I arrived in Costa Rica 2 weeks ago, embarking on my vision quest journey for the next few months.  My aim is to contemplate and understand deeply the self-inquiry question “Who am I?” I want to go deep within every fact and detail and meditate as much as I can in the true sense. My intention is to enjoy the perfect awareness, love, and bliss of my true self forever. I blocked out this time in my schedule because I wanted to dedicate this time to my spiritual practice, meditation, and life’s actual work. I want to be helpful to others in the journey of life and to help others understand the pure reality, it is important that I should be fully awakened myself first.

Honestly, the time I was leaving from the US, was no less than a marathon in preparation to free myself of previous priorities. A long list of ‘to-do’s to orchestrate with the logistics of packing, moving, selling stuff and letting go of belongings. The most amazing thing in the whole process was to let go of my stuff. It was bliss in itself! Initially, when I left Australia, I gave up loads of stuff but then shipped over some things which I chose to keep at that time. Now, I have let go of everything to get rid of my attachments with materialistic things. The kind of road I have decided to walk on, demands much more than getting rid of physical things. It also demands me of getting rid of my ‘busy’ schedule and simply live every day with no day-to-day commitments or agenda. Such bliss! It’s the sabbatical that I used to hear of other people doing it and now I am experiencing the stillness and quietness myself.

I used to be busy all the time in the past and have always worked hard for my living, constantly working or doing stuff. In my past, I would feel guilty if I was not working or doing something productive, thinking I had to work 24/7, that was a program for my conditioning.

Slowing down was so foreign to me. I rarely used to watch a movie for constant 1-2 hours as that would require sitting still and switching off the mind. And here now, I am operating at sloth speed! Totally surrender, going with the flow in the present moment.

When I wake up now, I am in silence staring out at the trees, birds, leaves or clouds outside my bedroom. Observing the stillness within, realizing how the mind has controlled my life with all the thoughts, opinions, concepts, beliefs which have caused pain and suffering.

My daily practice is to go beyond the mind and have a direct experience of being grateful, knowing and loving what is in the moment and asking the questions “Who am I?” “What is behind and beyond all this?”

Currently, I am reading all the books from the self-realization series found at www.seeseer.com. I am learning from Masters among which one is Mooji, whom I will meet in August at his 10-day silent meditation retreat in Portugal.  I am taking up a lot of meditation classes to achieve inner peace.Also; I am listening to CDs of different teachers plus watching conscious movies with powerful messages. Ironically, movies that I have seen in the past but understood their meaning now like ‘What the Bleep’, showing us that we have been conditioned and programmed by this world we live, and we make it real. We create our reality. The world and the “I” exist only as notions neither as fact nor as reality.

So far I have understood that we are in this world but not of it. We shouldn’t engage in world activities deeply. We should forgive ourselves on all levels for creating this collective consciousness chaos. We are nothing more than pure consciousness. Try to recognize your true self as undifferentiated, unaffected by time, past, present or future and enter peace! We keep exhausting our energies on things that shouldn’t really matter and forget to acknowledge the things we should.

Let’s instead of putting our energies to unnecessary soul depriving things, invest our energies in things that really matter! Be grateful and kind to one another as much as we can.