Temple Day: Happy New Year

Because I had read that New Year's Day is associated with a trip to the temple in Buddhism, I had planned on finding a special service in my area for New Year's Day. I did not find a dedicated New Year's service, but attended a regularly scheduled Thursday evening service at a Shambhala Center located about a 30-minute walk from my home.

The temperature had plunged below freezing that evening in Washington, DC, but still about 25 people showed up to practice Shambhala meditation and participate in a short discussion about Buddhism.

Located on the second floor of a building overlooking a glass-roofed entrance to a DC Metro station, the Center sits in a row of storefronts and restaurants on a very busy street. A visitor accesses the Center up a metal side staircase, and by knocking on a locked door protected with a passcode-style alarm system. A grey-haired and bespectacled man in a blue sport coat, tie, and grey slacks opened the door for me, and I stepped into a lobby furnished with upholstered chairs and straight-back chairs and a black bench-like sofa. The man asked me if I was new, and then told me where I could place my coat (in a closet that he called a cupboard) and that visitors should participate in a short training session before joining the entire group for meditation.

I placed my coat and backpack and shoes in the cupboard (failing to notice the dedicated shoe cubbies) and joined two other newcomers in the training room, located directly off the lobby. The small room held a table with glass bowls and candles and was decorated with tapestries and flags. Eight low cushions sat on mats, arranged in two rows, facing one more cushion/mat combo sitting at the front.

Susan, the leader, joined the three of us, and began to explain three basic principles of Shambhala meditation: the posture, the gaze and breathing, and the labeling of thinking. She explained that we should sit with straight backs on the cushion, cross-legged with our feet on the mat. Our hands should sit flat on our thighs, not too far forward on our knees, and not folded into shapes. We should train our gaze on the floor four to six feet ahead of us: any shorter distance might tend toward drowsiness, any further might open our peripheral vision to greater distractions. Whenever we find ourselves entertaining a thought or idea or emotion ("a thought with energy behind it") in our brains, Susan told us, we should label that occurrence as "thinking," and put it out of our minds, returning our awareness to our breath. She explained that Shambhala meditation should provide "abiding" peace, which was a word I heard several times at the Center.

We practiced for several minutes. With my four-to-six-foot gaze falling at the edge of Susan's mat, I tried hard not to notice her sitting cross-legged at the top of my field of vision. Susan wore her thick grey hair pulled back above her ears, which were studded with tiny turquoise earrings. She wore a purple turtleneck and padded vest with jeans, thick socks, and a pendant. Her face was pale, wrinkled, and (it must be said) appeared to radiate kindness.

When we finished our practicing, Susan led the three-newcomers back through the lobby and down a hall to the "main shrine." Before opening one of the two double doors, Susan explained that there should be space for us, but if not, she would retrieve new cushions. Entering, the two other newcomers found spaces near the door, while Susan pointed toward a front-corner cushion for me by a window out onto the very busy street.

From my perch to the front and the side, I had no opportunity to observe my fellow participants, which kept me much more focused on my gaze, and less visually distracted. Noises and lights outside the window, coughs and fidgets throughout the room, and the racing thoughts in my own head turned out to be my primary distractions, though my eyes occasionally also tried to trace the altar at the front of the room to record its components (flags, a gold folding-fan on a stand, two photographs of Asian men).

A meditation leader sat at the other end of the altar from me, facing the participants, with a clock on one side of her and a bowl with mallet on the other side. At the end of 45 minutes, she struck the bowl with the mallet to signal the end of our meditation, and released us to go drink tea in the lobby.

Often, the worship services I have attended will offer a social hour with light refreshments following the worship. The United Church offered a kaffeeklatch with the visiting Rita Horstmann, as did the Unitarian Church for the visiting Princeton professor who preached from a children's book. The synagogue I visited during Sukkot offered kiddush in the sukkah after the service. Time and again I have thought that I need to attend these informal gatherings, and time and again I have succombed to the temptation to flee, rather than overcome my shyness and make conversation in a room full of strangers. The Dumb Feast of the Dead at Samhain was a blessing. I was required to remain silent as we ate our meal.

The Shambhala Center short-circuited my normal flight-response by placing the social period between the meditation and discussion. The Center also comforted me in my decision to stay by limiting the chatting over tea to 15 minutes, rather than something open-ended.

So, I visited the restroom while the tea line was still long, and browsed the pamphlets in the hallway, collecting some of them and placing them in my backpack. Then I prepared myself a cup of green tea and noticed that there was only one chair (straight-backed) left in the circle of those seated in the lobby. The two other newcomers (twentysomethings) sat on the black sofa and made small talk with an energetic short-haired older woman in a pink sweater. Others stood in small clumps. Feeling shy to take the last chair, I stood off to the side by myself.

Susan came by and asked me how I liked the meditation. "Oh, good, fine," I said, and she said, "good," in reply, and moved along.

I stood and sipped my tea.

