HOW I MET THE TRADITION. AND WHY I STUCK TO IT

 

CONTENT:

 

1. Why writing about my personal experience?

2. Looking for change

3. Kadampa, meditation and death

4. The importance of informal discussions

5. The stay, more efficient than the session

6. The will to deepen

7. Concrete results

8. Anything is possible

9. The choice of a deep and quick change

10. Deconstructing

11. Spirituality? The yoga of the mind

12. From the microscope to the wide angle

13. More heart

14. The quest for peace (an unoriginal story)

15. Manjushri Portraits, an “inter-face(s)”

16. Room for the individual

17. Looking for change?

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Why writing about my personal experience?

 

As I was asking for feedback on this section about my personal experience, a few people asked: “why do you want to talk about your story, this project is about others!”

 

Nearly 300 people trusted me by letting me take their picture, with the will to publish it in a project which was still under construction, changing and evolving.  For all this trust , it is worth offering – for the curious ones –  a description of how I met the tradition.

 

Also, those who already know me have noticed it : I’m enthusiastic and love to ask for and to give my opinion and communicate!  Including on personal matters.

 

Despite all the benefits of my encounter with the Kadampa tradition, I apparently havent yet reached enlightenment, and my ego hasnt dissolved. Among the key sentences I remember from the last 2 years, there is this one : Buddhists but not Buddhas. There’s room for imperfection. And I see it with joy : everyone keeps their particularities, their facets, whether smooth or rough.

 

It’s less about changing yourself than being yourself in an harmonious way, and if possible in a pleasant and useful one for others. That’s what I did with Manjushri Portraits. Engage others, value them, generate engagement, suggesting an idea, listening, make it evolve.

 

Enjoying the conception and realisation of a project that is beneficial to others, without money involved, is happiness. A happiness some may have the chance to experience daily and lifelong. But a happiness that many can miss. This 2015 summer, I didn’t fail.

 

Writing about myself also gives me the opportunity to reflect on how I arrived here. But not only this.

 

The old timers in this tradition polish their knowledge in the company of the new comers. They live their first moments again through them. They reconsider the teachings they once received when comes the time to pass the word to those who are about to hear those teachings for the first time.

 

Regarding the newcomers, I would be happy if this project inspires positive change in  just one persons life. Attend a meditation class, a teaching or come for a working visit in one of the centres.

 

 

 

 

2. Looking for change

 

For a couple of years, I was slowly and unsuccessfully looking for deep change. Thus, in 2011 and 2012, to entertain myself, my Parisian lifestyle became more and more intense. Combining party, work and motorcycle in a tiring and dangerous way.

 

In March 2013, for the first time, the idea of doing a retreat came to my mind. Not a holiday, a training or an work placement. Taking a break, out of the city, of its business, to breathe, to take a step back.

 

I thought, if it isn’t retirement – then it’s got to be a spiritual retreat. But spirituality and religion wasn’t at all my cup of tea. Nonetheless, I had to admit that the way I was dealing with reality wasn’t enough.

 

Despite my profound respect for sociological and psychological tools and frameworks, for a few years I have often thought that those who have a spiritual practice benefit from an advantage. An additional dimension.

 

After a quick search on Google, I was about to take a chance in an abbey, in Brittany, France, even if the person I was talking to on the phone wasn’t very encouraging : “Are you sure you want to come from Paris? A person who arrived this morning left this afternoon because of an anxiety crisis”. He sounded anxious himself.

 

 

 

3. Kadampa, meditation and death

 

Unaware of this surprising answer, my 20 year old daughter thought I would have more chance of enjoying a retreat if it took place in a warmer area of France. Her Google search led her to the brand new Kadampa branch of Toulouse, 30km away from the city, in the countryside. The teacher answered the phone with a smiling voice, and offered for me to attend the introduction to the meditation she was providing in Toulouse in 3 days, and to take me to the centre in the countryside, right after. I couldn’t have asked for more!

 

I spent most of the first meditation session fighting against sleep. All the fatigue accumulated in a lifestyle where resting means losing time was opportunistically using this space to overwhelm me. And the few moments I could try to clear my mind, I witnessed a busy aerial space, full of noisy and un-responding planes. Interesting.

 

The next day, during my first teaching, I was tempted to treat everything with derision;  the chants, the bell and the drum, all these objects, theses names and statues I knew nothing about. What would my Parisian mates think if they could see me right now. Me, the marketing research director, graffiti writer, electronic music fan, familiar with the club’s backstage of the capital city.

