Lam Rim a place of comfort

ENLIGHTENMENT PATH: ELEVATE YOUR MIND

Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. This week she’s at the Tibetan piece of Fietas.

This piece of Joburg is typically tangled up in different histories and multi-ethnicities. Lam Rim is off a street named after a Boer general and occupies an old church. The street once divided people of different colours. Just like that. But people cross roads.

We’re bordering Fietas, the common name that’s not as euphemistic, for Vrededorp.

The Dutch Reformed Church window frames are now painted a merry yellow.

Lam Rim is an “enlightenment path”.

I know it’s a generalisation but I find Buddhists to be calm folk.

A resident on the property, Shayna opens the gates, barefoot, for Heather and I and here it is, that cheerful sort of equanimity.

She mentions, since it’s late afternoon, that the little corner “koppie” is a place for taking up some tea at sundown.

I wander up, noticing glass and crockery shards in the rock crevices, remnants of less calm times. I glance north and the SABC and Sentech tower rear up outside this peaceful place.

When Neil arrives, he’s also an epitome of this calm. So is the lavender bed and the “May Peace Prevail on Earth” sign alongside a buddha surrounded by pink quartzite.

Neil is an arborist when he’s not at this second home being a facilitator and he mixes a mean ginger tea.

It seems Tibetan Buddhism is about finding what it is about.

“People are moved to come here looking for answers, something to make sense spiritually,” says Neil.

Tibetan teachers often visit. The Dalai Lama was here in 2004 and Neil adds: “When you look for a place to meditate that’s been inhabited by great teachers, you get some of their blessings.”

The octagonal shrine room is almost gaudy, enchantingly so, the pillars swathed in bright fabric and the shrine, the Buddha, rather approachable.

There’s a bowl of apples among the bells. I’m finding this place comfortable, comforting. Neil explains that here meditation isn’t about “emptying your head and blissing out. It’s to elevate your mind – and the best is that the mind can be transformed.”

It is a silent meditation and when Neil rings his gentle bell after only 10 minutes, I am extremely surprised.

Lam Rim Buddhist Centre visit