mindfulness

Nature tries to hide the buildings and walls that the Frenchmen built. It can take the banyana tree a hundred year, but it will in the end strangle the mother tree (or mother wall). The young people want to look forward here, want to learn English, earn money,  buy an i.phone (everbody has one), maybe travel abroad, maybe by a car - but in crowded Saigon it's probably better with a scooter. Often whole families travel on just one scooter. The veterans and the people in party wants to hold the memory of the colonization. But it's not correct to ask if many of them comes to Con Dao, it's a tricky question. It's expensive to go here. Caon Dao is prepering for more turists now. A whole huge hotelbuilding is stopped halfmade a bit south of the city. Waiting for both Vietnamese and foreign visitors, but with walls still in grey concrete it looks like a building from the old Soviet. The very small fishermans village just beside is a contrast with it's tiny shops

The most difficult thing  when you meditate is often to get to the cushion. At least if you haven't get a schedule for it. Here at Con Dao, I have neither a cushion nor a schedule. So it's difficult for me too. But a chair will do. The next thing to handle is the monkey mind; all the thoughts, regrets, failures, plans and desires that stops your concentration. But that's the exercise - to go back to the breath - again and again... You might label the thoughts as "planning, planning" and then go back to the breath. After a time you will get to know yourself a bit more, often specific thoughts tend to come  back. Sometimes even good ideas or things you had forgot will come to you. I then use to write them down and then go back to the breath. Sometimes I even count the breath to ten and then start again... It's often impossible to find a totally quite place, so if sounds disturb you it might be good to label them too. This day it's a bit more

(First : updated video in yesterdays blog - my "monastery") Dharma-Burgers isn't a new phenomen, but the term must be pretty new. It's about commercialization of the Buddhist symbols or using them in the new age movement and so on: http://www.lionsroar.com/2015-the-year-in-dharma-burgers/ Quite funny but also a sign of the time. With some exeptions, religion doesn't seem to be as important as it used to be. My parentes where quite religions, my father listened to the mass on radio while he took the Sunday bath:-) But my grandfather was an active baptist. My grandmother was active in a church too. But my mother just listened and sung religios songs. And her children made the degeneration even worse.... Actually David Bowie met a Tibetan lama in the 60th and studied Tibetan buddhism for some years. The Lama, Chime Rinpoche, i still alive and in a video he's talking about skilful behavior for young people: "You don't have to become a Budd

A black squirrel jumps from tree to tree just in front of the ocean. The little black dog comes to me again and I cuddle him. I look in his eyes and I see the wilderness in them, he's a strax dog alright. And suddenly i bites me. It's in a playful way but I anyway stop the cuddle  and go away. A bit later, a mouse in my room. Now I now who's been eating of my banana. My "monastery" (above) suddenly becomes a bit unfriendly. Yesterday I found ants in my bed. And sandflies has biten me, Then I remember what I wrote about nature yesterday. And I have to smile; If I would like to put a value to nature as such, I also have to value it when it Comes to me. The ants where not so many and the bites from the flies doesn't bother me. The mouse was quite cute and curious too. I asked for a mous trap in the resception, but they hadn't any . Now I'm glad for it... The insects and animals are just looking for food, as I do. They don't hurt m

How can it be that all the dogs around the hotlels by the sea are so peaceful? They are quite many and most of them are without a necklace. They seldom bark and I have never seem they fighting with eachother. I don't think they have had any upbringing or training at all. But they get food from the restaurants from time to time. Maybe we have interpreted dogs in the wrong way. Maybe they know how to behave if we treat them well too. If we don't shout to them or harm them in other ways. If we look at the planet from an animal view, we would have a different picture. Of course they cannot have the whole picture, but it seems that neither can we. If I read a Swedish newspaper, I can read about climate change at one page and about the new cars or trips to Thailand at the next. Is as af we don't dare to understand the situation. Stephen Hawking speaks out though; http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35344664 The greates dangers for us is nuclear weapons

I have found my "monastery". A cheap hotel by the sea. But I'm nearly alone here. Just some dogs, I cuddled a small one today. The place is simple like a western monastery. But the view is beautiful. Not as from the last hotel: Every hour you could here the city clock and at six PM the daily news were transmitted to the whole village. It was okay for a while, but here I can hear the sea and I can see the small lslands and the city pier. The small fishing boats coming to the pier to unship their catch. Young people gather to see what fishes they have. The fishes are still alive and are transported in a tub to the restaurant where they have to stay in narrow aquariums until someone eats them. Even small sharks who are starring at the restaurant from their prison. I eat vegetabilie dishes even if the boats are so small so I guess they cannot threaten whole stocks. Now I stay away from all of this on my  new "monastery".               I

