Meditation Course

A meditation course should be easy to understand. A good meditation course should be a guided course. The best meditation course should be clear that you must understand very well at the beginning.
For those people who continuously find themselves stressed out from the daily activities of life, mediation may be just what they need. There are many ways in which someone can meditate and there is not one right or wrong way to learn meditation. However, one of the best ways to learn how to meditate is through an actual meditation course. The meditation courses that are offered all over the world are excellent for beginners, amateurs, and even expert meditators who need extra lessons and practice in the meditation field. In fact, it is recommended by many who practice meditation on a daily basis that a meditation course is the way that one should start out by learning how to meditate. There are all sorts of benefits one can gain by attending or listening to a meditation course and many of those benefits will be realized as soon as one opens themselves up to their free quiet thoughts and contemplating self.
A lot of the meditation courses that are offered focus on several different aspects of meditation. The first concept that is focused on is practicing finding an excellent form to sit in or relax in so that meditation comes naturally and much easier. Once that comfort zone is established only then can the rest of the meditation course take shape. Other principles that some meditation courses include is helping you to clear your mind and focus on one thing so that a relaxed state of mind with clear thoughts can be achieved. A popular and well-respected type of meditation that is taught mainly by Buddhist followers is Vipassana Meditation. This type of meditation course does, in fact, focus on clearing your mind so that you can see things in your life and throughout the world as they really are. It is all about coming to a realization through healthy deliberations and considerations that one is able to achieve a good meditative state of mind. Furthermore, meditation has been shown to not only increase the quality of life, but also to help one be able to relax and achieve that state of meditation on a daily basis.
The benefits that one can gain from attending a meditation course that requires little to no cost definitely outweigh whatever fee they pay, though. Meditation courses taught by Buddhists and others throughout the world are definitely worth the small donation that one may pay in return for the meditation lessons and instruction that is received!

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္း

ေက်ာင္းျပင္ပ ပညာေရးထဲက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္း ပညာေရး အေၾကာင္း ေဆြးေႏြး ခ်င္ပါတယ္။ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ေက်ာင္းဆိုတဲ့ ေ၀ါဟာရကို ျမန္မာလူမ်ဳိးေတြ ရင္းႏွီးျပီးသားပါ။ အထက္တန္းအဆင့္ ျမန္မာစကားေျပ သင္ရိုးထဲက စာေရးဆရာမန္းတင္ရဲ႕ ဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္းသား စကားေျပမွာ ဟိုတခ်ိန္တုန္းက ဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္း ပညာေရး ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ကို အေသးစိတ္က်က် ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာေတြ အေျခခံပညာတတ္ဖို႔နဲ႔ ယဥ္ေက်းလိမ္မာရွိမႈေတြကို ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီး ေက်ာင္းေတြ က သင္ၾကားေပးႏိုင္တယ္လို႔ လူၾကီးမိဘေတြက ယံုၾကည္ၾကပါတယ္။ အထူးသျဖင့္ နယ္ဘက္က ျမန္မာကေလးငယ္ေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ဟာ ဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္းေတြနဲ႔ မလြတ္ၾကသေလာက္ပါပဲ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသင္ရိုး နဲ႔ အတူ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကိုပါ သင္ေပး တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္းပညာေရးက ျဗိတိသွ်လက္ထက္မွာ ေမွးမွိန္သြားတာပါ။ ကိုလိုနီအစိုးရက ေခတ္မီ သိပၸံပညာနဲ႔ အဂၤလိပ္စာကို အားေပးလာတာေၾကာင့္ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေက်ာင္းပညာေရးနဲ႔ အလွမ္းေ၀းတဲ့ နယ္ေဒသ ေတြနဲ႔ မ်ဳိးခ်စ္စိတ္ ၾကီးမားတဲ့ ဗမာေတြအၾကားမွာေတာ့ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ ေက်ာင္း ေတြက ေပ်ာက္ပ်က္မသြားခဲ့ပါဘူး။ အဲဒီတုန္းက ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြဟာ ေက်ာင္းစာနဲ႔အတူ ဘ၀ေနနည္းေတြကိုပါ ဘာသာေရးနဲ႔ ဆက္ႏြယ္ျပီး သင္ေပးတာမို႔ ျမန္မာ-အဂၤလိပ္ အဘိဓါန္ ျပဳစုခဲ့တဲ့ J.S Furnivall က ဘယ္သူမွ မယွဥ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈပဲလို႔ ခ်ီးက်ဴးခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ဒါေတာင္ အဲဒီတုန္းက သင္ၾကားပံုက ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေတြက ၾကိမ္လံုးကိုင္ျပီး ကေလးေတြက လက္ပိုက္ မ်က္ေစ့စံုမွိတ္ျပီး ယံမဂၤလာ ဒြာဒႆဟိကို က်ံဳးေအာ္ၾကရတာမ်ဳိးပါ။ အခုထိ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ မတိမ္ေကာေသးတဲ့ ဆရာေတြ သင္ၾကားေပးသူ ေတြက ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ Teacher centered စနစ္ပါ။

