A Teacher of Compassion
Tony Fernando’s spiritual journey was just a delight to hear. Sharing how he transitioned from being an Opus Dei Catholic to a Buddhist monk in Burma is definitely a unique story! In the following excerpt, he talks about how his study of compassion was not just out of professional interest, but was also something he wanted to personally experience and embody. If you like what you read, take a listen to Tony’s full interview.
“They were sitting, like oh my gosh, like, some of them were not moving for a couple of hours!”
“I would say that the training was hard, because I'm used to mindfulness practice. And I did occasional metta, like, probably 15-30 minutes. I actually targeted that monastery, I'm not sure if it's Joah who told me about it or Viranani the nun, that they do a lot of metta training there.
And I forgot to mention, I'm also doing my PhD now, here in Auckland University, and my topic is compassion in medicine. So I'm very interested in the whole field of compassion, not just a certain emotional state, but also from a neuroscience perspective, also from a health perspective.
So I was thinking, since I'm interested in this topic, this is my topic of research. I want to learn metta from a place that really teaches metta. So I want to go to a place where compassion is taught. That's why I chose Chan Myay Myaing Monastery, because of its compassion training.
And I found it really hard doing metta training the whole day! It was hard, because it's very different from mindfulness. It was hard! But the teacher was saying, 'just carry on, carry on. It gets easier after about a week.' But my first week was really hard. And after a week, it became easy, like it became less effortful. It was flowing, whereas the first week, it was very mechanical, you know, the different stages of of doing metta. But after one week, 'oh, yeah, he's right!' It's more fun. It's easier, but still quite a quite different experience from just doing mindfulness of the breath or the body.
But one of the things I realized, is that I can actually sit for a long time. Nothing like the monks there! They were sitting, like oh my gosh, like, some of them were not moving for a couple of hours! And then here I am, after about one hour, I'm already congratulating myself. It's like, the ego is there. 'Tony, you've done what? You can do a little bit of walking now.'“