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Location: 303 Augusta Ave, Kensington Market, Toronto ON
Date: Sunday, August 25th, 2:30-9pm
Location: Toronto Public Library - Northern District Branch, Gwen Liu Room. 40 Orchard View Boulevard. Toronto, ON M4R 1B9
Date: Saturday, September 28th, 2019. 9:30am-4:30pm
Location: United Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street. Toronto, ON
Date: Saturday, November 9th 2019, 9:30am - 4:30pm
“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
When what we usually consider to be ourselves (our self-referential thinking) is rendered ‘insignificant’, we taste a brief moment of just being. Not just in nature, but as Nature. The distinction between us and nature collapses. Maybe this transcendent experience frees us to merge with the beauty that floods our sensory awareness. To be reunited with the larger, indivisible nature seems to bring a sense of relief.
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 :)
