It's been a few years since we started this blog, and it has brought us many satisfactions, especially me.

As I've explained before, it has taken shape according to our own lives, and I have no idea how many more turns it will take as long as the enthusiasm holds out.

Today I want to talk a bit more about the topic of meditation, because it's one of the subjects that has drawn the most attention and prompted more people to leave comments and ask us questions than almost anything else.

These days I see more and more people waking up, along with a growing curiosity about what lies behind all those millions of people meditating around the world.

My own interest deepened (because there was already some interest to begin with) when I found myself living in Bangkok and felt the need to search for something more within my unconscious, to go digging around inside my own mind.

Seeing so much peace on the faces of Buddhists in Thailand, I decided I had to take a course. So I signed up (as I wrote about in this blog) for a 10-day Vipassana Buddhism meditation retreat at one of the centers founded by the teacher Goenka.

I went off for those 10 days to somewhere out in the Thai provinces, and the full story is here in the blog, in September 2007.

Let me see if I can clear up some of the questions people have been asking me lately.

I can only speak to what I know and what I've lived myself, because I'm no professional in any of this, and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.

The practice I've been involved in since that first experience is Vipassana meditation (the kind said to have been left to us by the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama). It's true that he wrote nothing down himself, but his teachings have been passed along through the different teachers who have attained enlightenment just as he did, and who are therefore also Buddhas.

The word "Buddha" was first applied to Siddhartha Gautama. Later, within the Indian religious framework in which Buddhism developed, this awakening came to indicate a state of mental stillness, one that comes after transcending desire, aversion, and confusion.

Buddhism is, at its core, simply a philosophy, but unfortunately in many Asian countries it became a religion. I'm not a fan of joining religions, because in the process the essence and the spirituality tend to get lost. Behind these organizations, sadly, there is almost always a hunger for power and money, and that is entirely at odds with the true teachings of the great masters that so many religious groups invoke in order to draw people into their sects and institutions.

So what I've been practicing for nearly four years now has nothing to do with any religion whatsoever.

After my 10-day retreat in Thailand, you come away wanting to feel it again, to go further into those teachings. That's why when we first returned to Mexico I didn't sign up for anything right away. I wanted to observe, to take stock, to find something that actually fit what I was looking for.

There are many Buddhist centers in Mexico now, and I won't criticize any of them, because I do think they operate with considerably fewer hidden agendas than the Catholic Church.

Vipassana meditation is a bit like psychoanalysis, in that the further you go, the more it confronts you with your fears, your inner demons, and the truth of who you actually are.

Because we all construct a version of ourselves that we wish we were, layered on top of what the people who raised us, and the society around us, decided we ought to be. In this way we begin to build our own fantasy, distorting reality completely. Living inside that fantasy, we can't see our own successes or our mistakes clearly, much less change the things that don't make us happy.

We live in an entirely materialistic world, and that separates us, day by day, from so many extraordinary things. When you're so consumed by your own problems and achievements (almost always tied to money or to feeding the ego), you have little or no attention left for what's happening around you.

As you advance in meditation, you begin to develop a greater awareness of everything, and although at first you may find yourself questioning this new consciousness a great deal, in time you accept it and use it to know yourself better.

At first you meditate only in Shamatha (the practice of attaining calm), but gradually you learn other meditations that go searching through the unconscious and the mind for the roots of why we feel and act the way we do.

It's not just about recognizing your flaws, or the things that trouble you and make you feel guilt. It's also about recognizing your own qualities, and those of the people around you.

But unlike psychoanalysis, where you interact with a specialist who through various methods tries to get you to recognize your inner self, here there is no one but you. The teacher simply guides you and shows you a way of seeing things, and there's no need to share your feelings or whatever you discover in this search. Which means you're never obligated to confront anything with anyone if you don't want to.

I'm not a very advanced student, and given that my nature is a passionate one, it's harder work for me than for other people. But I keep at it.

Especially when I see the remarkable results around me and hear things like: when you achieve a truly deep meditation, there is nothing more satisfying.

I even heard someone say in Thailand: "No drug can produce the sense of wellbeing you feel when you learn to meditate and truly master your mind." For about eight months now, I've been meditating with a friend and Buddhist teacher from Casa Tíbet. It started with just the two of us, but friends of both of ours have gradually joined in, and today the group has fourteen people.

He is an extremely well-prepared teacher, with an enormous desire to give away what he has spent many years learning. He is himself a living example of the changes you can achieve over the years through study and dedication.

I think that's all for now, and we'll see what I manage to discover before I come back to share it with you here.

Sanuk.