The Long and Winding Road
Coming Soon…
The promise of the spiritual path has always had a strong pull on Annai. Growing up in a devout Catholic family in Barcelona, she preferred spending time in church while her friends only wanted to watch TV, and even began asking how she could one day become a Catholic nun.
When she was fourteen, Annai was pulled in different religious directions. Against her parents’ wishes, she secretly attended services at a church of another Christian denomination. It was also during this time that she read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, which served as her introduction to Buddhist thought. But her spiritual quest was dramatically put on hold when she fell in love two years later and became a mother at just eighteen years of age. Annai began volunteering for the Red Cross while training to be a social worker.
But she was now feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of life, and made plans to attend a retreat on dying, in hopes of better understanding her suffering. Ironically, the course was held at what would later become Dhamma Neru, a vipassana meditation center in Spain the tradition of S.N. Goenka, where she would return to many years later to sit silent retreats. And more ironic still, there she met the person who first introduced her to Buddhist meditation, a monk in the Thai tradition.
The monk taught Annai the basics of walking meditation and vipassana practice, along with sharing stories of the Buddha. Later he spoke about Amma, an Indian woman who teaches compassion, and they made plans to meet her during Amma’s upcoming visit to Spain. And also for the first time she began to hear about Goenka’s teachings, though she resisted taking a course when she was shown the strict timetable. Yet as intrigued as she was about these new spiritual paths, she hesitated exploring them any further, as they were so far afield from her Christian background.
For a full year, the monk continued to work on Annai to attend a Goenka course; partly to just get him to stop badgering her about it, she finally relented. She found the course extremely difficult, and cried every day. However, in the end, she realized this was a path she wanted to dedicate herself to.
Although she hadn’t traveled much, she decided to venture to India, to better explore the traditions of both Amma and Goenka. At first, her trips had to be balanced with caring for her two children, but as they got older, other family members could look after them, and she was able to extend her time away. On one of her trips, an opportunity presented itself to take the 8-month Pāḷi course offered at Dhamma Giri. Initially she balked, fearing her English wasn’t good enough, but a persistent and sympathetic staffer persuaded her to apply.
She worked diligently on the course, and got tremendous benefit from her extended Pāḷi study. And there was certainly serendipity! Periodically during the course, her youthful aspirations to become a nun would appear in her mind. Then at the end of the course, the teacher approached her and perhaps sensing a deeper potential in her, wondered whether she might consider becoming a nun, even if just for a year. Annai reflexively dismissed the idea at first, insisting that she was hardly worthy of such a noble calling. But then even more surprisingly, as soon as she stepped out of the building, she found herself walking behind two British women wearing Burmese nuns’ robes! She took all this as a sign that maybe the stars were actually aligned in that way for her.
She struck up a conversation with one of the nuns, Venerable Canda. Explaining how she had gone from a vipassana meditator to a nun in Burma, Venerable Canda played some chanting from her teacher, The Phyu Taw Ya Sayadaw. The voice touched something deep in Annai, and she quickly determined that she must find a way to meet him.
Soon after, she attended a long Goenka course, and every day she found her mind veered to thinking about whether to travel on to Burma, or return home to her children in Spain. Still unresolved in her mind at the end of the course, Annai was approached by a fellow yogi she had never met before, and who offered Annai her nun’s robes, telling her she had a deep feeling that Annai would “do something with them.” Annai took this as a further sign of her path and booked a ticket to the Golden Land.
Annai went right from the Yangon Airport to Hmawbi, the village where The Phyu Taw Ya Monastery was located, and ordained as a nun then and there. Although it was a ceremony she had never even seen before, nothing about the experience was strange or unsettling to her. “This was absolutely familiar for me to shave my head,” she recalls, “it was just a deep connection for something very, very familiar for me.” As she settled into her robes, she felt joyous living the life of a nun, and familiarized herself with the routines of the monastery. As she only had five months remaining on her visa, the Sayadaw instructed her to spend two months on samādhi and three months on vipassana, so she essentially went into a 5-month intensive course.
The Phyu Taw Ya Sayadaw was her only guide for that time, and even though she was only able to converse in a rudimentary way through several layers of translation, it was worth it. “I think we had some deep relation from the past, I am quite sure, because I was so confident in him,” she says. “I felt a strong vibration that was giving me so much strength for meditation.” As the course continued, Annai started meditating all the time, either in her kuti or the pagoda—even drawing inspiration from Webu Sayadaw and foregoing sleep. Seeing her progress, the Sayadaw gave her permission to walk into the forest beyond the monastery, where she began meditating for long periods of time under a large tree.
Although she didn’t interact much with the lay supporters at the monastery, they made a deep impact on Annai. “The people there are most people amazing thing I found,” she remembers. “I never will be able to repay the depth of gratitude I have to the Burmese people, because this was for me amazing. I never in my life have had this incredible support!” She describes one moment where she simply broke down and confided in a monastery volunteer that she couldn’t go on, feeling overwhelmed by being the recipient of “too much love.” But the volunteer responded that the more she meditated and the deeper her practice became, the more merit those helpers would gain, so that was the best way to pay it back. “The amount of support, of mettā, and of practical things that I got in Myanmar, I never--before or after-- got this in my life.”
