other countries. All the rest you produce goes to a dump without any type of environmental standards. And this is the very best you can have; in my community all the schools have the garbage at open sky, next to classroom.

If you walk in a very clean community in Mexico you can be sure that what they do is burning what they produce immediately or putting in a hole in the land (wherever they find the place) and burry or burn it, since communities normally don’t have access to municipal collect once they don’t pay taxes…

Why? Because there is no such thing as garbage. The word doesn’t exist as we conceive. All that God gave us is from Him, so it belongs to Him; this means that earth is going to embrace everything as it does with organic remains. There’s no concept of recycling, no word for it also because it also doesn’t make sense. There’s no such thing as environmental managing. Tseltal doesn’t have translations for these new concepts of living. And one cannot go back to what it use to be, we have to find out an intermediate solution, one that respects community way of living and the environmental standards of world globalization.

So now I’m trying to develop an environmental project within this school, with foreign teachers that doesn’t speak their language, don’t believe they are going to change, don’t recycle; building a recycle project in a country where recycle doesn’t exist. Project aside, this is also what I am doing!

And I still didn’t share my first glances about this community… well, hopefully in the end of this week!

Gustavo Esteva

In late January I had the fortune to meet Gustavo Esteva. Gustavo is defined as “grassroots activist and a de-professionalized intellectual”; he is a simple straight forward man, very passionate and fair.

So there was I, a European-city-woman asking Gustavo what could be my role here. As you state this you already found out the answer, right? It just doesn’t exist, as I first felt, as I learnt also within my friends in Schumacher.

So very directly, Gustavo just told me that I couldn’t do anything and in fact, if I tried, that was a mistake. Shocked? No, that was just the way I felt about it all, about the way the project was developing, about my introduction in the community, about the work all these organisations do with the communities, about how the communities are right now.

I don’t want to be unfair with all the organisations, people and with my own organisation and my own job, but it just seems that colonisation is still going on. Who am I to say that this is the right way to live? For sure most of priests also thought that teach the word of God was definitely the right way and I can see it was a mistake now. So building eco-technologies is a positive or an harmful approach?

So Gustavo was telling me his own experience and he was just trying to explain me that change has to come from the inside since I cannot enter entire in someone’s body to cure a disease, because that will kill the person. That’s also why he his defined as a “de-professionalized intellectual”, since he also disbelieves in teachers and students. How good can a teacher be if he doesn’t learn everyday from his students? And how good can a student be if he is not able to share his knowledge?

But in the end a question just couldn’t leave me, despite I agree with Gustavo in all: if change is from inside, how do we explain Che Guevara and SubComandante Marcos?

In that same night I went to CIDECI, an Indigenous Centre for Integral Education. Gustavo tried to make me an introduction by explaining me that in CIDECI they don’t believe in teachers or in classrooms or in all the classic way of teaching. Knowledge has to be free. We can understand that for knowledge to be free it cannot be confined to a specific formula to be disseminated, since we are all different and we all learn by different methods. So I ask, is knowledge free in our society? And does free as to do with free colleges? Are they the same thing?

In CIDECI you have what they call dynamic self learning. You are your teacher and who decide what, where, when and with whom you want to learn, in your own time and space. Its all experiencing, since we are all in this new era where caminamos preguntando.

In that night Gustavo talked about the Zapatista rebellion and about power, saying that they don’t want to take the power since power is not something for someone to gather, power is a relation so it has to be distributed; if you don’t distribute power – as you do it with love, happiness, sadness – you fall in domination. He made a good analogy between power and capital.

We developed a relation with capital based in possession, rather than in distribution. And when you think about how economy rose, you realised that money was just to help transactions and not something for you to possess. Money was really just a mean, something to be distributed.
But somehow we developed an unhealthy relation towards money and decided that you just have to have money and distribute it the less you can, as if you could be happy by cage your love. If you gather something for yourself, no matter what, can that really make you happy?

Something I really enjoyed in his conversation was about the difference between collective and community (this is a hard job to do in English since they mean the same, so I will try to do the best I can!).

So collective is what capitalism is able to do: generate groups of people that are organised by an external strength, creating individuals. In communities we are not individuals, we can’t since we don’t represent an “I” but rather an “us”. In communities I'm not Joana, but rather the daughter of Maria, the aunt of Marisa; we represent a link of relations, we represent a net of relations, we represent, in the end, the community. So we just have to fight against this way of seeing us as an individual and start see us as a net of relations, as an “us”.

But how can we do this? Well, first of all, by not being arrogant. We are arrogant when we think we are going to change the world, we are arrogant when we cannot see our scale, the scale in which we operate. Are we really the change we want to see in the world? if not, how can we change it? So start by yourself and then operate in your scale – your networks of family, friends – and start to build communities and change your “I” to an “us” – can we do it?

