Interview with Hanna Lompa on SWR2 “Tandem Rakete” about “Meditation, Mindfulness, Awareness”.
The design student Hanna Lompa, 23 years old, is sitting still after Christmas until New Year and meditating at the Winter Youth Retreat at Schloss Heinsheim near Bad Rappenau.
Run. Enter. Way … into the unknown. Silent anticipation. Curiosity. Uncertainty. Courage. Hustle and bustle around us. Hustle in the head. Overstimulation. Heavy baggage. Desire for healing, for space, as can be as you are. Time for yourself. Detach patterns, drawers, prejudices and expectations. Expectations of oneself and others. Breaking out. Mobile off. Switch off. Freedom. Shared train. Across the country ticket. Everyday life in the neck. Slowly you can breathe deeply. Longing for understanding. Forever. New, familiar and familiar faces. Familiar and strange fellow travellers.
Five people with the same goal. Castle Heinsheim. Anyone who felt the need for a break from everyday life, from the ego, from his mask, was exactly right at the Winter Youth Retreat. This community full of warmth, tolerance and emotion gave room to open, to be authentic. Like a lotus flower that dares to open. In countless, creative workshops everyone had the opportunity to unfold his individuality, his creativity and his abilities: Silent Walk, free dance, Acrobatic-Yoga, early-bird-yoga, calligraphy-workshop, singing, art-workshop, yearly review – Preview workshop, game evenings and blind dinners. We meditated twice daily and had the opportunity to continue meditating at any time. There were lectures on the subject of meditation and impulses to find your own way and go. These were held by Karl-Ludwig Leiter and Richard Reoch and there was room for questions and discussion. There was also an inspiring young man, Ali Can, who talked about his vision of building bridges. Especially with people who have prejudices against refugees, to make contact, to listen to them, to understand them, to learn what their fears are. To see that behind this fears, this anger people are stuck. In retrospect, it was the greatest gift for us to start the new year with wonderful people, in silence and movement. It was like a reset button, buying a blank canvas, putting down a knight’s armor or cleaning a glass. A new beginning to grow, a chance to grow. A chance to work with his neuroses and whims – to be allowed to. To see that you are basically perfect in itself. Melancholy. Pain. Do not want to go back to everyday life. About full. Open. Empty. The luggage is back. I can show my vulnerability. Feel the sense of being good as we are. Learn to show, then others show up too. To be open, to be warm, to ask interested questions, just to get deeper and to reach out to other people. Enriched, touched. Open heart. Inspired. Zest. Slow steady dissolving … of the community. Farewell. And then alone again.
And if they did not die then they still meditate today …
Text: Sarah & Julia Heyden, Simon Engelke, Lisa Fuhrmann
Picture: Sarah Heyden
Blog Editor: Dennis Engel
“Final stop Bensberg. Outside, the sun shines and shines through the dusty windows of the tram. I grab my backpack, which still has a clean shirt, another pair of socks, my toothbrush and the letter from Sita with the invitation to the meditation instructor seminar, and get out. Outside the station are two witnesses, Jehovah “Representative,” who advertise with the booklet “Truth of Life” and “God is the Answer.” For a brief moment, a thought shoots through my mind: The big question mark of life can be found everywhere, including here at the final stop. Somehow, the two do not look as if they were flooded with the joy of life and the love of God. But who knows? Maybe the sky is gray. I look around and look for some orientation. Then I make my way towards the castle.
What awaits me on the course? Can I really teach someone to meditate, me who has so many endless questions even after years of meditation? My stream of thought is interrupted again and again by the breathtaking view over the Rhineland. Then cloud towers, which are like the giant, changing structures of the sun counter-storm. And the endless blue of the sky! I stop for a moment and take a deep breath, the castle is already visible in front of me. At the hotel I put my things in the room and rest for a while. Hotel rooms always have a peculiar appearance: they give you the feeling of privacy, you can feel at home for a brief moment. But you still feel that the place does not really belong to anyone, it has no identity, no real soul. A small leaflet, a pack of gummy bears on the bed, the television as black box silent. I open the windows and let the refreshing, woody air of the castle garden flow into the room. Then I take off my socks and lie down on the bed. It feels very good to be barefoot after the long journey. First stretch and relax. I come here to rest and feel how I arrive.
