Meditation Sits
Many people, especially busy urban dwellers, feel overwhelmed and undernourished. They struggle alone with their challenges and are only rarely able to discuss – let alone practice – deep matters of belonging and connection and embodiment.
The vision of The Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC) is to provide a fun and accessible venue where people can discuss these things as they emerge from perspective-altering spiritual and psychological and social practices. Our members go on mind-body adventures – together and independently – and then share their insights and discoveries and inspiration with the community.
Details
So: We meet almost every Monday night. Starting at 7:30pm sharp and finishing by 9:30pm.
The location is Mosaic Yoga, 225 Sterling Road in Unit 23 (click the link for directions).
Cost is $10-20 sliding scale. The CEC is a nonprofit – funds go to pay teachers and support the costs of programming.
For this month’s offerings scroll down, or read our current newsletter.
What do we do?
The evening rolls out in two parts:
- Part one is 35-minutes of sitting meditation practice (from 7:30 – 8:30pm)
- Part two is 45-minutes of interactive practice, play and discussion (8:30 – 9:30pm)
In the first part, we experiment with different solo meditations, from restful absorption to creative visualizations, mindfulness-style noting (of various mind-body components), loving-kindness, sound meditations, choiceless awareness and many others. You don’t need to follow any of these techniques if you don’t want to – some people prefer to stay with their tried-and-true regular practice.
In the second part, we engage in different interactive practices, from partner noting to mixed-tape music sessions to theatrical craft projects to self-inquiry to Gestalt boundary exercises to any number of other combinations we make up in the CEC laboratory, as per our mandate to use arts and culture to explore issues related to personal growth. These are like playful investigations into different corners of human social reality, which we then discuss with great gusto. The idea is to create a bridge between the cushion and the street, to take our practice insights and actually try to apply them to real-life situations.
“A wise teacher, and a wise center, 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
The CEC is passionately nonsectarian – both humanistic and contemplative traditions are represented. That said, we do have an uber-meditation consultant: the Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young.
If you are interested in our schedule of explorations, sign up for our mailing list to receive our monthly newsletter.
Jeff Warren
President, The Consciousness Explorers Club
Contact us: info@consciousnessexplorersclub.com
NOTE: Meditation is a compliment but not a substitute for professional psychological and medical health care. There are risks in any psychological or spiritual method. Those risks increase for people who are experiencing significant distress or dysfunction. Please inquire if you are unsure whether or not meditation is appropriate for your situation.
For this meditation we’ve enlisted the sweet sounds of KiKo to help us settle into a journey to rebalance our energy centres, and maybe our nervous systems while we are at it. For part two, join us for a restorative yoga session and accompanying sound bath to explore how sound + stillness (+lots of bolsters and blankets) can helps us to drop into a more peaceful state. Now doesn’t that sound good?
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In tonight’s meditation we’ll explore the feeling of urgency that can arise when we sit, that nameless, directionless feeling that we should be DOING SOMETHING DAMMIT! In the second half, explore the way we hold identities as do-ers or non-do-ers of various kinds and ask what happens if we allow these identities to be a little more fluid.
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I imagine we all have our own experiences of how it feels to ‘give up’ or ‘let go’ or ‘surrender’. Tonight we will open our hearts to all of it, and feel for what there might be to ‘give up’ in order to ‘surrender’. In the second half, Fighting Monkey instructor and dance artist Elke Schroeder will lead Partnered Movement Situations exploring this theme of surrender; how can we work with another person to poke/prod/mine/tune/hone our relationship with surrendering to that which is outside of ourselves? What can this illuminate?
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For tonight’s meditation, we’ll open the doors wide to our own guest houses, aiming to accept all the wonderful weirdos who show up looking for refuge. Then we’ll offer our own unique wisdom to one another, emboldened by the wearing of ridiculous headgear.
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In part 1 we will take all that we have learned this month on surrender and proceed to sit with the simplest of instructions. In part 2 we’ll explore something most of us do every day and learn a technique not only to help us surrender to sleep, but perhaps also to this great big beautiful cosmos that serves our best intentions, once we get out of its way.
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