One of the other newcomers slipped away from his female companion on the black bench and started in my direction on his way to the restroom. He paused to ask me the same question Susan had, and we spoke for a few minutes about the near-impossibility of stilling the racing thoughts in your head. While he was in the restroom, I checked the clock. It had been 20 minutes, so the discussion group was late in forming. I stood and sipped my tea some more, but feeling the awkwardness of the solo social situation in a room filled with strangers, I stepped to the cupboard to retrieve my belongings -- and that's when I heard someone strike a gong. The discussion group would begin in the main shrine.

I walked back down the hallway to the double-doored room where the two newcomers (Ethan and Katie) sat on cushions in circle, along with Larry, a plump, bespectacled, wild-haired, scruffy, middle-aged white man in a yellow and brown pullover made of hemp or some other rough-looking fabric. Larry and I introduced ourselves to each other, as I perched on a cushion, in my grey pin-striped slacks and and thick dark-grey turtleneck. We waited as eight more experienced Shambhala practitioners joined us, forming a gender-balanced group of twelve.

Thursday nights typically are a book-discussion night, Larry explained, but with many regular attendees out of town for the holidays, tonight would be an open discussion.

The session began with a question about how to explain Shambhala to an outsider. Larry fielded this and other questions largely by himself, while also opening the circle for others to chime in their ideas, primarily yielding to the men on his left and his right: a ginger-haired older man in glasses with floppy bangs, and an eloquent-though-slurring older man with a halting manner who explained to the group that he is recovering from a stroke.

Shambhala, the group seemed to agree, can be very difficult to explain to an outsider, because it can be thought of simply as the meditation itself, accessible to people of any religion or no religion at all;, or it can be the Shambhala branch of Buddhism (contained within Tibetan Buddhism, a mahayana tradition); or it can refer to the mythical ("though some don't think of it as mythical") kingdom of Shambhala, an enlightened society, the vision of which inspired Chögyam Trungpa to begin teaching Shambhala meditation in the first place, many years ago.

There was much discussion of Chögyam Trungpa and his vision, as well as the vision of his son, Sakyong Mipham, a teacher and the current leader of Shambhala Buddhism, who, Larry said, had traveled to Washington to bless the Shambhala Center when it was founded. The two photographs on the altar, it turned out, depicted Chögyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham.

Of all the comments elicited during the discussion, four stood out to me:

1) "Buddhism is not a democracy" -- Uttered by Larry, this comment came after several rounds of questioning came back around to center on the supremacy of a teacher's word, and to the importance of a teacher-student relationship in starting down the Shambhala path. The Shambhala Center offers an entrance for the Shambhala path, with structured classes and teachings in addition to the public meditation sessions and talks. The classes charge a fee, and the materials are restricted ("you won't find these available on Amazon, or whatever") so that a student's introduction to Shambhala can be properly mediated.

2) "This discipline gives us a common language to talk about spirituality, so that if I say I feel like an outrageous garuda today, you know what I'm talking about" -- Again uttered by Larry, he gestured to a wall-hanging nearby featuring the "Four Dignities," mythical animals used as symbols in Tibetan Buddhism of various aspects of the Bodhisattva attitude (tiger, lion, garuda, dragon).

3) "I know I need to quiet my mind." -- This statement was uttered by no fewer than four participants, and seemed generally agreed by all in the circle.

4) "Be kind." -- This was Larry's answer when asked if there was a single ethical principle that he would consider the greatest in Shambhala. The men on his right and left both simultaneously re-worded his answer into: "compassion."

Samhain, part one: The Day of the Dead

Last year, in 2007, over Memorial Day weekend, I went on a gay men's spiritual retreat with a friend of mine who objects when I call him Buddhist.

"I practice Shambhala," is his preferred formulation, but whichever way, on retreat, most of the men were neither Buddhists nor Shambhala-practitioners. They were mostly pagans, Wiccans, or nothing in particular, like me. There was one Jewish couple, and an older man of Ukrainian descent who identified all at once as pagan, and also with both the Jewish and Eastern Orthodox halves of his ancestry.

When I set out to find a Samhain service to attend in DC, I looked up one of the pagan-leaning men from the retreat who lives here in town, to see if he might point me toward a local group. He suggested instead that I hit the road and observe the holiday at Four Quarters, an "Interfaith Sanctuary of Earth Religion" in south central Pennsylvania.

So, I called up Four Quarters and reserved myself a spot. They had a whole weekend of activities planned, and I carved out time for the Dumb Feast of the Dead on Saturday evening, followed by the main Samhain service itself. A snafu with my Zipcar reservation delayed my departure from the city, but I still managed to arrive at Four Quarters in time for the meal.

Legally organized as a church, Four Quarters is physically laid out like a large camp, located on 150 acres in the Alleghenies, bounded on three sides by a hairpin curve in a mountain stream. Visitors access the camp down a dirt road lined with cow pastures and orchards and McCain-Palin yard signs. I signed in at the farmhouse at the entrance to the property, where the man at the desk verified my payment, and then I drove further in to a grassy parking area a short walk from the dinner tent and the stone circle for the Samhain service.

