Seven years of meditating and the other morning I was in the common house during our Saturday morning meditation and my mind was racing, busy with lots of thoughts, planning a project, all that detail-moving-around, when I heard a robin's song, and then the flash of a thought,"See? I could be listening to this beautiful sound rather than being wrapped up in the roller-coaster of my mind,"
and then another flash, this one a like a moment of knowledge in my body:
"Oh. The sound. The thoughts. Both equally available to me. To notice."
I felt my butt sink a little deeper into the cushion. I noticed my body breathing.
I was just there, for a moment.
photo by notasif
Weekly meditation in the common house? Your community sounds more wonderful every time you speak of it. :)
ReplyDeletebeautiful!
ReplyDeleteAnd this is why it is a practice, right? We practice and then moments like this arrive and we're ready to meet them.
ReplyDeleteAhh.
i remember reading a few years back, about how not to try to get rid of thoughts. sits well with my philosophy of no-striving.
ReplyDeleteso you do communal meditation?
Hey Mon,
ReplyDeleteNice to see you here! Yes, no-striving is inherent in the Buddhist teachings, but there was a very serious misunderstanding when it first came to the west, and Buddhist practice became known as a “quest for enlightenment” rather than an ever-expanding sense of abiding. There are of course, different branches of Buddhism, each emphasizing different aspects of the teaching, but the type that I have practiced most is insight meditation, which emphasizes awareness of present moment experience. I wrote about it a little bit here and here.
And yep, weekly meditation sits, right here in the common house! Interestingly, there are quite a few meditators here, something I didn’t really know about before we moved here. One man offers weekly sits in the Common House on Saturday mornings from 7 to 8. There are probably 4 or 5 core folks who attend regularly plus 2 or 3 additional people who come every once in a while. It’s nothing formal – just sitting together with a closing metta (lovingkindess) or dedication of merit. Some of the folks are part of the same sangha (meditation community) I am part of, and others have different practices or don’t practice with a sangha.
Nothing social here is required – and the work requirements are minimal, as I wrote about in these posts -- so these types of social activities are simply offered by an individual. Want to share your love of bread making, hula-hooping, billiards? Choose a time, put it on the calendar, and let folks know.
And you know we don’t live on a commune right? :) It’s more like a neighborhood, and we share responsibility for the common areas with the added benefit of the common house -- a 4000-square-foot building with a big kitchen, dining room, mail room, two bathroom, a play room, laundry, guest room, etc. So while we all own our private homes, we have shared responsibilities and a shared “third” space to gather, with an overall intention to live in community. I was recently talking to a neighbor here who used to live in a big communal house and it really opened my eyes to how the two types of communities differ (and I am really glad we’re not living on commune at this point in our lives!).
Sometimes I feel like I am the master of the monkey-mind, so it is rather nice to see that I will still be figuring it out for a very long time. And of course, thanks for going into more detail of how the common house works and the people who you live with. Inspriation for my day:)
ReplyDelete