The week after KPY retreat, Phra Anan asked several of us if we wanted to write a blog for KPY website. I wanted to say no because I felt I wasn’t good enough and I usually got things wrong almost every time anyway, I felt that I didn’t have much to offer to other people. It’s embarrassing enough to share your thoughts in front of other people and be told it’s wrong. Now, I will have trails on the internet that will be there forever? For everyone to see too? I don’t know if that’s for me. So I freaked out a bit. But then let’s see what it is about.

I quickly asked what if I contemplate wrong? I don’t feel that I’m good enough to teach other people. And misleading people on Dhamma teaching sounds like it’s gonna yield bad karma for way too many lives. Scary!

However, Phra Anan said that mistakes are fine. The idea of the blog was to have students to share their journey in their dhamma practice so it wasn’t meant to be perfect contemplation anyway. Ah okay, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be 🙂

The request actually sounded reasonable; one post every week. But of course I had to think twice before committing. Can I really do it? I have an audit that is still going on at least until the end of October, I still have to work on the photos from KPY retreat, and I have to study for my tax exams if I want to get them done by the end of this year. Now how do I fit blogging weekly?

He then told us to check other students’ blog. I thought, wow, they are so dedicated. They really write 1 post weekly?

Then we checked their blogs and it turned out not everyone did 1 post weekly. My nerve calmed down by a lot right away 😀 I was so sure that because they all agreed to the term of writing 1 post weekly, that they really did write 1 post every week. I’m not saying that it’s okay to promise something with an intention to not fulfill it. I’m saying, it’s okay to commit and try my best. Although the result might look similar from a third person point of view, sometimes, thoughts do count.

But we’re gonna share our blog to the world? You have to understand, in this teaching, contemplating often means finding our wrong perception. MY WRONG. I will have to openly admit to the world that I was wrong!  And it might mean my friends and family or my husband’s friends and family will read that. I worry if they will judge me. I worry if my own words will be used against me.

But then again, it’s impermanence. They might use my words against me, they might be able to relate and learn something from it, or they might not even bother reading it!

They might judge me based on what I write but they also might/have already judged me for something I never wrote. I know that when I judge others, I don’t bother checking if they have a blog or not!

One thing I know though, writing things down helps me. I can contemplate better when I have things written in front of me. It’s a lot easier to go back to my previous thoughts and see where I went wrong, expand the contemplation, or see more impermanence than just think about it in my head.

And that was enough reason for me to say okay.  So now, I can say to you, welcome to my first post! 🙂