Annai was fascinated hearing her Sayadaw’s stories about practicing in Maha Myaing Forest near the Indian border, where he had a branch monastery; in particular, the wild animals and the dhutaṅga practice he was following really intrigued her, and she began pleading to visit. But The Phyu Taw Ya Sayadaw hesitated to give his permission, partly because it was unusual (and considered dangerous) for a female renunciate to live alone in the forest, and partly because there were many legal hoops that foreigners to jump through in order to acquire the correct permits to a region that was largely off-limits to tourists.
Good fortune once again favored Annai, however. She learned of a very wealthy supporter who was planning to charter her private plane for a religious ceremony at the Sayadaw’s branch monastery, and Annai talked her way on board. Although various police were waiting when they landed, the donor’s elite status and connections allowed Annai to pass without incident. It took many hours of driving down the bumpy forest road to reach the isolated monastery, during which time she was told stories about the powerful female deva who lived in the region. Finally, they pulled up beside the small bamboo hut where just a few monks were residing, and the ceremony soon began.
After it was over, The Phyu Taw Ya Sayadaw indicated that it was time for Annai to leave, but she again protested, pleading that it would be safe for her to stay. The Sayadaw again hesitated, but when a local woman came forward and volunteered to cook and offer food to Annai for however long she stayed, he relented. Two more bamboo huts were ordered to be built, one for each woman; the local woman started in preparing Annai’s food, and Annai began her practice, which included a vow of silence for one year.
Annai had never practiced in such a remote place. From snakes in her kuti, to armies of termites who could demolish entire structures in just days, to the sound of elephants in the distance, to the playful and occasionally naughty monkeys in the trees… it was a totally new experience for her. Moreover, whether large or small, each wild animal and insect was a possible threat, but Annai soon realized that the best way to confront them all was to develop stronger mettā. But the real challenge was yet to come.
As she later found out, the reason many Burmese people resist heading deep into the forest is the wide-spread fear of invisible beings populating more remote regions. As Annai had also harbored a life-long fear of ghosts, hearing about this unsettled her as well. But with her teacher gently guiding her to face these beings by sending them mettā, she became quite interested in her interactions with them. “The more you go into samādhi, the mind more easily recognizes these beings,” she notes. As her practice deepened, she realized the power of her mettā was ensuring her very survival in the deep forest. And what is more, she found that by sharing such wholesome, positive energy with these beings, they, in turn, looked after and cared for her. This led to developing a relationship with, and even something of an attachment to, specific deities living in the forest. While Annai recognizes that such talk may be confusing or uncomfortable for Westerners, she explains that it is widely accepted in a matter-of-fact way by many Burmese.
“If you avoid this, you are avoiding a big part of the teachings of the Buddha,” she says, “because the suttas describe what conversations they have with the devas or brahmas or any kind of invisible being. I am grateful that when I faced some of these experiences, I had somebody there to explain to me what it was happening, rather than saying ‘Oh no, don't think about this!’ Because I remember the time that I shaved my head for first time, and I had a recollection of past lives, from the beginning. But nobody was explaining about this, so I didn't know that even it was possible!”
Eventually, Annai returned to Hmawbi, and finally, after six years in total in Myanmar, back to Spain, where she planned to re-engage with the vipassana community of S.N. Goenka. Although she had pursued a rather diverse meditative experience, she always felt close to her first real teacher. “I felt from the beginning a very deep connection with [Goenka],” she notes. Visiting the country off his birth and sites connected to his lineage there had only strengthened her feeling of connection with him, and the stories about Burma that he told and the gratitude he expressed strongly resonated with her. “I was full of gratitude to Burma and of course full of gratitude to him! So I was feeling that this was [still] my teacher, even when I was learning some meditation before from another teacher.”
Before going back home, Annai took a silent retreat at a Thai vipassana center in the Goenka lineage, but she found it difficult to adjust to such a rigid timetable and confined to an indoor setting surrounded by dozens of other yogis—this was such a huge difference with the present contours of her practice as they had evolved in Myanmar.
On the course, Annai also found how profoundly she missed the Golden Land. “For most of the time, I was missing so much Myanmar, the Myanmar people their warmth and generosity, and their way of understanding life.” So one of her primary aspirations in returning home to Spain was to share the wealth and depth of teachings that she had learned in Myanmar with the Goenka community there. However, it was a bumpy road.
First, she had intended to remain a nun, but she found that because Westerners were unfamiliar with the appearance and needs of a monastic, Annai concluded that she could accomplish more as a lay practitioner, and made the difficult decision to disrobe. Then, given her meditative background, experiences and aspirations, the limitations of her involvement with the Goenka vipassana community became apparent. As a result, she sought to support a monastery that could support yogis in the dynamic, varied kinds of ways she, herself, had experienced in Myanmar. This led to the establishment of Sarana Vihara near the Montseny National Park, outside of Barcelona. She decided that if people there could not go to Myanmar, she would bring some part of Myanmar to them. “This will be my way to also recognize the so many things that I received from Myanmar.”
The opening ceremony of the monastery took place following the military coup. Annai found it to be an auspicious opportunity to emphasize the situation in the Golden Land in the attendees’ hearts and minds, as well as connect them to the precious Dhamma still to be found there; and her own thoughts went back to Myanmar and the dangers that her many friends and supporters were now facing. “Now the time is here to do something for Burma and to do something for the people,” she says, describing the donation drives that her monastic community has launched to garner support for projects back in the Golden Land.
Of course, her strong memories of her time in Myanmar continue to inspire her current work. “It was overwhelming: the generosity, the care, the support of the people [there].”