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Doors Open for Silent Vigil, Meditation and Prayer – Wednesday, July 25th

WEDNESDAY, JULY 25: Are you seeking a refuge for silent vigil, meditation and prayer? East Bay Meditation Center will provide a space for silent contemplation as part of our weekly […]

Apply now for Practice in Transformative Action 2018-2019 yearlong program!

Deadline for applications is August 6, 2018. This award-winning EBMC yearlong program is for people involved in social change who want to benefit from a solid foundation in secular mindfulness meditation-based practices and who are interested in learning how to share these stress-reducing practices with others in a culturally humble manner. PiTA6 is the sixth cohort of this unique yearlong experience for social justice activists and change agents. All are invited to apply, and there is a special invitation to People of Color. For more information, go to https://eastbaymeditation.org/programs/longprograms/#toggle-id-1
Please note that this is a secular mindfulness training program, not a Buddhist study program. 
Photo Caption: The PiTA4 yearlong program cohort, enjoying being in community at their daylong retreat, July 2017 

EBMC in the Buddhist media!

Article about EBMC in Lion’s Roar magazine July 2018

Read all about #EBMC in the Buddhist media! “Where Everyone Can Thrive”: A fabulous feature article about East Bay Meditation Center in the July 2018 issue of Lion’s Roar magazine. With wonderful photos of our diverse Sangha! You can purchase a copy of the magazine at EBMC for a $5 donation now (they’re in the kitchen on the table near the electric kettle; limited number available), or you can find out where to purchase it for around $8 at a newsstand near you by entering your zip code at this link: http://magfinder.magnetdata.net/. After June 12, you can also order this magazine as a single issue order from the Lion’s Roar online store.

Medical Supplies Desperately Needed in Palestine: Please consider donating

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) is helping to respond to a large number of casualties in Gaza. Hospitals there have been overwhelmed by those injured during recent protests. Supplies of many medical items and medicines are desperately low — and others have run out completely. Palestinians urgently need funds for trauma supplies, essential supplies for surgery, disposables for Gaza’s Central Blood Bank, limb reconstruction equipment, and more. 
If you wish to donate, you can do so through Facebook, which passes on 100% of donations to MAP, by clicking on this link: https://www.facebook.com/donate/252021992035461/10155639367872947/
 
or by clicking on the “Donate” button on MAP’s website, here: https://www.map.org.uk
 
Thank you, EBMC Sangha! 
 
[photo credit:  Medical Aid for Palestinians] 

EBMC’s Strategic Plan: A look at the next two, five and ten years of EBMC!

For the past nine months, the EBMC community has been engaged in a dynamic process to develop a strategic plan that articulates our vision and outlines strategic actions for EBMC over the next two, five and ten years.

EBMC staff and Leadership Sangha (Board of Directors) have been working diligently to craft our strategic plan based on input from the Sangha.

With the invaluable help of our organizational consultants and the contributions from our community, we are pleased to be able to share this final document with you!

To read online or download, please click below:

EBMC SP Final Draft 4.15.18

Naturally, we’ll be celebrating this incredible milestone! Please save the date of Saturday, June 2nd 2018; all are welcome!

EBMC Announces 8th Annual Dharmathon on Saturday, May 12th!

EBMC’s Eighth Annual Dharma-thon will feature some of the Bay Area’s most inspiring artists on May 12! Dharma-thoners will enjoy an intimate dinner with performances by Melanie DeMore, Naima Shalhoub, and Michelle “Mush” Lee, with a delicious multi-course meal cooked by local vegan Filipino caterer No Worries.  This event will take place at Betti Ono Gallery in downtown Oakland, an experimentally minded space for arts, culture and community.

