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I find traveling in a plane always gives you new perspective. Spending hours packed together in neat little rows with complete strangers feels like prison at first. If it is the red eye flight, you spend the first hour trying to get comfortable, twisting and turning violently, contorting your body into positions that will most certainly make it hard to stand up straight after your journey. If you are lucky enough, you sleep through it all. If not, after hours of struggling, you finally give up and try to read that book that has been gathering dust on your shelf the last few months. Yet, somehow, despite finally having the time to read it, you just can’t. It is too painful getting through that first chapter to delve into the good stuff. So you stare bullets into your neighbor who is sleeping so peacefully, the jealous part of you wanting to wake her up accidently and then apologize profusely while secretly beaming inside knowing that someone else will now be sharing in your suffering. You get excited when the flight attendant says a movie will be starting until you realize that you left your earphones at home and are too cheap to dish out the five bucks for a new pair. Bitterness. Yes, you feel bitter until that bitterness is pressing at every part of your being screaming to get off this damn plane. You are at bursting point when all the sudden all that frustration just melts away as quickly as it came, the last bit of energy wooshing out of you in a giant sigh. At that moment, you finally look out the window and see the beautiful view, realizing just how lucky you are to be in the sky seeing something so magnificent and supernatural, to be part of the heavens looking down on the world below. In that moment a calm suffuses your being moving through you like fresh water making everything so much clearer.
I have never done a Vipassana retreat, a silent, meditative retreat for ten days, but I feel like the inward struggle and end result are probably similar from what I have heard from others. That you have a raging battle going on inside you until the mind and body come together in a moment of acceptance and suddenly all the energy spent seems for not and the ego just falls way. For me these moments come and go. What a gift it would be to have a steady flow of acceptance and inner peace always at the very core of your being.
Filed under: Honduras, Portland, USA Tagged: flying, meditation, reflection, travel, vipassana Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
