Meditation Sits

Join CEC for an outdoor meditation sit around Toronto’s High Park Labyrinth! Dress for the weather! The Labyrinth is ringed by a large circle of picnic tables, great for distanced sitting. If you’d prefer, bring your own sitting gear and set up under a nearby tree.

Join Sharon Salzberg, one of the world’s leading experts in meditation, to learn practices for engaging in challenging times with clarity, calm, and heartfulness. Her most recent book Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World teaches us that meditation is not a replacement for taking action, but rather a way to practice generosity with ourselves and summon the courage to break through boundaries, reconnect to a movement that’s bigger than ourselves, and have the energy to stay active. This virtual interactive workshop will guide us towards embodying the fundamental principles of mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation to create a better world for both ourselves and others.

When you have a thorn in your arm, it’s better to experience the pain of pulling it out than spending your whole life trying not to touch it! Strong or subtle, every day we face painful, difficult experiences, which fear commands us to resist. But when we resist a difficult experience, we actually store it inside. We’ll learn how to counter this tendency, release stored patterns, and not create new ones.

In today’s in person session, we’ll practice opening our hearts to the gifts and lessons of the season at hand, getting slow and quiet. Then we’ll head outside to practice opening our eyes to the tiny beautiful things we can find in the industrial landscape surrounding Mosaic Yoga. 

‘You can’t take it with you’, ‘This too shall pass’, ‘The only constant is change’, and so on. Impermanence. We understand the idea. But how much frustration, anxiety, and suffering do we experience because we don’t really accept it? Tonight we look past our fixed ideas of self and world, into the ever-fluid activity of sensory experience to know experientially, moment-to-moment, that this too is passing.

Acceptance? Ya right. 
Work is a mess, my family is stressing me out, relationship drama …pandemic …the government …injustice …climate change (insert head exploding emoji). We know this “acceptance” thing is good for our mental and emotional well-being, and we also know it’s important to sometimes stand up and say “No. Change needs to happen”. 
So please accept (ha ha) my invitation to come together on the 21st, sit, discuss and share about how we reconcile these seemingly contradictory ideas. 

My partner Sarah and I have a running joke. I mean literally, we’re running when we make the joke. The joke is: soon we’ll get there. We’ll get to normal, to fixed, to calm, to The Balanced Life, to whatever fantasy of stability we imagine is waiting for us if only we can get the last of these fucking emails written. Just out of reach, but not out of sight. Except, of course, it’s both out of reach and out of sight. That’s what the mind does. Carrot on a stick, carrot on a stick, come on buddy you can do it. We all know how deluded this is, and yet we all fall into it anyway. 

This Monday, not only will we practice acceptance – yes, this here right now is your actual life – we will also explore the possibility that your mind is completely bonkers and out of sync with reality. We will explore this in a fun way, that is, making good-natured fun of the mind.

A virtual half-day meditation retreat with Shinzen Young, one of the most well-respected mindfulness teachers in North America. Whether you’re a newbie or a long-time meditator, your contemplative journey probably contains peaks and valleys and some long flat plateaus. Shinzen can offer tools and techniques to keep your practice buoyant and balanced, and teach you how to unstick yourself from any ruts along the way!

Join the CEC for a fireside meditation at Dufferin Grove Park! We’ll celebrate the upcoming solstice by inviting the light and warmth of the fire to brighten our long winter nights.