Episode 27: Sebastien Le Normand
How many of you meditators out there have not had this thought cross your mind at some point… “I should go to Burma!”
Maybe it was in the midst of a powerful sitting during an intensive retreat… or maybe when you felt yourself trapped inside the worldly patterns of a householder’s life and were looking for some break… or maybe when reading some Dhamma book and wanting to get closer to the source… or maybe all of a sudden, right in the middle of cutting some carrots for the winter soup you were making… wherever or whenever the thought occurred, it is not at all an uncommon one for a vipassana meditator.
And that’s exactly what arose in the mind of Sebastien Le Normand, a French yogi living in Canada. In Sebastian’s case, this thought became a reality, propelling him to plan a pilgrimage to the Golden Land in 2016. He found his time so remarkable there that he ended up visiting twice more. It was on his last Dhamma trip, as he was passing through Yangon, that Sebastien sat down with us to share experiences and reflections about various meditation centers and monasteries.
Looking back on his life, Sebastien describes how he never seemed to quite fit in normal Western society. He recalls how, even at an early age, his father recognized his non-conventional inclinations, and encouraged him to become a monk. After an initial interest in martial arts and Osho, Sebastien sat his first ten-day course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, an experience that forever changed him. He would go on to sit and serve many more courses, and attend a Pariyatti pilgrimage to India. Still, he yearned to visit a country where the culture and society supported the practice, as well as to meditate at sites connected to the lineage of teachers in his tradition.
In this interview he shares where his journeys have taken him, and contrasts his experience as a meditator in a secular tradition with how the Buddha’s teachings are practiced in a more conservative, religious community like Buddhist Burma. A published author, Sebastien also talks the role that nature has played in his spiritual development, why he identifies with the wolf, and how he developed a non-traditional lifestyle that allows him to travel and devote himself to meditation.
After Sebastien’s talk, Melissa Coats joins Zach Hessler from Dhamma Dena, a monastery in the tradition of Ruth Denison, an appointed teacher of Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Melissa and Zach discuss their own itinerant lifestyle as meditators and temporary monastics, and the opportunity that Myanmar has provided to so many Western spiritual seekers following their own Hero’s Journeys. Both harboring deep spiritual aspirations, they reminisce about their early travel experiences within Asia. They also explore the common phenomenon of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and how they’ve experienced this throughout their time in Asia, examining the role of conditioning within the individual regardless of culture, and touching on the prejudice that Western travelers sometimes harbor about Burmese and other traditional cultures, and vice versa.
Whether you are an accomplished traveler yourself or just an armchair adventurer, strap yourself in for this spiritual adventure tale, as we lead you through a virtual tour of Buddhist Burma!