While knowing you’ve heard a great deal about two of these topics, I still want to add my “yes, indeed.”
What a delight the Bridge Walk was! All of us coming together—in person in San Francisco and in spirit around the world—to realize all we hoped was possible. Even more than exceeding our financial goal, we were thrilled to reach the goal of walking 52 million steps! The 52 million steps brought together our commitment to physical fitness and our commitment to our friends in Kantolomba. A brilliant Sangha achievement!
In a recent discussion at the Monastery a visiting monk said she thought the greatest contributor to the success of this Sangha is the Privileged Environment. “It’s the practice that supports awakening while thwarting the behaviors that destroy nearly all well-intentioned groups: ego’s liking and disliking, posturing, and better ideas.” Our previous blog and the latest “Musings” underline the importance to the well-being of our Sangha of this unique practice. Perhaps we can all take this on as the overarching practice commitment for 2015?
Over the years, as a Sangha, we’ve tackled the voices of egocentric karmic conditioning, self-hate, depression, and feeling bad. Now it’s time to tackle anxiety. Stress has long been a hot topic, a big industry, and has resulted in large numbers of mainstream Americans taking up a type of meditation through “mindfulness.” Recently anxiety gained national attention and now we have a focus on adrenal fatigue.
My hope is that, as a Sangha, we can do an in-depth exploration of the relationship between dissatisfaction, busyness, the conversation in conditioned mind, and ego maintenance that will assist us in seeing how the condition called “anxiety” happens, and allow us to place it, along with self-hate, depression, fear, and feeling bad, in the category of “don’t need to suffer with that.” Our next blog will be my attempt to launch that specific conversation.
In gassho,
Cheri