November 3, 2003

samsara of a dharma center

Before working at a Dharma center I thought, “people that work in a Dharma center must have such a blissful life. They must really have wonderful thoughts all the time and have the ‘Midas touch’ with everyone in their life. They must be keeping pure ethics, practice for hours everyday on their own and have big group gatherings where the community comes together and rejoices and practices together.”

Well, that’s totally a distorted view of reality. Dharma centers aren’t that much different than other places I’ve worked. It’s funny, but prior to this job the Dharma was my own private thing. Now it’s integrated into the job, which is both wonderful and horrible. Wonderful because nearly everyone I see during the day is a practitioner. They are trying to watch their thoughts and change themselves. You know this and it’s nice, but if they do something that isn’t in accord with what you think a practitioner should do then it can really wreck your whole day. It can also be horrible because you live and work with the same eight people. If their is a puja and it’s on your day off or after your scheduled to be off then you don’t want to go “back to work” (i.e. into the building where you spend all day) to do practice with people you spent all day with. It’s really interesting, but I am practicing less now than when I had my own little daily practice that nobody knew about.

posted @ 10:25 AM

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