Be Here Now Turns 21

White Elephant gift exchange @BHN, December 2022

A poetic telling

21-years and here we are. If our group was a person, we could legally drink but would choose not to. 

If our group was the sea, I could say I’ve spent most of my adult life sailing its surface and swimming in its depths. And I could say I had only touched a miniscule portion of its offerings. 

If our group was a well-crafted loaf of artisan bread, I would say I was simply the shopper who pulled together the necessary ingredients, borrowed from other hands. The making & baking was the work of all of us. 

But enough about comparisons. What I most want to convey is this. The quiet work of anything great depends on two things that tend to confuse & scare: commitment & discipline. 

Thankfully, our group, our sangha, Be Here Now, has both. A commitment to meeting every Monday night, whether snow, summer, holiday or pandemic. And the discipline of tethering with purpose, joy & ease to tradition, format, sound teachings, and practice.

Okay. Back to comparisons. If our group was an orchestra, I’d be the gal who spread the word, showed up early to set the stage, and ensured everyone had a sitting place. Instrumental is the role of organizer, but the magic comes from the people. And the conductor? It might be the momentum generated by everything that’s ever happened. It might be the whole of all of us combined. 

__________

A practical telling

Beloved Community

Last Sunday, my home sangha, Be Here Now, gathered for a potluck & open mic at our local mindfulness center. It wast the first time in over 2-years that we had a social event outside of our weekly Monday night meditation group. Pre-covid, we organized open mic nights once a month through the winter and potlucks 2 or 3 times a year. Words cannot express how wonderful it felt to be together again in these ways. 

Once in a while, folks will ask me what the benefit is to meditating with a sangha, verses on their own at home. And despite my almost 20-years of sangha-building experience in the Plum Village tradition, I will often have difficulty answering this question. Being part of a sangha – or any group that fosters wellness in our body/mind system – is much less of an intellectual thought process than it is a felt sense of connection and belonging. Showing up and participating in a sangha is more than having the support of other folks to practice sitting meditation with. It’s a way to meet people, forge friendships, be uplifted & nourished by others, and share in our common humanity as people on this planet earth together. 

This morning, my husband Mike and I went for a walk around the neighborhood we’re currently house/pet sitting in for a good friend of ours. When we strolled past a community garden, I commented on how nice it was that such things as community gardens exist. Places where folks can go and create a collective energy together by cultivating small gardens in unison. Amid such dualistic times, in our western society that sometimes pays homage to individuality to the detriment of our ability to be kind and skillful with one another, it seems as though we could benefit collectively from having a few more community gardens & sanghas around. 

Sangha Building

In the wake of our teacher’s recent passing, I felt inspired to craft this letter to my home sangha, Be Here Now:

Dear beloved Be Here Now Sangha, 

This is me wanting to lend voice to the powerful reality of how what we are doing - this whole meeting every Monday night to gather in a circle to sit; to walk; to share; to breathe together and be fully human together - is incredibly precious and important. 

This is me wanting to remind us all - in case we have forgotten - that what we are doing matters. 

Our practice matters. Our coming together matters. Our presence at sangha matters. Our showing up for one another matters. It matters even to many who are not in the room. 

Let us not be tempted to minimize what it is we are doing here together on Monday nights because of the tendency we have as humans to reduce in value the things with which we gain familiarity and/or have ready-access to. 

Our sangha - our spiritual community - is a rich wonder of life. And every single person who comes through the door, whether once or a dozen or one-hundred times, makes the tapestry of our community stronger and more vibrant. 

Thank you thank you for making Be Here Now Sangha possible. For showing up and offering the gift of your time, energy and presence. There a million other places you could otherwise be and you are choosing to be here, now. And for this I am deeply grateful. 

Dearest sangha, even though I am 1,500 miles away, practicing at Deer Park Monastery in southern California through March, I know you are there and I am very very happy. 

Holding you all closely, 
Nicole Dunn
Founder and co-director of BHN

Building Sangha

As an ordained member of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing (OI), rooted in the Plum Village tradition, I know that my teacher has given us OI members the important task of sangha building as our highest priority as spiritual practitioners and leaders. Sangha meaning: spiritual community in Buddhism.

Inspired by a dialog I had the other day with an OI aspirant I am helping to mentor, I’d like to share some of my thoughts around what sangha building means to me and especially how it’s taking new forms in the wake of covid.