To register, visit: https://www.firstgiving.com/event/EBMC/2018-Dharma-thon

 

Seeking volunteers: Registration email management and Backup Temple Keeper (cleaning)

EBMC is seeking volunteers for the following volunteer positions:
 
Registration email management
Volunteer needs to have their own computer; they can do the tasks anywhere there is an Internet connection. The volunteer in this position is part of a team that is responsible for managing the EBMC registration @eastbaymeditation.org email one week per month. It entails processing cancellation requests for EBMC events through the Eventbrite online system, archiving emails, and forwarding emails to relevant EBMC staff members. Training is provided.
Time Commitment & Schedule:
One week per month (2-3 hours that week). The volunteer is expected to log-in to the registration email twice per week. We ask for a six-month commitment, renewable if mutually agreeable.
Please contact: Xiaojing Wang, EBMC Programs and Finance Director, Xiaojing at eastbaymeditation dot org
Backup Temple Keeper (cleaning EBMC), available Fridays before 5 pm
We need a volunteer available on Fridays before 5 pm, to sub when needed for our regular Temple Keeper volunteers. One regular volunteer does a one-hour shift on Fridays, cleaning the bathrooms and the kitchen. A second regular volunteer does a one-hour shift on Fridays, cleaning the entryway, office, and breakout rooms. Training is provided.
Please contact:  Mushim Ikeda, EBMC Community Coordinator, Mushim at eastbaymeditation dot org
Thank you!

Read DeNNiSOmeRa’s #SeasonOfGratitude Story

To wrap up a beautiful series of Gratitude Stories, longtime Sangha member Dennis Somera shares his experience with cultivating beloved community through sangha:
 
For the past decade, arriving on my cushion at the East Bay Meditation Center’s People of Color Sangha has alloWEd me a deep sense of gratitude, especially surrounded by (as well as supporting) others seeking refuge from HEgemonic patriarchal white supremacist culture.
Practicing with the POC Sangha and then with the Men of Color Deep Refuge Group has deeply supported the reconnection of my Buddha nature to Sangha. The weekly and daylong affinity group meditation sessions embody EBMC’s commitment to Radical Inclusion, which structures care (from john powell) into its daily practice as an organization.
Where politicized Sangha might falter in other spaces, at EBMC, we work with each other at the nexus of power and privilege. It is currently happening with groups like White and Awakening in Sangha and the Men of Color Deep Refuge Group.
 
Through EBMC’s relentless efforts to create an accessible space – in terms of location, physical accessibility, the Gift Economics model, and radical inclusion – EBMC is institutionalizing a structure of care for all people. In another EBMC deep refuge group, the Restorative Practices for Dharma Practitioners, we are attempting to structure even more Sangha care by integrating restorative practices/ talking stick circles/ council structures (respectfully drawn from Restorative Justice and indigenous wisdom) into more regular practices at EBMC.
When meditation is not only radical acceptance and attendance to the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows of our own individual lives, but is also extended outward to our communities, we can practice radically attending to each other and building a structure of care in BEloved community through a more inteRElational sangha practice.
 
EBMC’s radically inclusive care for all is the essential foundation for building beloved community and sacred sangha. It’s the way to open the door to everyone, allow our communities to learn and heal together, and bring this transformational practice into all of our daily lives.
In gratitude,
DeNNiSOmeRa

This week, Jess Dene Schlesinger continues our series of #GratitudeStories

This week, Jess Dene Schlesinger continues our series of #GratitudeStories:

I have had chronic pain for most of my life. It is hard to believe that I feel serene these days, as there were many years when I did not think life was worth living with this degree of unrelenting discomfort.

I had been told to meditate in order to help with my physical and emotional distress and tried to begin a practice for years. The problem that I was experiencing was that I could not find a meditation group that was accessible for my needs.

Often, I could not even access the space because of financial limitations (I live off of SSI), fragrance (I have multiple chemical sensitivity) or because I was not allowed to lie down when I meditated (I have severe pain in my spine and am not able to sit for extended periods). If I did access the space, the ableism that I experienced within the group felt so alienating that I would leave. I do not remember how I found out about EBMC, but in 2012, I walked into the East Bay Meditation Center’s Every Body Every Mind Sangha: a practice group for folks with disabilities, chronic illness, and/or limitations that was donation based with no one turned away for lack of funds.

