Hi, Sweetie, How Was Buddha Sleepover Camp? Fine. Make Any Friends? I Guess.

So I went to a big Buddhist temple in Western New York for a night. I went to three meditation teaching things, had some monk/nun-made vegetarian food, and slept in the women's dorm with some other Buddha learner chicks. It was very nice and the people were very nice and the grounds were very nice with some very nice walking trails and it was all extremely nice. So here's the other stuff:

First things first: this was a big step up from talking about meditating in a guy's deli in New Paltz on Wednesday nights. Community class is casual and practical and not intimidating at all. At the temple it's a little different, or at least it's too much for me - we're talking serious varsity Buddhism here, as far as I can tell. The people in the robes, the beads (whatever those are for), the bowing on the ground, the glamorous and cavernous temple with shiny Buddhas everywhere, the singing prayers in the meditation sessions (and I'm not crazy about the tune they set the prayers to, by the way). I feel like I muddied the waters a little bit, or least was sort of in danger of muddying the waters. The delight of Buddhism for me right now is its manageability, its portability. Here is the stuff that I can handle right now: just focus on your breathing, concentrate on that one thing to the exclusion of all else as best you can (while remaining relaxed), and try to direct your effort to something good like world peace and not something mean or negative. This is a habit I can take home and work on. The teachings on the retreat are significantly more complicated for me, even though they boil down to the same thing eventually, I think. It just seemed like there's about a zillion Buddhas to thank for their teachings, and each of them has different useful symbolism to them, and there are symbolic gestures in the prayers like making prayer shapes with your hands and then moving it to four different points on your body at certain moments in the prayers, and three bows on the floor that everyone makes before the meditation teaching begins. I don't know, feels complicated. I got some useful imagery out of it I think, but I have to just focus on the most simple part of it before I go learning a million new things that are supposed to help me. Plus one meeting a week has been enough to keep me thinking for a while - at the temple I went to three sessions in 24 hours. I just couldn't process it all in any meaningful way. I was fatigued.

Second: I did get something nice out this (besides my comfort with my own beginner level), and that's that I don't care about the hyper-reasoning or rationales that have been distracting me with Buddhism, such as whether it is impossible to make decisions without relying on a good/bad paradigm of life, whether training your mind to be selective in its thoughts isn't just a way to say Repress Your Dark Side To Be Happy - I think being so overwhelmed with the Super Buddha information made me feel a little less critical of it, paradoxically. I think I am starting to believe that I can't change emotional and spiritual problems intellectually, and a few different sources have told me the same thing in the last few weeks so the point has been taking root in my mind - Iyengar in Light on Life says that you must address your emotional health emotionally; and also in psychotherapy there is apparently such a thing as "intellectual resistance" to progress - we want to talk ourselves out of or into certain ways of feeling, and it's not really that productive (I read this in Friedan's The Feminine Mystique this week, what a rad book that is!). This is still pretty abstract for me but I'm liking where it's going.

Third: another nice thing I got out of this - I feel a little better about hiding from the world these days. I feel occasional waves of guilt about not using my law powers for good because it's too stressful for me. There was this one nun at the temple who heard me talking to someone about whether meditating and yoga are actually "doing" anything "good" for the world, and she laughed a bit, and chimed in. She said she wasn't laughing at me of course, but that her path to Buddhism really started when she found herself at a peace rally in a state of terrible rage. She said she felt that she was not really contributing to peace in the sense that she, too, was ready to kill and shout and destroy in order to get other people to change their behavior. That she was yelling and fighting to get someone else to work on world on peace, and it wasn't really going anywhere. She parroted what other people had said to her about meditation, along the lines of "if you want to help the world why don't you protest, picket, write letters, etc," but that she decided that she could really only work on herself. Someone also said that Buddhism is pretty much in favor of whatever you want to do as long as you're not hurting yourself (or others ostensibly), and stress is, well, extremely harmful for me and my health. But I'm still struggling with this whole problem, in the sense that spirituality seems like escapism to me sometimes, and that enduring the aggressiveness of social advocacy is really important, and that I should contribute somehow. I'm really glad that I can vote, and the only reason I can vote is because some insistent lady folks went to jail and took a few punches for me (yes this is more from The Feminine Mystique). What if they had all just meditated for change? I don't know. But I do feel like I have a positive framework for at least justifying/rationalizing my hermit-like behavior a little bit.

Fourth: made a friend! I had a really nice chit chat with someone from Canada who was really into Buddhism, and I got a really useful mini-lecture on Buddhist history and some nice feedback on searching for a path and what that means and that it's okay to shop around for a spiritual path, and all that stuff. We won't keep in touch or anything but it was a nice little two-hour friendship that made me feel pretty good about my personal struggle and that it's okay not to really know what's going on for now. I don't really know what's going on with my life direction and spiritual existence, and that's what's going on with my life direction and spiritual existence. It's sort of nice.