I’ve been reflecting recently on how many regular annual sangha gatherings and events I’ve not had – or will not have – the delight in organizing this year: our local spring mindfulness retreat; my home sangha’s summer campout; potlucks at my house; Mindful Community Conversations; Friendsgiving in November; open mic nights at our local mindfulness center; our White Elephant Gift Exchange in December. And the cancellation of all of these events and programs has resulted in feelings of sorrow and disappointment and also feelings of relief and spaciousness.

My weekly home sangha, Be Here Now, has been  meeting on Zoom now since March. In transferring to the Zoom platform, coupled with the cancellation of all the things that would normally bring us all together and help strengthen our collective group and individual relationships, I’ve often been referring to a teaching shared during a class series I took back in January centered around Nonviolent Communication (or NVC as it’s commonly referred to as) by our instructor: Be fierce about your needs and creative about your strategies. 

To me, sangha building is more than organizing chances and opportunities for folks in our spiritual practice to gather together as a group, it involves showing up for people, offering support, reaching out, checking in, touching base, remembering & honoring birthdays, and getting involved in the lives of active sangha members with heartfelt interest. It involves me stepping into my own discomfort and being vulnerable. It involves me not putting on an act or a front or pretending I have all the answers. It involves me bringing my full sometimes confused, sometimes messy self to the table.

Four Elements of Lay Life

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what the foundational elements of my life are, as a lay practitioner in the Plum Village Buddhist tradition. A while back, I watched a Dharma talk online from a monastic Sister where she spoke of the founding principles of monastic life at the monasteries in our tradition and I think, if I remember right, what I’ve landed on is similar to what she shared.

I’ve identified four elements – and to be clear, theses are ones I’ve simply recognized are true and in play for myself personally, this is not any sort of official list adopted by anyone other than myself.

Nicole’s Four Foundational Elements of Lay Practice Life

1. Practice (includes Dharma study)
2. Work
3. Rest
4. Play (includes music/art/creative expression)

For me, it’s helpful to understand clearly what my foundational elements are as a lay practitioner so that I know what my priorities are and in what direction I want to be spending my time and limited energy. Life is about balance. And for me it’s about balancing these four elements, often on a daily basis.

Beginner’s Guidance

Last week at our local sangha, affectionately named Be Here Now (BHN), we offered a beginner’s guide to the practice, as part of our regular evening’s format.

Here’s what our format was and what we covered:

• Start: 7:30pm
• Introduction to sitting meditation, 5-10 min (Nicole)
• Guided sitting meditation, 10 min (Amy)
• Intro to walking meditation, 2-3 min (Amy)
• Walking meditation, 10 min
• History of BHN & Introduction to our practice tradition, 5 min (Nicole)
• Secular vs. spiritual practice, 5 min (Nicole)
• Introduce and explain the usage of the Five and the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, 5-10 min (Linds)
• Intro to sharing circle (Nicole)
• Open sharing circle
• Closing circle
• End: 8:45pm

My prep notes:

Introduction to Sitting Meditation:

To listen to the audio file of this first portion of our evening, please click here.

Here in a few minutes, Amy is going to lead us in a guided seated meditation session and offer us some instruction during our sit tonight – but before we do that, I’d like to offer a little bit of instruction on posture for sitting meditation. Here at BHN we like to emphasize physical comfort when we sit and we like to encourage folks to simply sit in any way they feel works for them. And while that is still the case, I’d like to offer some additional guidance for those of us who may be looking to delve more into the development of a sitting meditation practice. If we resonate with the practice of sitting meditation and really want to enfold it into our daily/weekly routine, posture is an important component to address. When we sit in meditation, it’s encouraged that we sit upright and solid but not “at attention.” So we’re looking to find that balance where we can be both upright and relaxed; not stiff or rigid or locked in place. To sit upright, we want to have three points of contact. If we’re sitting on a cushion, that means our sit bones on the zafu (round cushion) and both knees on the zabutan (square mat) – and if our knees don’t touch the mat, then we want to support them with other small pillows or blankets, as we don’t want our knees to hover. If we’re sitting in a chair, that means our sit bones on the chair and both feet flat on the floor – and we want to have our backs not leaning against the chairback. So in both cases, we want to sit on the front 1/3 of our cushion or chair, if we’re physically able. And of course if you need back support then please use it. It’s also important to mention that our cushions and chairs are sans inferiority/superiority complex, so they happily reside together in the sangha. There is no better or less better seating apparatus when it comes to cushions and chairs, they are on the same sitting field. So please don’t get caught in the false view that sitting on a cushion will usher you someplace that a chair cannot.

