Meditation sessions on Zoom…

Lesly Juarez IMAGE

We began on 3rd December 2023, a group of like-minded artists of life, curious about meditation and how it can impact and enrich our lives. We have met many, many times since then. Initially, I offered 6 mornings a week: it was summer, and the light came early. As the year progressed, the light shifted, so winter meditation became 4 times a week.

I was well into my new studies, this time Contemplative Psychology, with Nalanda Institute (https://nalandainstitute.org) in New York City. The first year of the course focuses on meditation. We gather for weekly Zoom lectures presented by some of the leading practitioners in the world; we read and discuss the impact of meditation, and we connect with each other. There have been several face-to-face residentials, but I have engaged with the retreats through Zoom due to distance and my preoccupation with Climate Change.

Being a theatremaker who always works in collaboration with others, I wanted to establish my meditation practice in partnership with others, and it needed to be local. I had just finished a course called Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, a seven-week submersion into meditative practices and healing the environment. During this course, I heard the suggestion “start a sangha”. I researched what a sangha was and decided to be bold and step into the unknown: I would create a sangha within the community I had built up online during the COVID pandemic (3C Corner, a Facebook group where I offered dozens of workshops, motivation and (hopefully) inspiration to my arts community). I began tentatively at first, beginning with a private Facebook page called “Sangha for Artist of Life”. The very first post on my new group page was copied from the Plum Village website:

As we wake up in the morning and open our eyes, we may like to recite the following gatha:

Waking up this morning, I smile.

Knowing there are 24 brand-new hours before me, I vow to live fully in each moment and look at beings with eyes of compassion.

We can start our day with the happiness of a smile and the aspiration to dedicate ourselves to the path of love and understanding. We are aware that today is a fresh, new day, and we have 24 precious hours to live.

Let us try to get up from bed right away after following three deep breaths to bring ourselves into mindfulness. let us not delay our waking. we may like to sit up and gently massage our head, neck, shoulders, and arms to get our blood circulating. we might like to do a few stretches to loosen our joints and wake up our body. Drinking a cup of warm water is also good for our system first thing in the morning.

This was very appealing to me since I had come to believe that our world had, for a wee while, forgotten to look at each other with eyes of compassion. We were deep into the culture wars, and I felt that meditation was one way to develop awareness within my community.

To be continued.