This past weekend Lesley, Brian and I went and stayed at a Buddhist Temple in Seoul. It was an over night stay, so that we got to experience every aspect of the Buddhist life, including waking up at 4:30 in the morning to do the morning prayer and meditation. The night started out great, they gave us these rocking orange outfits to wear with blue rubber pointy shoes. We looked like a bunch of prison inmates that were going to go garden. For all of the prayers and the explanations we gathered in a prayer room, where we sat on the heated floor on top of little square pillows. The heated floors were so relaxing, they made me want to curl up right there on the floor and take a nap, which made it really difficult to keep my eyes open when our little nun lady was explaining the details of the weekend and giving us the background of Buddhism and Buddha. So after our little explanation of the religion we got to go participate in the ringing of the bell, which sounded the start of prayer time. After the evening prayer we went back to our heated prayer room to complete the 108 Prostrations. The Prostration is a prayer/meditation bowing gesture that involves standing, kneeling, bowing your head to the floor, lifting your hands, then standing back up. It all sounds simple enough, but one of these gestures is basically a squat, so to complete 108 in a row posed quite a challenge. While completing each prostration you put a bead on a string to make the wood bead necklaces that they wear. Putting the necklace together while doing the prostrations just made it that much harder, in the middle of struggling I would look down to see the pile of beads not make a dent at all. This process, also, is supposed to be a meditation, so your mind is supposed to be pretty blank. I don’t think I really know how to have a blank mind; so forcing it to be blank just made it that much worse. It went something like this “1, 2, 3,…15 wouldn’t it be cool to be a fashion icon?, 16, 17,… 20 omg this is hard, 21 I want a sandwich, 22…. 34, 35 o shoot I need to have my kids practice for the talent show, 36….41, 42 should I get a hair cut, 43…. 67, 68 I need to get more yogurt and cereal, 69… 79, 80 I want to put up Christmas lights, 81 it would be exhausting to be an octopus…98 this is hard, 99 this is hard, 100 my knees kill, 101 this is hard, 102 this is hard 103 im hungry, 104 this is hard, 105 I want to go home, 106 this is hard, 107 this is hard, 108.” It was rough.
In the morning we woke up at 4:30 to take part in the morning meditation. This was tough as well. We had to sit for 2, 20 minute periods with our legs crossed, our hands by our stomach making a circle with our fingers and thumbs, and our eyes focused on the floor about a foot or two in front of us. Again, we were supposed to clear our minds, and not cling to any thought, but try to overcome the urge to move or shift or concentrate on a specific thought. I was so tired, that the whole time I was thinking, “don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep.” It was not as bad as I thought it was going to be though, but I don’t think Buddhists meditate just to see if they can stay awake.
The whole point was to free your mind and go with the flow. I cant say that I necessarily accomplished the whole point of the weekend, but I got a lot of great thinking done and was able to complete my grocery list for the week. I can say, for one thing, that I really did find their train of thought interesting. The main thing that I took away from it was that they want to focus on being happy, and the only person that can make you happy, is you. They mentioned that people are unhappy when they disagree, or when they have different views about something. The way to solve that unhappiness is to find a way to find the similarity in the difference instead of just focusing on the difference. The only reason that you are unhappy is because someone chooses to think or make decisions different from how you do, but it doesn’t mean that it is the wrong way. A wise man, Mike Smith, once said a very similar statement to me when a person was really getting under my skin, and I found that he was so right. The only person who was making me mad, really, was me, because I was letting that person’s different way of thinking/acting get to me. The reminder this weekend was extremely refreshing, especially to see how happy these people are in their every day lives. It also helped me to think about how I live my life, especially how I am teaching. When I become frustrated I need to step back and remind myself that maybe it is me who is approaching this whole teaching thing the wrong way. I am just going to have to see how that goes.
