My awakening journey - by Clara

When I speak about my spiritual awakening journey, there were actually no visions or clearly miraculous experiences. Everything unfolded slowly, little by little.

In 2017, a friend who was living in the same house as me became ill. She began learning about macrobiotics and meditation. I felt curious and drawn to it, so I also started joining the meditation classes and Reiki classes that she had attended. From that point on, I began reading spiritual books, practicing meditation, and exploring a lifestyle that follows the rhythms of nature.

At that time, I was working as an architect - a career I had once dreamed of and had worked very hard to achieve. The workload was heavy and stressful, but I still tried to use every lunch break or late evening to read books and meditate. However, my practice was rather inconsistent and superficial. In meditation or energy classes, many people shared that they saw this or that miraculous thing, while I could hardly feel anything clearly. That actually made me want to continue learning meditation even more, hoping that one day I might also experience those “mystical” things. Back then, my motivation for exploring spirituality was mainly to understand how life works, and to find out how things in my life could become more smooth and favorable.

By 2019, after working as an architect for nearly five years, my work was still busy and stressful. Life repeated itself day after day: going to work at 9 a.m., and on good days returning home around 9 p.m., while squeezing in other classes to improve myself. But I began to feel more and more withdrawn, increasingly lonely, gradually losing interest in both my work and the classes. I just wanted to be alone, close to nature. Deep inside, a desire began to arise - to quit my job, take a break for a while, and return to living near nature. But after so many years of hard study, and so much money my parents had spent supporting me, I had only just stabilized my career - would quitting now be too impulsive? I hesitated for a long time and could not make a decision.

Then I began experiencing sharp pains in my abdomen and went to see doctors. I was examined at four hospitals: the National Cancer Hospital, the Central Institute of Parasitology, Hanoi Medical University Hospital, and Bach Mai Hospital. Each place gave a different diagnosis, with completely different treatment plans. Many results were still unclear and required further monitoring. In the worst case, I might have cancer and leave this life before I had the chance to do anything meaningful.

I began looking into buying insurance. Whenever I asked about insurance plans, I always asked one question: if I had cancer and did not want to undergo treatment, could I receive a sum of money to live my remaining days the way I wished? I thought that if that happened, perhaps I would go to a small village near a forest and live my remaining days quietly. If I died, that insurance money could be considered a small act of filial gratitude for my parents. But if I was not sick and did not die young, then I would have to remain in the city, continue working, and keep paying insurance until old age. These thoughts tangled my mind like a ball of thread.

After visiting three hospitals, the fourth visit to Bach Mai became a major turning point. That day I arrived very early, but when my turn came to take a number for blood testing, there were already more than a thousand people waiting ahead. A long line of people crowded together, waiting. Seeing that scene, I felt both shocked and frightened. I realized that if I kept living in the same cycle - working under constant stress, staying up late night after night, eating irregularly, consuming mostly industrial food - then perhaps I really would die early. In that moment, I decided to submit my resignation and look for opportunities to volunteer on farms so that I could live closer to nature.

In the second half of 2019, I quit my job and began traveling to many farms from North to South. By then my health was already quite exhausted: my skin looked yellow and pale, and I frequently had stomach pain, headaches, spinal pain, and joint pain. Previously I had thought these were simply consequences of working under too much stress or eating poorly outside. But even after leaving the city and living in gardens, those pains continued to appear repeatedly over the years.

At the beginning of 2020, I came to Sister Sili’s place. I call her “chị” (older sister), not “teacher,” because at that time she was simply like an older sister and a garden owner who taught me how to farm. My main intention was only to live close to nature to recover my health and to learn how a garden operates - especially from a woman, since most of the garden owners I had met before were men.

Something special happened while I was living there: it felt as if layers of my masks were gradually being peeled away. Bad habits that I had never noticed before, or that others had overlooked, she pointed out very directly. That shocked me deeply. At first I resisted strongly. All kinds of thoughts appeared in my mind: sometimes I justified myself, sometimes I blamed her or thought badly of her, but at other times I began to examine myself. Then situations in daily life kept arising one after another, allowing me to compare and recognize what was actually true. Some habits and personality traits took many years for me to change. Being around her was sometimes very uncomfortable, because it felt like I could not pretend or hide anything. But deep inside I knew she wanted the best for me, and that if I could get through it, I would truly become a better person.

During the Covid pandemic, there was a long period when she was not living with us. At that time I joined many spiritual groups and studied online with various teachers. She did not speak much about spiritual knowledge, but whenever she noticed that I was becoming too absorbed or overly trusting in a teacher without discerning right from wrong, she would simply give me a few “keywords” so that I could reflect on them myself.

During that time she also sent me a message saying that if I wanted to leave, I could leave. But I wanted to stay. Before that I had stayed in a meditation monastery and had passed through many other gardens, yet only here did I truly feel that I was beginning to change my bad habits.

By 2023, when I started meditating together with her and participating in the educational work she was guiding me toward, I finally overcame the heavy drowsiness during meditation that I had struggled with before. I also realized that working in education truly helped me continuously reflect on and examine myself. From that point on, I became more trusting and steadfast — both in her and in the spiritual path.