Meditation Sits
*During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re meeting online every Monday at 7:30pm EST
CEC Monday Night Zoom Room: https://zoom.us/j/799184864, passcode = 00000 (five zeros)
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
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, passcode = 00000 (five zeros)
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@gmail.com. You can also sign up to be a monthly supporter via our Patreon page.
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 30-minutes of interactive discussion ending with breakout rooms (8:30 – 9pm)
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.
“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: consciousnessexplorersclub@gmail.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.
Join the CEC for a fireside meditation at Dufferin Grove Park! We’ll celebrate the shortest, coldest month by inviting the light and warmth of the fire to brighten our February souls.
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In this practice we will make a compassionate inquiry into our nature, our lives, and how we relate to the world, in hopes that it will lead greater inner harmony and a little more freedom.
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Together we’ll explore our clouds (i.e. thoughts, emotions, sensations, distractions) and invite them to settle so our enlightening suns can shine through. Maybe we just catch a glimpse, a little ray of sun peeking out to remind us that we already have all that we need. We just need to be with it all, just as it is.
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For convenience, our mind parses phenomena into categories, and when it succeeds, moves on. But what about our actual experience? Can it be so neatly divided, and how does an attempt at such inquiry lead to “waking up”?
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Join the CEC founder Jeff Warren for a Friday night meditation expedition into our February theme of “Waking Up”. Or maybe into some other place the consciousness calls!
We’ll be meeting live at our Mosaic Yoga studio home, and streaming via zoom for our faraway friends.
Tonight we will tap into our bodies, where emotions are stored, explore sensations, and wake our frozen emotional selves up from the slumber of a long winters’ nap.
More InfoJoin the CEC founder Jeff Warren for a Friday night meditation expedition into our March theme of “Imagination”. Or maybe into some other place the consciousness calls!
We’ll be meeting live at our Mosaic Yoga studio home, and streaming via zoom for our faraway friends.
Join Sharon Salzberg, one of the world’s leading experts in meditation, to learn practices for living with a more spacious, open sense of possibility, creativity, connection, and joy. Her new book Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom teaches us that through meditation we can use our difficulties to steer us onto a path toward an authentic, flourishing life—living in a way that allows us to find the wholeness that lies within. This virtual interactive workshop will develop tools needed for this journey to expansive freedom.
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