Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery Read online

  On my previous trips to the ashram I had heard about the pancha karma, a five week mind and body detox done with Ayurveda medicine, but I had never thought that seriously about actually doing it. However, it happened that many of the people who I sat with during meal times were in the process of doing the full five-week detox themselves. Everybody I spoke to had only good things to say about the pancha karma. One lady told me that after the pancha karma her stomach problems, which she had lived with for several years, had mysteriously gone away, and then there was a French guy who told me that his twin brother had literally come back home a different person after the pancha karma, as old fears and mind patterns of his had shifted. This really got me thinking that maybe I needed to do it as well. I had been hoping to tour with Amma on her three-week south Indian tour in January, the same tour that I had been on the year before, but healing was way more important right now than going on another tour. Besides the ashram, as quiet as it was now, made it a perfect time to do the pancha karma.

  The next day I went to see the Ayurveda doctor to find out more about the detox. The lady I saw was a lovely middle-aged Indian woman who had been a long-time follower of Amma’s. She told me that the pancha karma is a deep cleansing at the cellular level and that it removes ten years worth of toxins in your body, both physical and mental.

  “The pancha karma is therefore not only a detox for the body, but a detox for the mind as well,” she said. When I showed her my skin problem and asked whether she felt it would be good for me to do the detox, she nodded straight away and said that she had no doubt that it would help. I was sold. I left her room absolutely certain that I had to do the pancha karma. I put my name down right away and started a few days later.

  ***

  The first day of the pancha karma I was feeling a little nervous as I didn’t quite know what to expect. There were two Indian men waiting for me in the pancha karma room, both of whom were dressed in nothing but a lungi wrapped around their waists. These were the two men who would be working on me for the next five weeks. When they had everything ready and were all good to go, I was told to take off my clothes and I was given a small piece of cloth to cover my genitalia. I felt awkward strapping this tiny piece of cloth around me, as it looked more like a G-string than anything else. For the next hour the two men massaged me from head to toe with special Ayurveda oils, chanting the entire time. Both the men’s hands moved freely over my body, and were often touching either my penis or the area around my anus. For someone who didn’t like people invading their privacy, the pancha karma would be just about the last thing you’d want to do. When the treatment was over, I was told to take a hot shower and then to go and rest in my room.

  In order to get the full benefit of the pancha karma, and to give yourself the maximum chance of removing the toxins from your body, it is vital that you followed the guidelines. The first, and probably the most important thing of all, is that you take it very easy, and that you rest as much as possible. Even walking around and socialising is to be kept to a minimum. Your daily diet is also very important, as heavy foods take longer for the body to digest. The longer the food takes to digest, the slower the detoxification process will be. Even things such as what vegetables and fruits you could and could not eat were clearly stipulated. Sleeping during the day is also a no–no, as this too supposedly slows down the process of the toxins being removed from your body. Reading during certain parts of the pancha karma is also to be avoided. Reading exercises the mind, therefore it too slows down the detoxification. During the pancha karma one’s body is extremely vulnerable, which makes it that much easier for you to become ill. It is therefore very important that you keep warm and out of the wind at all times. To reduce the risk of becoming sick, each person is given a piece of white cloth to cover your head, which protects you from both the sun and the wind. No matter how hot and humid it gets during the day and at night, they also suggest that you avoid turning on the fan in your room. When I had gone to see the Ayurveda doctor I remember her saying that many Westerners doing the pancha karma don’t realise just how major the detox is, and how it is working on you on so many different levels.

  “Doing the full pancha karma is like putting yourself through an operation and therefore it is not something to be taken lightly,” she explained.

  By only the third day of the pancha karma, I was amazed at how completely wiped out I felt. I had no energy to do anything. Just the short walk to the dining hall alone was enough to tire me out. This was all perfectly normal though, as most of the other people doing the pancha karma were experiencing much the same thing as I was. With all the rules of things you weren’t allowed to do, and your body feeling as tired as it was, the pancha karma could be tough going as it meant that you had to spend a lot of time alone in your room. A whole lot of time alone in your room meant a whole lot of time for self-reflection. Five weeks worth of soul searching could feel like a lifetime. Therefore, for many people the pancha karma is torture and they can’t wait for it to be over and done with, but this wasn’t my experience at all. As tired as my body felt, I was amazed at how calm and still my mind was and how peaceful I was feeling. Once I knew what to expect, I actually looked forward to each day of the detox, as I was sure that it was doing me a lot of good. The one thing, however, that did make it a lot more challenging for me, was the fact that my mp3 player happened to break right at the start of my daily treatments. What a blow this was. Not being able to read was one thing, but no music was like stripping me of my life support. My days, therefore, typically passed by with me lying naked on my mat staring up at the ceiling above silently repeating the mantra that I liked the most, Om Namah Shivaya. Perhaps my mp3 player breaking was just how it was supposed to be. Not having music would force me to take a good hard look at all the thoughts and all the madness that was going on in my mind.