It’s five to six, and the letter says Karl-Ludwig Leiter wants to hold the greeting at six in the evening. So shoes on and go. I enter the attic of the meeting rooms. Most participants are already there, Karl too. It’s a heartfelt reunion, and Karl beaming at me with joy: “Hey, nice that you’re there!” Besides me, there are eight other participants in the room. The most diverse people from the most diverse worlds and lives, but all with alert, questioning eyes. I notice at the beginning that probably nobody really knows what to expect. My neighbour and I are jokingly a bit joking: “I hope this is not an assessment center!” “Did you read the page So and So from” Wie vor Was “, as it was in the invitation window? Hopefully that will not be queried ?! “” Nene, do not worry, Karl himself has no desire for such a stress! ”
We introduced ourselves, giving us a little insight into our lives. “Why are you meditating? What’s your story? “Unbelievable to hear how meditation, as a silent companion, runs like a thread through people’s lives. Everyone in a different way, and it seems to me that everyone has managed to make meditating a natural part of their lives. Then Karl tells us what we will do this weekend. He explains in his own words once again the correct way to bring a person closer to the technique of meditation. Then role-playing games should begin, the leap into the cold water. The situation always consists of a participant who would like to learn to meditate and a teacher. The instructor is sent out of the room and the rest of the group looks at a character together, which the instructor will then meet on the return to the room. I think the idea of roleplaying was great and I got in touch immediately. I play a devout Catholic who shows some interest in meditation. My role seems to lie to me, and as extra preprogrammed shoot me scenes from my childhood in my consciousness, which I immediately flow into my role. My father was an organist all his life, and as a child I had to go through quite a few church services, so now was the moment to make something productive out of my childhood traumas. The situation seems to be with me, because in the middle of the Unterweisergespräch the church tower bells of the castle begin to sound. My instructor is doing well. With endless patience and clear direction she makes it clear to me that meditation does not add to my “faith”. Meditation is an exercise, a path that is possible for everyone, no matter where you come from or what you believe in. After a while I trust her composure and calm. Although I play a role, I find myself ready to open and let go. We meditate for a moment before the exercise is over.
During the day, there are countless other great encounters and crazy characters. You could actually write a book about it alone. But one thing is very clear to me: Every instructor explains the meditation in his own way, although one explains the same exercise. I feel that everyone is explaining from the very bottom of their hearts. They also tell the story of their own lives, directly and clearly. We all agree on one thing at the end of the seminar: We all have abdominal muscle hangovers and are totally happy to have had such great moments together as a group. The journey continues, you also get to know yourself better in this direct encounter that takes place when you pass on the meditation technique. There is no concept that you could write before, no roadmap, how it will work. There is a counterpart, a big question mark hovering in space, and the big wide room. I once entered a room, never meditated. Complete openness, the pencil touches the blank sheet of paper for the first time. How exciting, how crazy! I close my eyes for a moment and take a deep breath. Somehow, right at that moment, a phrase from Chögyam Trungpa comes to my mind:
The bad news is:
We fall endlessly through immense space. Without a parachute and without anything to hold on to.
The good news is:
There is no ground!
Many thanks to Karl and Susanne for making the seminar possible.”
Time out – that does not exist!
Anyone who has worked hard for many months, weeks, days and countless hours has earned a break. We speak of well-deserved holidays, the much needed break and we look forward to a lot of “time and rest – only for me”.
That is ours. Vacation. This was fought in tough collective bargaining, we have cleverly already registered at the beginning of the year in the company vacation planner … as we later on the beach early in the morning our deck chairs with the proven crew towel will mark. The date has been fixed for months. With red felt-tip pen there is a thick spread over two weeks in July: MY HOLIDAY!!! So big are the letters that nothing can force its way into it. And every day that July approaches, the red of pen becomes more intense, haunting – more promising.
