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11:11

The Dalai Lama & His Flip-Flop Meet Obama rama!

The choice of footwear of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, the indisputable leader of Tibet, for his meeting with the U.S. President Mr. Obama rama on February 19, 2010.

(Photo: BBC News)

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Since 1959, Tibet has been occupied by China. His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Tibetan people under his guidance of non-violence have been fighting for basic human rights such as freedom of speech, movement, religion and preservation of their own culture despite the Chinese government's strong and often brutal oppression.

In his tireless effort to gain international support to improve the situation in Tibet, the Dalai Lama has been meeting with numerous world leaders traveling around the world.

The meeting with Obama happened about 10 days ago regardless of the firm and insistent opposition by the Chinese government because they believe the Dalai Lama is a "separatist."

Yes, that's an ill-fitting word for the Dalai Lama, who preach non-violence and compassion for all, even for the Chinese government which many Tibetan might consider to be their "enemy."

Not only the Dalai Lama, but also any Tibetan who wants to speak up for more independence from China so they can enjoy basic human rights, as most of us take it for granted, will be labeled as a "separatist" and persecuted.

Obama is the third U.S. president who had a meeting with the Dalai Lama. They met "privately" in the Map Room of the White House rather than the Oval Office which is usually used for more "public" meetings to avoid infuriating the already-steamed-up-like-a-good-dim sum Chinese government further.

When I saw the flip-flop that the Dalai Lama was sporting at the "private" meeting which happened in the midst of winter, I was puzzled and ecstatic in my shallow assumption about his "humanness" at the same time.

"Aha, he must be making a statement against the treatment of the meeting as "private" rather than "public" by wearing the casual flip-flop", I pondered.

No, the Ocean of Wisdom, the living reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara (the Deity of Compassion) does not operate on that level.

He was actually wearing flip-flop when meeting with George W. Bush who allowed to be filmed with the Dalai Lama in public for the first time as a U.S. President. Of course, that enraged China like a rocket that was backfired.

This is the first photo of G.W. that I actually admire, needless to say.

Anyway, the meaning of the flip-flop will not be known to me unless a kind stranger provide me with the info but I am just glad to come to witness the bright side of G.W. for once and all.

My friend pointed out that this latest meeting of the U.S. President Obama with the Dalai Lama was nothing but a political show that was put up by the Administration to further infuriate the Chinese government for their own purpose which will not likely to be revealed to the mass anytime soon.

But even so, the mystery purpose of the flip-flop will be more worth exploring to me than getting caught up in the political war game between the U.S. and China.

Really, if someone knows what is with the flip-flop, please kindly point out to the source of the info. Thank you!

If you are interested in getting more educated about the Tibetan situation, check the websites below:

Central Tibetan Administration

Tibetan Youth Congress

Tibetan Women's Association

My Home Is Here & Everywhere On Mother Earth

(With nomad horses near the Himalaya in North India, Nov 2009)


It's been about a year since I chose to become homeless.

No, I haven't had privilege of sleeping on the street yet thanks to so many people's kindness.

On 03/03/09 at the age of 37, I left my beloved & cozy San Francisco apartment to be a global resident of this Mother Earth

My First Stop: India.

Yes, it's such a choice of cliche for those who are wanting to be awaken.


(After organizing Ganga Cleaning Day with Swami Nagnath in Varanasi, April 2009)


So I got a backpack full of necessary stuff to live reasonably comfortable plus my laptop and a camera to record & share what I experience on the road.

No, it's actually quite comfortable having the bare minimum stuff that
I can personally carry to sustain my life.

There's nothing I haven't used in the past 6 months in my bag and if there is,
I'd give it away Now.

Keeping it light is the name of the game on the road and in life as well.

Anything extra, I gotta carry on my back so no thanks.

Yes, I'm a big loser with a capital L on my forehead in this materialistic world where the sense of success tend to be measured against what you have.

No, I got no money, no stable job, no car, no house, no fancy clothes,
no, no, no, no, no blingin' stuff that represent that kind of worldly success.

But why homeless? Or you could use euphemisms like nomad or gypsy or
how about Dharma Bum?


(With my Tibetan monk friends in Dharamsala, Sep 2009)


I chose to be homeless to be Me, who is not a representative of all the worldly material success carefully promoted by global corporations for their benefit only while putting the wellness of the people on the back burner like it's some left over food that can be left to rot.