  ***

  Amma returned to the ashram in early December. It didn’t take long for the place to fill up and the atmosphere changed completely. The ashram always felt so much more alive whenever Amma was there. When I went to get my first darshan from Amma a few days after she returned, I noticed that I felt a very strange sensation in my chest area. It felt as if someone was pointing a laser beam straight at my heart. It wasn’t a particularly nice feeling at all as it were as if I was having a mild allergic reaction to something, and that my chest was closing up. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first, thinking that it would be a once off, but when I went for my next darshan from Amma the week after, once again it felt as if a laser beam was being pointed at my heart. The feeling would only go away after I had left the stage and walked away from Amma.

  This experience didn’t only happen when I received darshan from Amma. Every Tuesday in the ashram we met in the temple for meditation and lunch. By the time I arrived at the temple the following Tuesday, it was already jam-packed with people. I therefore had no choice but to sit outside the temple on the balcony, 50 or 60 feet away from where Amma was sitting. With my legs crossed and my back against the wall, I shut my eyes hoping to meditate for a while, but almost immediately I felt the same sensation in my chest area. I was so far away from Amma at the time that I thought that there was no way it would happen again, but it did. I had heard many people say that Amma is pure love, that she has no ego and therefore radiated nothing but pure, unconditional love. From what was happening to me, I could only imagine that the pancha karma had opened me up so much that this pure love which was pouring out from Amma was hitting me straight in the heart. I felt this same sensation for the next few weeks whenever I was around Amma, and then, as mysteriously as it had started, one day the sensation disappeared altogether.

  ***

  Of all the darshans I’d received from Amma over the past two years, the one I was about to get from her was to be by far the most unforgettable of them all. After getting my hug from Amma, I always liked to go and sit quietly and meditate for some time. On this particular day she was giving darshan in the temple, and
not in the hall, which is where darshan usually took place. Directly after receiving my hug from Amma I went to sit on the stage away from the line of people waiting to see her. Sitting with back upright and my eyes shut, I tried to still my mind of thought and to enjoy the peace that came along whenever my mind was quiet. My mind, however, had other ideas. The internal chatter continued and it seemed as if my mind had no intention at all of shutting up. Maybe five or ten minutes passed by without me being able to quiet my mind. Eventually, by now feeling totally frustrated, I decided to hell with it. Let me just sit here and relax for a while and give up trying to meditate. This is exactly what needed to happen. I had to stop trying to meditate and to just be. Literally a few seconds later I found myself falling into a deep meditative state. From all the many times I’d meditated before, I knew at once that this was different. Sure, I’d had many wonderful meditations in the past and I had felt moments of such deep peace before, but this wasn’t the same. It felt as though I was very much separate from my mind and merely observing my thoughts as if they were someone else’s thoughts. How many times I’d read before that we are not our thoughts and that we must learn to observe our minds dispassionately, and not to identify with our thoughts no matter how dark and devious they may be, but now, for the first time in my life, I was truly doing it.

  For some time I remained in this state. If I wasn’t observing the thoughts that were passing through my mind, I was focussing my attention on what was happening around me. In this deep meditative state I was in, I was amazed at how attuned my senses were to everything that was happening around me, people chatting, laughing, clapping, things falling to the ground. It was as though I could feel it happening all at once. I had never experienced this level of awareness before. Sitting absolutely dead still, with my eyes firmly shut, everything around me then went silent. So silent in fact that I was sure that Amma had finished giving darshan and that everyone had left the temple. For all the time that I had been sitting there on the stage meditating, I’d had a vague idea of how long I’d been there, but it now felt as though time had disappeared completely. I had no idea whether I’d been sitting there for 20 minutes or for six hours. Yet I was filled with such an indescribable feeling of bliss that I didn’t want to open my eyes or to come out of this state that I was in.

  When I did eventually open my eyes some time later on, it felt as if I was coming back from another world. The same as when you come out of an operation, I could only keep my eyes open for a few seconds before they’d automatically shut again. This went on for a while, me opening my eyes and then closing them again. When I did eventually take a good look around I was surprised to see that the temple was still very much packed with people, and that there was a long line of people standing no more than four feet from where I was sitting. They were right there and I hadn’t even heard them. Curious to know how long I’d been sitting there, I looked up at the clock on the wall and saw that the time was 3:30 pm, which meant that I had been meditating for an hour and a half. Standing and walking out of the temple was a surreal experience in itself. My legs were like jelly and I felt like a little baby learning to walk for the first time. This blissful feeling slowly started to fade away over the next hour, but what an unbelievable experience it had been. Now that I’d had my first real taste of what was within me, I was even more inspired to carry on with my spiritual practices than ever before.