Our eyes can be open or closed and our hands can be relaxed in our lap or on our knees. If our eyes are closed, we want to try to relax all the muscles around each eye and in our face. If our eyes are open, we can keep our gaze pointing downward, about 2-3 feet in front of us. We want to try to keep our shoulders relaxed and not scrunched up and tight.

Developing proper posture when sitting in meditation supports us in a couple of key ways. When we sit upright, with both solidity and relaxation, it allows our belly to have the space it needs to fully expand and contract, which is necessary in order for us to breathe deeply from our diaphragm. This sort of posturing also helps us to start training the mind to quiet and settle down. It’s much easier to still the body than it is to still the mind. And in order to start working on stilling the mind, we need to cultivate some discipline and support in our physical body. If our body is too loose and too relaxed, our mind will have a much harder time in becoming settled and concentrated. If our posture is lazy, our mind will be lazy too. So we start in our body, developing good posture for meditation, and over time – slowly slowly – our mental chatter will start to settle down.

When we first start sitting in meditation, it’s very common to feel as though our mental chatter actually picks up when we sit down on the cushion. But really what’s happening is that we are creating enough stillness to put on conscious display how active our minds really are. So it’s not that our minds are becoming more active necessarily, it’s simply a matter of noticing it in a way that we’re not used to.

Our root teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (often referred to as Thay, which means teacher in Vietnamese) says that we must learn the correct spirit of sitting. In an interview with what was formally called Shambhala Sun magazine, Thay offered that sitting should be pleasant and that we must learn how to sit without fighting (January 2012). So when we sit, we practice to simply sit and enjoy our sitting 100%. To be gentle and kind with our self in body and mind. If we sit in such a way where it feels like hard, taxing labor, Thay goes so far as to say that we are wasting our time in meditation. He said: the problem isn’t whether to sit or not to sit, but how to sit.

So how do we sit? What are we doing when we’re in meditation? Well, to start, what we are NOT doing is trying to wrestle our mental chattering into submission. And if we have the goal of sitting without the presence of any mental chatter – if we think having zero thoughts is a thing – we’re in trouble, because that’s impossible. We’re human and mental chattering is part of the deal. What we’re looking to do instead during sitting meditation is to redirect our focus and attention onto something else other than the spinnings of our thoughts. So our practice is simple but not at all easy: it’s to notice when our mind is trailing off into the past or future and to gently, with kindness, invite it to reconnect with the sensations of our breathing or the sensations of our body and sensory experience. And when it wanders off again, which it will, we practice to notice and return again. Notice and return, notice and return. This is the practice of sitting meditation. It’s a mental training ground. And it takes practice. It takes ongoing, diligent, continual practice. Our mind is a muscle and the practice of sitting meditation is rather akin to going to the gym to strengthen our physical muscles.

So, now we will segway into practicing all of this together as a sangha (which means spiritual community in Buddhism), and Amy will offer us some guidance along the way.

An Ushering Forward

December 2018

End of year letter of support & encouragement and an ushering in of 2019

offered by Nicole Dunn, BHN Founder & Program Director

 

The ticking of the clock is real, dear friends. The incessant chattering of time and the accompanying approach of growing older are a thing – a thing not to fear and run panic-stricken into the streets mind you, but a thing to keep closeful watch over, so as not to fritter our time away on trinkets of thought and harmful actions, in the interest of time being short and life being precious.

We are ripe with excuses to run, to hide, to distract our attention away from what is true and present and even good. We know what medicine we would do well to take yet we do not take it. We stand anchored in our own way, unable to move past our own barrier of self.

It is important to hold time in our peripheral vision; to know it is there like a friend reminding us to live and love well every chance we get. Still we mustn’t be beholden to it. We mustn’t listen to every tick, tick, ticking like a time bomb about to explode. We must allow it to inform our path forward without putting it in charge of dictating where we go. We must regard it as sunset or rise and greet it warmly with reverence, knowing we cannot hold onto it or make it last.

With a tender ushering, as though we were to sway a fragile bud to open, we can learn what it really means to Be Here Now, with all of the beauty and messiness that it entails.

We must learn and practice to live a non-fiction life – to let go of all that is not serving us well, largely: the notion that this moment should be some other moment. For our romantic partner to be some other partner – our job to be some other job – our bank account to be some other bank account – the landscape outside our window to be some other landscape – the weather (exterior or interior) to be some other weather – our hardship to be some other hardship.

