Ruth McDonald

Kula, Sangha, and Learning Community

My yoga community, or kula, has become very important to me in recent years. We not only practice postures together, but also meditate together, support each other emotionally, and often find ways to take care of each other, when one of us is in need. As I have studied yoga and meditation, I have also become interested in Eastern religions. One of my favorite Buddhist writers is Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay), a Vietnamese monk who lives in exile and runs a monastery in France called Plum Village. I was originally interested in how this community works within the practice of mindfulness. Thay is coming to the United States to visit Magnolia Grove monastery in Batesville, Mississippi in September, and I am considering attending the retreat entitled Healing Yourself is Healing the World. For more than fifteen years, I have been a teacher of one kind or another. I taught drama to young students before I became a High School drama director and spent the last five years teaching English. I will complete my requirements for my MA in Literature with a focus on Composition Studies by the end of July and plan to teach composition and/or continue my work in a writing center. I am also planning to undergo training to become a certified yoga instructor in August/September. So as a teacher, I am interested in cultivating mindfulness in my students. Thay and the residents of Plum Village, as well as the monks at monasteries in the United States which are in his tradition, such as Magnolia Grove, Deer Park, and Blue Cliff monasteries, are committed to assisting adults and children in creating a mindfulness practice in order to bring about a more peaceful planet. My question then is how do these communities work, and what can I learn from them that I can share with my community and my students?

My first stop on my research adventure was the Plum Village website. In addition to being a monastic community, the center offers retreats and mindfulness trainings to lay people. The philosophy of the community includes everyone who has ever visited as part of the Sangha, or community, for “there is no coming and no going . . . we are always with you and you, with us.” Visitors to the center follow the same schedule as the residents; they practice meditation, eat together in silence, and participate in Dharma talks. The focus on building Sangha is strikingly different from the elevation of the individual portrayed in Ayn Rand’s work. The webmaster expresses that “the Sangha eyes and hands and heart are greater than that of any individual member.” The residents all have another person who they look after as an extension of themselves, called a “second body.” That person in turn “chooses someone else, so we create a complete circle with each person linked to the next.” They use this practice to connect to each other and “realize how we are truly parts of one body.” Every activity is done with the practice of mindfulness, from washing the dishes to brushing their teeth. Periodically, they ring a mindfulness bell to remind people to stop, relax their bodies, and become aware of their breathing. One of the past visitors, Ed Glauser, is an elementary school counselor in Georgia. His article on the Plum Village website, “The Mindful Schoolbell,” recounts his experience of bringing the bell to classrooms, where he successfully used the bell to teach mindfullness to students. The Plum Village community is currently working on a film, Thay has released a book, and the community has created a manual all in the pursuit of enlarging the Sangha.

Since I am considering visiting Magnolia Grove in September, I journeyed back to the virtual United States to peruse their website. This community seems very similar to the one in France. They also focus on the practice of mindfulness and open their Sangha to the world community. I noticed that a teacher from New Orleans had brought her students for a four-day retreat recently, so I wrote to the office, inquiring about the visit. The person that replied told me that it always brings them “great joy” to have students come to practice with them. He/she said they had not received any sharing from the recent visit yet, but that the same teacher had brought students the previous year and had sent a letter documenting some positive changes in the students on their return. The following is an excerpt from her letter that shows an example of how one student changed not only his attitude, but affected school staff:

Before leaving the school Thursday morning for the funeral, I was walking down the hall with our assistant principal. We came across a student, who attended the retreat at Magnolia Grove, who was at the water fountain, just steps from his classroom. The assistant principal immediately started yelling at him demanding to know why he was out of class. He explained that his teacher had given him permission to get water, the assistant principal continued to yell and fuss. The student put his hands together, bowed and said “Mr. Assistant Principal, I am sorry for upsetting you, please forgive me for this.” Wow, the assistant principal was shocked and could only reply to the student in a softened way.

Clearly, the Magnolia Grove Sangha had a positive impact on these AP Psychology students.

            Next, I wanted to see if there was any scholarship on the subject. I found two articles using the UHCL database that support this kind of reform in both public schools and community colleges. For brevity’s sake, I will not go in depth to them now, but both articles speak of building community to “restore wholeness and foster engagement, imagination, and compassion in both instructors and students” (Haight, 2010). The atmosphere in a public high school can be distressingly dystopian, but I believe with an approach that focuses on building community in the classroom and teaching students of any age to slow down and be mindful, a more utopian atmosphere can be created. This type of approach reminds me more of the educational philosophy of Herland, where the mothers focused on the joy of natural learning, instead of the extreme control and oversight that we see in current educational practices. I would like to continue to inquire into positive ways to create community in an educational setting.

http://www.magnoliagrovemonastery.org/

http://www.plumvillage.org/

Gates, Gordon. Awakening to School Community: Buddhist Philosophy for Educational Reform. Journal of Educational Thought. Vol. 39-2, 149.173, 2005.

Haight, Robert. The Classroom is a Sangha: Contemplative Education in the Community College. New Directions for Community Colleges, vol. 151, 29-38. 2010.