  CHAPTER 24

  It had been almost a year since I had last worked and my money was starting to run low. Having a good idea of how things worked in Korea, I figured that it would probably be best for me to head back there for a second year. My first choice was to find a teaching post at a public school in Daesan, the same town that I had lived in before. When I received word of an opening at an elementary school down the road from the school I’d last taught at, I quickly sent my resume through. Things were looking good and it seemed in all likelihood that I’d get the job, but then, right at the last minute, they pulled the plug and offered the position to someone else. I was now back to square one. However, not long after, my recruiter phoned to tell me that there was a position available at an elementary school in Dongtan, a new suburb on the outskirts of Seoul. At first I wasn’t all that interested. For one thing, the pay was less than the previous school I’d taught at, and secondly I didn’t want to live that close to Seoul, as I preferred being out in the countryside. My recruiter told me that it was my call in the end, but he did warn me that teaching positions at public schools in Korea were becoming increasingly difficult to find.

  “If you turn it down, Jed, there’s a good chance that you will have to sit around for a few months waiting for another position to become available.”

  I weighed up my options and decided that I better play it safe.

  My opinion of Dongtan quickly changed when I got there. Being a new suburb meant that it was relatively clean and modern by Korean standards. It almost had the best of both worlds in that you had the city on your doorstep, and at the same time you had the countryside right there as well. The apartment they put me up in was no more than 300 metres from where I worked, and directly across the road from where I lived there was a park with mini golf, tennis and badminton courts, a skate park, a sports field and a running track, not to mention a handful of walking trails through the surrounding forests. It was perfect. It had everything I needed right there. From being as sceptical as I had been in the beginning, I was now left thinking what great luck I’d had to land up in Dongtan. This, however, wasn’t the end of my good fortune. The cherry on top was the school they placed me at. My Korean co-teacher, the person I’d have to teach all my classes with throughout the year, was a calm and lovely middle-aged lady who was always very organised. Me taking on more of an assistant role in the classroom, and not the other way round, suited me down to the ground as it gave me more free time at work to concentrate on my spiritual practices.

  The circumstances that led me to Dongtan really did deepen my belief that the intelligence behind life, call it God or what you will, had a better idea than I did of what was best for me. I had thought that going back to Daesan was definitely the right thing for me to do, but now it was so clearly obvious that Dongtan was a far better bet. It would be a fresh start and a new chapter in my life. In a way, going back to Daesan would have been like moving backwards.

  After settling in and finding my feet, it wasn’t long before I met a bunch of other foreigners who were also living in Dongtan. I spent the first few weekends going out with them, either to local pubs or to nightclubs in Seoul, but after each night out I always woke up with an empty feeling in my stomach as if it had been one big waste of time. Things that had made me feel so good a few years before – parties, nightclubs, and late nights – now did nothing for me. My life had clearly moved on. So I very quickly moved away from the crowds and reverted back to the solitary-type lifestyle I’d lived in Daesan. It was a good lesson for me though, and a good reminder that I didn’t want to spend my year in pubs and nightclubs.

  ***

  As had become my routine by now, I meditated for an hour in the morning before leaving for school each day. My meditations were coming so much easier than the initial few months in which they had been nothing but one long struggle. Getting up early for my morning meditation was, therefore, no real sweat at all. Once at school, either during my free classes or in the afternoon after my lessons were finished for the day, I’d use this time to read from my spiritual books, or I would watch spiritual teachings that I had found on the Internet. By doing this, it was a constant source of inspiration for me and a daily reminder that I not only had to watch and listen to these teachings, but, more importantly, I had to put them into practice in my daily life as well. I’d never been one for spending a lot of time in front of the computer before, but I now made an extra effort not to waste idle time aimlessly searching the Internet. I also stopped following the news, as it seemed to put so much focus on all the terrible things happening in the world. If w
atching the news was going to inspire me to make positive changes in my life, and to get out there and do good in the world, then fair enough, but if I wasn’t going to put any action into place then what was the point of taking in all that negativity for nothing. Following international sport, however, was still one habit of mine that I wasn’t ready to let go of just yet.

  Having disconnected the TV in my apartment the first week I arrived in Korea, in the evenings I liked to take long walks through the forests across the road from where I lived. These walks became part of my daily spiritual practice in that I’d silently repeat the mantra, Om Namah Shivaya, or the mantra, Om Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu, which means, may all beings be happy. By repeating these mantras, focussing either on my inner breathing or on the syllables of the mantra, it always helped quiet my mind, and by quieting my mind, I was able to get more focus and to be more fully in the present moment. By being more fully in the present moment I’d always enjoy the walk so much more than when my mind was constantly jabbering away with one restless thought after the next.

  ***

  After a few weeks of taking my walks through the forests in the evenings, I then started to walk through the park itself. Strangely, I no longer wanted to be only in the stillness of nature, but now preferred to be around people more. At times when I was able to calm my mind and have a high level of awareness, I’d watch people around me, and my heart would spontaneously fill up with so much joy. I’d see a child playing, someone laughing, or even a couple holding hands, and I’d experience this great feeling of love inside me, as if I was the person who I was looking at. This was a completely new experience for me, feeling such happiness by doing nothing other than looking at a complete stranger. In the past I’d typically only feel happiness if I was the one directly experiencing whatever it was that made me feel happy at the time, but by sharing in the joy of others, it made it so much easier to be happy. What a wonderful realisation this was.