by Amy Grennell

Created on: March 10, 2009

Instead of being spiritual once a week in Church or with a group there are myriad opportunities to honor your spirituality in the everyday.

Offerings

Making an offering to a deity is a nice was to incorporate your spiritual life into the everyday. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition there are seven bowls of water which represent the seven limbs of prayer - prostrating, offering, confession, rejoicing in the good qualities of oneself and others, requesting the Buddhas to remain in this world, beseeching them to teach others, and dedicating the merits. I like offering things to the Gods and Goddesses and this is a nice thing to do for any faith really. It can be water, flowers, food or something else you would like to offer to the divine. Just make sure it's not leftovers or the worst portion of the meal because who wants that?

The traditional set of offerings in Tibetan Buddhism, commonly represented by bowls of water, comes from the offerings presented to a guest in ancient India. The first bowl contains clear water for the newly arrived guests to drink. The water should be imagined as pure as nectar and offered in vessels made of precious substances. In the second bowl is water for the guest to wash his or her feet; a reminder that in India people walked barefoot. In the third bowl are flowers, reminiscent of the crowns of flowers offered to women and the garlands offered to men. Masses of fragrant, beautiful flowers can be called up in the imagination. In the fourth bowl is incense, an offering to please the sense of smell. In the imagination billowing clouds of fragrant incense are offered. The fifth offering, pleasing to sight, is bright light commonly in the form of a lamp, which like the sun and the moon illuminates darkness. This light is imagined to be so clear that you can see even the smallest atoms without obstruction. Sometimes colored lights are offered and imagined to be emanating from nectar. In Tibetan tradition different colors are believed to have various healing properties. The sixth offering is a bowl of scented water. Intended to soothe the mind, it is applied at the heart. Seventh is an offering of food and eighth is an offering of sound. All of these elements transcend various religious paths and can be used to honor Jesus, Mary, Buddha, the Goddess or any other deities.

Either from reading it in a book or seeing something similar on TV once, I like the idea of pouring a single bowl of water in the morning to sort of use as a focal point. You

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