Extra Credit

I attended the Tibetan Buddhist Group today at the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha. I mainly chose the Tibetan Buddisht Group because its the last one before Friday, but i'm glad that I went to that one and not the Zen Meditation because I couldn't handle sitting like that with my legs crossed for any longer then we did. I’m not used to sitting with my legs crossed so sitting like that for about an hour was pretty hard for me. I just couldn’t get comfortable and my feet kept falling asleep. But aside from that I thought all the other aspects of the group were really interesting and I would go back again if I could get over the sitting for that long. Everybody was nice about it though and the Lama told us at the beginning that it was ok if we had to move around if we needed to.
I got there about 7:15 and there were two other new people there too so I felt better because I definitely didn’t want to be the only new person there. So we took our shoes of and went up stairs and introduced ourselves to the Lama and sat down. Two other new people walked in soon along with some people who had been there before, all in all I would say it was 10 people in the group. Usually they start at 7:30 but I think since there were several new people the Lama asked us why we decided to attend class and what we already knew about Buddhism and things like that. He also started explain things like the four noble truths and talked about emptiness and he used an example about how Coke doesn’t contain the flavor inside it because if the goodness of coke was inside the bottle then everybody who drank it would have to like but they don’t because the flavor is subjective.
After that he described how we were supposed to sit with our legs crossed and each foot on the opposite thigh, back straight, hold your arms out and let them just fall naturally, and chin tucked a little bit. Then we started the prayer or mantra and he said we could try to follow along or just listen, then he hit this little gong and we began the prayer. Once the prayer was done he hit the little gong again and we started the silent meditation. Before he had told us that if anything pops into your head your supposed to take it as just a thought and think of it as a bubble that you pop with a feather and then go back to your relaxed mind. We did that for about 10 minutes and then he hit the gong again and we started the prayers again. The last prayer we said was the longevity prayers and he said usually you say that prayer in the morning.