As Puja and the Hymn Singing session ended, Bro. Chook announced that Sis. ------------ is going to give us a dhamma talk, so students from age 9 to 17 is told to stay back. However, Sis.------------ have not arrived. As Ananda is in charge of today, Sis. Khoo is told to keep us occupied for 15 minutes, unprepared, she hand over her to Bro. Nathan who taught us how to sing a certain pali song.
After the pali song. Everybody retreated to the chairs. But before she did an introduction, she called all of us, students, teachers and parent to sit on the floor closer to the stage. She begin by introducing a certain yoga beginning with a leaping frog,
followed by a foetal position (baby position)
and then demonstrated how to do the
"Tree Position" (One leg neatly crossed the other at the front of the knee and arms at the side and then over the head, then the other leg that is standing , bend, as if we're sitting). The trick is to focus on a point and never to waver. A lot of students hopped around unable to keep this position. As time pass, and they got use to it, they begin to caught hold and stand steady.
Next, she told us each to find a partner and sit back to back with the right hand over our mouths and the left hand over our stomach. The right hand covers the mouth to symbolize right speech:
No lying, No harsh speech, No slandering and No idle talk. We put the left hand over the stomach to feel our breathing.
Then she did a little game to excite the little ones by asking : Why do you come to Sunday School? Is it because your parents send you? Who is happy to be here? And told us where to stand if that such and such is our answer. Astoundingly, many students are happy to learn the dhamma and rushed to the stage as Sis. ------------said to stand if we're happy. However Ananda students did not budge. Maybe because we're tall and don't want to run around silly like the younger ones, or probably, we're just neutral. Later, she had us in a line and we had to observe the feet of the person in front and follow their steps. This is also a sort of meditation. Sister Khoo said that this is called
"Walking Meditation". We walked around the hall a few times and finally stopped. We were told to cover our ears with our thumbs and place the other four fingers over our eyes and concentrate on breathing.
Then we all lay down in the
"Corpse Position" Sounds gruesome, doesn't it? But its pretty comfortable and relaxing. We're told that if we're studying, and our eyes get tired and heavy, we can do this "corpse position" to relax and to re-focus.
As lunch wasn't ready, we went to our respective teachers. Sis. Khoo prepared paper for surveys.Teacher Khoo and Sin Yi handed out forms and there were questions like: Personal details (Name, Date Of Birth, Hobbies, Likes and Dislikes...), and to rate our knowledge on the life of buddha, the dhamma, or whether do we practiced the dhamma at home from 1-10. Besides that, we're told to list down at least 3 or more of our preferred activities which is listed on the back of the paper, and
how are we going to make it happen (the activities).
Everybody wrote all sorts of answers and Teacher Khoo laughed out loud when she read them. ^^
Teacher Khoo talked for awhile about dances. languages and cooking at her house. We are practically more excited about going to her house to cook (we did this once before, we did gnochi , a type of pasta and bread and butter pudding
, we also learned how to grill green and red papers over the stove fire to make the peeling of the skin much easier, and bacon and cucumber finger food. We also tried a variety of cheese with grapes and such, it was a lot of fun)
Then we had a wonderful lunch, courtesy of the volunteers at the kitchen. Three
Sadhus to them! WESTERN BREAKFAST!
We had sunny side up (egg), cucumbers, potato chips( almost like French fries) bread and sausages. Jong Shyan and Tian Hao did the contemplation before meal and the contemplation after meal.
After lunch, everyone was free to go home. I am sure that everyone had a good time today.
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