I don't have to depend on my sister, I can do things by myself.

 Damsas Dharmawardhana,

    This was my first ever Retreat, but because I only stayed for half of the Retreat I was not able to get the full experience that everybody that started from Friday, but I will still share my feelings and experiences. As many would think, one of the huge problems would be the time that everybody wakes up. Not everybody wakes up at 5.00 every day, but as we went on through the retreat, waking up early got easier. The first few days many people were solely surviving off of the coffee or tea given in the morning though. We also had morning meditations with candle lights. That was a very calming meditation and it would wake mostly everybody up.

    What I was very sad about was that since I was a day late, I didn't get to visit the Cambodian temple that they went to. Another hard thing for me to do was stay awake in some meditations as some meditations were very long and I was not used to this many meditations and especially when they were like 30 minutes long every time. Another hard thing to do was keep my back straight because I would usually forget to keep it straight and I would slouch on the chairs we were sitting in.

    As this was the first day of my Retreat, I was really relying on my sister, but as the days went by I didn't really need to rely on my sister that much because I knew what to do.

    After we started, Deepankara Hamuduruwo's discussion was very interesting but since I didn’t sleep much that night I was very sleepy during it and soon managed to fall asleep. As for the parents, it might have been a little sad to leave them but because of you accomplishing things alone, personally, it felt very great to do something that you would usually have to get help from your parents. Doing any task independently feels very amazing. Managing something like that all by yourself seems to make you proud or feel grown up.

Theruwn Saranai.