Tomorrow is going to be my first night in the community, my first meeting with all the teachers from secondary school… For sure I will learn a lot!

The Project

I’m working in the Training and Education Centre on Health and Ecology for Peasants (CCESC) and make part of a ten people team – a nutritionist, two doctors, a nurse, a health promoter, an agronomist, a translator and three volunteers. We receive (little) financing for a project that aims to reduce the undernourishment, obesity and diabetes (one of the major death causes in the area) on Chiapas’s communities.
These problems were caused by the changing of alimentation habits and physical activities. Traditional food products like beans are being replaced by pasta, oils, fried food and sweet beverages, inclusive from the first year of life. Indigenous communities hold the greatest consuming records of such drinks (drinks that, in some cases, are cheaper inside the communities then any where else!).

The project was designed to fit a community scale basis for further dissemination in the rest of the communities of a municipality, since one of the major problems founded in communitarian experiences of educational support is that of being established uniformly, without concerning cultural relevant differences. Nevertheless I ask: and reproducing a project of a community to other, even in municipal scale, is efficient?

So the aim of the project is developing an educational strategy mainly for women with children up to six months that consists in the construction of educational material for a healthy alimentation based in the traditional concept of a good life – Lekil Kuxlejal – and of local production.

For achieve that the project consider the implementation of a house model with a backyard. This house model should have a good example of a stove – since in most of the houses the food is cooked directly from the flame of the burning wood and without chimney – a dry latrine and an efficient water capitation system. The backyard should be an example of ecological concern, so there’s a compost system and a greenhouse.

Despite the fact that this should be built with the people (since is for the people), it was the municipality that chose the community and since results must be presented, all this was done mainly by the CCESC team and without the community participation (and even knowledge about what was going on!)

In these weeks since I arrived I was participating on establishing the house model as well as being aware about CCESC main activity and the situation of Chiapas’ communities.
Many doubts were in my mind from the first moment – how come something totally from outside can make a positive change in the inside? Is a greenhouse the appropriate solution? Is by someone from outside start to give the example about how to live in the community, that the people that actually live in will plant their food and have healthier behaviour?

And a lot of information was give it to me by CCESC director – one of the most brighter and kind person I have ever met – information about development governmental projects, immigration and emigration consequences, the importance of breastfeeding, the consequences of an unhealthier alimentation in the first years of life.

And by this information I got more concerned about what the consequences a project can have.
Government-sponsored complementary feeding nutrition programs are often based on instant industrially prepared foods with high energy, protein and vitamin content. This has enormous consequences for the community.
First of all, administering the majority of these products require the dilution in potable water, which is commonly unavailable raising the risk of contamination and infection. Also, this kind of food has high contents of sugar, making the children more dependent on sweet food, leading to greater risk of diabetes and obesity.

But this isn’t all. By giving this food to all the families (which is an enormous expenditure for these municipalities and the country), it makes not only that the mothers stop breastfeeding their babies, but also stop giving them local food. And since are the women who take care of the backyards, of the family food, they find no need to do so, since the message is that industrial food is better than their own. Also it makes all families more dependants on governmental help, therefore, poorer. Of course other elements contribute for this abandon.

So in the end we find communities that have the highest consumes in beverages, stop caring for their land, their backyards, changing their alimentation, increasing waste, loosing identity, loosing resilience, loosing their freedom. Is this help?

But who am I to judge?

These weeks we could capture the attention of students which got involved with us and helped us whenever they could. We hold a workshop with women that able us to discover with them which products are in the region (in their backyards) and when to plant and harvest. Around fifteen of them offered to help us on our backyard by giving their knowledge, time and seeds.

With CCESC’ director I was able to decide what was really going to be my investigation. Therefore I will try to understand the role of these backyards for lekil kuxlejal. I’ll try to understand the differences between families that care for they backyards from those who don’t – are they healthier? Happier? More confident? More satisfied? And try to understand why some are leaving their backyards and what seem to be the consequences.

So in the end I am helping on arranging my house in the community since I’m going to live, in part time, in the community. And my job is learning, learning from them since I don’t really know what I have to offer them or even if I should offer something in these terms. I just want to listen, to be aware, and to make good relations that help me on learning more from these women.

In one hand I see myself very useless, on another, I see myself as a new open notebook ready for a new story. What have I learnt that can really help others?

Lekil Kuxlejal

Just in the day of my first Tseltal class (the language of Chacoma, the community I’m working in), I leave you with what we want to achieve in this community, what Tsetales call as “good life”.

Tseltal has its own meaning of “good life” a complex concept which is called Lekil Kuxlejal.

First of all, there cannot exist Lekil Kuxlejal without peace – slamalil k’inal. Lamal means silence and k'inal, environment. External environment is called ecosystem and internal environment is called mind.

In Tseltal, ecosystem is a collective reality where nature and society are necessarily integrated.

