St.Mary's College Student Retreat 2006

Over the past two weeks, Deer Park was privileged to host 17 students from St Mary’s College along with their professor Dr. Nushi Safinya.

Having the students here has brought a whole new dimension to our Sangha life- enabling us to see and to experience Deer Park in a new way: through their eyes.

Most of the students averaging 20 years of age, came to the monastery to learn the Art of Mindful Living and Compassionate Communication.

During the first week, in addition to participating in our regular schedule special workshops, activities and discussions were held for the students on such topics as “Mindful Sexuality and Relationships”, “Compassionate Communication”, “Dealing with Strong Emotions” and “Beginning Anew”. In the second week other activities included a “City Practice Day” where the monastics took the students down into the town to do a number of errands. The twist is that for each errand they were given certain reflections to do in order to explore how they can apply mindfulness to these everyday aspects of life. We’ve also had fun activities such as hiking to enjoy the moon, tai chi, rollerblade hockey and arts and crafts. Each day, as part of their curriculum the students had reading assignments to complete and discuss with the monastics assigned to guide them…. We so enjoyed being College Students! We’ve noticed that many of the students had sweatshirts with “St Mary’s” written on them. Maybe we should have “Deer Park” sweatshirts made!

For the first week, each morning we arranged for the students to wake up a little bit later than usual and have sitting meditation as a smaller group. In this way we could have both a shorter period of sitting for them, and offer guided meditations each morning. After a week here, the majority of the students excitedly stated that they wanted to sit with the larger Sangha each morning for 45 minutes. This morning we tried it for the first time- and after the 45 minute sit, the students felt like heroes- that they could make it for such a long time.

Another special aspect of the past week has been the student’s wish to learn how to cook and to offer meals to the Sangha. All the students have been divided into cooking teams and they have had a lot of fun. In addition, Dr. Nushi organized the students to offer a Middle Eastern banquet for the Sangha. The assortment of dishes was truly extraordinary as was the pride of the students in offering such a delicious meal to us all.

There have been some rough patches over the past week. It is a difficult adjustment for many of the students to suddenly be in a Buddhist monastery so far from their usual schedule, comfort foods and friends. Therefore, Br. Phap Niem and Brother Phap Hai decided to do what our teacher always does for the monastics during a long hard retreat- to write each of the students a “love letter”. Each of the letters prepared was individual- sharing about the wonderful qualities we see in each one.