This holiday, I attended a meditation course run by the Young Buddhists Association of Thailand. It was designed to be an enjoyable course that blended the practice of sitting and walking meditation, the application of the skills learnt from it and fun activities. They also had speakers come in to teach us about how meditation can help in life.
I learnt a lot from the meditation course and I will try to remember everything and use it to help me whenever I need it.
The first thing I learned from it was that happiness does not come from things outside of yourself or your mind. The example our teacher used was people being sad about something and complaining on Facebook and ranting about it. The teacher said that people who do this are looking for attention from friends and become happy when people give them the attention they want. She taught us that to be truly happy, you must first calm your mind, and watch the breath. The peace you get from not bothering about anything else is true happiness.
One of the games we played to apply the concentration on the breath was to hold a bowl of water which was filled to the brim and walk around the garden and try to spill as little as possible. I remember that when friends walked past me and I looked at them instead of concentrating on myself and my bowl of water, the water spilled and my team would lose. When I cleared my mind and stayed with myself and didn't care about anything else, I didn't spill my water!
Over the duration of the course, a total of 7 speakers came to talk to us. The first was an LSE graduate who regularly practices meditation. He told us about his time in Dulwich College and said that he had many roommates during his time there, he didn't like many of them as they were loud, slept late and didn't take many showers. He was angry at them but he told us that we should forgive
anyone who makes us angry as it makes us feel better about the situation.
The second was a monk who came to talk about the 5 precepts. He said that a good human being has to make sure they stick to the 5 precepts.
The third was a monk who came to teach about how important our lives are and how lucky we are to have so much. He showed us pictures of farmers who were so poor they couldn't afford shoes, and compared it to our lives. We have money to pay for clothes, shoes, and food, we are extremely lucky.
The fourth was a man whose family was extremely rich, they had 3 factories and many houses and cars. As a child he had lots of money to buy everything he wanted. But when he grew up a little, his family started running out of money and had to sell their factories. Then they had to sell their houses and had to rent one. More bad news came their way and he was stuck in jail. Luckily his parents bailed him out. His mum then told him to go on a retreat at his local temple. After doing so for many months, he came back and realised that he needed to do more charity and be more thankful for
he has.
The fifth was a monk who talked about being polite to your elders and how you have to respect them.
The sixth (and my favourite) was a Cambridge graduate called Pam who was the LSE graduate's sister. She came and talked about how meditation can be used in all parts of life. She went to a boarding school called Wycombe Abbey. She said that meditation helped her to concentrate on her studies and not stray from schoolwork. She said it helped her to make the right decisions, her friends started drinking alcohol when she started to become a teenager and she tried it too but she made sure she stopped with the help of meditation. When she finished her GCSEs, she got all A*s in physics, chemistry, biology, maths, English, English literature, French, Spanish and further maths. When she applied for Oxford and LSE, she didn't get accepted and she was very upset but she got back on track and tried harder, and after that she got into Cambridge.
The final speaker was a former model who won the 'Miss Thailand' award. She said that she used to drink all the time and party with her friends. All this had to stop when she found out she had cancer. She spent her time meditating and learning about Buddhism. She realised then that nothing is permanent. Another lesson she taught us was that you should love your parents. When she was ill her mum took care of her even though she was a very difficult child and she even welled up a little when she talked about her mum.
Overall I learnt a lot and will try to use this in my everyday life.
Thank you YBAT, and a special thanks to uncle Boy and auntie Ann.
