Jarrod Newell

“I left home with the intention of being away for six months. And then eventually I came home like 10 years later!”

So begins Jarrod Newell’s description of his most unusual story. From a small, conservative town in New Zealand, he traveled across Asia, Africa and Europe before his journey turned into an inward, spiritual quest.

Like many young people from Australia and New Zealand, Jarrod took advantage of the working holiday visas available in the United Kingdom. And like many who ended up in London, he participated fully in the city’s wild, partying lifestyle. After staying somewhere long enough to save some money, he would pick up and find a new place to visit. “We're traveling and combining it with all these mind-expanding drugs and also mind-expanding experiences,” he recalls. “We were so young and naïve, and everything was so new and fresh, and having all these fantastic experiences.”

In between the partying, working and moving around, Jarrod found himself missing the nature that surrounded his town back home, but was too caught up in that hedonistic lifestyle to  extricate himself from its pull. “My life was just full of chaos, because of the lifestyle I was leading. I wasn't so aware of the concept that for every action, there's a reaction,” he says. “I was living overseas and doing lots of sketchy things.”

He made his way onto Amsterdam, where the partying only increased in intensity and frequency. One day, he met an American couple who had spent time in India, where they had attended vipassana meditation retreats. “[The man] just radiated this intense peace. I'd never met anybody like that before, and I felt like blessed to meet this guy!”

Jarrod already had plans to fly to Los Angeles and make his way to Mexico, but even as he did so, he couldn’t let go of the impact this couple had made on him. Dedicating himself to vegetarianism and beginning to consider a trip to India, he started to feel as though he now had one foot in the worldly plane and another tentatively wishing to explore wellness and spirituality. Still, he wasn’t ready to fully commit to the latter option yet. So, his next stop was Africa, where he joined several friends hitchhiking up and down the continent, “having wild adventures all the way through, and drinking lots of booze.”

Eventually getting back to London, his carefree behavior now began to manifest some serious consequences, such as when he fell from a window and broke his tailbone. Growing determined to finally see India, he somehow got emmeshed with some shady figures smuggling gems, and had to hightail it out of the country before more serious trouble found him. Traveling once again through Europe, he landed in Greece to attend the Rainbow Gathering, a kind of hippy festival. At the event, he met a girl who had just completed a ten-day vipassana retreat in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, and told him of an upcoming course in Crete. Jarrod was intrigued, and without bothering to register, traveled there to find out how to join. The course was full, but the center manager pointed out some nearby caves where Jarrod could stay. Then, somehow just before the course was due to start, he was informed there was a place for him after all.

Jarrod certainly must have been quite the sight during that course. “I had dreadlocks, and a big beard. I had no long pants, just only shorts, and I had this big didgeridoo that I'd been traveling around with, busking.” Additionally, as he’d been sleeping under bridges and in train stations, it was the first solid bed he’d slept on in months. The course experience was brutal, but had a deep impact on him, to the point that he became something of a “religious zealot, going to convert everybody to vipassana!”

He was now 25 years old, and returned home a committed meditator. He sat and serve regularly at the local vipassana center, with his family worried that he had got himself involved in some cult. In 2002, Jarrod heard that Goenka himself would be leading a pilgrimage through Burma, and he knew he had to go. And as soon as he stepped off the plane in the Golden Land, he realized he was somewhere special.

“It's like a sacred place, isn't it?,” he says, referring to the country as a whole. “It’s a place where you are careful about what you say and about how you behave. When you land in Burma, that happens! Well, that's how it felt at that time. There is this is richness to the place and the people, like the way that Goenka talked about.”

After a decade of partying his way around the world, he was amazed to see how Burma’s capital city, Yangon, basically shut down by nine o’clock. He took his daily sittings at Shwedagon Pagoda, and was overwhelmed by the generosity of the people. As this was back before the country’s roads were modernized and a new line of Swedish buses were imported, their travel was often more of an adventure than anything else; the large group spent as much time broken down on the road as they did at their intended destinations.

But it was all worth it. He was especially moved by his sitting in Monywa. There he meditated in a cave at Shwe Taung Oo Pagoda, where Ledi Sayadaw used to reside nearly a century ago. It was there that the idea of ordaining as a monk first came to him. Other pilgrims quietly tried to dissuade Jarrod of the idea, informing him that it wasn’t encouraged in that tradition. Yet the inclination stayed with him. While he was attending a donation event at the Goenka family home in Yangon, he actually got a chance to talk with the principal teacher, and ask his advice.

As he had been warned, Goenka was not keen on the idea, and tried in various ways to talk him out of it. But eventually he could see it wasn’t working, and Jarrod still remembers what he finally said: “You go! You be a monk!”

The conversation deeply impacted Jarrod. “He was a very intimidating guy to talk to,” he acknowledges. “He’s full of love, but also extremely a strong character, so it was wonderful that he gave me that opportunity. So then I was like, ‘Okay, I'm going to do this!’” Jarrod realized he now had a kind of trump card in his pocket, because for any teacher who might try to change his mind or warn him of the penalties for ordaining (meaning that he would be removed from long-course eligibility in that tradition), he could truthfully say that he had Goenka’s own blessing.

