Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

Between Weekend Retreats: Community Work Day
I’m handling retreats better than in the Winter. I don’t know why they started getting to me back then, maybe I’m adjusting better to the crowds now. Next weekend is a “Family Retreat”, and is a day longer because of the holiday weekend. Oy. It’ll be fine, I tell myself, it’ll be fine. On non-retreat weekends, we often have community work days on Saturdays when lay practitioners are invited up to help out with work projects and we feed them and house them for a night for free if they want to stay on until Sunday’s public Day of Mindfulness.

Yesterday I was on a team to clear out two guestrooms that were being used for storage because we’re going to need every room we have for next week’s retreat. I was glad that I wasn’t on the campsite clearing team that I was on all last week since I ended up getting a pretty extensive case of poison oak on my arms and legs. Just a lot of itching and scratching, no severe blistering like someone else got. The wisdom of clearing out poison oak for campsites is an interesting one. I’m not sure what the logic is. One lay person last week made the keen observation that we were just making it easier for people to get poison oak. On Friday morning walking meditation, the community walked down to the area we had worked on, and right into the area we cleared. It looked very nice, but I knew better, I knew what was in there, I wasn’t going in there. Several other people were also holding back, and I noticed it was all of us who had worked on the site. We knew better, we knew what was in there, we weren’t going in there.

Poison Oak Grove:













During work meditation, quite a few people are good on the “work”, but not so clear on the “meditation”. With one of the monks, it’s even a problem because his old habit energies come up, and work is all about getting things done, and he completely loses the meditation part and it affects other people. He’s working on it and encourages people to keep pointing it out to him by telling him to breathe. I’ve started bringing a mindfulness bell to worksites and I sound it every 45-60 minutes to get everyone to stop, breathe, and come back to mindfulness in case they’ve gotten too caught up in ‘work’. During the day, whenever we hear a bell sounded, we stop what we’re doing and bring our minds back to our breathing and the present moment. It’s habit. Except during working meditation, and the first time I did it, people didn’t respond automatically and kept working for several seconds until it dawned on them. I was told this is a practice used during Plum Village work meditation, but it seems to have been discarded at Deer Park, the frontier monastery.