Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

Rainer Maria Rilke describes this gracefully: Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

community building as spiritual practice,

heard years ago that Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The next Buddha will be the sangha.”

All men [sic] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. — REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

The new teachers of wisdom in the idiom of the people will not be recognizable by their robes but by their hearts. This

Mindfulness can be the practice that connects our individual spiritual path with the path of all beings.

My gratitude to the Center for Whole Communities in Waitsfield, Vermont, for introducing me to the terminology of “whole communities.” One of CWC’s founders, Peter Forbes, describes Whole Communities as being “the sum of healthy relationships between people, and between people and place. A community is made complete or whole when people are fully v

After I ate my fill, the opportunity for me to be generous appeared. Excess food was usually given to the monastery kitchen to be incorporated into regular meals for the larger temple community — but I figured that our temple was very well supported: it had grants from the government, not to mention offerings from generous lay supporters. So I chos

You may think you are meditating with the purpose of attaining peace in your own mind or tenderness in your own heart. You may think that meditation practice is about creating a deep awareness and mindfulness in your own life so that you can choose what leads to happiness for you rather than what leads to suffering. You may even feel the benefits w