After the pilgrimage was over, Jarrod took a Satipaṭṭhāna course in Thailand before returning to Burma with his goal of ordination.  Although he can’t remember the name of the monk he ordained under, his descriptions point to The Phyu Taw Ya Sayadaw, who had been one of the very few monastic teachers in the Goenka organization before stepping down to oversee his own monastery. From there, Jarrod gained permission to practice in Mogok, a town famous for its precious gems, and which very few foreigners are allowed to even visit. He was also growing into his role as Buddhist monk at this time, seeing that wearing the robes brought a greater responsibility to the community than as a lay meditator.

“It was tremendously humbling when you go out and do alms, and you go into these villages, so poor, [people living] in bamboo huts,” he recalls. “People got word that a foreign monk was coming, and they get up at four o'clock in the morning and all make food! They'd have a tiny thimble amount of rice, they were so poor that couldn't they afford to give you more than this tiny dollop of a spoonful of rice. And they came out with all the best volition! They put it in my alms bowl, and they were so dirty, I remember it being so filthy, cooking over fires and just covered in stuff, and tipping it into my bowl, and I remember just thinking, ‘Oh, my God!’ It was huge responsibility.”

But as much as he was benefiting from these experiences, he continued to feel a pull to return to Shwe Taung Oo Pagoda in Monywa. Some lay supporters arranged his bus travel there, and Jarrod arrived without knowing a soul there. Introducing himself and announcing his intentions, he was immediately assured that all his needs would be taken care of, and it did all work out well. Sun Lun Monastery offered him food and Mogok Monastery gave him a hut to sleep in for the duration of his stay. With his needs taken care of, Jarrod decided to sit a ten-day self-course in the style of Goenka retreats. Waking up every morning before 4 am, he would climb the hill where the pagoda was perched, and an elderly monk over 90 years old would chant while Jarrod sat in the cave through the morning. Jarrod sat there intensively throughout the day, often to the bewilderment of Burmese pilgrims and tourists, who on occasion even doubted he was a real person and not simply an apparition. After the ten days were over, Jarrod took a day to rest while indulging himself by listening to BBC World on a shortwave radio. He then started his second ten-day self-retreat the following day. He would do this six times in a row, always giving himself just one day between intensive courses.

When he was coming to an end of his stay, an English-speaking monk approached him and asked if Jarrod would accompany him to his home village on the full moon day. Impressed that a foreigner had traveled so far to become a monk in Burma, he arranged for Jarrod to give a Dhamma talk that evening, informing him that he would have to talk for at least an hour. Word traveled quickly, and soon over 200 people had assembled, along with a bevy of audio and visual recording equipment, along with speakers and microphones. Yet word also reached military intelligence, which quickly became concerned that Jarrod was a covert operative donning monk’s robes who was trying to instigate an uprising against the military regime. So as Jarrod was tasked navigating his way through his first ever Dhamma talk, he began to notice soldiers patrolling the outskirts of the crowd with AK-47s, ready to jump into action if ordered. But his talk went off without incident.

Still, Jarrod was greeted with open arms and an open heart by nearly every Burmese person outside the military that he came in contact with, and on more than one occasion was invited to remain in whatever area he was in, with promises that all his needs would be looked after, even if he chose to stay there for life! However, in the end, he decided to disrobe, which was surprisingly painful for him to follow through with. For over a month afterwards, he found himself unable to sleep on mattresses, as he had become so used to sleeping on the floor.

Jarrod left Burma to attend his first long course in India, and then made his way home. For the next several years he worked itinerant jobs and continued taking long courses, eventually joining a 60-day, the maximum amount allowed in the Goenka tradition.

When he was 32, Jarrod enrolled in medical school, where he met the woman who would become his wife. “Now I've got three daughters, and I'm just very much a householder,” he notes. “Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just the way my past has gone. I'm very grateful that I've got the past that I've had, the Dhamma experiences that I've had, and I'm still on that journey. But at the moment, there's tremendous lessons to be learned to being a householder. I've having three kids and I've got a business. I've got a medical practice here in my city, and I travel a lot for work. So yeah, I guess closes that loop in some way, shape, or form!”

Looking back on his experiences in Burma two decades later, he is keenly aware of the previous opportunities afforded in one’s youth, when there are less worldly attachments to hold one down. “At the time of it… I just was open to new ideas,” he says. “If you could look at it pragmatically, you are just wide open [at that time of life]. And then when you're very open, things happen to you. You're open to new ideas, then you find yourself on a plane to Burma. And then your whole life takes a whole different trajectory.”

Still, the memories from that time in the Golden Land are never very far away, and the lessons from those years are precious. “I think about my death sometimes,” he admits, “and when I think about death, I think about my life as a monk too. I guess I know that those experiences and the work that I put in there, maybe it’s going to help me transition to the future… to transition across to something that I don't know. My monk life and my thoughts about death are intertwined, which is interesting.”