Where nowhere to go With no direction home. Been to the coralreefs today, snorkeling. Beautiful reefs and very intact. So many colours, both on the reefs and on the fishes. (Not my film though) Also lovely people on the boat, from Germany, Scotland, Austraila and of course Vn. Great to talk to for a while... But afterwards I felt lonely. I guess I wanted to be by myself for a while, but when I ate my dinner, at an English owned place, I had the feeling not to belong anywhere. Not in Europe and not in Vn. And they played the song in the heading above. It must have been the time with the nice people around you, and the contrast at the restaurant that made it like that. Then it's good with mindfulness (and with a blog).  The concept of  mindfulness includes to accept the fact that you will never be completely satisfied. You will always look for new things to satisfy your mind. You think that luck is around the corner. So you are looking for the next move and the move

I'm not interacting with Vietnam. Just with this little Island, it's inhabitans as herons, an eagle, a lot of hens, dogs, cats, people, trees and so on. It takes some time to adjust to a new place, so far away from home. The warmth, the new bacterias in food. It's as when the stomach has adapted, the whole of me can be relaxed and really here. I really don't know anything about Vietnamese culture, but I know that most of the Swedish culture is imported. It isn't so old and has a mix of influences.  I guess it's so here too..  Sweden i changing and so is Vietnam, the countries have no permanent self.  Con Dao is changing a tiny bit because of my precence here.  If I behave well my influences will be good and so on.  The French colonizers have left many bad memories here... As the Americans and the former South Vietnamese regime. I'm sure these wounds still are alive.  A former  American soldater killed some children i Vietnam d

Where ever you are you will have to learn how to smile. Perhaps because of the weather, or because that women here are used to smile. Men more seldom smile to strangers like me. Carsten Jensen, a Danish writer and journalist, wrote in a book after a long stay in Vietnam, that men here seemed to be less curious and more comparing than women. As if they would adore you for your money, but they can also be mocking you as a foreigner from the west that only can say a few worlds in Vietnamese. Western foreigners that has caused so much suffering here in the past. I think Jensen generalized some. Most people here seem to be quite indifferent to you. In most stores women don't smile to you but both men and women smile back if you smile to them, at least most of them. So, as in mindfulness, it's about interaction. Im many ways I feel at home here: In the shops, they let banknotes lay higgledy-piggledy in a drawer. Usually we don't do that in Sweden, but my family did it a

To be or not to is NOT the question according to (deep) Buddhism. That means, in the real sense, we are never borne and we will never die. Since we have no separate self, we are more of continuations, than individuals. Continuations  and relatives to the first bacterias on Earth. We must have a sense that we are individuals, otherwise we would probably go mad. But take David Bowie (RIP), he said in an interview that he made no distinction between himself and his alter egos. But on the other hand his latest wife has said that she married David Jones, not David Bowie. Bowie was the stage figure, Jones the real David. So what is it that dies when somebody dies? Is it like when an alter ego of Bowie dies - or is Ziggy Stardust still alive (at youtube)? My mother died several times. When my brother died, one of four children, a part of my mother died too. She went into the door too alzheimer. She lost her memory for what happened the last years, in that way my brother could go

I have changed hotel. This is good too, but now I don't live just beside the sea. Yesterday evening I didn't do the usual walk on the empty beach at the late evening. I didn't lay down on the warm sand to watch the stars and to meditate. Instead I talked with some  travellers from Poland about experiences on the Island, hotels, beaches and so on... But we also talked about Sweden and Poland, refugees from Syria and the EU. And in a sudden I lost the contact with Con Dao, in my mind I was back in Europe. The German world for mindfulness is achtsamkeit, I often use the similar "aktsamhet," in Swedish, in English it would something like "caution". I lost the caution yesterday - i guess I was too much in the conventional world (in a Buddhist context, that means the normal, materialistic world, where we are chased by our desires). If you are going to be mindful, it must include Emptiness (of a separate self), Interdependence and Aimlessness. Yeste

Took a tour on a motor cycle today. Up in the montains where the air was clear and a little bit cooler. Often you could here monkeys moving around in the trees, but you seldom saw them. Some squirrels and birds, many beautiful butterflies. We love nature, at least most of us. But I must confess, i don't like monkeys so much. Maybe they reminds me too much of myself... At a remote beach, just beside the jungle there was a sign that warned people to leave their clothes on the beach if they where going for a swim. Monkeys do not seem to be so mindful, at least not these longtailed macaques... I have to practise a lot, so I don't end up like them... But then again, monkeys have not at all destroyed so much in nature as we have. We are so called "intelligent" primates. But was that intelligence a mistake from nature? 

