Childhood photos, the fleeting impression of a dream, flowers wilting on the kitchen table - reminders of impermanence are everywhere. Nevermind the grave reminders of the cemetery I walk through a few times each week. Changes, transitions and endings are the rules, not the exceptions. Though Western culture is hellbent on selling us eternal youth and everlasting love, our lived experiences reveal a different reality.
And yet, in the rhythm of my everyday life, as a relatively young and healthy person, I’m all too quick to lose sight of how changes, transitions and endings are personally relevant to my life. Somehow, it can be hard for me to connect the dots. I have a feeling I’m not alone in that. I wonder sometimes if asking ourselves to build a life, to commit to the things and people we love in this world requires us to forget, in some sense, the tenuous nature of existence?
September 4, 2026 | By , cec | 4 minute read Kindness is an unfolding, spacious opening, not a destination we strive for. The deeper we go with ourselves the more we can access this place of deep connection with others, creating a compassionate foundation from which kindness can flow in all directions.
These acts of kindness don’t need to be grand gestures. Simple, micro moments - an acknowledgement, a smile, looking in someone’s eyes during a conversation, really, truly listening...acts of kindness are the language of love. The Dalai Lama says, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
July 2, 2026 | By , cec | 4 minute read No surprise that interdependence can feel like sweet balm in an otherwise-imbalanced world. But what we seem to forget is that interdependence isn’t something we have to try for, orchestrate or strive for. It’s something we simply can’t fall out of.
In other words, you do not have to try to be interdependent. You simply can’t not be.
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 :)
“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
