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Season of Gratitude: Ruby Olisemeka

We invite you to join in our Season of Gratitude at EBMC! As we close out 2019 we are sharing stories from our Sangha about how EBMC has positively impacted them and asking our Sangha to collectively raise $25,000 to keep EBMC sustainable and accessible for the benefit of so many. 


We are tremendously grateful to a generous Sangha member who has given a matching grant and so all gifts to EBMC between now and the end of the year will be matched dollar to dollar, up to $10,000! Please support the center today at the highest level you can and help us meet our end of year goal! 

From Ruby: 

I first discovered EBMC while I was teaching young people at a nature school. The director forwarded me information about EBMC’s yearlong Practice in Transformative Action (PiTA) program, and that is when I began my meditation practice. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that EBMC changed the course of my life—it was a place of awakening for me. During that first year of practice, I shifted the way I perceive myself and others and the larger world in which we live. Through guiding teacher Mushim Ikeda and the community of practitioners I found there, I was able to create a support system of peers that held me and has helped me continue to practice in ways that are transformative. As a farmer and a teacher, I know that diversity is health. At EBMC, diversity is intentionally cultivated, and that is why it is such a healthy and healing space.  

 

My work as a teacher focuses on fostering young people’s connection to nature and supporting their sense of responsibility for preserving ecosystems. The practices I learned at EBMC have helped me expand my understanding of suffering and injustice, and now I share that with my students and inspire them in turn. I have learned that the wider my perspective, the more I can help them to expand theirsNo matter what the subject matter, I work to inspire my students to be more expansive in their thinking in order for their actions to be more impactful. My ability to do that is directly connected to the practices I learned at EBMC. 

 

EBMC practices loving kindness in action; it is a place of refuge and healing. I carry the lessons I have learned at EBMC with me wherever I am. I live in New York now, and when I come to the Bay Area, I return to Mushim as my guiding teacher and EBMC as my spiritual home. In this world where there is so much suffering, EBMC is a place where you can put your suffering down for a little bit. For that I am truly grateful.

Ruby Olisemeka

EBMC is Hiring!

“When we work with love, we renew the spirit” – bell hooks

East Bay Meditation Center is currently hiring for an Operations and Facilities Director. This is a part time, salaried staff position with immediate availability. If you are interested in joining the staff team at East Bay Meditation Center and helping us uplift our mission of fostering liberation, personal and interpersonal healing, social action, and inclusive community building, please send your resume and cover letter to the staff contact below. 

Click here to read full Job Description

Candi Martinez Carthen  candi AT eastbaymeditation DOT org 

Photo by Kari Shea

 

 

Seeking new EBMC board members (L.Sangha)

Application deadline Dec. 2, 2019

Help EBMC find a permanent home! If you love East Bay Meditation Center and have experience in fundraising, capital campaigns, and/or real estate management and acquisition, please consider applying to be on EBMC’s L.Sangha (Leadership Sangha / Board of Directors). For full info and application form, click here: https://bit.ly/2pcO0C5

(Other skills that may be applicable are organizational development, facilitation, budgeting, Human Resources, program development, restorative justice, technology, legal)

For more information about current LSangha (board) members, click here: https://eastbaymeditation.org/about/lsangha/

Deep Bows of Gratitude.

Shared Leadership at EBMC: Want to Know More?

Dharmathon 2019: Sign Up to Help Sustain the Work of East Bay Meditation Center!

We are thrilled to announce Dharmathon 2019 on Friday, October 18th 2019 from 6:30 – 10:00PM. 

Please join us for an evening of delicious food, powerful performances and friendship at the beautiful Alice Collective in Downtown Oakland, California. 

Sign Up to become a Dharmathoner / Learn More at: https://www.firstgiving.com/event/EBMC/2019-Dharma-thon

Want to apply? EBMC’s award-winning yearlong mindfulness for social activists training. Deadline 8/5/19.

Apply now for EBMC’s PiTA 7 yearlong program, mindfulness training for social activists & agents of change! Application deadline is Aug. 5, 2019. From Ruby Olisemeka, nature educator, graduate of Practice in Transformative Action 6:


The Practice in Transformative Action program (sixth cohort, 2018-2019), gave me the knowledge, skills and language to have mindfulness moments with my junior ranchers (4 – 5 years old) and longer meditation sessions with my nature explorers group (5 – 11 years old) as well as my middle school science classes (12 – 15 years old). At least 60 children every week got to connect to mindful awareness of breath.
The effects on my students were incredible. The most memorable effect was with a group that was really difficult to bring into a state of calm during our all groups’ morning circle. My co-instructors agreed to change our morning routine by letting me lead all 30 children in a mindfulness/breath awareness exercise. In a few weeks, the children no longer had to be wrangled into sitting and calming their verbal exuberance, so we could begin and have a successful morning circle. As soon as we said “to the stump circle” all our students gathered peacefully and were sitting in circle calmly waiting for me to start the day by saying “Meditation is a survival skill, the more you practice the better you are at it, let’s take a deep breath in and begin.”


