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Location: Dufferin Grove south fire pit
Date: Sunday, February 5th, 3-4:30pm
Location: Mosaic Yoga, 225 Sterling Road #Unit 23
Date: Friday, February 24, 7:30pmET
Location: online via Zoom, link provided upon registration
Date: Saturday, May 6th, 1-4pmET
“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 feel like I was placing my faith in spiritual teachings and teachers, trusting that they had knowledge or insights that I needed, all the while overlooking my own inner wisdom as to how I should actually live my life. This far-off idea of awakening, with its promise of everlasting peace and fulfillment, was distracting me from waking up to my life as it is. I now understand awakening as a process of coming more into reality.
So I sat. And after months and then years, I found that the samskaras started to get quieter. They weren’t so urgent. And when I was able to watch them without being pulled into their content and without dropping down their rabbit hole, they had less hold on me. When they had less hold on me, it was easier to know what to do. Noticing the transience of the samskara made the simple day-to-day reality more rich and available.
The act of celebration is a type of moving meditation. It doesn’t have to look like a dance party - that's just the way that I like to do it. There are all sorts of personal celebration activities. It can be a walk by yourself, spending time in nature, an intimate dinner with friends - whatever the activity that helps to pull you out of your mind habits into the larger world of interconnection.
I’ve been practicing mindfulness for over 20 years. Some things have changed and some things haven’t. The key thing I’ve learned is I don’t have to change who I am to be happy. All I need to do is accept the moment. I’ve learned that I’m not in control of most things, and that trying to control everything is not only pointless, it’s the source of most of my suffering. As one of my teachers posted on the door to the meditation hall – “Relax. Nothing is under control.”
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 :)
