ThaBarWa Meditation Center in Myanmar: A different kind of retreat

In February of 2016, I stayed 8 days at ThaBarWa Meditation Center located a bit outside of Yangon, Myanmar. Those 8 days tapped into every extreme emotion one person could experience.

Here’s what I saw/experienced in the first 13 hours at ThaBarWa:

• A dead body (covered, so I only saw cold, white feet)
• A monk slipped and fell in the kitchen, hit his head, and walked away rubbing it
• A band of mostly women chop chopped chopping, from early afternoon to well into midnight (I joined in to chop and peel half a bucket of garlic and onions)
• Meanwhile, a line of monks filled little baggies with rice noodles (the following day was a holiday so we were preparing a special breakfast)
• Living quarters of the elderly and disabled in stinking conditions, each “household” given a cubicle  where they slept and kept their belongings — although small and smelly, lodging, meals, and medical care are provided completely free to anyone who is in need of mercy, that’s why they call this a “mercy village”
• Children ran up to me and other volunteers to hug us…very sweet, but confusing and sad
• Passed by the TB ward….yup.

How ThaBarWa works is absolutely anyone and everyone is welcome to live in this village founded by Sayadaw, a businessman cum monk. The center is kept thriving because everyone pitches in voluntarily. Cooking, collecting alms, meditating, and even medical care, all are done communally.

A Korean doctor started a school with one classroom and tends to her clinic seeing patients two days a week. Every morning monks head out for alms and come back with food to share with the thousands of residents, including the foreign volunteers like me. Oh yeah, I was technically a “volunteer.”

Foreign volunteers were suggested to push the elderly and disabled residents in their wheelchairs, to teach English, to go for alms rounds with the monks, to update the website, or any other ways to put our skills into use. Above all, we were encouraged to meditate. While I was there, a very handsome, very enthusiastic French high school graduate got the lot together to sweep the village clean of garbage. I was touched by his eager sense of duty and determination to help, as with the rest of the volunteers, but personally, I felt helpless and did not want to be involved, and by day two, I was ready to leave. But I didn’t.

There is an enormous load of thoughts and feelings difficult to sum up in one post. I wrote journal entries–just two–from grueling day two and from transformational day five, which I’ll transcribe in a separate post. For now, let’s just say that those 8 days at ThaBarWa Meditation Center were the most challenging but supremely rewarding experiences of growth ever.