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When my husband and I moved into our present home this summer, one of the many things that delighted us about the little carriage house in the middle of downtown was having an extra bedroom. Since our household consists of just the two of us and our two small parrots, we could put the futon couch in that extra room for guests but use it as a shrine room on a daily basis. It even had enough built-in bookshelves to hold all our books on religion–Christian, Buddhist, and Pagan.
I organized the bookshelves, set up my Tibetan Buddhist shrine with the blue and white labyrinth rug from IKEA in front of it, and began working my way into a daily meditation practice. I tried meditating in the morning, after waking and while my husband was taking his shower. I tried meditating in the evening, before going to bed. I tried sitting on a zafu, on a gomden, on the futon couch, on a chair, on the gomden placed on the futon.
Last week, I suggested to my husband that we re-locate our shrine downstairs, in the living room, around our fireplace. The fire is gas-fuelled, but the brick is vintage. He agreed, and soon the television had been moved upstairs into the former shrine room, the furniture had been rearranged to focus on the fireplace instead of the tv, and my husband had resumed meditating. He had never felt quite comfortable in “my” shrine room. And last night, I moved our Mac computer and hooked it to the television, leaving my old Dell attached to the smaller monitor in the bedroom; we now have enough space to use our two computers separately.
There’s a lesson in all this, but I’m not quite sure yet what it is. We were both so sure that having a separate shrine room would be peachy-keen and the bee’s knees. Yet my husband’s practice as well as my own got a boost when we put our shrine in the center of our living space, instead of in a dedicated area.
The image at the head of this entry is a plaque I bought from Sacred Source and put on the mantelpiece when we moved in; it’s a reproduction of an ancient Roman depiction of the household gods. The little bowls of water I offer daily now honor the Lares and Penates as well as Tara, Avalokiteshvara, and Shakyamuni. The Buddhas don’t seem to mind, and neither do the household gods.
