About 15 people attended our Sangha gathering this afternoon at the Iowa City Public Library, including a number of first-time attendees, which was wonderful.
Here is a summary of our readings and activities:
- I shared story told by my teacher Jack Lawlor during a retreat in Plano, Illinois, last weekend. Jack and his wife Lori have a house in Wisconsin whose property is on a steep bank created by glaciers thousands of years ago. An old oak clings to the side of the hill and has survived many decades, maybe a century, despite sometimes violent storms. Jack said this is because on one side it is protected from the storms by the hill, and on the other side by a row of old pines planted during the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. He said the hill and the pines are the oak tree’s Sangha, offering it protection and support whatever weather comes, in much the way we support one another in mindfulness practice.
- I also shared this story from my retreat: Before the ceremony began, as a way to manage our expectations, the gentleman overseeing the tea ceremony announced: "It won't go as planned. It won't be the same as the last one. And it will be absolutely perfect." This has become my mantra for almost everything in my life and certainly applies to our sangha gatherings.
- As we prepared for meditation, I shared the story about a time when Thich Nhat Hanh left his hermitage for a long walk, unaware that a storm was coming. When he returned, he found the windows blown open, the papers on his desk blown about, and rain everywhere. Rather than act out of panic and rush in to “fix” the problem, Thay breathed in and breathed out, then slowly closed each of the windows, and then mindfully set about the task of cleaning up. I offered that meditation provides us a chance to to the same thing: to build our capacity to approach our life with peace, calm, dignity, and mindfulness. We breathe in, we breathe out, and we gently close the windows of our senses and thoughts so the howling winds don’t continue to upset us. Then we go about cleaning things up, putting things in order.
- At the conclusion of the meditation, I read this from the Thai Forest Monk Ajahn Chah: "I’m always asking my students to do difficult things. The food is unpredictable and poor; we sit up all night; it’s freezing cold, and you only have these simple cotton robes. It’s boring here; it’s demanding; it’s lonely; and you do things that are fearson, like sitting alone all night in the forest. Yet all of it has the purpose of leading you to freedom in yourself, to something greater than that which you know to be true.”
- For the Dharma Talk we read pp. 129-30 from Thay's lovely book about the life of the Buddha titled "Old Path White Cloud." I highly recommend it.
- In the excerpt we read, the Buddha--the day after he was enlightened under the bodhi tree--gathered children from the nearby town (his first students) and taught them about mindfulness by showing them how to eat an orange.
- After the reading, our Sangha did its own orange meditation. After passing around a basket of Clementines, I shared Thay's suggestion that we place the orange in the palm of our hand, look at it while breathing in and out, so that the orange becomes a reality. That we take in the color, the smell, the texture and the taste, eating one segment slowly and thoughtfully at our time rather than rushing through to eat the fruit -- when in fact what we're doing is eating our sorrow, fear, anger, past and future.
- Thay teaches: "When you are truly here, contemplating the orange, breathing and smiling, the orange becomes a miracle. It is enough to bring you a lot of happiness. You peel the orange, smell it, take a section, and put it in your mouth mindfully, fully aware of the juice on your tongue. This is eating an orange in mindfulness. It makes the miracle of life possible. It makes joy possible."
- During announcements, I told the Sangha our next meditation session is Wednesday, May 18, at 7 p.m. in Iowa City Public Library Room A.
- We also have another opportunity to take part in a walking meditation followed by conversation at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 14, in Hickory Hill Park. Information is on the Meetup site. We had a wonderful time last time and would like to make this a regular part of our practice.
- Finally, I shared that I am looking for any Sangha members who might be interested in serving as facilitators for our meditation practice. If you are interested, please let me know by emailing me at icsangha@gmail.com.
- At closing, I shared this reading from Joan Tollifson:
"Nonduality isn’t about “me” becoming somebody who no longer gets confused or no longer has any human flaws. It doesn’t mean “me” turning into someone who is in some special state of mindful presence 24/7. It doesn’t mean that “I” have no self anymore. It doesn’t mean that “I” am “somebody” who is constantly aware of being nobody, or constantly aware of nondual boundlessness as some kind of special experience, or never again fooled by mirages or never again caught-up in a movie-story of encapsulation or separation. The very notion of a permanently enlightened person is predicated on the very misunderstandings it claims to have risen above. So, can we stop trying to figure all this out mentally and simply come back to the utter simplicity of where we are: the sounds of traffic, the sensations in the body, the taste of coffee, the rise and fall of breathing, the cool breeze blowing in through the window? And the most important thing to remember is that waking up always boils down to right here, right now. It is never somewhere else or yesterday or at some future time when conditions are different or better. It is just this, exactly as it is."
- Finally, I shared a brief story about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who lived in a small hermitage in Gethsemane Monastery in Tennessee. Merton was greatly interested in Buddhism, saw many common threads with his own Catholicism, and wrote a book called “Mystics and Zen Masters.”
- In the middle of downtown Louisville, Kentucky, there’s a bronze plaque commemorating one of Merton’s mystical experience during this period, an incident that took place March 18, 1958:
- “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers….There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Bowing,
Stephen
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