Young people and sore soul

For twenty years I have been teaching  yoga, aikido and meditation. During these  years I’ve lived many significant experiences, I have had the possibility of starting relationships with important people, masters who have educated me. They taught  me to how to find interest and give a sense to life, set me on the road which  had allowed me to overcome great difficulties. Now teaching for me is a way of expressing my gratitude for what I have received.

At present in our Center, ASIA, something interesting is happening: many young people are undertaking the practice of inner search with surprising diligence and seriousness.
Now ASIA relies on several high qualified teachers, who can recognize in the various classes youngsters  who live a deep existential uneasiness. Often these youngsters  have not even the words to express their anguish, they simply have sore souls.
We teach them how to calm down and look inside themselves with clearness, in order  to develop the search of sense of existence with acumen and a serene critical mind; to not withdraw in front of any question, because young people’s questions and doubts  are sacred.
And if their answer should be “life is a non-sense”, so they must face this answer without giving up, showing that the only fact of being-there, aware of being alive, is a huge impact, an abiss worthy of speechless amazement.
This is today’s Zen and ASIA’s young people are recognizing it:  they know how  to give value to what takes them away from Non-value.

I have often been counsulted by crying youngsters, living a condition of pure existentialist despair for no specific reason, they suffered of non-sense.
“I cry every day, I don’t find any sense in anything...why should I go on living?”.
 I have heard this sentence, with slight variations, from many youngsters. With them the basic rule is not cheating: they soon realize this, and after it’s worse.
I look at them straight in the eyes, sometimes telling them something, sometimes we stare at each other silently. If they look for what I have found, we understand each other beyond words, Ishin den shin, from soul to soul.
Then suddenly they change mood, they immerse themselves in the practice of meditation, of aikido, of yoga. During this practice neither I nor the other teachers spare them anything, but they are the ones who are the most honest towards themselves: they invest a part of their life to find the sense for the rest of it. And often they find it.

by Franco Bertossa 

To read the Italian version, please click here. 

To read more articles, please visit our Articles archive.