3 am wake up bell

3 AM Wake-up Bell

I'm feeling a bit like a special guest star on Meghan's blog this week. It's Todd here and I'd like to share with you what we've been doing during our week long break from school. Fortunately this was not a forced break due to the political situation here, rather it's a scheduled break by the school. So, for this week we've been enjoying our time, well, at least using our time as wisely as we can. From Saturday to Wednesday we did a short four day meditation retreat at a well-known forest monastery about an hour outside of Yangon. I wish we could post photos to show you how nice this monastery was. It was set up with spacious and quiet grounds, lots of ponds and bridges, good healthy food... basically all the requisites of a quality retreat center. Many species of birds too, but of course that's not why we were there, which I had to remind myself of a few times.

The practice at this center and in Burma in general is based on the Mahasi Sayadaw methods, who was a famous meditation teacher here. His methods come from the Buddha's teachings on the four foundations of mindfulness, which is based on cultivation of mindfulness and wise reflection in order to develop wisdom. The practice at this center, in a nut shell, is basically to try to stay focused on the rising and falling of the breathing, while trying to be aware whenever something distracts the attention away from the breathing in the form of sights, sounds, odors, tastes, sensations in the body, and thoughts. Whenever the mind goes away from the awareness of the breathing, we were instructed to make a mental note of what it was that distracted us, like seeing a bird fly by, having the thought "that's a kingfisher",.. and simply noting "seeing, seeing", and 'thinking, thinking" respectively as they arose and then returning our awareness to the breathing. Sounds easy, hmmm? :) Well, at times it is and at others it is nothing even close to easy, but as time goes on awareness and concentration get stronger and as one slows down, is watchful and careful of the hundreds, if not thousands of diversions that occur each day, not trying to make any of them different to what they actually are, insights do begin to arise. Of course there's more to it than that, but that's a brief summary of what we did for those four days.

It was a good retreat for both of us and we enjoyed our time meditating, Meghan with the nuns and Burmese laywomen, and I with the monks and Burmese laymen, all working together trying our best to purify our minds. The challenges of waking up at 3 am, the unpleasant physical sensations in the body from sitting, walking, sitting, walking... for hour-long periods throughout the day until 9 pm were all worth every minute of it.

So, now we are getting ready for a new week with the kids. One more thing I'd like to share is that the community service club I've been organizing at the school is really taking off this year. Students have been delivering second hand clothes (that were donated last year in a school wide clothes drive) to local villages and orphanages. If you'd like to read more about that, you can visit the community service blog at: http://web.mac.com/todd_davis8/iWeb/Community%20Service

Hope you are all doing well and having a good week.
Thanks for reading and good wishes,
Todd