Sunday meditation took place in the cold basement, among a few very brave participants. I found that after hearing stories about what Zen monks suffer in the retreat centers in Japan, I tend to think that this kind of cold I feel is reasonable, if not bearable. None of the participants seem to mind, but there is a lot of mention about the heater not circulating a lot of heat, and the possibility of even changing the heater. Should we get a louder one that might disturb the participants, however much it disperses a lot of needed heat? Or the quieter one which actually has no circulating heat?
Of course, these questions are pretty immaterial when it comes to the actual practice of meditation itself, but the point is to suggest that we normally spend a lot of time trying to adjust our inner temperatures: if sad, make happy; if alone, turn up the 'social' dial, and so on. What if we simply ignored that inner dial, or didn't adjust it even if we had the power to do so? In fact, I am lucky that we haven't had too many group meditation spaces where we could in fact have adjusted a thermostat to get the temperature 'just right'. This is because everyone's 'just right' is very different, even though people often assume that the inner thermostat is the same for everyone.
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