Previews and Coming Attractions
When retreat season at the Zen Monastery Peace Center ends, we turn our attention to planning for the Zen Center’s and Living Compassion’s next year. The pace of our lives has slowed. We’re going from cooking and cleaning for waves of retreatants to making the property rain-ready. It’s a lovely, quiet time to come together, to appreciate all that’s happened throughout the season, and to begin to lay out the calendar for the months to come.
Last year in those meetings we settled on Deepening Practice as our focus for 2012. We started the new year with a free video workshop for the whole Sangha, followed with an email class to create our Deepening Practice Action Plan (DPAP), and continued throughout the year with conference calls to support participants in keeping their DPAP commitments. In addition, I challenged everyone to become one of 300 people committed to raising $1000 each doing something that “lights you up,” the proceeds from which would support practice. We didn’t get 300 volunteers, and not all who did commit reached their goal, but we had mountains of fun meeting each Thursday evening via conference call to share inspirations and successes.
Our theme for 2013 is “The Cooperative of Practice: Being Lit Up Together.” Practice is not something that some people make available and then others partake of. Practice is Sangha and Sangha is a cooperative. We all own it, we all share in it, we’re all responsible for it, we all benefit from it, and we all belong to it. In other words, the giving—AND THE RECEIVING—goes in all directions.
The video workshop that will kick off this year will be on Sunday, January 20. Please mark your calendars now!
I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll bet we can expect another email class. And for those of you taking this year’s challenge, which I’m pretty sure will have something to do with “Learning to Love Learning,” we will continue with the Thursday evening good time.
One of the best parts of this last year for many of us revolved around Sangha Market. We’re going to be featuring some of the marvelous Sangha Market offerings for your holiday shopping pleasure, so please avail yourselves of that great way to support one another and practice through putting your dollars where your heart is. We know the Market is not the easiest place to buy and sell and we’re working on it. This year one of our top priorities is getting Sangha Market to be thoroughly user friendly. Please be patient as we do our repairs. If you want to buy or sell something but the process is difficult for you, let us know. Nancy (nandanna2@hotmail.com) is always there to assist.
Happy holidays. If we don’t see you before, we hope you will join us on January 20.
In gasshō,
Cheri