အခု ၂၀၀၀ခုႏွစ္ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ အံ့ၾသစရာေကာင္းေလာက္ေအာင္ပဲ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီး ေက်ာင္း ပညာေရး ျပန္ထြန္းကားလာတာ ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာတျပည္လံုးမွာ အစိုးရ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳ စာရင္း အရ ကို ေက်ာင္းေပါင္း ၃၀၀၀ေက်ာ္ ရွိေနပါျပီ။ အရင္က မူလတန္းအဆင့္ေလာက္နဲ႔ ျဗိတိသွ် ေခတ္ေနာက္ပိုင္း မွာ ေႏြရာသီ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ သင္တန္းေတြေလာက္ထိပဲ ရွိခဲ့တဲ့ ဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္းပညာေရးဟာ ဒီဘက္ေခတ္ ၂၀၀၀ခုႏွစ္ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ ျမိဳ႔ၾကီးျပၾကီးေတြမွာကိုပဲ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြ အမ်ားၾကီး ရွိလာပါတယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ ပညာအဆင့္ကလဲ ေရးတတ္ဖတ္တတ္ရံု မူလတန္း အဆင့္ေလာက္ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘဲ အလယ္တန္းဆင့္အထက္တန္းဆင့္ထိ ရွိလာပါျပီ။

ဒီေနရာမွာအခုဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ပညာေရးနဲ႔ အရင္တုန္းက ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေက်ာင္းတို႔ ကြာျခားတာကေတာ့ဘုန္းၾကီးေတြကခ်ည္းပဲစာသင္ေပးတာမဟုတ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။အခု ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ပညာေရး ကေတာ့ ေခတ္ ပညာတတ္ ဆရာဆရာမေတြက အစိုးရေက်ာင္းရဲ႕ သင္ရိုးအတိုင္း စနစ္တက်သင္ေပးတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းေတြ ျဖစ္ေနပါျပီ။ သင္ၾကားနည္း စနစ္ေတြဆိုရင္လည္း ေခတ္မီတိုးတက္တဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသားရဲ႕ သင္ယူႏိုင္မႈနဲ႔ သင္ယူ လိုစိတ္ကို ဦးစားေပးတဲ့ (Student centered) နည္းကို ၾကိဳးစားျပီး သံုးေနၾကတာ ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ဆရာ ဆရာမ ေတြကလည္း ကေလးေတြအတြက္ သင့္ေတာ္တဲ့ သင္ၾကားနည္းစနစ္ေတြကို ဖတ္ရႈေလ့လာၾက ေဆြးေႏြး ၾကျပီး ေတာ့မွ စာသင္ခန္းေတြကို စနစ္တက် ကိုင္တြယ္လာၾကတာကိုလည္း ေတြ႔ေနရပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ေက်ာင္း အမ်ားၾကီး ရွိလာရတာရဲ႕ အဓိကအေၾကာင္းရင္းကေတာ့ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ စီးပြားေရး အက်ပ္အတည္းေၾကာင့္ပဲလို႔ ေျပာရမွာပါ၊ မိဘေတြ စား၀တ္ေနေရး က်ပ္တည္းလာတဲ့အတြက္ ကေလးပညာေရးအတြက္ ေငြကုန္ေၾကးက်မ်ားတဲ့ အစိုးရေက်ာင္းပညာေရးကို သင္မေပးႏိုင္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ အဲဒါ ေၾကာင့္ အခမဲ့ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီး ေက်ာင္းေတြဆီ ေျပးၾကရတာပါ။ အဲလိုန႔ဲပဲ ဆင္းရဲခ်ဳိ႕တဲ့တဲ့ ကေလးေတြ… မိဘမဲ့ကေလးေတြရဲ႕ အားကိုးရာအျဖစ္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ ပညာေရးေက်ာင္းေတြ အမ်ားၾကီး ေပၚလာတာပါပဲ။ တကယ္ေတာ့ Non-formal Education သာျဖစ္တဲ့ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေက်ာင္းေတြဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက သတ္မွတ္ထားတဲ့ လူတိုင္းအတြက္ ပညာေရး( Education for all) ကို အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖၚေပး ေနတာနဲ႔ အတူတူပါပဲ။

