Life Is Difficult

From my title you may expect this to be very negative blog but it’s not. My latest new year’s challenge was to try Buddhism. One of the major principles of Buddhism is that life is difficult but you can still be content or dare I say happy even when there are bad things going on in your life.

To do this challenge I checked out two books from the library. One was very basic and good for a beginner such as myself. The other was right from the Dalai Lama and was just a wee bit too intense for me. I'll spare you any more details on Buddhism but I recommend reading your own book sometime if you are interested in some enlightenment.

The first thing I had to learn about being a Buddhist is how to spell it. I kept leaving the ‘h’ out of Budda, Buddist, Budissim. Thankfully my friend told me this before I wrote this blog. I told him I guess I wasn’t a very good Cristian either. To which he explained maybe Towist would work best for me.

After reading my two books I went to a Buddhist temple with a friend who already practices Buddhism. Unfortunately the service is in Chinese so I probably wouldn’t have gotten much from it. Just sitting in the temple was a relaxing experience though. And the temple offers an English speaking discussion group so we attended that. I found this class to be very rewarding and informative. It was much different from the engineering classes I'm used to. After class there was a free vegetarian pot luck which was a nice bonus. I ate so much I had my own little Buddha belly. I also attended a tea ceremony. Everyone at the temple was so nice and seemed so happy. It was a good experience and I even made a few new friends.

I like Buddhism and would like to learn more. Unfortunately with limited free time and many other resolution challenges, I’m not sure how much more I will pursue of this.

Cat “Buddha Belly” Cathy