We have three online meditations a week, on Wednesday morning, Thursday evening, and Saturday morning. The Zoom links for those meetings can be found on the Events Calendar and you will also find more detailed information below. You’re welcome to join us online for any of the 3 meetings each week.
In addition to our regular online meetings, we are now meeting for in-person meditation sessions every Wednesday and Saturday Morning. Please see the Events Calendar for specific details.
During the Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday online meetings, we “sit together” for meditation for half an hour. Meditations include guided meditations, meditations with some initial guidance and instruction, and silent meditations. The Wednesday morning meditation starts at 9:30 am, with half an hour of meditation, followed by half an hour of sharing. On Thursday evenings there is a talk or discussion and sharing following meditation. Meditation is from 7:30 until 8:00 pm, with the talk and discussion ending at about 9:00 pm. The Saturday morning meditation starts at 8:00 am, with half an hour of meditation followed by half an hour of sharing.
The Thursday night series of talks are currently focused on engaged spiritual practice, looking at ethical living, intention, compassion, and other qualities that have a profound impact on how we live in the world and how we can try to be a positive influence to reduce the suffering of others as well as our own stress and unease. The talks will all be self-contained, but if you’d like a book to explore this area in your own life, The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World by Donald Rothberg is a good resource for the series. For each talk, we’ll give an indication of the chapter(s) that would be most helpful in supplementing the talk and discussion.
After the 7:30 pm meditation on Thursday, 8/26, there will be a talk on equanimity and how it can be practiced in daily life and social engagement. The relationship of equanimity to lovingkindness, compassion, and joy will also be discussed. The following week, Thursday, 9/2, there will be a discussion of our own experience of equanimity. Chapter Nine in Donald Rothberg’s book, The Engaged Spiritual Life, has an excellent discussion of equanimity, as does Chapter Nine in Sharon Salzberg’s book, Lovingkindness.
We’ll be finishing up our discussion of the engaged spiritual life in about 4 weeks. The next set of talks will be based on the Buddha’s first and most basic teachings which are on stress and suffering, their causes, and the path that can lead to the end of suffering. Chris will emphasize the interpersonal and social aspects of those teachings in the new series of talks. An excellent resource for those talks will be Gregory Kramer’s book, Insight Dialogue: The Interpersonal Path to Freedom.
If you can’t or don’t wish to join the online sessions you can just meditate at the same time as we’re meeting and know that there are others from the group who are meditating with you. I’ve had many people contact me to say they were doing that for our meditation sessions recently, and that it can help bring a feeling of connection.