When I joined the official Dewa Sanzan shrine Yamabushi training a few years back I learned quite a lot.

For the shrine training, the sheer number of participants means it’s hard to keep tabs on everyone. I was quite shocked when I saw people smoking. I thought the training was supposed to be about training yourself, and that smoking would be banned.

Well, I kinda complained about that to a friend, who had done the training multiple times by then, and he said that’s because the training is for the individual, not the group. That was a bit of a mind shift change for me. I was expecting a lot of serious people, but it was more of a boy’s club. To each their own I guess.