Om Mani Peme Hung

Om mani peme hung. Sounds kinda weird and unintelligable, doesn't it? Imagine hearing it, for the first time, chanted by 2,000 other people in a big sports hall outside Prague city centre while meditating at a Buddhist retreat. Yep, it was full on.

My first experience at the Diamond Way Buddhism retreat was seeing, first hand, Lama Ole (the man who guides this lineage of Buddhism) talk with all these people who had come from all corners of the world to learn and practise with him. I was totally lost. At the best of times, I am distracted during meditation but imagine how hard it was to stop myself opening my eyes to look at the people around me chanting these mantras and counting how many they'd done on their mala (beads)... it was a lot to take in.

Luckily, I had my friends M and T, as well as a lovely travelling teacher, there to help explain me through the more foreign bits (pretty much all of it) and so I spent the next few days absorbing what I could and putting everything else in the "to do" basket for later.

It really is a step by step process trying to understand Buddhism, and I know it's not for everyone. But as T said to me in Munich, I kinda already think along the same lines as much of this philosophy so it wasn't all too hard to comprehend. The parts about treating everyone with kindness and trying to shed your mind of negativity and ignorance seems to make sense. The parts about enlightment and crushing cups with the power of your mind, a little harder to take in.

The first night I stayed there, which was actually the second of the course, everyone was quite energetic and sleeping in the sports hall (where they held the lectures and soon 48 hour meditation) was a little difficult. Apparently when you practise enough, meditation becomes a powerful energy source and so these people must not have needed sleep or something. Either way, my mind was swimming so I probably wouldn't have slept easily in a pitch black queens bedroom with a foot massage either.