Today I found the that the water in the at the beach was coverd with a film of olika or petrol. It smelled bad and my eyes got irritated. It must have come from one of the small fishing boats. They still use ignition engines here, they sound nice but are probably not so good for the enviroment. The waves are big today and the oil will disperse but not go away totally. Some part of it can be transported to the mainland 200 km away. Marco Polo, the adventurer, stayed here at con dao on his way to China. That must have been the first contact with another culture for the inhabitans. Now it's another time and the world has really been connected. Yuval Harari, the historican, points out that the long trend is that the world is getting smaller and smaller. There has been many wars that have stopped the trend for a while, and some contries, like North Korea, tries it best to be outside of it. But in a wider perspective the trend is unbroken. It can be symbolized by the green

It might be easy when you are are on vacation, but it's possible to be mindful every time, at least to some degree. When I swam in the ocean today, I tried to be with the body as much as possible. It's as with sitting meditation, you now and then loose your focus and begin to think. So then you have to go back to the body; how does the water connect to the arms and so on, is it warm or cold, how does it behave when it meets your head and hair? Is the water very salty, does it feels fresh? It's possible to do the same when we take a shower. We can get in touch with the water and body, we can even be thankful to the body; the skin that protects us, the heart that beats so many thousand times a day, and even at night. And when you come from a northern country like I do,  it's very easy to see the sun as a gift. To let the sun caress your face, to feel that you are one with the sun and just let the thoughts go for a while. The body is a gift, yes even our whole life

It's hard to do nothing. If we don't sleep, the brain is working all the time. Thoughts are jumping from tree to tree like monkeys. I came here to meditate, to be by myself and to write. I have found that the whole island is very meditative. Not many turists here, even don't many inhabitans. It is as if the Island is waiting for the big tourist-boom. A Vietnamese men was wondered when I told him that I will stay here more than three weeks. He suggested that I should rent a motor bike and to go snorkeling on a boat. I will do that, but it's no hurry. I appreciate the stillness at the camping where I live in a little hut just near the water. So I say to myself; "slow down, don't hurry and don't do any special things if you don't fel you really have to. To swim, to go to a restaurant once a day, to buy some fruit and to enjoy the stars at night at the beach is enough. And be aware of your footsteps in the sand, the evening breeze on your face

Con Dao is an artipelago  province outside the south of Vietnam. When westernes think of Vietnam we often think of the war, even if most of the young people here want to forget about the war. It's history here now. But the party wants the people to remember, because it was the communist that won the war - even to the cost of about three million dead Vietnamese people. I'm in Con Son now, the biggest island in the artipelago. I have just visited the Tiger cages. It's not a pleasant experience. I visited first the French prison, then the American one. They were quite similar, as if the americans just had copied a model. From 1954 it was the South Viet Governement that took over the use from the Frenchmen who started the whole thing. But the Americans built a new prison with tiger cages as late as 1971, only years before the peace. I'm sure they let the south Vietnamese people do the dirty job there. So this is the country from which the man of peace, Thich

I was wrong about Tenzin Palmo. She stayed in the cave for twelve years! But the last three years was the most isolated. And it was more of a hut built on a montain. Her happiest years were in the hut. But as the rest of the world, buddhism is patriarctic. And she still struggles with that. But she has temper and even humor and a big smile. She has shoosen her way and shown that anyone can do it. Though her way cannot be copied, she courages us to find our ways, inside our outside a tradition. But i think it's also possible to mix traditions, for example mindfulness with the culture you come from. So here's Tenzin Palmos story. Which story is yours?

I think Tenzin Palmo is right. She spent three years in à cave in Tibet, meditating a lot of course. Now she teaches other people, as it is her duty to awaken us. I hope she succedes before it is to late... As she says in another interview ; "Buddha didn't succed". So who will? In the moment I'm having a retreat on my own, in a much more lazy way. Just a month on a not so desolute island in Vietnam. But not many people here, so I can be with myself, with the breathing sea and with the stars above. Maybe I will know myself a little better after this...