တကယ္ေတာ့ျဗိတိသွ်လက္ထက္ကစျပီးေမွးမွိန္ေနခဲ့တဲ့ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေက်ာင္းပညာေရးကို ျပန္ျပီး အသက္ ၀င္လာ ေစတာက ၁၉၉၃ခုႏွစ္မွာ မႏၱေလး ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ စာသင္သား ၃၉၄ေယာက္ကို ဆရာ ဆရာမ ၁၀ေယာက္နဲ႔အတူ ဆရာေတာ္ကိုယ္တိုင္ စာ၀င္သင္ျပီး စခဲ့ရတာပါ။ အခု၂၀၀၅-၂၀၀၆ပညာသင္ႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ စာသင္သား ၆၃၉၀ နဲ႔ ဆရာဆရာမ အေရအတြက္က ၁၃၀ရွိလာျပီး အထက္တန္းအဆင့္ထိ သင္ေပးေနရပါျပီ။ ေက်ာင္းမွာ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာခန္းနဲ႔ စာၾကည့္တိုက္လည္း ရွိပါတယ္။ ဆရာေတာ္က တကယ့္ကို အျမင္က်ယ္က်ယ္နဲ႔ စီစဥ္ေပးထားတာပါပဲ။ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦးေက်ာင္းမွာ မိဘမဲ့ကေလးေတြကိုလည္း ေက်ာင္းအိပ္ ေက်ာင္းစား လက္ခံေမြး ထားပါ ေသးတယ္။ ဆရာေတာ့္ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ကေတာ့ ဆင္းရဲတဲ့သူေတြအတြက္ အနာဂတ္ဘ၀ တိုးတက္ဖို႔ကိစၥမွာ အေရးၾကီးဆံုးက ပညာေရးပါပဲတဲ့။ ေဖါင္ေတာ္ဦးေက်ာင္းပညာေရးနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ျပီး ၂၀၀၆ခုႏွစ္ ေမလထုတ္ ခ်င္းတြင္းမဂၢဇင္း မွာ ျမတ္သာေ၀ ဆိုတဲ့ စာေရးဆရာက အေသးစိတ္ ေရးထားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အရင္ကေတာ့ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေက်ာင္းေတြကို ျမန္မာကေလးေတြ ဘာသာေရးနဲ႔ နီးစပ္ေအာင္၊ စာေရးစာဖတ္ အေျခခံ ေကာင္းရေအာင္ ဆိုတဲ့ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ေလာက္နဲ႔ပဲ ပို႔ၾကတာပါ။ အခုကေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းပညာေရးအတြက္ ေငြၾကး မတတ္ႏိုင္လို႔ ေက်ာင္းမေနၾကရတဲ့ ကေလးေတြအတြက္ အနည္းဆံုး အေျခခံပညာရဖို႔မွာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြက အေရးပါလာပါျပီ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေတြက ဖြင့္တဲ့ ေက်ာင္းျဖစ္တဲ့အတြက္ေတာ့ ကေလးေတြအတြက္ ဘာသာေရး အကန္႔အသတ္ ရွိသြားတာမ်ဳိးေတာ့ ရွိပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ဆင္းရဲခ်ဳိ႕တဲ့တဲ့ တျခားဘာသာ၀င္ ကေလးေတြပါ စာသင္ၾကားခြင့္ရေအာင္ အခမဲ့ အကူအညီေပးေနတဲ့ NGO အဖြဲ႔မ်ားကို စာသင္ေက်ာင္း ေတြ ဖြင့္ခြင့္ေပးသင့္ ပါတယ္။ ဒါမွလည္း ကေလးတိုင္းအတြက္ ပညာေရးကို အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖၚရာ ေရာက္မွာပါ။

