Rest for me was equivalent to unproductiveness, boredom, and weakness. “You can sleep when you’re dead” - I used to say all the time. I used this to justify overworking, staying too late at the party, or taking on too much. “I don’t have time to rest.” That was another one I used to tell myself. What I didn’t know then, was this was a boundaries issue. I didn’t actually have time to rest. Trying to carve out a 5 minute meditation in my day seemed impossible. And 8 full hours of sleep? Forget about it.
February 25, 2021 | By cec | 5 minute read Relaxing with wakeful attention makes space for what is hiding in plain sight: the natural creativity of mind. Each moment of experience is already a complete display of creativity. Everything that prances across the stage of the mind - thoughts, feelings, stories, perceptions, beliefs, images, memories - is totally, artfully unique to the experiencer.
January 28, 2021 | By cec | 4 minute read The tools and practices we employ to help support and promote our well-being, be they musical, meditative, contemplative, creative, active or ingestible, open us to recognize and receive the insights that emerge. Sometimes in surprising ways.
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 :)
“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
