Nun of Your Business

What happens in your kitchen when you come down for breakfast? I live at a Dharma center which gets a lot of traffic through its dining room, the place where I get my meals. I currently live about 30 feet away from the back door of the dining room. On a quiet morning like today, I can feel comfortable rolling over there at any time for breakfast, but when there is a big group I usually wait until the guests have mostly cleared out before trying to get my tea and cereal. Still, there is usually something interesting happening when I get to the dining room. I'm starting this post, which I will add to over the next month. Wednesday, June 6 Table over by the back door: A group of three works on a musical about Amelia Earhart and George Putnam called Final Approach . They discuss lines and scenes from the script and hum tunes. They discuss famous actors who have ruined their careers by undiplomatic things they have said or done. Table by the front door: I sit down here where...

I live in a Buddhist subculture. I don't just mean the place where I live, but most of the people I interact with are at least nominally Buddhist. Because they have all had extensive teachings on karma and compassion and working with the mind, I have higher expectations of them than I do of the rest of society. However, those people--especially the ones who are involved in Dharma-center work--are often at the end of their rope, over-worked, stressed out. That stress shows up in the form of unfriendliness and short tempers. So, I started thinking, how can we change the system, the culture around our Dharma centers so that people have a better way to handle the stress. Should we make more structure so that their time is more protected--certain hours of the day that are silent or for formal meditation practice only? Or does some kind of training program need to be implemented to target these Dharma workers and show them how to practice Lo-Jong, Thought Transformation, i.e., how to tra...