OPTIONAL DAY-LONG OR PART-DAY PARTICIPATION (morning or afternoon session)
Sunday, May 20, 2018 10:00am to 4:00pm Early Learning Center, 1 New York Ave. (absolutely no walk-ins/no calls please)
Meditation teachers Ib’nallah S. Kazi and Cornelia Santschi will lead this donation-based NCMC program. (Bios on Leadership Page of website.)
This retreat will help the community to understand the need to cultivate the insight, instincts, and focus needed to navigate the growing uncertainty and instability manifesting in our world. You will take home meditation tools that will help you to reconnect to the inner guidance previously lost in the incessant noise of modern society.
Included will be guided meditations, qigong and yoga movement, an art as meditation session, a visual presentation, and discussion. NCMC instructors J. Javier Cruz and Jennifer Becher will provide assistance. The program is intended to be appropriate for beginners through experienced meditators. A seasonal vegan Medicine Meal will be prepared by Arelis Hernandez, a Newark urban farmer-meditator.
If the weather is nice we plan to spend much of the day in the spring breeze of the adjoining outdoor courtyard! It will be a unique opportunity to experience the setting of a state-of-the-art LEED-certified green building. The venue is an easy and direct .6 mile/11 minute walk from Newark Penn Station. Wheel-chair access.
Please, absolutely no Walk-Ins and no Phone Calls to the Early Learning Center. Call NCMC at 862-227-3288 with inquiries or by email at info@newarkmeditation.org. For more information about Newark Center for Meditative Culture go to the website at www.newarkmeditation.org.
Registration Required on Eventbrite at: https://ncmc-there-is-a-season-retreat.eventbrite.com Suggested donation is $20 by PayPal/Credit Card when you register or Cash or PayPal/Credit Card at Door. A donation-based program of Newark Center for Meditative Culture.
The beginning of a new year has become the traditional time to evaluate our lives. So let’s do it! And let’s use a brick as our multi-purpose metaphor.
As a starting point, we’ll take this well-known quote by actor Will Smith: “You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.” There’s a lot of wisdom in these words, but let’s examine brick laying more closely as it applies to our meditative and spiritual perspectives.
First of all, who are we?
When we reflect on who or what we are, we might imagine that we are a person carrying 5 piles of bricks on our shoulders. These bricks might represent the five aggregates in buddhist psychology — form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. We hold tight to these constantly changing piles of bricks trying to keep these activities from changing.
We can let these aggregates/bricks weigh us down. So why not instead of carrying piles of bricks on our shoulders, we take them off and lay them along the ground and simply observe and adjust them.
Why am I where I am today?
Let’s go back to the brick wall. Some of us may need to dismantle our wall and start a radical new wall. Others might just have one brick to start with. Others of us may have already built a beautiful brick wall, basking in our glory, only to see ourselves like Humpty Dumpty, falling, out of our carelessness or mistakes. Or, we might be building around others who are effecting us with their rubble, their taller walls, or poorly made walls. Then it’s vital to practice non-judgement and patience as we build our own.
Or, we may have fallen from no apparent reason at all to us! That’s just how it appears sometimes. Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put together again when he fell off his brick wall. However, we can find that there always is a way to start over — again and again and again — but under different conditions and possibly with different aims in building our new “biggest, baddest, greatest wall”.
Then what direction should we take?
Now that we’ve laid our aggregate bricks on the ground, we can use these bricks rather than have them use us, to construct a beautiful pathway. For example, we might see the pathway we construct as the buddhist eightfold path: upright view, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. When we apply our concentration and mindfulness through the practice of meditation, it can have good effect on the other bricks on the path.
Is this a perfect “yellow brick road”? Not quite, there will be bumps and road blocks along the way, but the sense of well-being and inner happiness that continue to develop will be worth the practice of these meditative life skills. Once you have a committed practice you can broaden your road and even jump on and off the pavement to move skillfully through many modes of life situations.
How can we merge spirituality with success?
There is nothing wrong with wanting to go first or be the best, provided that our intention is to help pave the way for others along the way! We can help make others’ paths more easy — we can give them a little mortar or offer a brick.
There’s a quote attributed to the Sufi sage Rumi: “Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.” But then, why do some of us not get what we work hard for and want? We can’t all be great hip-hop artists or brain surgeons, but our passion for music might manifest in a different way in our work or at home. Our ability to be deft with our hands and make quick decisions might not manifest as becoming a surgeon, but instead as a wonderful conscientious activist homemaker.
So what about inner happiness?
Let’s start building with the brick of breath. Breath is form. We take one breath at a time, aware of the moment, aware also of our body, which is also form — with perhaps a little smile on our face — and be happy, that’s all. Be happy with ourselves as we are. Oprah Winfrey is quoted as saying, “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”
Perhaps we can each become a BRICK HOUSE of Inner Happiness! Happy new year! Peace.
It’s a simple task to breath in and out but to be mindful and present with it takes practice. And this practice can help make positive, effective, and even transformative changes to our lives. Breath is just one form of meditation that can make an impact — there are many objects of meditation — but the breath is a good place to start as it’s available at any given moment wherever you are in Brick City.
A butterfly stops to mindfully breath on one of our meditation cushions at the start of one of NCMC’s summer meditation classes held in Military Park through August, each Wednesday evening at 7pm weather providing.
To help to understand just what mindfulness of breathing can do, here’s a clear description about mindfulness of breathing to contemplate. It’s from a book of essays titled The Issue at Hand by meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal:
“Mindfulness of breathing can be a powerful ally in our lives. With steady awareness of our inhalations and exhalations, the breath can become an equanimous constant through the ups and downs of our daily life. By resting with and perhaps even enjoying the cycles of breathing, we are less likely to be caught up in the emotional and mental events that pass through us. Repeatedly returning to the breath can be a highly effective training in letting go of patterns of identification and holding that freeze the mind and heart.”
NCMC teacher Kazi, of The Spirit-Centered Life, notes that an important component of yoga, meditation, and mindfulness is breathing, and he advises people to pay attention to it. “Your breathing will often let you know what’s going on with your emotions.” he has stated. *
