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Location: online via Zoom, link provided upon registration
Date: Friday, January 7th @ 7pm EST to Sunday, January 9th @7pm EST
Location: online via Zoom, link provided upon registration
Date: Saturday, February 5th, 11am - 4:30pm EST
“A wise teacher, and a wise centre, needs to offer a whole range of skillful practices, because people come along at different stages of their inner development, with different temperaments, and with different sets of problems.” -Jack Kornfield
I would not have thought that a rigid monastic schedule would feel freeing - but it does. I’m free of my desperate need to make everything exactly the way I think I want it to be. I’m free of caring if my clothes are attractive. I’m free of needing to rely on willpower. I’m free of endless choices that don’t actually serve me. my own life, the more powerfully I can help my communities. It’s unexpected, and it’s life-changing.
On one hand, we can say “fuck it” to mean “I’m out. I’ve had enough. This is bullshit”. The breaking point that becomes the impetus to draw boundaries and stand up for what we know is right, destroy the systems and tendencies that hold us back - both the structures of oppression all around us and their echoes inside of us. On the flip side, we can use “fuck it” to mean throw caution to the wind, to say “I’m in. Fuck yeah! Let’s goooooooo!”. This one liberates us from the “should” of it all, gives inspiration to be spontaneous, and permission to be different from who we think we need to be.
Back to school this September was ripe with excitement. In Toronto, students hadn’t set foot in public schools for at least 6 months, for many it had been 18 months. Emotions were running high for everyone: kids, parents and teachers alike. My personal goal this year was to reconnect to that loving approach, and make my class community a safe haven of inspired learning once again. Then the gears of a mass public education system began to squeeze and grind...
We just finished version 2.0 of our CEC Community Practice Activation Kit available for free here. The idea of this kit is to inspire people around the world to start up their own community practice groups, in a way that’s unique to them and uniquely responsive to their local needs and context.
Suddenly, we exist. Existing is complicated. We turn to practice. As we love to say at the CEC, being human takes practice. But what is a practice? The simplest definition of practice is some action – mental, emotional, physical, social – that you choose and repeat, so that it can become a habit. It is the deliberate cultivation of habits. Contemplative practices are practices that rehearse how you want to exist and relate to yourself and others.
This primer is about the broadest possible classes of meditation and spiritual experience. It’s a work-in-progress. Every time I come back, I find myself cutting more details, for they seem like technique-specific effects, and not the human universals I once imagined. So it goes. In a couple years there may be nothing here at all.
Almost any domain or activity in life can be approached as an intentional practice, and the people who specialize in these domains have learned important things about being human. How can we draw this wisdom out? Introducing the Consciousness Explorers Club's new pluralistic practice paradigm :)
