As a practice, I make Buddhist meditation prayer beads. On occasion a Buddhist practitioner or a Buddhist-curious person finds out I make malas and ask what they need to pay to have me make them one.
I find it is karmic that they cross my path and then that they ask or that I offer; so it seems equally karmic that I make a mala for that person. The truth I perhaps don’t make obvious is that while they may feel it’s a gift to them, to me it’s nothing more than a pretty thing. Indeed, it is I who is honored to be gifted with the capability to add to someone else’s practice with nothing more than some colored stones and thread. Money is of little consequence for a little thing like this.
If I can’t afford the cost of materials I let them know, but you’d be surprised. When you offer something for free so many offer something back. You may not want to take something for yourself, but joy is contagious, when you give with joy, joy is what you foster back. People are glad to donate to someone else’s mala. So I’ve thus far never run out of funds for someone’s prayer beads.
Any donation for my “work” go to the next project for the next person needing prayer beads.
I do not make rosaries for profit, but for the practitioner who has asked for them. It’s a generosity practice that is part of my daily life and ordinary values. A way to stay connected to people and see things as things. So let’s talk about my things. I have not super many, but enough pretty things that I adore wearing and feeling near me. Some items have sentimental or historical relevance and are heavily imbued with intention from use and time.
They are often symbols as reminders of my daily aspirations and are what let me be calm when the worst looms on the horizon. These objects are valuable because of what they mean to me, for no other reason. Some are expensive others are cheap, but the cost of the thing isn’t as important as what image it strikes in me, what chord it makes and sound of music in my head, when I see the emotional wow of this beautiful symbolic thing.
It is a practice for me to part with these things at some point. Not because I don’t cherish them, but because I cherish them, I feel they are imbued with power and goodness that will pass along to someone else’s karma. In a way it feels like giving away a piece of my karma that from mud went to lotus.
In each rosary I’ve made is something that was immensely dear and precious to me. Sometimes my most treasured memories and symbols of strength, warmth, things I give away as reborn in these prayer beads. I have never told told my friends, for I didn’t feel the meaning was in this part of the gift to them, the meaning was in the part of me that died joyfully and peacefully to give another the heart of a new joy.
My mother of my heart is the elementary school teacher I had through all of my elementary years and a dear friend in the years after. She said, “Remember one thing, your freedom ends where another’s freedom begins. If we are at an intersection, your light must be red for mine to be green and viceversa.” She taught me respect for the human heart when I was eight.
Each set of prayer beads has beads or elements from my own jeweled treasures. From necklaces and heavily imbued items with all my daily reminding of goodness and aspiration, the prayer beads I’ve made and given away contain treasures I’m sharing with the world. They can look at that same beauty and long and aspire for a more profound and genuine understanding of RIGHT NOW.
That is really precious part of the practice to me because it is a meaning of joy is only such because it is shared. It is in parting that such joy is shared. For we are never that far apart, so long as we share the same human heart.
Everything I love is something I eventually give away, as a way to keep in touch with that kindness in myself. This is why it can also take a long time to create a full rosary. There are many considerations. Tangible kinds would include the aesthetic of the physical mala. Intangible kinds would include the purpose of the mala to its practitioner. This part can take a good while for me to feel out. And if I feel something beautiful that I own from my own jewelry, maybe because it was a gift, or maybe because it was expensive, I add it to the mala for that person, as a gift that pricked enough to bond me to the meaning of gifting. It’s a shamanic way of making a rosary.
The maker always lives in between the physical and the imaginary, the rough materials and the idea, and then must craft part of himself into the creation that has love. The giver is only so kind because of the giving. So it does not matter if something was expensive or not, precious or not, if it is fitting to the whole process of gifting another’s person’s practice with something meaningful, it must be meaningful to me to give. I think of the person in what I know of them, our interactions, I meditate on this idea of their rosary. I try to envision where they might use it and how, given what I know of the person. I consider materials according to the person’s preference, aesthetic, type of practice, and then I start to lay out ideas on my bead board.
Here is where the conversation with keeping and letting go starts. I love the beads I’m about to make for someone else, here starts the whole process of giving what pricks just a little and seeing how much joy it could bring the other person, then I see how for myself, it’s just a thing, but giving it to them it becomes a world of joy in itself, and my thing looks so small compared to that.
The process of mala making is gradual. Like a stranger, I get to know the heart of the thing I feel around the materials I’ve chosen to give this project. Sometimes I start with thinking I will give this and that, and then as I unfold the heart of that giving, I find myself letting go of dear little trinkets, things I’ve cherished and valued, then I contemplate how this pricks a bit. And each time it pricks a little less when I look and see, it’s just a thing, one I value occasionally, but on this mala, it’s a treasure, because it meant so much to give away.
It is a relationship with the nature of change. Practicing seeing the joy and not just the death of the change. And then it’s a practice of releasing what I am ready to let go, it’s never forced. If I can’t let go of something, it’s ok, I save it for the next time I try. Eventually it is just a thing that can bring sorrow to lose or joy in letting go. The choice eventually becomes a natural consequence of having loved. By sitting nakedly with the possibility of losing something, I sit through its loss as I fear it, because I just look at my thoughts unraveling the tremendous scenarios of how I’ll feel if I let this thing go.
When I’ll want it and it won’t be there, then I think, how often I even forgot it was there. In a real way I grieve my losses one by one, so I don’t let them build, I practice seeing loss for what it is and letting it go. And there instead of death, I find joy, a simple stable place of attachment to the world in the right way, not one of grasping, but one of being committed to the world’s wellbeing, starting with my own.
This is a way of practicing the net of my worth. If I cannot let go this tiny little thing, how much harder will it be to leave this body to the world?
I am still young, but I’ve lived so close to the heart of birth and death, so have you with the breath, in out. Beginning end. The beginning end is now. To love is to be in sync with this rhythm, the loss, the parting, the joy that comes from giving what small amount you own. It is for you I am everything I choose to be. It is because of you I have reached any bit of kindness, for the sorrow, for the loss, it’s taught me to move along and stay fluid.
There is nothing you can’t do, when you put your heart to it. I realized this and now I’m wondering in a sort of “crisis” but mostly an intriguing opportunity presented to me by an interview on television to talk about dharma… now I am curious, how do I want to shape this vibrant energy within myself, how do I channel and direct it so that it helps others the way I was helped.
Reset Your Heart Drive 
Posted on August 12, 2011 by The Heart Drive
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