Working with Ayurveda, Yoga, Meditation and Therapy, we see that many people come to most forms of ‘spirituality’, traditional teachings, or different mind and lifestyle approaches, after feeling let down by the more usual forms or common refuges we turn to for happiness.
We all have been or will eventually be in times when the mind – and probably also the body – seems clouded, lacking clarity, energy and brightness. These are the depressive moments of challenges, lack of control and direction, creating moments of anxiety and agitation. Moments when we not only place suffering on us, but also on others. These are actually important moments in our lives where we start looking for answers. Moments when we open ourselves beyond our comfort zone to explore, look deeper and question the norm.
Our ordinary approach in life is to search for happiness outside. We feel a strange sense of incompleteness that must be filled with an outside object, person or experience. Depending on our conditions, they may be money, relations, power, recognition, or maybe even isolation, being different, exclusive. Studying our own past shows us that any such refuge that seemingly gave us that so desired feeling of completeness, in the end proved to be temporary. At worst, it proved to bring more suffering: from passions comes hurt or hate, from the craving for happiness comes sadness, from illusion comes delusion.
After many failures and trials, we start to question: is it possible to have some sort of long lasting happiness? Is peace just an idea? At Plantation Villa we approach it using a combination of holistic elements. The body must be healthy and in it’s optimum state, with the right foods, Ayurveda and Yoga. The environment must be close to nature and away from all the stimulation that we have always pursued so eagerly in the past. And the mind must learn to be.
How can the mind just be?
A human being should learn how to ‘be’. To be is to accept the present moment. To turn inwards into the mind and realise that all emotions and thoughts are essentially just visitors, as they come, they will go. Sometimes the most ordinary things, like the breath and the mere sense of presence, can bring a delightful state of “being”. And that this ‘being’ is the sense, the essence that we have always been carrying. It has never changed.
The search for this root is the search of meditation, of spirituality. As you get closer to this pure sense of being, you will learn how to relate fundamentally to it as ‘you’, and not anymore with the always changing circumstances around you. You will understand that joy, happiness and peace are actually products of this being, and not of something outside from you. You will learn that when clouds start to appear in the mind space, you can remember and still see some rays of sunshine, the brightness of existence.
These aspects of life are not new. They have been practiced for thousands of years, in different places. We aim with our retreats, to provide an opportunity of learning and questioning the norm. An opportunity to explore how to be, how to find a self that is more clear and through that a more permanent refuge into happiness and lasting peace.