Bombarded by commercial ad one after another every angle of our life like
TV, the Internet, billboards and so on, we are being deceived to believe
what you got is what you are.

Not so.

We are more than what we own materially: In fact, we are more than our stuff.

Do you really think the latest gadget you just purchased would be the thing
you'd be pondering on as you lie on your deathbed?

Really. Think about it.

You would more likely be thinking about who you loved, not what you loved.

Let us not become a sucker to the systematic brainwashing of
tyrannical global corporations to strip us of our humanity
to become a mere "consumer."


(Give it up for our Tibetan brothers & sisters in Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama)


That is what I refused so I chose to be a homeless traveler with
no price tag around my neck.

I refuse to wear what you want me to wear with your logo on it.

I refuse to hear what you want me to hear with your commercial in it.

And I refuse to bear witness to the global corporations'
cold and calculated exploitation of the poor in "developing" countries
in the name of maximizing profit and advancement.

Some say they envy my freedom.

Yes, I want to believe that we all have the freedom of movement and speech in this world of subtle oppression by those who control almost all
the limited resources on this planet.

It is very subtle indeed, and the rabbit hole gets deeper as you go down as many people are busy watching TV to kill time.

All the commercials on TV tell me how important I am so I should be buying this and that to make me feel more important.

But the fact of matter is this:

The world comes around and goes around without Me in it anyway.

I'm no important and this little Me, marina saga, is merely a witness to
this facade of the Grand Drama so called Life.

There's nowhere to go as a homeless traveler, actually.


(Yup. This cow's not going anywhere. She's just chillin' in Dharamsala)


I'd rather just sit here & watch the world does its dance in and out of me without feeling too attached to its story.

Life's too short to think it's going to last forever for me and keep pretending there's always tomorrow to do what I want to do today.

Ultimately, I know that Business is as usual even after this little Me's gone.

So might as well be singing & dancing my own dance with my barefoot and
my pack on the back celebrating the beauty of Life itself.

And of course, let's not forget to be kind to all beings in Life so I can see them do their own dance that they came here for.

In love & gratitude,

Japan, 022710

Sending You Gratitude Through Vipassana

Temping as a Nun:
I am sitting in a motel room in Fresno after coming back from temping as a nun for 10 days in a Vipassana silent meditation retreat in North Fork. It is a tiny sleepy mountain town situated in between Northern and Southern California about 4 hours south east of San Francisco in the beautiful mountain range of Sierra Nevada where a fire station shares the space with a local library. What a combo!

The retreat started on 10/29/8 so I promptly missed all the Halloween festivity fiasco and the most-watched-ever Presidential Election of Obama vs. McCain (I voted before I left, in case you are nosy) but I am not feeling like I missed out on the red-hot-drama-rama considering the precious experiences that I had during the retreat.

In the evening of October 29, I checked myself in at the Vipassana Meditation Center to be oriented for the next 10 days of nothing but being in silence. We were to get up at 4 am the next morning to start meditating from 4:30 am to 9:00 pm, clocking about 10 hours of sitting time everyday. But it's not like you do a non-stop sitting marathon for literally all day long between those hours. I was given 2 meal breaks (oatmeal/cereal/fruit breakfast and a vegetarian lunch a day, but no food after 12 pm), 1 tea break, and 1 hour resting period a day. Naturally, my pants started to feel a bit loose after a few days even if I wasn't trying to pull Jenny Craig on my already reduced size hump.

After 10 days of meditating like this while being deprived of the typical human privilege like talking, reading, writing, listening to music, exercising, or anything that would take my attention away from my mind that is accustomed to receiving an incessant flow of external stimuli, the ordinary things that I am experiencing here now in this space, like the smell of a generic motel room, the sight of obsessively colorful signs for the gigantic fast food restaurants outside the window, the sound of cars buzzing up and down the street, the feeling of the cool metalic keyboard of my laptop that was stored away cold in the trunk of my car for the 10 days, make me feel like I am back in my old reality show exactly where I left off.