I noticed in the parking lot that the celebrants drawn by Samhain seemed more attracted to multiple bumper stickers than perhaps your average motorist:

"God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts."
"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist."
"She who laughs lasts."
"Polyamory: Love shared is love multiplied."

Men and women, some of them in cloaks, were walking down the dirt road toward the dinner tent. A long-grey-haired man in a T-shirt and jeans pulled his SUV in next to my Zipcar. He made an ashamed comment about his choice of vehicle and its impact on the environment, and he praised my car-sharing when he saw the Zipcar logo on the passenger door. A group of women with a guitar sat in a circle by the side of the road singing "Down to the River to Pray," a song I have sung at the Unitarian Church before. Their next song began with the lyric, “We all come from goddess, and to her we return…”

Feeling needy of food and light-headed from the drive, I walked down to get in line for a hot plate from the commercially outfitted on-site kitchen. Dinner consisted of salad with vinaigrette dressing, applesauce, a black-bean side dish, colcannon (cabbage and potatoes together), yeasted rolls, ginger-stuffed pork loin for the omnivores, and a choice of vegan or non-vegan squash soup. I chose everything except the pork loin and balanced my vegan squash soup bowl over my mulled wine cup on my way to find a seat.

At the entrance to the dinner tent a woman in a black dress with a pentagram necklace said to me: "Please observe our silence in memory of our Honored Dead."

I entered a two-room tent with seating for maybe 250 and took a place on one of the benches. The tables were set with tea lights inside tiny carved-out pumpkins, which provided the only light. Not only was everyone completely silent, but they seemed to be avoiding all eye contact as well, with me and with each other.

Some people blessed their food with a waving of their hands over the plate and bowl before they began to eat. Some wore cloaks and some did not. Men tended toward beards and long-hair, tattoos were prevalent, and ages ranged from infant to elderly. I noticed no obvious gay couples, though there had been lesbian bumper stickers in the parking lot.

I felt that the silence made me eat more slowly. I found myself mostly singing songs in my head when I wasn’t observing the downcast faces or thinking about the food. The songs in my head were upbeat, so I felt off-center, as if I wasn’t connecting to the common purpose which felt very somber.

As the dinner drew to a close, an unseen woman outside the tent read a plaintive and wistful poem that began with the words "I miss you most upon each Samhain, when the boundary turns to sheer..."

She invited the spirits of our ancestors to walk among us throughout the evening. By now, the sun had gone down, and there was to be a gap of maybe 30 to 45 minutes between dinner and the worship service. After exiting the dinner tent, I chose to take a walk down the gravel road looking upward at the stars, shining bright in the clear, warm night, as they do not do in the city. The sliver of moon must have been low in the sky, hidden by the surrounding mountains.

I walked past tents and fire pits and parked RVs. Some people were staying at Four Quarters for the weekend; others who are members of the church itself camp there for longer periods of time.

By the time I turned around and walked back toward the stone circle where the ceremony would be held, night had fallen hard and it was very dark. I could hear other footsteps in the stones on the gravelly road, but could not see any other walkers until I was close upon them.

I passed single walkers and walkers in pairs, and up ahead, I heard voices talking in low tones. I could not see how many people or where they were, but I guessed maybe ten or twelve, and then suddenly I was upon the group.

We were standing directly outside the stone circle, and as I stepped into the crowd, their dark shapes took form before my eyes, revealing people who were very tall and shaped like cones. I realized with a start that I was the only person I could see who was not wearing a voluminous, long, black cloak and a very tall pointed hat. Most were also carrying a staff.

Wow! I had never felt out of place for not being dressed like a witch before!

The feeling actually hit me really hard, as I registered two kinds of sharp fear, each followed by shame.

The first was a completely shocking fear of witches. I am not afraid of witches. I have known and associated with self-described witches before. But something about the darkness and the cultural associations with the hats and cloaks and the feeling of being surrounded produced an unbidden panic I could not have anticipated.

It subsided as quickly as it came, but I felt properly and terribly ashamed.

The second fear was the fear of standing out for not being properly dressed. I was wearing two T-shirts, short-sleeved over long, blue jeans, and green canvas sneakers -- and feeling a little like a slob.

My fears about my appearance, then, triggered shame for not having prepared correctly to observe the cultural norm. If I remove my shoes at the Hindu temple, and cover my head when required at the synagogue, then I should be prepared with a cloak at Samhain. I overheard one woman walk up bemoaning that she had left her cloak at home, so I knew soon enough that I would not be the only one, which was some comfort. Then, as others gathered on the road to wait for services to begin, it became clear that street clothes were going to be in the majority, and that the full-dress witches were the early-birds. I breathed something of a sigh of relief.

Shortly, a woman in a black dress and pointed hat began threading her way through the crowd with a an iron pot in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

"Reach into my cauldron and find out what you need to leave behind tonight," she said to each of us, before shining her light on the small printed papers we withdrew.

Mine said: Let go of your judgments.

When we all had a paper, someone rang a bell somewhere, and the woman with the cauldron told us to take a deep breath.

"You all have hard work to do tonight," she said, and started walking off the dirt road toward the stone circle. “Follow me.”