Lesson Plan: Buddhist Prayer Flags

Of course, we couldn't complete our World Religion unit on Buddhism without doing Buddhist Prayer Flags!  This class was run by artist and teacher extraordinaire, the Reverend Donna Belt!  She explained the tradition of prayer flags, and the fact that they are hung in a set order by color, which symbolize different elements.  So the traditional order is:
Blue--representing sky
White--representing air or wind
Red--representing fire
Green--representing water
Yellow--representing earth

She discussed the fact that the flags are called "Wind Horses," and that the belief is that every time the wind moves the flag, it send the energy and prayers contained in the flag, not to a divine being, but through the space, blessing everyone.  So it is a belief practice much in line with the Buddhist tradition of universal connection and compassion.

Reverend Belt helped the students create universal healing prayers involving all of the different elements.  They they wrote those prayers on their flags, sometimes also decorating them with a horse image or other decorative elements.

Once they were completed, the teachers demonstrated the traditional way to hang a set of prayer flags...

First one

Then another

Then many

It can be a very powerful--and beautiful--way to talk about Buddhist beliefs.

Lesson Plan: Zentangles

We did such a wonderful activity as part of our Buddhism unit in World Religions.  One week we focused on Zen Buddhism, which has a great focus on being in the moment.  I wanted the students to have a Zen experience, so we did three activities in a row in complete silence (a total of 30 minutes, which is a LONG time not to talk when you are 12-14).

First, we did a silent Zen meditation that focused completely on the breathing.  That lasted for 10 minutes (and felt like a LONG 10 minutes for some of them, although others found it relaxing).  We ended up with a 5 minute silent journaling activity, in which they wrote down their experience of the three events.

In between those, however, we did 15 minutes of this wonderful thing called Zentangle ®.

We used Zentangle as a drawing meditation.  It is a deceptively-simple art form created by Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts that is supposed to improve the artist's focus, awareness, feelings of freedom and relaxation, and artistry by creating repetitive patterns on a small (3.5 inches) square of paper.  The square is first divided into sections by a few lines, and then each portion of the square is filled with a different pattern.  In its purest state, it is supposed to be only black and white, but some add colors as well.

The students and I all LOVED doing this.  Compared to the breathing meditation, the students felt that the time seemed to fly by and that it was easy to maintain the silence.  Making a Zentangle  is very liberating, because even those who claimed "I can't draw" felt like they could draw lines and "doodle."  It does capture your focus and your attention in a very relaxing way, and is mostly spontaneous, and yet repetitive.  And it does draw you into kind of a Zen experience.  Apparently, people are using it all sorts of way, including doing it before tests to get students into a relaxed and focused way, or as part of the process of addiction recovery and other related theraputic uses.

It's the sort of thing that is hard to explain.  But I highly recommend you visit the Zentangle website, or other online resources about this new art form (one of my favorites is Zentangle Patterns), get the basic instructions, and try it yourself!

Below we have the beautiful tiles (as they are called by their creators, Maria and Rick) created by our class.  As always, even though everyone was given the same materials and directions, the results turned out to be very different and reflective of the varied personalities in the group.

Curriculum Resource: Buddhism with Dharma Games

I recently found a cute little website when I was looking for things for my World Religion class.  Buddhism and computer games--two things you wouldn't necessarily put together.  But the site Dharma Games has a number of computer games, but all with Buddhist themes.

The games are mostly typical game formats--pinball, concentration, pacman-like--but are overlaid with Buddhist concepts and imagery.  So for most of them, you don't really have to know a lot about Buddhism to play them, nor do they really help you experience or work through Buddist principles or thinking.  But still, it is a fun and different way to get students to learn a little bit about Buddhism.

They have one called It's Meditation Time, which is a puzzle game where you have to get all the Buddhist monks to sit down in order to meditate.  But when one monk changes position, the others next all take the opposite position from before (so that the neighboring monks that were seated are now standing and vice versa).  It's a good puzzle, because I have no idea how you re going to get them all seated.  If you figure it out, let me know in the conments below.

                                                                                    

New Year's Day 2012 Blog: Welcoming the New Year

Welcome to 2012!

That was what I wrote on the white board for the Sunday School class I taught this morning.  We had a really great discussion about "outside of the class" things they enjoyed last year and wanted to do this year. We're going to try for our first-ever "lock-in" for this class, some fun and interesting fundraisers, and some experiential spiritual workshops.  I don't want to give away all of our secrets, but let's just say that have some real "out of the box" ideas that I think our entire spiritual community will enjoy.

In addition to some brainstorming and planning, we did a nice Buddhist meditation that is called "Transcending Karma" that helps us detach from our past, and participated in our annual New Year's Burning Bowl and White Stone Ceremony, which I describe last year in this post.

It was a gorgeous day, so our family had a nature walk to enjoys the great outdoors.  Then we came home and ate our traditional "nuevo-Southern" New Years Dish of white chicken chili (made with black-eyed beans, which we feel compelled to eat on New Years but don't really like on their own, but are delicious in chili) and green salad (I can't cook collards, so we have fresh leafy greens instead).

All in all, a pretty fantastic way to spend the first day of the year.  If the next 364 days go anything like this, we're in for a wonderful year!

This will be the last of my holiday posts.  However, starting tomorrow,  I will be running a time-related series of posts.  What could they be?  Check back tomorrow evening to find out......

Lesson Plan: Bodhi Day, or Rohatsu in Buddhism

Happy Bodhi Day, or Rohatsu in more traditional Buddhist language.  Rohatsu is the celebration of the day that the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.  The day is recorded as the 8th day of the 12th month, which makes it December 8 for us in the US, but it may be celebrated other days in the Asian or indigenous culture.

At least one of the celebrations of Bodhi Day involves decorating a Bhodhi tree (which is a type of fig tree, or related to the ficus tree) in bright, electric lights, and colorful decorations.   This is yet another of the basic religions that is geared to protecting the immediate spa

So when we opened our study of Buddhism in our World Religion class, we began with practices such as Bodhi Day.  We created trees for students to decorate, either as Rohatsu trees or in their more original format.   You can see the trees below:

Lesson Plan: World Religion Dream Catchers

In my short (five-week) World Religion class, we are concentrating on the six religions that have had the most influence on Western culture--Paganism, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam (in order of when they began).   So to help the students keep the order of these religious movements straight, we made World Religion Dream Catchers.

Dream Catchers are a tradition among some Native American tribes (which fall under the Paganism category).  They are a circle created out of a branch of wood, between which string and beads have been strung, creating an open web in the middle.  The idea is that the dream catcher will capture the bad dreams sent to a child, but will allow the good ones through its openings.

Because we are on a restricted budget of both money and time, we made ours out of paper plates, from which I had cut out the centers and punched eight holes around the inner circle of the remaining rim.  I had the students write the names or draw symbols for the six religions (we covered the religious in symbols in class beforehand) on the paper plate rims, and then string yarn from hole to hole IN ORDER of the religion's founding date.  So the first hole was just the start, but then the student would string the yarn through the Paganism hole, then through the Hinduism hole, then Judaism....you get the idea.

Here are some samples of their work.  As always, they were following the same instructions, but came up with some lovely variations.