Feeling Like a New Buddha:
I was feeling like a buddha when I left the center this morning with no craving for worldly things, but at many moments later now, I am already feeling the surge of desire for entertainment cropping up even if I vowed not to check my email and voicemail, or look at the Internet to see who won the Election until I write about what I experienced during the retreat.

So that was the plan. But I started to hear something beeping in my backpack which was sitting on the bed 6 feet away so I checked to see what could be making that weird mechanical noise and found out it was my cell phone screaming to let me know it was running out of juice and needed to be fed. I thought I had it turned off 10 days ago but it somehow got turned back on mysteriously in the bag and was now calling for my immediate attention. So I picked up the phone, and as soon as I saw that little envelope symbol indicating that I have text messages, I couldn't resist. I checked my texts and the next thing I knew I was checking my voicemail, email, horoscope, MySpace, and looking at the internet to see who won the Election despite my vow.

So much for the buddha mind, eh?

Anyway, this is not to say that the meditation retreat didn't work to train my mind to become more focused and sharpen. I got that, too, for sure. But all I am saying is that I still got a long way to go, probably like 2500 more retreats like this before I can be a master of my mind. Haha.


The 10 Days of Mind Boot Camp:
Those 10 days were no easy breeze for a lay person like myself pretending to be a nun for the time being even if I was basically just sitting on my butt almost all of my waking hours.

It doesn't sound much but it is an intense process because I was not merely sitting but consuming so much energy concentrating to stay in the moment so I could train my wandering mind to observe the present reality as it is not as I would like it to be, even if the reality felt like my legs were about to rot with no proper circulation and fall off from the acute pain of sitting on a pancake-thin cushion for two hours without moving an inch like a fake bronze buddha statue that you can buy for $49 in Chinatown.

If you have never meditated before, try to sit comfortably in a quiet space for a few minutes to see what your mind does. I'd bet my mom's pension account that your mind starts to wander off to all directions like a wild boar as soon as you sit because that is what the mind likes to do. It usually takes so much effort to tame the wild mind and have it to stay only in the present moment because the mind always likes to attach itself to something that has already happened in the past or something the mind wants to see in the future in order to validate its existence. I have heard that we experience about 60,000 thoughts a day on average. Wow! What an incessant thinking machine that we have installed!

Anyway, back to the meditation.

So what is it like to be meditating for that long for 10 days? Is it not boring, you'd ask. Of course, I often time observed myself becoming bored out of my sanity and started entertaining all kinds of action plans for my creative projects, thinking about what type of tea I'm going to have for the evening tea break, either a caffeinated one to get through the evening discourse without dozing off or a non-caffeinated one to keep it real, or trying to remember the last name of my favorite sweet shop owner that I used to frequent when I was attending kindergarten in Japan because I didn't like to face the reality of sitting on a floor with 100 other people crammed in a dark and cold meditation hall while having to hear the orchestra of burping, sniffing, coughing, farting and other unindentifiable noises.

But when I caught my mind wandering off like that, I acknowledged the fact that I checked out of the reality and let the thoughts go and come back to the present moment. It is called "mirroring of thoughts" in the world of meditation.


Blissful Benefits of Sitting:
But don't get me wrong. The experience was not all that downer-oriented only as I may be making it sound like.

On the contrary, it was more like receiving a plateful of gracious and delicious food for soul that nourished and straightened out my entire being physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Otherwise, why would I have gone back again after finishing my first 10 day retreat back in 2006 where I experienced so much mental and physical discomfort like ungodly pounding headache due to caffeine withdrawal or something to that extent, the knee pain that made me feel completely numb from the waist down, or the undeniable but systematically denied urge to communicate with others to share the agony of sitting for 10 hours a day?

What was it that I was craving for so much that made me go back for even more after having all these seemingly unbearable and undesirable side effects?

I didn't know the answer to this zen-koan-like conundrum before I checked myself in for the second round but it popped up to the surface of my consciousness during one of the 4:30 am sessions.

It was the occasional moment of the piercing silence that reminded me of my own divinity when all the meditators in the meditation hall were in a perfect synchronistic stillness being completely submerged in NOW and experiencing the profound sense of peace and harmony that reside in each one of us no matter how deep it may be buried ordinarily. To be immersed in this timeless piecing silence and to go back to the infinite and celestial Void that I came from was the main reason I went back.

