The Hidden Path (WINNER OF THE BEAUTY AWARD for Spiritual)

A Drastic Decision

I am changing my life only for one reason: To improve my life.

- Sri Chinmoy

"Yesterday, I did a two kilometer run. For the first time in my life!" I proudly announced to everybody, whether they cared to know, or not, the next evening in the Centre after the Wednesday meditation. We were sitting on the white, carpeted floor of the smaller room, eating Prasad.

(Prasad is food, which has been prepared especially for the occasion. It is placed before the shrine and the Transcendental Picture during meditation, in order to allow it to be saturated with meditative energy. It is taken with gratitude once the program is finished and eaten with care in a separate room. Some consider it one of the highlights of the evening (for some reason, food tastes so much better after a profound meditation), and it is a great way to get light into the body. It can loosely be compared to the host in the Catholic mass.)

Surprised at the unexpected sound of my voice all heads were being raised, and I was suddenly the recipient of a variety of curious and amused looks.

"Very good!" Hanna beamed. "Congratulations!" Anna and Trude chorused. Although I could not help but notice that their enthusiasm seemed a bit strained. Which was not surprising, really, considering that each one of them had already completed at least one marathon.

Still, I was proud of my achievement. 

And to my great joy, my new friends were kind enough not to put a damper on my enthusiasm by pointing out that two kilometer was really nothing to write home about. (Even though my parents would probably have been quite pleased and surprise, had I taken the time to actually write home about it. After all, they still knew me as the lazy child, very unwilling to climb up mountains or even go for a walk.)

I smiled first at the girls, then at the boys, who were sitting opposite from us on the left side of the door leading into the mediation-room.

(By the way: in the meditation room itself, the girls would sit on the left side, while the boys occupied the right. To keep us from getting distracted by members from the opposite gender (no checking out anybody during the meditation! Oh, and you might wonder why I call everybody 'boys and girls'. Well, simply because everybody else in the group did. And since English is not my mother tongue, it came naturally to me and I never questioned it. Only much later did somebody tell me that the reason for this practice came from Sri Chinmoy, who referred to his disciples of any age as 'boys and girls', to remind us that we are all children of God.)

Manuel had given us an additional explanation: countless energy currents or nadis (presumably 72 000 of them) flow through our body at all times. The three main ones called Ida, Pingala and Sushumna, flow up and down on the left, the right and also through the center of our spine. In doing so, they embody specific qualities.

Ida's energy is gentle, soft, soothing, sometimes lethargic, feminine and connected to the moon. Pingala, on the other hand, is powerful, outgoing, sometimes aggressive, male and attributed to the sun.

Sushumna is the central and main energy.

All in all, women usually embody more of Ida's qualities, while men in general express Pingala's. When arranged accordingly, this creates a kind of spiritual energy field, not unlike that of a magnet. Hence the sitting order. (Which, by the way, also existed in Christian churches some centuries ago. Maybe those people knew more than we usually give them credit for...))

Looking around, I briefly noticed that the Centre in Graz was a lot smaller than the one in Salzburg. Apparently, the building had once been a stable, which was still visible in the way the brick ceiling arched.