Chapter Seven

A summer at the ranch, residential counselor burn-out. Vision Quest in the desert bears fruit: Go to Thailand for 6 months.

And so the travel oddesey continues, again I bring my confused mind and the question: So what? What am I doing here 9000 miles around the world? A tiny insignificant being on a tiny blue and green and (increasingly) brown planet circling an insignifcant sun in the corner of one galaxy among trillions (accurate?). What am I doing, yo?

Enter: Vipassana Meditation. Seeing things as they are as taught by Gautama the Buddha, the enlightened one, the perfectly self-awakened one.

Like Christianity, people have messed up the teachings of the Buddha over the years, but the good news is it appears that careful study of the human heart is actually all we need to get liberated from suffering in this world. I decided to give it a try. Through the confusing study of multiple meditation techniques, including two versions of vipassana meditation which both stipulated that mixing techniques could be dangerous, I began an inquiry into the workings of this body-mind. Interestingly enough, it was only though ordination as a buddhist nun at a northern Thai temple that I came back around to curiosity about the teachings of Christ. I was baptized into Catholicism at about four--it is one of my first memories, though I had little idea what was going on and the ceremony felt mostly scary and confusing rather than spiritually significant. I attended mass for many years and took religion class from kintergarden till eighth grade, but I do not believe any of this imparted to me an honest sense of Christ's true teachings.