A SACRED PLACE
~ AJAHN BRAHM
I keep encouraging all Buddhists to have a place in their houses, if not a room, at least a corner of their house, which is their shrine room, their religious room. I sometimes see how big people’s bathrooms are. Sometimes they’re made of marble, and they have very fancy taps and faucets. What are they used for? People use that place to clean up their bodies!
People also have these amazing kitchens, and lounge rooms, and games rooms, and playrooms, and TV rooms, and dining rooms, and huge, huge bedrooms, with on-suites. But very few houses have got a spiritual room. A room set aside just for the cultivation of Dhamma or religious practice. They don’t have a spiritual haven in their house, a place where they’re not cleaning their bodies, but they are cleaning their minds. They don’t have a place where they’re not feeding their stomach, but they are feeding their heart. I think that it is so necessary in today’s world, to have a meditation room, a shrine room – just a place of peace and silence.
If you really haven’t got a room in your house to do that, ask yourself, "Do I need all these other rooms"?
Are they really all that important, an office and all that other stuff? Put the office in a corner of your bedroom, and put your meditation room in your office. What is more important to you? But if you haven’t got the room, at least use a corner of some quiet room, a quiet space, where you can put your Buddha statue or your pictures, and your Dhamma books. Have that as a sacred space in your house, a place where you can go at any time. After a while by sitting there regularly; chanting there, even reading Dhamma books there, it builds up power. and becomes a power spot in your house. A place where you can just sit, because the only thing you ever do there is: to meditate, to chant, to read Dhamma books, to quieten down. It becomes psychologically empowered as a place of peace.
I’ve been teaching in this way for many years now, encouraging people to build these places in their houses, or in the corners of their rooms. People have told me amazing stories of what happens when they have these quiet places. Whenever they get uptight, or tense, or have an argument with their wife, or husband, they just retreat into their quiet corner and sit down to meditate for awhile. It saves many marriages, and so much pain. One family told me once, that their young son and daughter were having an argument, a fight. The son hit the daughter, or something, smacked her one, and instead of smacking him back she ran up into her mother’s bedroom, and sat in the sacred spot and meditated for a few minutes.
The parents were so impressed, because they had never taught her to do this. She just felt that when she was so disappointed, when she was so afraid, when she was so uptight, that that was the place to go.
It’s marvellous for your family if you can have a place like that, so that people in your family; if not yourself, your partner or children, will have a place, a refuge, which reminds them of their inner home.
When you have a place in your house that is a sacred place, make sure you don’t use it for anything else.
Please, respect the sacredness of that area. Don’t use it to listen to the radio or CD’s or to write books or anything else. It’s a sacred place, a place for doing nothing, a place of relaxation. Everywhere else in the world you have to strive, you have to exert control, you have to do your duties, and do the work that is expected of you. You have to endure silly people telling you to do stupid things. But the fact is that when you go to your little corner, you can be at peace there and let go. It’s your little monastery, your little refuge, the ‘Vultures Peak’ in your house, and that helps enormously. This is a bit of skilful advice for you.
Sometimes we can find a suitable place even when we are not in our own house, even when we are at our place of work. I read recently of one person who did a very skilful thing to be able to meditate at work.
This particular person couldn’t find a place to meditate. He couldn’t sit and meditate in his office, because you know what it’s like in the world. You are sitting in your office doing nothing, and someone will come up to you and ask for your help. They will not leave you alone, because everyone is busy and they think you are not doing anything, so you must be free. Not free at peace, but free to help them. "You’re not doing anything at the moment; can you give us a hand?" They don’t realize that doing nothing by meditating is so important and valuable. People don’t respect peace in our society; they think it’s copping out. That’s why busy people tend to make other people busy because they don’t respect peacefulness. So this man decided that every hour on the hour he would close his eyes and meditate for one minute.
It couldn’t be exactly on the hour, because if there were a telephone conversation, or a meeting with a client, or something, he would just postpone it for a while. But in every hour he would always meditate for one minute. He would close his eyes and sit there at his desk, just being still and enjoying present moment awareness, silence and breath. That’s beautiful. He just had one minute of silence and stillness. It worked so well that people walking past seeing him with his eyes closed thought he was thinking about something, or making a decision.
People didn’t know what he was doing. Because it was not for that long, they didn’t bother him. He had one minute of peace every hour at work. In his office, nobody knew what he was up to, and he got away with it. Just imagine if you went into the office and sat cross-legged in the corner, your boss would come up and say, "We are not paying you to do that, get back on the computer and work." But that didn’t happen. He just took one minute of silence in every hour at his desk; so he was continually resting. After fifty-nine minutes of hard work he took a one-minute break to collect himself, and to be still. This man found that he had a lot more mindfulness for the fifty-nine minutes that followed, and so he got much more done. He was more alert; he perceived the problems quicker, he was actually a much better worker after that one minute of silence.
Source: “Practising In The World” by Ajahn Brahmavamso
https://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebmed084.htm
📸 was taken on Oct 22, 2016 @ Jhana Grove Meditation Retreat Centre
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