How to Celebrate your Birthday in the Buddhist Tradition.

Particularly if you grew up in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, please comment below and add some info or ideas—I did my best but am not known for my memory.

In the Buddhist tradition, our birth-day is considered a particularly important, spiritually-powerful day. It’s considered important to mark it, and mark it properly—with a sense of appreciation, sadness, poignancy…and celebration.

Growing up in an American Buddhist family, my ma would always start the day the good ol’fashioned American way—with an embarrassing, sweet, love-ful waking me up and singing the whole song to me while, embarrassed and touched, I rubbed my eyes and sat up in bed so she could put down the yummy breakfast-in-bed tray she’d prepared.

I think that’s important—not to get too conceptual about “how-to-celebrate-one’s-birthday-in-spiritual-manner,” but to remember that basically you’re marking the occasion of the first lighting of the little brilliant fragile flame that is your life. And, of course, the day serves as a poignant reminder that this endless cycle of sun and moon, week and weekend, seasons upon seasons…isn’t so endless. This life is short—why, just yesterday I was a boy. Now (technically, if not emotionally) I’m a man.

...click here to read the rest.

Yours,

Waylon Lewis
editor-in-chief, host
elephantjournal.com, Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis

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