What is Life All About?
Jochen Meissner, the founder and owner of Uncharted Horizons, shared his thoughts at the start of the pandemic when Yangon went into its first lockdown period.
“Meditation is helping me for sure in general to keep calm and not to panic or not to worry too much or develop anxiety.”
“I started in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, IMC. That's what I practice, what I learned, and the story is easy to explain: during my travels in Southeast Asia starting from like 15-18 years ago, I became very interested in Buddhism in general. And that's when I heard the first time about Buddhist meditation practices. It was in 2009. Back in Austria, I became really interested in meditation. So what I did, basically was to use Google and search ‘meditation in Austria.’ And I found out this IMC, International Meditation Center, founded by Sayagyi U Ba Khin, there is one in Austria in Carinthia. I had no idea before that it existed.
I had a look at the homepage and it looked very interesting, so I sent them an email, and they said, 'Okay, we have a course, 10 day retreat starting in two months' from the date I sent the email. I was very welcome to attend. Okay, let's do that! This was in August 2009. I did my very first retreat in Austria. Another one followed in 2012 and then in 2017, at the IMC in Yangon, I did my third retreat.
And I was actually planning now to do one in May, but for the moment, meditation centers don't do official retreats. So I have to wait and practice by myself for the moment at home.
Meditation is helping me for sure in general to keep calm and not to panic or not to worry too much or develop anxiety.
Of course, especially for the poor people in Myanmar, there's no social security, as in Western countries. I mean, there's a lot of monasteries, religious associations, Buddhist as well as Christian and Muslim who donate food in the streets in Yangon, like street kitchens who provide local communities in the poor areas with essentials for cooking or just handouts, rice, oil, beans, like this. So it's really good to see that not only the Buddhists, but I've seen NGOs as well non-religious as well as Muslims, Christians helping the people in need here, which is really great.
And I also personally, we have my tour company, we also have a small charity. And we arranged now in Dalla, which is across the river from downtown Yangon. Very poor area where there is a slum area which we support since several years already. We installed the drinking water filters there. We built the toilets there last year, also with donations from our guests. And we talked to the ward administrator yesterday. We're getting 50 bags of rice today and we'll donate them on Sunday to the people there. So for around 300 families, we can help, because the government, they are helping, but it's not enough.
So the ward administrator is a friend of mine and he asked us for help. And we can buy 50 bags of rice and donate them this Sunday, the last small thing we can do to contribute.
Of course, I do hope that Coronavirus, the whole situation will also have positive effects. Like, just people think what is actually really important in life. What is life about?”