 

But I needed to give a chance to something new. All this folklore was beautiful. And this teaching - on death - was powerful.

 

Listening to it, I saw that I completely identified with the stereotype that turns its back on death, despite the fact that it’s one of the most certain components of human life. My life packed with work and most of all with distractions, more and more intense. Distractions of which the purpose was to hide from death, even if they were accelerating it, but not following me into it. In truth, I was cherishing myself to death. As a moth, high on light, would burn itself to death and disappear in smoke on a halogen lamp.

 

Two years later, this realisation is not completely assimilated. But I keep it on my personal dashboard, allowing it to positively influence some of my decisions.

 

 

 

4. The importance of informal discussions

 

Then, came the discussions. Talks with the centre’s residents or visitors. Sometimes in English, with people coming from all over the world. People of all ages, of all types, people who I would have probably never spoke to in Paris, in my work and leisure centred life. A life where you spend most of your time ignoring people around you.

 

Simple, sincere, human discussions. Often light and fun. People calmly answered the investigative questions the cultural anthropologist I am asked while they smoothly coped with my love for irony and derision. So I couldn’t walk away from them thinking they were stuck and rigid. This is one of the reasons I keep this tradition in my life.

 

I’m an enthusiast but I also like to analyse and to question. So in this Toulouse centre I opted for the following vision:

• Being historically sceptical regarding spirituality, and already having a job in which reading and writing have an important place, my brain also being weakened by my current life style, I didn’t want this experience to be purely theoretical i.e. reading books, learning things by heart etc.

• Nonetheless I was totally open to all that could intuitively touch me, to all that could obviously reach me, and to all that I could practically learn; by looking at behaviour, by discussing daily life examples.

 

I said to myself, if within these people and within this tradition, there is a quality, an efficiency, an interest, a benefit, I must be able to find it and to simply, directly and explicitly feel its effects. And for this, I’m still here today.

 

One can have interesting discussions on the meaning of life on the phone, between two work meetings. Or, under the influence of alcohol, in a crowded bar. But sober, really taking the time and listening to each other, in a calm environment, before or after a teaching or a meditation session, pervades us differently.

 

And I couldn’t deny I was often surprised by the content of the discussions. I remember a person, in the centre for a stay, telling me how she had suffered a lot, for many years, after her partner’s death. However, after having connected with Buddhism, she realised she was holding to this pain – in an egoistic way– by not accepting the loss of the precious being.

Spontaneously. I thought that NOT TO suffer would be an egoistic behaviour. But she was right. Now suffering less, she could even feel more love for her partner, and generate more love around her.

 

 

5. The stay, more efficient than the session

 

Friends or health professionals could have suggested to her the same change. But to hear good suggestions is easy (not necessarily common). What is difficult is to put them into practice in a way that really changes your life. And what enabled this person to really change her life was what I was experiencing myself right now. In fact, before this stay in Toulouse, I had never experienced such a strong mix of quality conversations, nature, silence, solitary and collective life, philosophical reflexion, teachings and beauty of the spiritual objects and rituals.

 

Rarely had I this rapidly and this deeply  - and most of all this calmly – opened a new space. Generated a fertile gap. Felt the vertigo of an encounter with myself and of a connexion with something way bigger than me.

 

And all of this had nothing to do with believing in Buddha or in reincarnation. Nor with Dharma awareness or comprehension of the spiritual objects displayed in the teaching room. The benefits of the context I was in didn’t need these answers. Didn’t even need the questions.

 

And all of this, therefore, for me as for this person, and for anyone, was an immensely powerful tool for change. Powerful enough to change my current trajectory, to divert myself from my dangerous distractions, as it was powerful enough to lead this person away from depression and the dangerous spiral of pharmaceutical treatment. Even better, It showed her new horizons, with an infinite potential.

 

The first change manifested itself right on my first day. We all bear a list of things to change. At the top of mine, for many years, there was this idea of leaving Paris and, most of all, my home for 13 years, loaded with family history and stories. On a walk by myself, lightheaded, out of nowhere, like a thunder strike in a blue sky, I knew the time has come. I had the conviction it was the right thing to do. I took the decision.

 

To change the place you live in doesn’t guarantee an improvement at all. But in some cases, it can contribute to one. And this Toulouse stay was a good example. Sometimes you need to go to know.