While I had experience with identity-based community as a radical, queer Jew, I had never come out as a person with disabilities nor sought community within this identity. I was astounded: I was surrounded by people that I could relate to, my access needs were met, and I felt held for the first time in years.

I remember going back to the Every Body Every Mind Sangha and hearing Jim Willems speak for the first time. Here was an individual who experienced the degree of chronic pain that I was experiencing, yet he did not seem to be suffering. How was this possible? I could not fathom having that degree of acceptance and peace around my pain.

The East Bay Meditation Center, along with the incredible teachers of the Every Body Every Mind Sangha, patiently taught me the Dharma and how to develop a meditation practice within my abilities. I learned the difference between pain and suffering and use this tool to this day. I learned that I can have a life with a lot of pain and also be truly content.

I do not exaggerate when I say that EBMC saved my life. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been able to access an affordable, justice oriented spiritual community that recognized my needs as a person with disabilities and never said that my access needs were “too much.” I am deeply grateful to the center and everything that it has given me.

Jess Dene Schlesinger
***
With four days left until the end of the year, we have just $3,750 left to raise to make our year-end Match!!

Please support #EBMC in continuing to be an accessible space for all by helping us reach our goal today: 

eastbaymeditation.org/generosity/donate

Thank you for your generosity!

Read Raúl Cornado’s #SeasonOfGratitude Story

In this week’s #SeasonOfGratitude post, we are inspired by this powerful story of dharmic practice, righteous rage, and collective healing from EBMC sangha and board member, Raúl Coronado:
 
I imagine many, if not all of us, at EBMC are on a path seeking spiritual serenity, a path that is grounded in our realities and lived experiences but that also seeks awareness of the true nature of things via the dharma.
 
I’m searching for a path where I can feel and come to terms with the specificities of the pain and racial debasement I experienced growing up in racist Texas, a place where the word “Mexican” always felt like a horrible racial slur when spoken in English.
 
I’ve spent years of rage, shame, frustration, anger, seething, simmering, boiling. I’ve spent many years in therapy, in the dharma trying to get rid of that “‘excuse me’ tongue and this nagging preoccupation with the feeling of not being good enough” that Lorna Dee Cervantes writes about in her poem “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between the Races.
 
That rage, even when bottled up (maybe perhaps because it was bottled up) has often taken control of me, shaped my path, my vision of the world. It’s driven me, and rightly so, to fight for spaces for people of color, for queers of color. But I have to acknowledge that it has also warped my sense of reality for sure. At times, I reacted to that racism by turning it its mirror opposite, a kind of ethno-POC nationalism, one that eschewed white people in the name of our liberation.
 
Buddhism, time, studying women of color feminism in college, returning to my dad’s homeland, Mexico, a place I spent much of my childhood, radically altered my world. It made me realize that my racialized condition as a Mexican from working class origins was contingent, that my being “other” was not universal and that I most definitely also had privileges that I had not acknowledged. I may have been a victim of homophobic, racist, class-based oppression, but I too was not without privileges. The problem, as the queer Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga taught me, was in ranking our oppressions. As she wrote in Loving in the War Years: “Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place”.
 
The dharma has helped me see how that rage and internalized racism has warped my sense of the world and our place in it. I’m sure we each all have our very unique versions of wrestling with what I call demons: racism, classism, homophobia, sexism. In my dharma practice, I want to learn how to use the dharma to be mindful about these mind states, these feelings that percolate throughout the day triggered by interactions with media, work, life.
 
The East Bay Meditation Center is my sangha. It’s where we are collectively learning how to use the dharma to heal, grow, and flourish. Our EBMC is radically innovative, and every time we sit together, appreciating the present for all its pain and beauty, we actively create a vibrant, inclusive, beautiful spiritual community.


Raúl Coronado