Our FBA Dharmabyte today,and#8221;My Practice in Everyday Life,and#8221; is one of a series of short talks given for the Triratna [FWBO] International Urban Retreat of 2009, where Order Members from around the world speak about their life and practice.
Kamaladevi is an Order Member living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. Here she talks about doing the mindful and#8220;danceand#8221; of self and other in her work at a busy community library.
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by free Buddhist audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. Hi, my name is Kamala Davey and we're in Auckland togged up a bit because it's winter. And I'd just like to talk about my job, which is working in a very busy public library, in which I find a very good venue for the practice of mindfulness. In fact, it's absolutely crucial that I practice some kind of mindfulness during the day, otherwise there's lots of suffering and stirring because it's such a busy, chaotic place. That's Abindale Community Library and we've just got a small staff and a huge number of customers coming in and out. And it's a real community center because there's heaps of different nationalities, lots of Chinese, Indian people, people from all sorts of Pacific islands, people from countries in Africa, from Germany and Australia and all the rest, as well as the New Zealand parking lot. And we do have New Zealand Mallory coming in as well. Not only that, it's all ages. It's babies coming in for active movement of music and elderly people coming in to learn computers and even a Chinese computer class where they seem to need to talk at top volume all the time. We have a homework club for nine-year-old to twelve-year-old kids, and that's in busy and we try to assist them with their homework, as well as running the rest of the library. So it's not just the box, it's helping people on and off computers, fixing up accounts for them, troubleshooting, cursing at the technology, which is one of the hardest things I find when the technology breaks down. And quite often, so short start after it feels like we have to split ourselves into several pieces. So it feels like multitasking is the score for the day and you just can't keep that up. So I'm having an intention every day to remain mindful and it doesn't happen 100% of the time, but I soon learn or soon discover when I'm not being mindful, and that is when I feel tension in my body, my chest, belly, my face, my shoulders are all tensed up, and the mind is whirling away, maybe there's judgments coming up, there's spiritability, impatience, aversion, and all those negative kind of emotions and feelings coming up. Hang on, mindful, mindfulness, and I bring my awareness back to the body, and I breathe into the tension of wherever the tension is in the body, because the body is the clue about what the mind is doing, what emotions are being produced by the mind. I breathe and soften the belly, soften the body, feel my feet on the ground, feel my spine rising up, shoulders back, face relaxed. It's sort of like setting itself very quickly into a meditation posture, even though you're still moving and talking. And then I'm in more of a position from that basis, I'm a position to have an open mind, open heart to the person I'm dealing with, and to take them in fully and not to think, "Oh, there's another one person waiting immediately behind them or there's somebody over there that needs help," and so on. And then I can get a sense of what it means to do one task at a time, to take in the person fully, to recollect that there's innumerable conditions in their lives that I don't know about, that have brought them to the library, and maybe they've got some anxiety about something more Christian, about having to pay 30 cents fine, or 30 dollar fine, or whatever, what they're wanting to join up, and we have a lot of people joining up each day to the library, new members. So when I do that, come back first of all to the body, and that gives me a clue about the emotions and feelings that I'm going through, and relax all that, open out to the person, and then that sense of separation between me and the customer sort of vanishes, and then it feels more like that there's not them and other, so to speak. And it's more like we're in a kind of a game or a dance together in the library. So, yeah, throughout the day, I can sort of go in and out of this mindfulness, and it's been very valuable to set that intent from each day to come back to the body, and start from that foundations of mindfulness. And yeah, it's a lot more fun for everyone. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate, and thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