The prefix ‘s’ indicates that we’re talking about someone (in this context, the peace of someone) because in tseltal as in other maya languages, every being, person, animal or object are subjects that influence and are influenced in a constant interdetermination, a constant intersubjectivity, because we all make part of the same big heart. Something or someone don’t exist by themselves, cannot be separate, it makes part of something bigger.

Slamalil k’inal (peace) is a state of silence of the person, of his/her mind. It is also a state of ecosystem harmony. Peace is a social and a cosmic question but experience at an individual level. The conception of peace for Tseltales assumes the sacred and perfect dimension of silence. Silence is sacred and an essential element for generate harmony and with it, good life, Lekil Kuxlejal.

Slamalil k’inal presumes the unit of individual wills that intersubjectivitely create it and like that will form one heart. If someone is experiencing an internal peace in his/her mind it is because it lives by any form a collective harmony where all of us are included. And this is Lekil Kuxlejal and it cannot belong just to this World or just to this material life, its one of the multiple dimensions that soul will travel when leaves this world.

Lekil Kuxlejal supposes a perfect integration between society and nature. The happiness of the community is projected and felt within the environment and ecosystem, which in its turn, makes people happy (the internal environment, mind). In Tseltal these analogies are frequent since one cannot separate human from nature, they share the same identity: nature and birds laugh like us and we fly like birds (Tseltal song). Nature is happy with our laugh and we are light as their fly, this is Lekil Kuxlejal, total harmony.

And for Tseltal, peace is has important as the sun: when there is peace, there isn’t any sadness in our heart, there’s no angriness, no crying, no fear or death; there’s the “good life” in all is splendour, we’re all one heart; we’re unity, there are the same rights for all, everyone sees equally the gratitude of everyone, there’s love, there’s fairness in our hearts. Peace is the centre of Lekil Kuxlejal. And when we’re in peace our heart is happy.
But how to apply the concept of Lekil Kuxlejal in our day life? Lekil Kuxlejal it’s a set of ecologic and moral conditions.

Lekil Kuxlejal and matrimony

Lekil Kuxlejal cannot sustain by itself, it’s born by men and women relation and their actions; Lekil Kuxlejal arrives with the kids of our family; it is generated by the strength of our work – “economy” -, with the corn germination, with the germination of our work; Lekil Kuxlejal develops with what exists in the world. It is also generated with the celebrations made by our communities.

Tseltal writings show that a union between men and women is complex – we all have problems once in a while; that happens to everyone – but Lekil Kuxlejal happens when husband really takes his woman seriously and his woman takes her husband seriously. Both take care of each other. An if they learn together and if both men and women puts effort in its job, then it will be very pleasant if we follow each other efforts, and that will improve our duties and by that our family is born. Concerning raising children, despite the difficulties that can appear; our children need our word of love and caring.

Lekil Kuxlejal and Caring

Tseltal believe that we cannot mistreat what God gave us, we cannot disturb it because is that that give us the “good life”: If we mistreat the work of God, our life will not be long. Therefore, we must take care of our houses as our gardens and our forests.

Lekil Kuxlejal and respect

Lekil Kuxlejal arrives to us when we are able to see other’s greatness, your friends and family, your community. It also comes to you when you respect other’s work, by your right speech, by not saying lies, by not making any harm to anyone. No problem will come to you if you’re always practising Lekil Kuxlejal. Life will be truly beautiful if we can see each other’s greatness.

Rectitude, knowledge and justice

Lekil Kuxlejal demands that we make justice with rectitude, and this is possible when there’s any resentment in our heart against a brother, making us able to feel the harmony in the environment. For Tselatles, problems are subjects. There’s a responsible but since we’re talking about a subject, all community must be united to eliminate the problem, since it exists by itself.

Knowledge is acquired by our heart, it gets inside of our heart and for correct learning we need a harmonious affection. Therefore, problems make us loose our knowledge, because individuals loose their capability of recognition, the capability to address adequately to the situation (since there’s no peace in our heart). To solve our problems all community needs to discuss it and find together a solution.
Putting someone in prison isn’t solving the problem, since that is addressing the problems with rancour and hate in our hearts, and like this, problems are not going to be solved.

Autonomy, word and Lekil Kuxlejal

“No one can make peace for us”

It’s in the community that we will say how to do it well. What is decided it will say how to achieve the “good life”, because no one else can decide how to do solve our problems. So the word of each assembly would be the word of good life. Words that give life, words that give harmony to our hearts. Words with what life touches your partner’s heart and the heart of your community. These words search where and why life starts in our fellows. Not the words that perish life, that hurt the feelings of all of us and each one of us, that aren’t pleasant. We should not learn the words that destroy us and destroy our community.


