Causes and Conditions — How I Came to a Metta Vipassana Retreat
As I set out for my first Metta retreat, I find myself less occupied with where I am going than with how I arrived here. The journey that matters most, I’ve learned, is rarely the one on a map.
It is the invisible trail of small kindnesses, casual encounters, and moments that seemed inconsequential when they happened, yet quietly rearranged the future.
I think back to a long drive many years ago, from Hyderabad airport to Dhamma Nagarjuna, that remote meditation center resting beside the still waters of the Nagarjuna Sagar dam.
Three hours shared with an Estonian yogi, Taavi, whom I had given a ride to, and whom I had never met before and would never meet again in quite the same way.
We spoke, as travelers do, about practice and life and the vague longings that bring one to sit silently for weeks.
Then, when we arrived, we sat together for a while before the bell rang and noble silence descended like a curtain.
Forty-five days for him, thirty for me. And that, I assumed, was the end of our brief crossing.
But life, as always, was quietly taking notes.
After his longer retreat ended, he called me out of the blue, wanting to travel, to stay connected, to keep moving through India together.
He came and stayed with me, and it seemed as something subtle had already been set in motion. We became good friends even though we hardly meet or even message.
Years later, when Luangta came to Mumbai for a two-day teaching, it was Taavi who told me about it. I went.
I mentioned it to another Vipassana meditation Yogi, Sharmila whom I had met just once earlier, as just another event in a crowded spiritual calendar.
Yet it was there that I met Sister Sukha, and others walking the gentle path of Metta — some of them seasoned veterans of Goenkaji’s Vipassana, now drawn toward something softer, more relational, more quietly luminous.
From there, curiosity deepened into inquiry. I read. I listened. I joined online Metta Vipassana retreats.
Each step felt modest, almost accidental, but together they formed a trail — one that now leads me, years later, to this moment, on the way to my first in-person Metta retreat.
All of it, improbably, unfolding from a simple act: giving a lift to a fellow meditator on a hot afternoon in Hyderabad.
The Buddha called it causes and conditions — the invisible threads that keep tying one small moment to a much larger destiny.
About author
Reji Varghese is the President of Forms and Gears, a 53 year old Fixture building company in Chennai. He has been a Vipassana meditator for over a decade and is also a guest writer for a number of national newspapers and magazines.
