and then I climb the mountain behind my school with KoHo.
Remember when I was conflicted about meditation club? My attendance was spotty for maybe a month after I first tried it, but I'm addicted now. The club leader was too busy to hold the meeting last week, and I can't even tell you how much I missed it. I missed it like only a person as awkward as myself could miss it.
It's really soothing. I've gotten used to the sharing of feelings at the beginning and end of each session. At the beginning, I tell them what things are stressing me out lately. At the end, I usually try to find a silly way to describe the sensations that go on in my head during the meditation (for example, at various times I've told them it feels like: "my head is filled with water, and the tide keeps rising and falling," "electricity on my scalp," "there's a crab crawling around in my hair," etc). Today I told them it felt like someone was gently pulling my head upwards, like my head was a balloon and someone was pulling on my string.
The room where the meetings are held is so cozy. The floor is heated, and we sit on blankets/cover our laps with blankets. After the sharing of feelings, we sit in lotus position, close our eyes, and concentrate on our breathing. Then, the meditation leader (U Young-Hee) kneels in front of all of us by turns and puts her hands on the top of our heads for about 1-2 minutes each, ostensibly to share diksha (the energy of the universe) with us.
To be perfectly frank, it's this part of the meditation that I'm addicted to. The meditation itself is soothing, and it does calm me, truly. But I'm not sure that I would be making such a habit of Thursday meditation club if it wasn't for the 1-2 minutes of having someone's hands on my head. I have always loved the feeling of someone's hands on my head. It makes me feel so calm and under control and "everything will be okay." For a few minutes, U Young-Hee is my master/mentor and she will take good care of me, I know she will.
After we have all received diksha, we leave the lotus position for whatever position we find most comfortable (for me, my legs remain in lotus position, but I lay back flat on the floor). And we listen to soothing music and breathe deeply and sometimes briefly fall asleep and dream a little. After a while, we regroup and share what we felt during the meditation session (this is the part where I make up silly things).
And then we leave school, and I hike over the mountain with KoHo to the subway station that is second-nearest my school. It takes about 30 minutes. I get home at 6:30 or 7, make dinner, watch Korean soap operas, try to study Korean or lesson plan. But I am scattered all the time lately; it is hard to make myself do work.
Enough about me. How are your Thursdays?
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Okay, I'll tell you. (Exhaustively.) Today is Thursday: I woke up and had earl gray tea and fruit salad for breakfast. I get the fruit salad at the produce stand near my house, I am addicted to fruit salad, and their fruit salad is the best for only 4 pesos. It looks like orange soup because it's got a sort of broth of orange juice. It's a little bit different every time-- today it had slices of plum with the peel still on, and the purple skins stood out against the overall orangeness. That was special. But it always has oranges and apples, sometimes bananas, sometimes pineapple, and it ALWAYS has ONE sliver of kiwi in it, floating near the top.
I was thinking of devoting a whole blog post to this fruit salad this morning when I found the plum slices, honestly. But I guess I'll write an extensive comment on your blog instead.
Anyway, then I showered and played with my hair a little and then I got on a bus to go to a café, a chain called Aroma which is one of the few cafés here where you order at the counter. It's downright weird. The point of going here was to finish my statement of purpose and patch together a personal statement for Michigan. I figured going far away would motivate me, maybe? Here they make cappuccino (uncommon in itself) with a towering pyramid of foam on top. It's intimidating, and pretty annoying.
I don't know what will happen later. I don't have a favorite Thursday milonga, so nothing about my Thursdays is fixed since I dropped out of clown school. But maybe I will see if I can get into acrobat school. Yes, I'm serious.
My life is a joke.
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