Last year, I was by myself at a used bookstore in NYC (Strand) and a guy started talking to me about some kind of Buddhism. In all honesty, I was kind of unbalanced at the time. I felt all out of sorts from the move away from MN, and had started meditating, and it was all a lot for me. But the same toughness that didn't see this (my sensitivity, and overdoing change) kept me safe walking around the city by myself. Anyway, this guy was nice, and it was interesting talking to him. He was from some sort of Buddhism where there is a stick they chant to. He gave me a sheet of paper with the info and I promised him I would look at the website, even though I wasn't really interested in chanting to a stick. I kept the paper because I didn't want to be a liar
Recently, I took the piece of paper from this man out of my purse (I am tossing out everything I can, and that means going through it all). I looked up the website. It was pretty much as he described it, chanting to a stick. Buddhism is interesting (though yoga is what appealed to me from day 1), but not my particular thing, and I may be too Western for this stick chanting. I can dig mantras (I highly recommend the Ravi/Ana kundalini yoga DVDs for a Western crowd; they explain the purpose behind various exercises as you go along). However, chanting is a little too somber for me. I know the stick thing is not as ridiculous as it sounds--but I can't figure out why I'd want to do it. I just thought the whole thing was interesting. I remember mostly wondering why he decided to talk to me. Did I look weird? Now I think he was probably enthusiastic about his practice, and saw I was open-minded. It's so funny, the people you can run into.
I was reminded again because I went to that bookstore, Strand, when we were in NYC last weekend. I love bookstores, and my weakest point, as far as materialism goes, has to be book collecting. I try to give away books I'm not reading (I even gave away my 1984 version of the book 1984--which was my favorite book for several years! I was a somber teenager :) ) and now have the excuse that I'm going to give them away to a local prison book project. They need the books, I insist, so I need to buy them and read them. But the stack is getting to be too much, even for me. Time to start going to the library more often!
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I took a meditation class in college and for one class we meditated on a candle. I found it really entrancing. When I experimented with meditation on my own years later, I found the candle to be very important in giving me something to fixate on. The candle, the stick, they are all good tools for helping with meditation.
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