meditating outside

I meditated outside for the first time today. It was more out of necessity than desire. It's been really hard for me to meditate daily lately while I temporarily live in a household with multiple kids and other adults.

But this morning I was walking back to my car after running in the park. I passed two women who just happened to be talking about meditation. "It makes me so much more calm and focused..." one of them said. I agree. I wondered if anyone would be home when I got back -- if the house was empty I might squeeze in some practice. But what about outside? Right now? I looked around. What if someone saw me... "What's that nut doing?" What if an animal attacked me? You know, one of those giant mutant predatory squirrels.

sunshine film

At first the film "Sunshine" seemed way to dark and pessimistic for my liking. I'm sure others felt the same. But the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated a few of the Buddhist-related themes in the film, such as mindfulness.

(Spoiler Alert)

In the film, a crew of several scientists are

the next step

I finally went and sat with a local meditation group this week. It's a Korean zen lineage, and they were friendly and humble folks. Although the several other people there on that week night were all white Americans, we met in an actual Korean Buddhist temple. The temple was about the size of your average home, with a pretty blue ceramic tile roof. Inside there was just one large room, with a polished wood floor, and three large gold seated-Buddha statues in the front. On the wall behind the large Buddha statues were shelves from shoulder-height to the ceiling with hundreds of the same seated gold Buddha figure, each about ten inches tall.