50 years ago, on November 4, 1956, my parents and we four girls moved with a wagon, two horses and six duvets, from Hungry to Austria. I was four years old; it was the time of the Hungarian Revolution and the border was open for two weeks. Many Hungarians and Germans took the opportunity to escape the communist regime which had taken over Hungry after the second World War. Our grandparents had been disowned and forced to leave Hungry ten years earlier. The reason for the forced exodus was the loss of WWII by the Germans. Our German families had been living in Hungry for four hundred years, but the Hungarians felt they had the right to make them go home.
Where do you go "home" to, after 400 years?
When we arrived in Austria, I remember that I completely stopped speaking for a few months. I did pretty much the same thing when I moved to America in 1980. Although the circumstances where completely different, to America I moved on my own. Through my studies of theater and acting, I was determined to find a teacher. I was led to New York City and interestingly enough, the teacher I found was Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, not an acting teacher but a spiritual teacher who helped me to act in life.
In my journey, the period of not speaking was rather interesting in the sense that it helped me to adjust, to process more deeply and to avoid ridicule when making mistakes. It is a very painful time when all that is familiar to one is taken away. But through that pain the inward movement becomes much stronger and the inner voice becomes more audible.
Hazrat Inayat Khan uses the metaphor of a boat that we learn to direct through the inner voice:
"The way to develop the power in oneself to withstand all disturbing influences in everyday life is to quiet oneself by means of concentration. Our mind is like a boat in the water, moved by the waves and influenced by the wind. The waves are our own emotions and passions, thoughts and imaginations; and the wind is the outer influences which we have to cope with. In order to stop the boat one should have an anchor, an anchor to make the boat lie still. Now this anchor is the object we concentrate upon; if it is heavy and weighty then it will stop the boat, but if this anchor is light the boat will continue to move and not be still, for it is partly in the water, and partly in the air.
"But in this way we only control the boat; utilizing the boat is another question again. The boat is not made to remain motionless; it is made for a purpose. All of us do not seem to know this, but finally this boat has to be made to go from one port to another. And for the boat to be able to sail, various conditions must be fulfilled; for instance, that it is not more heavily laden than its capacity. Thus our heart should not be heavily laden with the things that we attach ourselves to, because then the boat will not float. Also the boat should not be tied to this one port, for then it is held back and will not go to the port for which it is bound.
"Furthermore, the boat must have that responsiveness to the wind which will take it to that port; and this is the feeling a soul gets from the spiritual side of life. That feeling, that wind, helps one to go forward to the port for which we are all bound. Once it is fully concentrated, the mind should become like a compass in a boat, always pointing in the same direction. A man whose interest takes a thousand different directions is not ready to travel in this boat. It is the man who has one thing in his mind, and who considers all other things secondary, who can travel from this port to the other. This is the journey which is called mysticism."
This is the insight and understanding I have gained into the different steps I have taken in my life and this is the way I have arrived here in Tucson ready to open up a center, "The Core", and the graduate school of the Institute for Applied Meditation, for guiding and helping all those who are ready to listen to their inner voice and embark on the journey with their boat ready to move where the wind of the divine spirit is taking them.