Wednesdays on Fridays

[An email sent to the Beloved Community as the launch of the collective sessions in receptive silence in Oakland. Let me know if you would like to be removed or added to the weekly emails. UPDATE: Here is the link where you can LET US KNOW is you are coming next Friday! Many thanks to the Service Space posse!]

Namaste dear beloved community, citizens of the World! 🙂

May this email find you being the change you want to see in your communities.

You are receiving this email because we want you to know that at least twice a day we are sending our love and universal blessings towards you. I particularly thought/felt that this was a great pretext to acknowledge how important you were and are in my life. Thank you facilitating the growth of my soul.

Inspired by Wednesdays and the selfless work, deep sense of kindness, and unity held by the Mehta family in Santa Clara, some people of the community in the East Bay in California think and feel that Fruitvale would be a great place to share a similar experience. So, a few kindred spirits brain/heartstorm about the idea to start Wednesdays on Fridays at Casa de Paz.

We adopted the suggested format by this (r)evolutionary family:

7:00PM	An hour of collective silence; its unguided, without any music. For first-timers, this primer on meditation may be helpful.
8:00PM	Short reading of the weekly iJourney reading, followed by a circle of sharing of “aha” moments from everyday life.
9:00PM	A vegan meal, offered in silence. Those who can stay afterwards, help with related projects of the Great Turning.

When: Friday, Aug 12th, 7PM (and now, hopefully, all Fridays!)

Where: 1978 36th Ave, Oakland, CA 94601 (map)

Let us know if you are coming to know how much food we need to cook. We are working on creating a website so that you can subscribe to the weekly emails. Let us know if you want to be included in this list. You won’t receive further emails from Wednesdays on Fridays unless you reply to this email.

Attached you will find the passage we will be reading tonight. We are standing on the shoulders of giants –as Eknath Easwaran and Joanna Macy– and we think that this piece is appropriate for the launch of Wednesdays on Fridays as we are working to embody integral nonviolence.

In radical love and service,

On behalf of Casa de Paz 🙂

PS: As new members of the Fruitvale community, we have noticed how the neighborhood has been hit with a lot physical violence, but also, in these few months we have been showered by the rich social and subtle capital of the community. We invite you to share in greeting our neighbors even if it is just friendly eye contact and/or“Buenas Noches/Hello”. If you speak Spanish, the likelihood for you to practice some of it in an encounter with a neighbor is as high as 90%.

The Shambhala Warrior

–by Joanna Macy

[A Tibetan Legend]

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

“You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.

“Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made.

“The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training.

“How do they train?” I asked.

“They train in the use of two weapons.”

“The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one,” he said, lifting his right hand, “because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see.

“But insight alone,” he said, “can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world’s pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.”

— Joanna Macy

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