And then we count the days already loud. Tell my colleagues that we only have to endure eight weeks, and then we finally start. Eight weeks, that’s 56 days or 1,344 hours … and with each passing day, it’s 24 hours less. And then it is sometime so far: then the white areas on the holiday calendar have moved up to within a few centimeters of the big red “M” of MY HOLIDAYS. IBIZA – I’m coming!
The work is not really exhausting. At least not as heavy exercise exhausts and makes you tired. The effort comes from a different place. It is the uniformity of activity. The routine. The daily monotony of always the same processes. It starts at nine o’clock. But only if the traffic jam in the city center is exactly as it always is: annoying but predictable.
Water pipe break … then it does not hurt anymore with point eight. Even if it annoys us every day: punctually at eight is still better than half an hour later. The lost time you have to stay longer in the evening … and then you are trapped in the death trap of the rush hour.
Nine to five. Every day. Monday to Friday. January to December. From apprenticeship to pension. That’s so. We got used to it. It has to be like that, they all do it that way, you can not do anything … that’s life.
In the morning, we look forward to finishing work. It’s especially hard on Mondays. there is still so awful much week ahead of us … from Wednesday it’s better then again. Half. Half the week has been completed and done – finally brought behind us. Then it’s Friday soon … YEAH … weekend. And in May there are only 1,344 hours to go to vacation. They are still going around. This is always the same every year: The time from spring to summer passes much faster than the slow autumn, which seems to freeze slowly to winter in ever-growing nights. We like that time finally disappears faster and we are glad that we have the endless wait behind us. Full of impatient expectation, we look at what else can and will come.
Once we really think that old habit of our minds to the end, we actually do. Anyone who is happy in the morning, that it is soon evening, at the beginning of the week can not wait for the weekend and in the winter is looking forward to the summer … the accustomed but imperceptible to a fatal attitude to life: NOW to look forward to LATER. To consider the COMING more important than what is NOW. PROMISING a FUTURE to be more valuable than the REAL of the PRESENT.
If you have toothache, then you may like to yearn for the end, the agony. And if you’re now involved in complex issues, you may like to crave quick solutions in the future. And if we do not really know what’s right at the moment, of course we have to work with patience and long breath on the clarity that only arises when the current confusion comes to an end and new perspectives have opened up for the future. All this is not a problem.
This attitude becomes a problem only when it has become independent. When, through years of habituation, patterns of behavior have formed that have been ground into constant habitual patterns through constant repetition. We have become accustomed to finding assembly basically stupid, to consider the so-called “free time” better than the “idle time”. We have divided our lives in business hours and after work, in work and vacation, in everyday life and leisure – and we try our lifelong time even split in terms of time and time off.
Time out – that does not exist.
Physically not. Even the few people who can understand Einstein’s theory of relativity from the reality and the unreality of time will probably not be able to fully understand the notion of time-out that has become modern. The roots of the word time-out lie in sports. There, players of a team are taken out of the game at certain times and then they can take a so-called time-out on the substitute or penalty bench. The game continues though. For everyone – except the one who has to wait for his new job on the sidelines. Until the time-out is over. The time passes anyway. Only we just do not play anymore.
Of course, the idea of a break is obvious. The desire to simply get out of everything is comprehensible and quite legitimate. If you work a lot and intensively, you need breaks. To rest and to regenerate. Every break has a beginning, a middle and an end. In between, time passes exactly as it does outside of the breaks. They are subject to the same laws of physics as the time before, after, and in between. That sounds banal and obvious. What’s remarkable and amazing is that we emotionally perceive and rate breaks differently than they actually are.
Breaks we perceive as the VIPs of the time. There is the usual and normal time. As experienced at work or during school hours, and there are breaks, vacations, holidays. These times have a special meaning for us. They are more valuable and important than all the days before. Holiday days do not match the grey of everyday work. Colourful and promising, they sting out of the stew of the ordinary. With the most diverse expectations, we have charged them with pictures, ideas, wishes, hopes and aspirations. So we feverish the dream vacation – so we hope for a super time.
