Temple Tuesday
Every other week Amy, Owen (Branching out student) and I have been going to meet with Taihaku or Kenzan for 2 hours on Temple Tuesday! In these meetings we first bow and say a greeting then do 10 to 15 minutes of sitting meditation. We close with a bow to the mat as well as a bow to the other people in the room before venturing into the kitchen area where we discuss usually a reading from the book we are reading together Seeds of a Boundless life. This quarter we have mostly talked about having preconceptions, prejudice, and judgment and how it changes your actions and once you recognize those thoughts it is easier to dismiss them. We have also talked about the first of the four preconceptions which is refraining from harm, before this meeting we were asked to see for ourselves what refrain from harm meant to us in our lives. After the discussion time is over we go back into the main room to close with a 10 to 15 minute sitting meditation.
Reflection
At the beginning of this quarter Taihaku, our (Amy, Owen and I) Buddhist mentor had us write a letter to ourselves making promises to ourselves we wanted to keep. At our next meeting, we brought our letters and together we performed an incense ceremony over the letters we wrote and placed them under the Buddha statue in the Shao Shan Temple. In my letter I wrote to myself that I would meditate every day for at least 10 minutes and I promised that I would continue to be positive and kind to others around me. So far I have been able to do one of those things, I have been for the most part positive to others around me but I do admit sometimes I slip and have an outward negative attitude. I haven't been meditating every day for 10 minutes, more recently I have been able to but towards the middle and beginning of the quarter I would postpone it to later in the evening when I would be too tired to meditate so I would just sleep. I think the thing that kept me from wanting to meditate was my idea of what meditation should be, I guess what I thought it should be is forceful suppression of any kind of thought but that is not what it is intended to be. Taihaku explained it as the appreciation of every moment in its specialness but this, this is the special moment. Meditation is a strict thing in a way but it is not something negative, recently I have found that it is a way to remind yourself that you are alive in this moment. Meditating earlier this quarter was hard for me because I didn't know how to do it, I would start getting frustrated really easily whenever a thought would pop into my head then that frustration would lead to another thought then another then another just piling until I couldn't continue. I’m not sure who said it Amy or Chris but changing your mentality by saying “I get to” instead of “I have to” makes a very large difference in meditation.I have noticed that I have subconsciously incorporated the frame of mind of Buddhism into my daily life, for example, I have found it harder to blindly stand up for something and also blindly disagree with something or someone without considering where that person came from and why. It also feels harder to get angry at people because people aren't intentionally mean or unpleasant for no reason and being able to see through that shell that people have has helped me understand people better.