တကယ္ေတာ့ ပညာေရးဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ အဓိက မ႑ိဳင္ျဖစ္တာမို႔ အဘက္ဘက္က ယိုင္လဲ ခ်ဳိ႕တဲ့ေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ဗုံးဗံုး က်မသြားေအာင္ ထိန္းဖို႔ဆိုရင္ နိုင္ငံသားတိုင္း ပညာတတ္ေရး၊ ပညာသင္ႏိုင္ေရးဟာ အေရးၾကီးလွတဲ့ လိုအပ္ခ်က္ပါ။ အဲဒီ လိုအပ္ခ်က္ကို ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြက ျဖည့္ဆည္းေပး ေနတာပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲသလိုပဲ လူထုေတြဘက္ကလည္း ကေလးတိုင္းအတြက္ ပညာေရးကို တတ္ႏိုင္ သေလာက္ ၀ိုင္း၀န္းအားေပးၾကရင္ေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ပညာတတ္ေတြ ထြန္းကားလာမွာမို႔ ေခတ္မီ ပညာေရးႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္ေအာင္ ဖန္တီးတည္ေဆာက္ေရးမွာ အမ်ားၾကီး လြယ္ကူလာမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

YOU, TIGER or QUOI

You know that you are a human being. But still, you don’t know what the responsibilities of human being are. So, you ought to check your life at first. When you were born in the world, you brought a perceptive brain with your body structures into your life. Then, you exist, you live with these body structures life in the world. Then, you had an idea that you are human being who can bring many things to this world by your own energies. You must do more to reveal the very deep responsibilities in your life, for all beings and more than other creature because you as a human being have the highest intelligence and great strength. Actually, you have more strength than a tiger which is strongest among the animals. You have the ability to abstain from being cruel like a tiger, to be a good person by the strong noble energies.

As you know, the power of a tiger is very

dangerous. They have more strength and quick force than any other animals in the forest. Tigers often kill and eat other animals, especially the cows, the sheep, to sustain its life. Also the tigers always keep their courage in their hearts. Mostly, tigers carry out whatever they do bravely. Moreover, tigers believe themselves and their abilities in their mind trying their utmost to win during their fight to befall their prey, earning their feed.

You must to do the good and right thing in the world because you have the highest intelligence, as well as the greatest strength, greater than tigers. However, that does not mean you must act in same way as tigers do. But, your activities should be in good and right way for all creatures because you are a human being. On the other hand, it is very important not to use your strength and intelligence in vain, just because you've got it. Even if you would die without doing any "good" or "right things" for all creatures, maybe, you can be one human being who is not harmful. But you need to try pass all your life's to act with the tigers' courage only then will you be one human being who spending worthily the life's time in your record.

