Episode #110: Journey Into Renunciation
Ariya Baumann’s spiritual journey began far away from the tropical surroundings of the Golden Land. Growing up Christian in a small town in Switzerland, she spent her childhood skiing and hiking the Alps with her family. But as a teenager, she began to have existential questions about God. “How can this loving God allow so many children in Africa to starve and die from hunger?” she wondered. “How can this loving God allow all these conflicts and wars going on in this world?”
As she began to investigate possible answers to these deep questions, she came across some writings on Buddhism, and was immediately intrigued by the promise of meditation. “By doing it, one could experience and realize for oneself what really exists, and what is real,” she remembers thinking. The first text she found on the subject of actual practice provided these very simple instructions: “When you sit, just sit. When you eat, just eat. When you go, just go. So basically be present in each moment, and know what you're doing.”
Ariya hiked to a small mountain hut determined to apply these teachings on her own. “For one week, I tried to implement it: just eating, when I was eating, just doing the dishes, when I was doing the dishes, and so on. It was only later that I realized that this was actually my first retreat!”
Although she wanted to take a more formal meditation course, she couldn’t find anything offered at that time, and instead took off on a trip around the world. In Thailand, she joined a course at Wat Suan Mokkh, and then took several Tibetan retreats in India. After running out of money, she returned to Zurich, where she worked and joined a local meditation group. Two years later, she was off again, noting simply that “my hunger for more meditation was very big!” Between more Tibetan courses in India, she fell in love with an Australian man, and ended up following him back to his country. While staying with him, she learned about an upcoming visit from Chan Myay Yeiktha Sayadaw U Janaka, a teacher in the Mahasi tradition, and made plans to attend a meditation course with him.
U Janaka encouraged Ariya to slow down her movements, so as to be able to observe every moment of mental and physical action. But she initially resisted, feeling that this instruction was better suited to a beginner. Still, she tried anyway, and the result was stunning: “Within 24 hours, it was unbelievable. How beneficial that was! My meditation deepened very quickly, my concentration became much deeper, the mind became clearer. Mindfulness became so sharp and accurate. I could barely believe that this was possible, by the simple fact of slowing down, and being more present, more mindful.”
The year was 1992, and the Burmese government wasn’t exactly open to foreigners who wished to stay for an extended period, no matter the reason. Still, U Janaka managed to get her a six-month visa. In many ways, her life has not been the same since.
She decided to ordain temporarily as a nun. Most would-be aspirants have one thing or another that they are simply so attached to that it challenges the very idea of renunciation. For some it is intoxicants, while others simply love books and movies, some can’t give up good food, while others don’t wish to let go of sexuality. For Ariya, her biggest attachment was song and dance, as she had spent a lifetime training—and was herself a teacher—in that field. But she decided she could let go of that love for a three-month period of nunhood, and proceeded to shave her head.
“The three months went by so quickly,” she recalls. “And it was so interesting to practice the meditation. I had left everything in Switzerland, so I had nothing to go back to. So I told myself, maybe another three months, and I'll finish my meditation and I'll be enlightened, or at least halfway through to enlightenment! And so I continued, six months past, still not yet enlightened. But the practice was so interesting, and I wanted to stay on.”
Additionally, her renunciation only grew stronger. “I realized that by that time, I had lived without singing, dancing, playing the piano… and I was still alive! I didn't die yet. What was surprising was to realize that I was actually happier with my life. I was more satisfied, I was more at peace… Then it was clear that further transformation, and uprooting all greed, hatred, delusion, it's a possible thing to do. The mind can change and the mind can be transformed. Because I was happier than before, there was nothing that pulled me back to Switzerland. So I simply stayed on in Burma at the center.”
As months passed into years, Ariya stayed in robes, in Myanmar, her practice bringing her further into mundane reality. She was amazed by what she experienced. “With the meditation, mindfulness, and concentration, and looking carefully, just like becoming an electronic microscope, we see more and more deeply into the true nature of this body of physical processes.” While she felt the Tibetan courses were more based on intellectual understanding, she appreciated the simplicity and practicality of the Mahasi method. “A skillful teacher guiding you in the practice, this was enough! It is so simple, but so transformative, so profound, being able to go very deep with this just very simple approach of being present with whatever is happening in the body and mind.”
As she became integrated in monastic life, she also learned more about the surrounding Burmese culture as well. She picked up the Burmese language during her breaktimes, when she went into the monastery kitchens to make various desserts. This ability eventually led to being asked to translate for Chan Myay Myaing Sayadaw U Indaka. She moved from the Yangon branch to the Hmawbi monastery, where longer meditation retreats were held, and became the foreign manager there. And she developed close friendships with local practitioners, which had a profound impact on her. “Burmese people understand the importance of the Dhamma practice, and really see it as the best thing you can do with your life!”
Other things were harder to adjust to, such as the preferential treatment of monks over nuns, and male meditators over female yogis. She tried to encourage her Burmese female friends as well as nuns to be more empowered, but found them “resigned into their position, and into their role.”
Over time, she was asked to move beyond translating, and actually teach herself. “That was quite unusual as a nun, as a female being,” she notes. “But in a way, I thought, at least this can happen. Although it was me a foreigner, and maybe that facilitated the whole thing, because I don't know how easy it would have been for a Burmese nun.”
Her teaching career only grew from here. “I enjoyed teaching,” she says. “Being in a teacher position was also continuing my practice, just in a different form, a different aspect. But I took that as a further deepening of my practice, and more and more invitations came.” Alongside Daw Viranani and Chan Myay Myaing Sayadaw, she began offering intensive mettā retreats in English. Before COVID, the course was so popular that yogis would fly from all over the world to attend, and it was usually filled just days after registration opened.
Today, Ariya is heartbroken about the current coup. “My heart is bleeding, and I'm so sad about what is happening in Myanmar right now,” she notes. Still, she lived through dark times there before. She recalls once asking a friend a political question at the monastery, and urgently being hushed, as there were military spies who posed as meditators attending courses.
She also reflects on the role of foreign meditators in supporting the Burmese people during these challenging times. “The practice transforms something in that person, and the person becomes kinder, more compassionate, sees things more clearly, more patience, more forgiving, reacting less angry, less greedy. So each person, on a very small scale, can be an Engaged Buddhist, in putting into practice what insights or wisdom has arisen through the practice, or seeing more clearly the interdependence of human beings or natural resources available in this world.” From these small acts, she sees the possibility of doing more, and details the wide range of humanitarian projects that she and other Western meditators have taken up in the country. “In this way, we are engaged in giving back something to the Burmese people.”
As the devastation from the conflict continue to wreak havoc in the country, Ariya comes back to how much gratitude she has for the priceless spiritual lessons she learned there. “The fact that in Burma, the practice of meditation is respected and understood as something very precious. This makes Burma so special! Practicing in the West, it's okay. But to practice in that field of the Burmese Dhamma, where there is so much understanding about the value of it, that makes it so special to practice in Burma. I find many people who have come to Burma have felt the same.”