I wonder, how different is this from Buddhist principles? And isn’t this what we all want? What happened? How was it destroyed? A utopia? Tseltales say it isn’t because it doesn’t refers to an inexistent dream, it had existed, nevertheless it has been in declining but it hasn’t extinguished and it can be rescue. Shall we try?

Step one

“I will write everything in a blog!” I guess this was the sentence I claimed the most in the last month! I know; the total change with Schumacher, Vipassana, México- so much to tell and so… little time? Words? What?
I guess it starts and ends with what is the purpose of the blog – talk about me or my project? In the end I want that what I do is exactly what I am; which allways possible isn’t. So the confusion starts. Well, I will try, and then will see! (I’m not even sure that English should be the language!)

Everything set in motion with a question: do I really believe in what I’m doing? And then some others: why I want so much to go to México, why I want so much Chiapas? And why communities?! I’m used of my car, my house, my clothes, beauty creams, parties, everything! Why this?
Fortunately Rita, a friend from my job in Faculty, told me about Schumacher. So much she told me about or so much I truly believed on her, that I went there, for three weeks, for Earth Jurisprudence course. What?? Well, what I learned in the end wasn’t only from this course. Wasn’t only from this time in Schumacher, since one month later I was there again. Really really in the end (and this will sound the most kinky ever) I understand that nothing besides love guides you. Love from other people, love that you have inside and just release in all ways, love from nature; all that guide you perfectly in your journey. Because with love everything really starts to make sense.

And I learnt so much! And so important things. In the end I learnt the importance of listen me; and listen me is listen the other people, is listen nature, the world. So everything starts to make sense: how can we believe in a society that people don’t know what nature is about? What are the grounds of that society? What can it value? And looking around me and at me, I can see that we value what people have and not what they are. Can we be different from that?
And little by little enrooted nonsense concepts started to be weakened and replace for not so factual-proven concepts but more grounded ones: grounded in nature, in love. Why aren’t they so factual? Well, because everything is impermanent and no such a thing as eternal exists; because of that there aren’t consolidated TRUES, but it can exist solid roots, that give birth to an always changing tree – one that changes with age, with time, with environment…

Still didn’t have the words to thank all of people that I met in Schumacher. Still don’t know how to do that. I can say that they changed my life, they gave me the love to do it. Without knowing me, without any reason, all of them, in their particular way, found a way to grab my hand and take me further in my own path. How can you thank such a thing?

By knowing all these people there’s nothing else that you can believe then that the world can be changed. For better.

It was also by being in Schumacher that I started to realise the amazing power of meditation. And here, Constantin just gave me the strength to go further: so there was I, on the 9th December, at Vipassana Meditation Centre, in Hereford.

In this course of Goenka, talking in any form, reading, listen music, computers, are forbidden. Ten days with the minimum contact with the world, ten days when you truly are with yourself. Ten days meditating ten hours per day.

Almost everyone that knows me was really misbelieving in me not talking for ten days – I can’t be in silence for ten seconds!! Well, in the end I didn’t miss it once. In fact, in the 10th day, when you can talk, I just retired to my room, I just didn’t want to start talking yet (perhaps because I knew that then it was unstoppable!!)

Vipassana is a meditation that believes that all suffering can disappear by observing the truth. So instead of concentrating in an image, word, mantra, Vipassana tells you to concentrate on your sensations. When you do so, you realise that everything is impermanent. Your cells are always changing (and you can feel that!), everything in the world is always changing; the world is all vibrations, vibrations caused by the changing of its own elements. So everything in the world is impermanent.
When you realise that you also realise that you can’t stop forever bad things to happen to you and also you can’t always have what you desired – so in end, where is happiness? Well, as all of us seem to know but not to experience, happiness is inside of you. When something happens to you is you who qualified it as good or bad; that’s why different people react differently from the same experience. And here is the key for happiness: be equanime. Change the reactive pattern of your mind for one of balanced observation.

Stop generation aversion, stop generating craving. And observe what is happening, observe what are your sensations, and only then act; but don’t react. Because when you do so, you generate suffering. By complaining, exploding in anger, invading with passion, you loose your balance and generate a seed of suffering. And then, when that situation or something similar happens, you just react; but this time worse because you have more hanger/rage/sadness/anxiety/passion inside of you. And this is one never ending growing snowball.

When I was there I could feel my hanger, my anxiety, my passion, my desperation. And by being persistent I could just observing the sensations it provoke in me and let them go. Nor even once I wanted to leave (also because of all the strength Roland, Constantin, Yvan, Joana gave me).

Whenever I was feeling some feelings regarding give up, I just used that for my analysis, for training my equanimity.

And I also felt such an enormous happiness!!! I just wanted all of you there for me to share it! It was a never ending, truth, powerful happiness; all I really wanted was to share with you this knowledge, this experience so then you can feel the same! And because of that I just was more exciting to continue – if I learnt everything, I could be really able to share it. But I learnt it is a long path in which I was just giving the first step.