When I signed up for a meditation class at the Buddhist centre near where I work, there were a few things I was expecting from it. Sit down, chill out, go home, was about the order of proceedings I envisaged. I was thus surprised, nay, bemused, when the first thing our soft spoken and genial class leader instructed us to do was form a circle around the room and begin walking slowly in a clockwise direction. I say ‘instructed’ – it was more like a gentle coaxing from an old friend.
The room we were in was another suprise. I’d expected the class to be held in a functional hall or similar. Our room was in fact a Buddhist shrine, complete with the Buddha himself at one end and various other components including incense sticks and photographs of people. It lended a certain gravitas to proceedings.
So far so, well, unusual. Perhaps I could add ‘visiting a Buddhist shrine’ to my list of ticked off #40Things. The class leader, while clearly a devout Buddhist (complete with Buddhist name that I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch), wasn’t interested in converting the 12 of us to his religion, only to help us meditate. In fact he didn’t even mention Buddhism. And the walking in circles, he explained, was just to help us relax a bit and shake off the stresses of the morning, before getting down to the nitty gritty.
The nitty gritty did indeed involve sitting down and chilling out, eyes closed and following the breath. Apart from the rather unfamiliar ‘straddling a cushion’ pose, and a couple of stomach rumbles that threatened to issue forth as an embarrassing breakage of wind, it was also very relaxing. So relaxing in fact that on a couple of occasions I began swaying back and forth as sleep almost overtook me.
After the best part of half an hour of sitting quietly, eyes closed, thinking of almost nothing, it was a somnolent yet fresh-headed class that emerged from the shrine. Tea, coffee and friendly chit-chat were all on offer in the adjacent sofa room, but for us it was back to the rigours of work and building up enough stress to justify another visit the following week.
Meditation class
Pros Interesting, relaxing
Cons High boredom threshold required. Needs regular practice to be properly effective
Verdict Nice way of chilling out at lunchtime, and I loved the sense of the totally unfamiliar
Rating 8/10
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Photo thanks to Petr & Bara Ruzicka
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