Hearing the word "Nibbana"
It was so fun getting to talk to Melissa Coats about the differences between meditating in Burma, and meditating in the US. She was so inspired by the spiritual opportunities brought by the Golden Land!
“When the Burmese nuns were walking down the line receiving Dana, I just started crying! ”
“Yesterday we were at Maha Dana at Pa Auk. And when the elder Burmese nuns were walking down the line receiving Dana, I just started crying!
Seeing these elder women, many of them decades of deep practice as monastics, and the generosity of all the people coming to donate and making offerings to them, supplying everything they need and more for the coming year of their lives... practicing and dedicating their entire lives to awakening into freedom. Like, so beautiful, so touching! I just cried.
There's so many things that I've been touched by coming here. I came just with curiosity and not so much with expectation of my practice to go any way or what I was going to encounter coming on this journey, just like an openness to see what's possible.
I first sat a retreat at Panditarama and every talk they gave every single night, almost every talk, they were talking about Nibbana. They were talking about reaching at least sotapanna in this life, at least reaching the first stage of enlightenment. It's possible in this very life! And I was like, wow, even if sitting three months at a center in the West, like, maybe I heard the word Nibbana once?”