The point is that you need to act properly in whatever like a tiger which eats only vegetables. If not, you would be stupid human being like a wild tiger always using their great strength in the wrong way. if you want, you do not need to be real vegetarian. Well! You know that you are normal human being and you have passed most of your life's time. Now, if you have not ever done your responsibility as a human being for all creatures or for your true freedom, ask yourself whether you are a human being or a tiger. Then the first step of all is telling to the world who you really are.

Written by Ashin(Burmese Children)

Gone with the wind (or) Transience

The time is arriving to start the Second World War. Now, I live in India and have married an Indian man. I have five children with him -two girls and three boys. But, I often remember my native country, my old lover and my royal palace where I was born and grew up. Actually, I am royalty and very special person from my holy family according to our Burmese tradition. when I was young in royal Burma , there were always many people who look after me ,the royal people who help me and a lot of young females who were attendants of my parents surrounded me. I can never forget the golden slipper which I wore on my feet in my past time, the royal orchid that I adorned on my head, the golden building with the tiered roof where I lived. Especially, I always miss my native country, royal Burma and a royal monastive school boy who was my old lover.

After third Anglo-Burma war in 1888, it seemed to be peaceful in Burma. But.

, for me it was the time to start a war in my heart. I did not like my father's order, who was a king named THI PAW, at all because the whole dream of my heart was broken by this order. And then, I heard that I would be sent to India together with my royal family by authority of Anglo. In my mind, I really did not want to obey my father's order in this way. On the other hand, it was difficult to relinquish the custom of the royal family. That's why I had to follow my father's order.

I loved to sit on the palanquin when we went to the garden or to the monastery or somewhere. I was delighted living under Buddha's SaSana or way of Buddha. I also enjoyed deeply in pouring the water each other among the royal families, especially during the water festival. Even still, I like to listen two kinds of the sounds from royal Burma. One is the sound of the people when they recite the Buddha's literature in the monastery or in the religious ceremony. The other is the voice of my old lover. While I was living with the royal family in the palace, in Burma, I did not think that I will be in this present situation very different from my royal custom. I always thought that I could be living together with my lover in Burma, who is the monastive school boy  hearing  his explanations about Buddha's literature until my final resting place .but, in this present situation, I am living  with my Indian husband and my family in India which is far from our royal palace. I have slept with my Indian husband in the same bad for many years. Now, I am a wife of Indian man. Meanwhile, I always talk to other people in the normal person's language and I do not speak the royal language which was used by the members of the royal families.

When I was young in Burma with my royal family, I fell in love with the monastive school boy who should be a lord of royal Burma. Everyday, there were full of Burma's brave and the patriotism in each his words. During Anglo-Burma third war, he wanted to show Burma's brave or blood by fighting the English soldiers. Nevertheless, he had no chance to show his abilities in that way because of my father's order a king in royal Burma. He used to say that he would always keep the royal country and his girlfriend, a royal orchid in his heart forever. Because of my father's order, the royal Burma was easily taken in the possession of Anglo after Anglo-Burma third war. My father did not want to see the blood of royal people in the war. That's when my heart was broken because I had to leave my lover a monastive school boy and the royal people from YATANAPAWN palace in Burma.

When we were carried from the royal palace to GAWWAIN harbor by English soldiers, I had a strong desire in my mind to see the image of MAHAMYATMUNI pagoda and my lover's face. However, I just saw most Burmese people's faces looking sorrowfully at us along the street. Although I searched for my lover's face among the people till arriving on the ship, I did not find him at all. I never again saw his figure in the rest of my life. It was the last day for me in royal palace in Burma.

Nowadays, I feel happy living near my Indian husband and my children in India because I love them so much. I do not want to go back to my native country or to royal Burma because I can not leave my family in India. I have already forgotten almost all royal custom from my past. In my real life time, I do not need to see my old royal boyfriend again, who I loved in Burma .It was just in the past. In this time, I always need to see my Indian man for my life. I also decided not to tell my children about this story and about the royal Burma because something what I had in my past is gone with the wind.

Written by Burmese Children