After graduating from from art college and working in London for 6 years I decided to take a year off and travel. In 1980 I flew to Greece. I didn’t feel comfortable in myself and thought that travel might help me to broaden out a bit.
I went around the islands and hung out with other travellers. I was going to move on to Thailand, but I heard from some very experienced travellers that India was a very “different and special place”, so I flew on to Delhi.
Spirituality seemed to be a vital part of the culture in India and more openly expressed than I was used to in the UK. I became curious and took the boat over to Sri Lanka where I enrolled on a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat with the Buddhist master, Goenkaji.
This was the first spiritual thing I’d ever done and it was an incredibly intense introduction to the art of deep thought-free meditation. We had to remain completely silent for 10 days and woke each morning at 6am to start the first of three lengthy periods of meditation. It was a quite a fascinating experience!
Back in India I travelled up the east coast came across a Hare Krishna temple. I stayed there for two weeks trying to understand their philosophy, but it wasn’t my cup of tea…
Spiritual enquiry
Stumbling into it
Some extras
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