This morning was bloody freezing, the coldest I’ve felt in a long while. Never thought I’d say that in Thailand. Many contributing factors though, a lack of heating being the most obvious. The bad haircut didn’t help either. Luckily thanks to a last minute offering from an aunt in the form of a wool hat, that was taken care of. I woke up at around 3:15am and got to the chanting area before Ajahn, so need to keep this up for the rest of the week.

It was liberating too to simply accept my position as a new monk and read from the book. The fear of being judged was after all entirely irrational as in hindsight, I wasn’t fooling anyone in my monk act. I’ve been doing it a few days and I wasn’t going to know anything. Even with a blanket it was still bitterly cold so not much meditation was achieved.

The cold got to me so much that I almost decided that I would forgo the morning snack altogether and hide under the duvet for a while. Soon I realised that I didn’t really have a choice in the matter because if a more senior monk was present, then I needed to be present too. This was one of the few occasions where you wanted to do the washing up because the water coming out of the tap was relatively warm.

Then it was again a cycle of:

• 45 minutes sitting meditation
• 45 minutes walking meditation
• 45 minutes sitting meditation

which was then followed by the meal. I got a smaller portion again but this time it was because I was looking for hand-friendly food (to practice as that was apparently how monks ate at Wat Pah Nanachat) and there weren’t that many. In the end I just used a spoon anyway. Tan M. went through step by step about how to carry all the bowls and eating utensils in one go as I would be need to be able to do it soon.

The routine was becoming familiar now. Walking meditation was still rather ineffective as I was still only trying to avoid being impaled by twigs on the ground. The Q&A session was painful like yesterday and I think the problem will persist this entire week.

The evening chanting went as well as expected. The left knee was dying later on in the day, but still dying regardless. A new senior monk joined us for the evening which meant every other monk had to shift one seat sideways. So I got to sit behind a large pillar so at least there were fewer eyeballs to see me shuffle my legs around.