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 in Toronto almost every Monday night. Starting at 7:30pm sharp and finishing by 9:30pm.
With calls for social distancing to curb the spread of COVID-19, CEC is offering virtual meditation sits and discussions via Zoom for the foreseeable future. Please join us Mondays at 7:30pm(EST) to meditate in community and cultivate some connection in these physically distant times. If you live outside of Toronto and have always wanted to check out CEC, now’s your chance!
CEC Monday Night Zoom Room: https://zoom.us/j/799184864
The usual location is Mosaic Yoga, 225 Sterling Road in Unit 23 (click the link for directions).
Cost is $10-20 sliding scale, or PWYC. The CEC is a nonprofit – funds go to pay teachers and support the costs of programming. For online sits, the CEC gratefully accepts donations via e-transfer (within Canada) or Paypal, sent to consciousnessexplorersclub@
For this month’s offerings, 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.
In this exploration we will work with the relationship between our most dominant of the five senses, sight, the mind, and the heart. We’ll explore this relationship between visual input – -> thought — > emotion, and see if we can begin to change hardwired patterns and perhaps even our worldview
More Info
Tonight we’ll begin with connecting to the strength in our network of relationships past and present. Then we’ll go a step further, extending our awareness to those areas where the culture is contracted or knotted up. Our goal is not to unravel these knots, but to bring a fierce compassionate consciousness to them.
More Info
In this meditation, we explore the life-changing magic of self-compassion. We’ll proceed in stages: first we create a bit of metaphorical space between our witnessing awareness and our seething minds and bodies. Then we kick back and watch our wiggly bits wiggle, always curious, on the lookout for subtle patterns. Halfway through we move into a deliberate self-compassion practice, the simple but profound orientation of caring for what we find inside.
More Info
The answers to our current predicaments – from the personal to the global – can be found within the wide and wonderful, creative and resilient web of nature. And to be clear, nature is a web of relationships which we are a part of; not apart from. So let’s tune in! We’ll start by practicing psychological death – letting go of who we have known ourselves to be and with our freshly shattered egos, we’ll meditatively drop in to our favourite nature spots, rekindling our relationships with nature and listening for some moments to whatever wisdom the earth might have to share.
More Info