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Location: Dovercourt Park fire pit, 155 Fernbank Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 3A2
Date: Sundays, December 21, January 18, February 15, March 15, from 3-4:30pm
Location: Ecology Retreat Centre - 308046 Hockley Road Mono, ON L9W 6N2
Date: Friday February 6th at 5pm to Sunday February 8th at 2pm
“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
Accepting something doesn’t mean you like it. Acceptance is the act of acknowledging. This exists. That is happening. If I break my leg, I have to accept its brokenness in order to proceed skillfully. “Good vibes only” power of positive thinking isn’t going to unbreak it. Denial and avoidance will only make it worse. Feeling the pain, seeing the injury for what it is, is the first crucial step to making it better.
In meditation, we remember our community. It is each other. It is our ancestors and the people who will be walking down our street long after we return to our solid place in the ground. Our community is the family of living things, and we are carried by the same current. This is why we built the CEC. To sit with each other in that ever-flowing current. To give and receive the encouragement and feedback that lets us know both which way to grow and if we are. It makes for a much better party.
For me, this is where the discomfort starts to set in. With no deviation from the school and activities schedule until at least June, and no vacation on the horizon, I start to get antsy, when I feel like I’ve personally hit a plateau. Over a decade into my mediation practice, I’ve at least developed an awareness of this: my extreme distaste for when it feels like nothing is happening in my life. When there’s momentum, forward movement, growth - I’m good. But the second that starts to slow, I get that itchy allergic reaction.
Meditation is ultimately about dropping as much of the framework or understanding as we can, and beholding directly the mystery of existence. The more we shed our ideas about what the world is, the more intimately we can encounter it.
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 :)
