CASCO – Om Devi Reynolds offers a chance for anyone in the area to meditate under her supervision, which she said is a duty she undertakes to encourage awareness and the importance of taking care of each moment.
Reynolds is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest who has been living in Casco for the past three years. Although she has been offering meditation sessions at her Casco home, she also recently began an early-morning meditation in Norway in the common room adjoining Fare Share Market. People should bring their own cushions.
At 5:30 a.m., a small group has been regularly coming to the Wednesday meditation, Reynolds said during an interview at her Casco home.
She wears her gray hair buzzed short, as Buddhist priests often do, although she said she doesn’t have to. At this point, she said, running her hands through her hair, she appreciates not having to deal with wisps getting in her face while meditating.
Reynolds also uses a wheelchair most of the time, which she frequently shares with her cat, Specks, who jumps into the seat almost as soon as Reynolds gets up, curls up and then does not budge as Reynolds tries to get back in. At the age of 5, Reynolds came down with polio and had to undergo surgery several times in her life. At 12 and 23, she spent a year in a body cast, and throughout the latter year, she practiced meditation.
“Zen practice really doesn’t matter what your age is or what your physical disability is,” she said. “We all have limitations of one kind or another that we deal with or we don’t deal with.”
At her home in Casco, art hangs on most of the wall space, some of it her own. Reynolds graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York in 1971, where she studied art and design. That was also where she started to launch her study of meditation under the tutelage of a Japanese professor, who was a Soto Zen priest. She was born in Ithaca, N.Y., to a farming family.
But her first experience meditating came when she was 16 and ran across it in a book.
“I had a deep feeling around it,” she said. “I knew that I would continue to meditate. I felt it was a good practice. When you have a deep feeling about something, you stay with it.”
Buddhism has been part of most her life. She is now 58. She became a priest in 2000 after practicing with a teacher for 14 years who, with her, decided she was ready to take that step.
“It is just a feeling of inner-certainty of a path,” she said.
She was ordained at the Kannon Do Zen Center in Mountain View, Calif. California had been her home for many years.
At the center, Reynolds met her husband, Eric, who works for the state as an accessibility coordinator, in charge of program and architecture access for the disabled.
As a priest, Reynolds said it is part of her job to offer the opportunity to practice, a place to practice, to offer encouragement and sanctuary. In her home, there is a quiet side room lined with cushions. She will guide anyone interested in experiencing meditation, either in a group or individually.
“Part of the practice is to carry the practice forward,” she said, adding later, “To keep the possibility of awareness alive.”
Meditation is a process of self-discovery, she said, but it does not lead to any gain, because there is nothing to get, as the Buddhists believe.
“The point is nonattachment, not attaching to things,” she said.
“The thing is not to go be intellectual,” she said. “It’s really a deep listening process to everything, inside and outside. It’s sitting, mouth closed, ears open, eyes open, nose open, just breathing.
“Our mind’s job is to produce thoughts. You let them go by, like leaves in the wind.”
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