When we go on vacation, we prefer to travel to distant lands and places that are very different from what we already know and have become accustomed to for many years. The first hours at the dream beach are breathtaking. Picturesque sunsets, intoxicating cocktails and exotic aborigines. Everything new and intense, exciting and fascinating. This feeling lasts for several days. It would be best that would go on forever. That’s how we think for days, weeks, maybe months. And at some point, we got used to the view from the terrace to the sea imperceptibly day after day. The sunset is still breathtakingly beautiful, but every day the same sea and the same view make the sun and sea a habit. Every day nice weather is just nice until it finally rains again and the habit is interrupted.
Even on a dream vacation you can get used to.
Because dreams also become a habit. If they have only dreamed long enough, repeated often enough, and thus become uniform and predictable step by step. The problem with habit and everyday life is neither local nor time. It is up to our attitude and attitude to places and times. If we give a higher priority to foreign and exotic places than the well-known ones and if we attach more importance to time-out or breaks than the times before, after and in the middle, then we do not solve the fundamental problem by not changing the location of the world: to be out of place can be where we are and not experience the moment when it happens.
The ability or inability to be here now is the key. Who can not be here HERE, probably can not be HERE somewhere else. Because if you’re in another place that is so distant, this new place will be the only HERE we can have. HERE is always HERE. Here or there. There, where we are with our whole being – that is, with body and mind and with heart and mind – there is always HERE HERE. There is no other place here than where we are NOW.
And there is no NOW other than the NOW at this moment either. Certainly, we can look forward to the holiday in the coming July long before … but even this pre-joy is always only NOW. And if our actual experience in July of the beach of Ipanema has become reality, it must be balanced with the ideal image of pre-joy. Unfortunately, almost all pre-positions are ideal pictures … pictures that follow an idea and all too often an ideal, or rather precede it. And then one thing is almost inevitable – the disappointment.
That the beach is not as immaculate white as in the brochure, that the locals are unfortunately not as friendly to us as in the stories of other travelers and that the weather is very different, as predicted in the weather forecast. Or everything is much nicer than you imagined. But you have to imagine the holidays not so nice, not so ideal. If one looks pessimistic and with great skepticism toward the upcoming vacation, one can preempt the disappointment … but who wants to go on vacation with someone whose view into the future of fears, fears, forebodings and doubts is clouded.
An open view is necessary.
One who does not know in advance what to do. A view that is open to the new and the unforeseen. A look that is not obscured by ideas and burdened by desires, hopes, expectations and fears and may even be hopelessly overloaded. To see a way that leaves the unplanned, the spontaneous and the creative space, to surprise and enchant us. Magic never happens planned. The magic of the moment is not designed on the drawing board of future technicians … it always arises when two things come together.
BODY and SPIRIT – HERE and NOW
When we are HERE, with body and mind and when we are NOW, with heart and mind. Then the force of reality with all its potential can knock us off the stool of habit, the capricious wind of unintentionalism can blow fresh air in our faces and chance can pour out its surprise bag full of surprises on us.
But we – we live everywhere. But not HERE – just not NOW.
We can fly to the moon, build or use complicated smartphones, and develop or work through complicated organizational structures. We can travel to the remotest corners of the world and have knowledge of the long-gone millennia or clear ideas of what the future will bring us. If we look closely, we notice that we live either in the future or in the past. Every perception of our life, every thought and every reflection deals either with something that has already passed away or with something that may or may not happen in the future. EVERY thought! ALWAYS! More precisely – almost everyone. Of the hundred thousand thought impulses of an afternoon, perhaps three or four deal with the moment HERE and NOW. All left-over thoughts belong to the past or the future.
All past moments are irretrievably over and all future experiences remain as long as unexperienced possibility and an unreal idea … until every near or distant future has become NOW. Reality always takes place NOW.
HERE and NOW to experience, you can learn. You have to learn again. As a child, we still knew how to do it. When we were immersed in our game … and there was still no separation, between experience and the one who is experiencing it right now. We and our experience were one. Can become one again. We have just forgotten … this ability has only been spilled, superimposed by adulthood and by reason and the seriousness of life. We can conquer this widely open country again. With not too much effort, we will succeed effortlessly.
This effort is called meditation.
