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Date: Monday, January 11th, 7:30pm EST
Location: online via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/799184864 passcode: 00000 (five zeros)
Date: Monday, January 18th, 7:30pm EST
Location: online via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/799184864 passcode: 00000 (five zeros)
Date: Monday, January 25th, 7:30pm 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
We usually think of concentration like any other skill; we get better at it with practice, by applying more effort. While the former is absolutely true, the latter is not always so, and in fact trying harder to concentrate often leads to more inner turmoil. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more I tried to escape my restless, distractible nature, the more stuck in it I became.
It's December, our favourite CEC theme: “Fuck it”. Yes. Rescue me please from my precious pieties and grown-up self-regard. And all the hand-wringing about “getting it right.” The tut-tutting on meditation postures and the microschools of thought on which subcontinental strand of Buddhism is most pure. Truly: Fuck it.
That’s why I think the shared sentiment we are sitting with during these strange times isn’t grief, but heartbreak. We haven’t lost anything that was true to begin with, at least for good. Sure, we were infatuated with a future that would never love us back, a past that could never come closer. In our swooning for things that would never be, we scorned a gentler truth: the only love we had ever known, is beating through us and all living things each moment, calling out to us, again and again, like Mary Oliver’s wild geese.
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 :)
