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.