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 have been 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. 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.
The talk after meditation this Thursday, 9/23, will wrap up our Engaged Spiritual Life series. We’ll look at some of the ways in which we can realize and embody an engaged spiritual life, and explore our intentions around doing that. A major emphasis will be on the variety of ways in which we can express our values and intentions in daily life. The following Thursday, September 30, we’ll discuss our experience of this exploration. The final chapter (“Conclusion”) of The Engaged Spiritual Life by Donald Rothberg would be a good resource for the talk and discussion.
The next set of talks for Thursday night meetings 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.