A life-changing event is only life-changing if we are willing to make changes as a result of it. The first experience I had of this was when I was 21 years old and sat a ten day vipassana silent meditation retreat, just north of Auckland, New Zealand. It was a revelatory experience as I had been interested in meditation for a number of years, but never quite had the self-discipline to practice it much myself, or the exposure to such good teaching to get the instruction necessary to learn it correctly.
It was life changing because as I digested what I learned from the retreat, I felt that some behaviours in my life would need to change. Over the next couple of years I began to cut down drinking, found a meditation group to practice with, and began visiting Buddhist monasteries. I would love to say that it was a smooth ride, but actually it was full of ups and downs. Nevertheless it was life changing.
My second major experience of this was 12 years later, when I had been living in Buddhist monasteries for almost six years consecutively and had been a Buddhist monk for almost five years. I had a period where I was quite sick and began to have suicidal thoughts. I had never experienced something like that before and it began a process of questioning the lifestyle I had committed to, which eventually led to leaving monastic life and moving to Cornwall in the UK.
In the same way it was life-changing, and at the time I had been extremely committed to monastic life, so the change came as a great surprise. Making this change forced me to listen to myself a lot, and gave me a lot of courage in trusting my intuition. When we begin to engage with the spiritual journey, we have to e prepared for changes that we had not yet anticipated. Often we have a plan of how we hope or expect our lives to go, but seldom is this how things turn out. Sometimes we have to change our lives to re-align with our path.
Have you had a life changing experience? If you were to change something in your life, what would you change now?
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