On Wholeness.
Peace, love, non-violence, non-harming, satisfaction reverence, awe. These are the flavours of wholeness, the background radiation on which our lives dance.
Location: parks around Toronto!
Date: Wednesdays May 25, June 22, July 20, August 24, September 21
Location: Mosaic Yoga, 225 Sterling Road #Unit 23
Date: Saturday, June 4th, 2-4pm
Location: Bela Farm, 5750 6th Line Erin, ON N0B 1Z0
Date: Saturday, June 18th, 11am-5pm
“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
Peace, love, non-violence, non-harming, satisfaction reverence, awe. These are the flavours of wholeness, the background radiation on which our lives dance.
For me, embodiment involves the incorporation of our thinking, feeling, and willing capacities. A two-way path of communication between mind and body. This communication channel wasn’t something that had been developed or exercised for the better part of my life. I’m learning that our bodies speak a different language than our penthouse dwelling hamsters.
If we look closely, we can feel the force of our imaginations blowing around us, carving who we are to become. We engage with our environment, co-create with it. Our inner and outer worlds tangled in a dance of becoming. We are not made by sheer manifesting will alone, but we’re also not stuck in an unbending world. We are the dancing middle way.
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 :)