Settling Into Sound
“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.” – Wu-Men Huikai
Steph: In the spirit of keeping things simple, tonight we will tune into sounds: around us, beyond us, and within us.
Meditations
Meditations Archive
Steal These Meditation Ideas
Part of the CEC’s mission is to inspire people around the world to create their own quirky, self-lead meditation communities. To that end, we’d like to share these short descriptions practices we’ve lead over the years.
Back to Basics
Oliver: What an age we live in! So much access to wisdom from so many sources, so many spiritual practices and styles… it’s like a big, beautiful, mind/body buffet. If you’re like me though, you sometimes crave a bit of simplicity to cleanse the internal palate. Tonight we get back to basics and sip the cool, clean water of stillness and silence to make space for a fresh new year.
Imagine All This Was Easy
James: Everything. Surviving COVID, pairing your socks, getting enlightened, loving, being loved. It was more than easy, it had already been done and you are just front-row magic show watching it unfold. Is such a thing possible? I’ll go one deeper. It’s more than possible, it is what’s fucking happening. Climate change, hunger, over as soon as they were identified, though the timescale spans human lives. All we can do to hasten it is let the work pass through. That is what we will practice in this sit, and every one: holding still so we might know the next best move.
Meditate with the Body, not with the Mind
Seishin: When my teacher, a Zen monk, returned to the USA after training in Japan, he was surprised to see that meditation was being taught as something you do with the mind. At his monastery, he was taught it is something you do with the body — the mind just naturally ends up following. In this meditation we will use five points in the body to simplify our practice and return to our embodied selves, and notice what effect this has on our minds. This is a subset of the Jade Method (those who are interested can sign up for the full online course in January).
Begin Again
Avi: We’ve spent the past few years trying our best to stay grounded in the midst of the pandemic’s uncertainty. Now just as the new year is beginning, a new wave of the disease is hitting us, and understandably it is easy to lose touch with the practices that centre us. In those moments, we can remember that our forgetting is only temporary; as soon as we are aware of having lost the thread of practice, we can simply choose to begin again. Begin again to notice the breath, begin again to reach out for support, begin again to plant our feet firmly in the earth.