I go to Berlin again the following weekend, this time for sheng zhen with Master Li and Jing. I am tired from working and thinking non-stop, and arrive tense from the early morning travel (the train ran five minutes late, and it was a rush at Spandau to find the stop for the bus to Kladow, which I caught by the breadth of a minute). At the start, I notice that I am full of sadness, and that the heart weighs heavy. But after just one day of practice I feel relaxed and happy again. What a relief.
I had booked a room at a small hotel in Gatow, a ten minute bus ride away on the road to Spandau, and when I arrive it seems utterly deserted and abandoned, much to my dismay. I panic for a moment, but then I see a notice outside the door with what I assume to be an emergency phone number which I call. Indeed within a few minutes a man arrives in a car, and takes me to a small dark room that faces on the noisy main road. He understood I was not happy, and after some mobile phone deliberation, I am shown to a lovely bright room with a balcony opening on to the west bank of the Havel River overlooking a dock with a few motor boats. It feels like heaven. Here I let the mind take a rest; I don’t even open the laptop which I took thinking I’d catch up on the missing entries in this blog.
In the evenings I sit on the balcony watching the river, almost as smooth as a lake with a barely noticeable current. I watch the sail boats and rowing boats passing by, a covey of ducks gliding alongside the lilies that grow at the edge of the water, swallows flitting back and forth, planes taking off from Tegel airport to the north, and vague figures on a sandy beach on the opposite shore, a man throwing a stick into the water for a dog to fetch. There is a soft silence broken only by the sound of oars slicing the water, the occasional gentle lapping of water on the shore, and the song of birds with the falling of dusk. The first night, Germany wins a soccer match against Portugal in the European Cup, and fireworks explode in blazes of green and red cartwheels along the sky line to the east and north.
The qi gong is just what my soul needs. And even more than that, I need the open, friendly, and embracing atmosphere, and the warm welcome I receive from friends of a friend. One of the people I meet is Heinz, a 70 year old man from Freiburg who is staying at a pension near my hotel. He is a priest cum psychotherapist, who studied theology in Goettingen as a young man, with a deep experiential knowledge of the dharma, and we have heartfelt conversations about Germans and Jews. I feel I can be honest and frank with him about the challenges of my stay here, and he speaks about his own difficulties. Once, he attended a psychologists’ workshop in California; they were working in a fish bowl, a woman was in the center of a circle and supposed to address each of the others with eye contact, but she refused to acknowledge him. Asked to address the omission, she burst out in anger, protesting that she was Jewish and hated all Germans. The facilitator told Heinz to join her and made them talk mouth to ear in whispers, until they ended up hugging and crying. He has childhood memories of enemy fighter planes strafing people in the streets with indiscriminate bullets, and of sitting in a bunker with neighbors hysterical with fear from the bombing, not knowing whether they would emerge alive. I told him how burdened I felt with the collective trauma of the victims, and he told me of his personal burden of the collective guilt. But, he said, the past is holding us back. He bent towards me, looking me intently in the eyes, and said we have to leave the past behind to move on to the future, and the only way to do so is to be with and work through the pain. It is a moment of healing.
