Kado practice: The Path of Flowers

Last Friday I helped out preparing the Kado flower arrangements for a Shambhala meditation weekend. As you may recall I took the workshop Kado: The Path of Flowers last month and this was the first occasion to practice my new skill. Suzan of the Shambhala centre Amsterdam showed me around and taught me the ins and outs of preparing the rooms for guests. She told me that by placing flowers the rooms are brought alive.

The first thing she made me do was to go to the market and buy flowers. That sounds really easy, right? I walked by the various stands and looked at what they had to offer. I had in mind to buy at least two bunches of really long flowers for the large arrangement in the main mediation hall and some bunches of textured and colourful flowers that combined well together. My budget was EUR 30 and at first I thought that wasn't much, but I found out that I could buy more with that than I estimated.

Suzan and I each made our own Basic Upright Left Kado arrangement, shown above is mine.

For the main meditation hall we made a large Basic Upright Left Kado arrangement together. This meant that we literally sat down side by side and placed each flower in agreement. Suzan has had years of experience and she talked about space and relationships between the flowers. I learned a lot from this session. Apart from that it was a relaxed, enjoyable and fruitful day.