Silence is God and God is silence. It is only in this piercing silence that I find solace in my existence, I glimpse on the glaring clarity shining on my path, and I take refuge in the mystery of the Universe in awe.

Nothing else gets me off like this. Nothing.


What is Vipassana?:
So, what is Vipassana meditation anyway? According to the pamphlet that I got from the center, it is one of India's oldest meditation techniques that was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. Even if it sounds like a Buddhist ritual of some sort and it is from the Theravada Buddhism tradition, but in its pure sense it is kept as a non-sectarian practice and no conversion effort is made during a retreat which works for me because I have little interest in organized religions in general.

"Vipassana" is a Pali (the language Gotama the Buddha spoke) word that means seeing things as they really are, meaning everything that we perceive as solid objects including our bodies are actually just pure energy that is vibrating in and out of existence at a very rapid rate so that our mind thinks that they are solid when it actually never stays the same and it is constantly changing its form.

This concept of impermanent nature of reality is beautifully articulated in one of the most beloved and my personal favorite Buddhist sutras, the Heart Sutra:

"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form."

Vipassana is a tool to purify one's mind through careful self-observation of the senses to have a first hand experience to realize this fact, not as a mere intellectual understanding.

Vipassana also teaches you to maintain a perfect equanimity, which means not to have craving for or aversion from any particular physical or mental sensations that you might experience while meditating because everything is just a transitory phenomena and it seems silly to feel attached to something that impermanent. This realization can be applied to any other situations in life as well and I try to practice it every moment although I find myself out of the loop from time to time.

And I feel okay about it. I am not being attached to producing the condition and that is my excuse. Haha!

During the 10 days of sitting, when I got a blissful and tingling sensation of energy flowing freely through the body from time to time, I could feel my mind trying to grasp onto the pleasant sensation. But when I felt stabbing pain through my legs and butt from sitting for long hours, I could observe my mind wanting to stop the painful experience. But the whole point is to train your mind not to be attached only to pleasant sensations while avoiding unpleasant sensations at all cost because that would create another round of sanskara, which is the cycle of karmic bondage of action and reaction - the bondage of suffering human existence.

So I kept on suffering to break the cycle of suffering.


The Silent Obeserver:
This may sound bizzare to some folks, but it was an empowering experience to continue meditating while calmly observing my mind desperately wanting to bail out of the agonizing pain that was happening in various parts of the body simultaneously but if I didn't react to the craving by moving the body, often times the pain would disappear mysteriously no matter how excruciating it felt before the disappearance.

After having experienced this psychosomatic nature of physical pain, I felt like I had an epiphany, like I have finally seen the man behind the curtain who is diligently, perfectly, and constantly conducting the Dance of the Universe alone. I realize that I was witnessing the Law of Nature in action, that everything is truly impermanent. This experiential awareness would help me maintain equanimity through challenging situations that may surface in life.

Be in Now and be in a perfect equanimity. It is as if I have found a silent and detached observer of my own mind.

Experiencing everything as a silent observer, not being attached to things one way or the other and accepting the reality as it is a beautiful place to be because nothing can go wrong in life when you are in this space no matter what happens. You realize everything is just impersonal happenings and this, too, shall pass. By having this realization, you can enjoy and appreciate everything and everyone in life even more while you are around them knowing you will not be around them forever.


Mastery of Love:
It sounds very aloof, I know. But I feel it takes this level of awareness for detachment to be a true humanitarian who loves everything and everyone as you love yourself, unconditionally and without expecting anything in return.

Being in this clear and spacious consciousness of unconditional love and living from the moment to moment without being distracted by my mind's chatter even when I am bombarded with a continual flow of information, is the ultimate state in where I want to reside. That would afford me to always be "anchored in peace and harmony" as one of the spiritual teachers whom I highly respect, Ramesh S. Balsekar, said in his book called "Peace and Harmony in Daily Living." My dearest friend, Erin Reese, gifted me the book before she departed for India again last August. Thank you, Erin.

So herein lies my biggest attachment:

Mastering to authentically love everything and everyone as I love myself with a perfect awareness of the Law of Nature that everything is impermanent while being anchored in peace and harmony every moment.

Thank you for being here and may you also be anchored in peace and harmony every moment through this timeless journey.


In Love and Gratitude,

Marina Saga