Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

Five Mindfulness Trainings:
I touched on this before. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are precepts for laypeople. We don’t call them precepts because we don’t like the implication that they are commandments and are maintained or broken, succeeded at or failed. The idea isn’t to strictly live by these precepts, but to train ourselves to be mindful of them as they present themselves in various issues in our daily lives, even when we’re not following them. Easier said than done, and I think a lot of people, including monks, put a moral value on them, which they shouldn’t.

This morning, in place of the first Dharma Talk, we had a ceremony for reciting the trainings. The ceremony is performed once a month, and if there are people interested in receiving them, there is a transmission ceremony as well. I received them at last month’s ceremony. It’s a ritualistic thing. I guess people wouldn’t take them seriously if there wasn’t a ritualistic aspect placed on them, and that makes sense, I can accept that. So it is encouraged that the trainings be recited every month, and if they aren’t recited in three months, preferably with a practicing community in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition, the transmission is "lost".

The ceremony is formal with the monastics dressing up in their orange “sangati” robes over their usual brown ones, and it follows a script in a book and includes bell ringing and prostrations. Each of the trainings are read aloud and it is asked whether the practitioner has done his or her best to study, understand, and practice each training. The response is silent since each person’s response is personal. So I imagine a silent response to the Fifth Mindfulness Training, the one on mindful consumption might be something like, "Yes, I am aware of the suffering caused every day by my turning on my car; that people, plants, and animals are even killed, and natural resources destroyed, so that I may drive it, even though more than half the time I could have taken public transportation or ridden a bike which would have also improved my health and fitness. Whenever I turn on my car, I am mindful of the global consequences, and I am sorry for the poor suckers who suffer for my convenience."

I’m gonna suck as a monk.

Total Relaxation:
Among the afternoon activities on Sunday Day of Mindfulness is often something we call “Total Relaxation”. Some people love it and swear by it. I’m not particularly enamored of it. It’s basically a guided meditation while lying down, in which participants are guided to focus on body parts to relax each part, one by one. All the times I’ve participated, it has been guided by a pleasant-voiced nun, and after the guided part is done, she sings for 10-15 minutes, almost lullaby-like, to aid in the relaxation. A lot of people fall asleep during Total Relaxation, which is fine, almost expected, and they snore to wake up the dead. A lot of people experience not knowing whether they fell asleep or not, but they end up refreshed and relaxed. I’ve fallen asleep during it (don’t know if I snored), I’ve also experienced not knowing whether I’d fallen asleep or not, and I’ve managed to stay aware through the whole thing. Never have I emerged refreshed and relaxed. Quite the contrary, I get irritable and impatient. In fact, during Total Relaxation has been the only time at the monastery that I’ve become irritable and impatient! I’m still trying to figure out what that means, aside from maybe sucking as a monk.