For application, email PITA at eastbaymeditation dot org. More information, meeting dates (Sept 2019-July 2020), info about the teachers, click here.

May 18: Buddhists Declare Climate Emergency Actions

Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:00 – 5:30 PM Pacific time –
** Wesak Awakening: Buddhists Declaring Climate Emergency Together** No charge, registration required because of limited space. Location: The Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, 1661 15th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 
We invite you to take action for the world we love. Come together on Wesak (the anniversary of Buddha’s awakening) to bear witness together to our climate emergency. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wesak-awakening-buddhists-decl…
Guided by beloved teachers Thanissara and Kittisaro, we’ll join in ceremony, collectively naming and acknowledging our harrowing climate situation. We’ll also be supported by a diverse array of speakers (including Anne Symens-Bucher on behalf of Joanna Macy), interactive heart-based exercises, movement to help us ground, live music with The Invisible Bee and others, and the opportunity to speak and listen to each other’s intentions for responding, individually and collectively, in these times. 
We’ll end the event with a plant-based meal shared in community, and leave with the strength and inspiration to continue this vital conversation within our families, sanghas and beyond. We hope you’ll join us for this afternoon of contemplation, sharing, connection, engagement and truth!

Note: This event is free. Space is limited. Please register to assure your spot. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wesak-awakening-buddhists-decl…

May 18, 2019: Awakening to Climate Emergency:
Join the Live Webinar! 9:00am Pacific time 
In connection with the Call to Declare Climate Emergency Now and timed with the annual observance of the Buddha’s Awakening to reality, we invite you to join us with your local Sanghas and communities for a live webinar to Declare Climate Emergency at all levels. We will come together to commit the process of declaring a climate emergency together. We’ll be sharing resources, strategies and outcomes as we mobilize together. Register here: https://oneearthsangha.org/progr…/dcen/webinar-registration/

The live event will begin at Saturday, May 18, 2019 9:00 am PDT and will be recorded. As soon as the recording is available, it will be posted here: https://oneearthsangha.org/progr…/dcen/webinar-registration/

The time is upon us to take to heart the Buddha’s radical awakening and to apply all our practice, skills, and what wisdom and compassion we have to the task at hand, which is protecting Mother Nature and her myriad beings while ensuring a liveable planet for our children, grandchildren and the generations to come.

Mother Nature is calling us to be truth messengers and change agents and to enact a radical, quantum shift of consciousness that mirrors our rapid planetary state shift. Through DCEN we honor this call by naming and embodying the reality that “business as usual” is no longer viable for a sustainable future. In particular, we call on the Dharma, mindfulness, yoga communities, alongside all involved in awakening, healing, and transformational work, whatever affiliation, to join us in this effort. If you don’t feel you fit in these categories, you too are absolutely welcome.

The call from Mother Nature, Grandmother Earth is now extremely urgent. We have almost no time left to act as protectors of life on Earth and to pull together to hold a ground of consciousness, resilience, and wellbeing. We need to move while we can, before we experience a collapse into free fall where conducive spaces to share and organise are replaced by the shock of societies becoming more chaotic and dismembered as our life support systems die.

Let us join together in our heartbreak so we can share and transmute our grief, pain and outrage into a clarity and focus that informs creative, joyful, non-violent action.

I hope to see you there.
— Thanissara, with the DCEN team.

Featured Guests
This live webinar will feature:

Kittisaro & Thanissara – Sacred Mountain Sangha US / Dharmagiri Sacred Mountain Retreat S.Africa.
Kristin Barker – One Earth Sangha
Jozen Gibson – Brooklyn Zen Centre, Awake Youth Project, Insight Meditation Society.
Noliwe Alexandra – East Bay Meditation Center
Mark Ovland – XR UK Logistics
Charity Kahn – San Francisco Insight
This event will be hosted by One Earth Sangha

And..

If you can’t make these, organize your own event, with your family, community and/ or sangha. Template and sign up here (via 1ES) https://oneearthsangha.org/programs/dcen/share-your-event/

Want to see the source document for a Dharma / spiritually orientated process for declaring, with resources.. go here

Buddhists Climate Emergency Now

Seeking new EBMC board members, application deadline May 27, 2019

Seeking NEW BOARD MEMBERS to join #EBMC‘s Leadership Sangha to help find EBMC a permanent home! Deadline for applications is May 27, 2019. If you love East Bay Meditation Center and have specific experience in fundraising, capital campaigns, and real estate management and acquisition, for full info & to apply, click on this link, download as a Word document, or copy and paste into an email, fill in your information and email it as described in the application form, please. Please share this information with others who may be interested. Thank you. 

Program Committee Accepting Applications

The EBMC Program Committee is accepting applications for new members. Apply here, and contact programs at eastbaymeditation dot org with any questions.