New year, new Tibetan outlook

IF YOU thought the island's new year celebrations ended with blue toes and brandy at Braye – they didn't, not quite.

Up on Trigale later this month another new year will be marked – not as boisterously, but perhaps more intriguingly.

Roberta Roberts-Mapp runs the Buddhism and Meditation Centre, the only dedicated centre of its type open daily to the public in the Channel Islands. Organised yoga and meditation sessions have been going on in Alderney since the 1970s.

On the first weekend after 22 February she will be marking the start of the Tibetan New Year, Losar, which in Tibet heralds 15 days of celebrations.

She will start Losar in retreat, in a traditional ritual of purification involving a two-day period of fasting, silence and prayer. Her day will begin at 6.30am on Saturday with an hour-and-a-half of prayer, then another set at 9.30am and then again in the afternoon. Lunch on Saturday, then liquids at 8pm will be her last food and drink until 7am on Monday. She will break her silence only for the chanting of prayers.

It's one of the more arduous Buddhist practices but for her, it's well worth the effort.

'I'll emerge from it hungry, of course,' says Roberta, pictured above, a care worker and office administrator. 'But I also find the experience very humbling. Even though I'm not eating I know I'll get food, and abundant clean water, when there are millions who don't. I also get the freedom to practise my religion when there are countries where you don't get that. You have to deal with yourself. It's a very personal experience and one of the harder Buddhist practices.'

Roberta officially became a Buddhist at Samye Ling Tibetan Monastery in Scotland in 2009. It's a place she now regards as a second home and regularly visits for instruction and retreats. She first went there for a Tai Chi course in her 30s, having practised yoga from her teenage years.

Her mother wasn't surprised. Roberta, who moved with her family to Alderney at 18 months old, remembers her mother telling her how as a small child she had met several Tibetan monks who had come to the island investigating the possibility of starting a retreat. Recalls Roberta: 'My mum said, "You were fascinated". So maybe I'm living out a childhood dream.'

Organised yoga and meditation sessions have been taking place in Alderney since 2002 and in 2007 the group got a full-time home at Maison du Chien in La Trigale. Teacher Chris Walters stepped down in 2008 and Roberta was asked to take over.

From spring to autumn she leads prayers, chanted in Tibetan, at 6am and 7pm, every day. People also pop in to use the retreat hut in the garden, which features with a kneeling block, incense and lots of richly-coloured throws.

People use the centre to pray, take time out and to meditate, a tool Buddhists employ to develop 'mindfulness'. Non-religious meditation sessions are held three times a week.

What effect has Buddhism had on Roberta?

'I don't take myself so seriously,' she says. 'The meditation has given me breathing space to see things from different angles, not just from the point of view of my own ego.

'It's not a quick fix – more a gentle process of readjusting our habitual tendencies so that we can work from a basis of peace, happiness and compassion to help us deal with whatever life throws at us.'