As we embark upon the new year, let us stretch into our discomforts. Let us unfurl just a little bit, into those places we avoid like the plague. Let us dance wide in the joyful field of our heartspace, but not as though no one is watching. Dance wide as though everyone is dancing with you, because they are.

 

Breathing & Smiling,

Nicole Dunn

Chān Diêu Hoa,

True Wonderful Flower

On Sovereignty

The definition on dictionary.com for the word sovereignty is as follows:

• the quality or state of being sovereign, or of having supreme power or authority.
• the status, dominion, power, or authority of a sovereign; royal rank or position; royalty.
• supreme and independent power or authority in government as possessed or claimed by a state or community.

However, in regards to sovereignty as it pertains to a quality we can develop and strengthen in our daily life, which can help to bolster our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, this textbook definition is not so helpful.

For my purposes, I would define it as: the state of relaxing with solidity and ease, into all the parts of who we are.

My husband Mike and I are slated to give a joint talk at our meditation group, Be Here Now, tomorrow night. The title and topic of our talk is: cultivating sovereignty. Aware that this word is not common in our collective vernacular (here in the U.S anyway), we will start off by sharing each of our own working definitions that we’ve come up with. His is as follows: freedom and liberation from being governed by unskillful habit energies.

Sovereignty involves being able to carry our true home with us everywhere we go. While we will of course still experience difficult situations and the full gamut of human emotions, when the quality of sovereignty is strong within us, we will be able to maintain our calm and clear center, without getting uprooted by the winds that blow around us.

Sovereignty is akin to a tree. A tree trunk is upright, solid, and grounded (solidity). Its branches, however, go with the flow and bend in the wind and its leaves change, shed, and regrow with the turning of seasons (ease).

After offering my working definition, I plan on giving a couple of personal examples (see below) of how this quality has shown up for me in the last few months, to hopefully help give some context and illustrate how sovereignty can be a beneficial quality to invest our time and energy into. I mean, it’s all fine and well to teach about cultivating certain qualities and states of being, but I think it’s important to also speak to the why as well. Whether I want to speak about cultivating mindfulness, joy, a sitting meditation practice, sovereignty, or any other number of things, it’s good to offer at least a brief reference as to the potential benefits that watering these seeds can have on our everyday lives.

Squirrel Meditation

Our campsite on the Flathead Lake

This past weekend (Aug 2-5) we had our sangha summer campout with our meditation community Be Here Now – it was our 6th annual! We’ve been using the same campground each summer: Big Arm State Park on the Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana. For the past 3 years, we’ve been managing to reserve their one and only group site, which wonderfully allows us to be all together in one spot AND right on the water! So great!!

Each campout is a nice social/community building/relaxing hang-time on the lake opportunity for our sangha. It allows us to be joyfuly together, whilst revelling in the lake, each others company, and the practice of having nowhere to go and nothing to do. We spend our time: reading, floating/paddling/swimming, conversing, laughing, playing games, drinking tea/coffee, sharing community meals, napping, and hanging out around the fire at night. Given that we had a smaller group than usual, and Saturday afternoon was a bit blustery, we even took a field trip this year during our campout: cherry picking!

Interfaith Work & Sangha Building

I’m currently reaching maximum saturation levels in terms of my usage of time spent on writing projects, events planning, managing meetings and gatherings, and attending a variety of other functions. I’m in the boat right now of practicing to say no when it comes to the question as to whether or not to take something else on – AND it’s going well, too, I might add.

Factoring into all the many lovely things I’ve chosen to do with my time is to: tell a story on stage at the Wilma Theater here in town on May 5th, as part of an interfaith concert and celebration event called Tangible Hope, submit an article to be considered for publication in the Mindfulness Bell for their sangha building issue (slated to come out in the fall), and write a short piece for the Community of Faith section in our local newspaper (for their May 12th edition).

Is interfaith work and sangha building different? Ultimately, no, I think not. When I look and engage through the lens of sangha building, I see clearly that sangha exists wherever I go. It’s all around me. Whether in the setting of my home sangha of Be Here Now or my larger Plum Village family, or my growing relationships and partnerships with local pastors and interfaith members as part of the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative (MIC), which I serve to represent our communities of Be Here Now and Open Way with, sangha is an action verb; it’s a quality of heartfulness that propels me in the direction of cultivating brotherhood and sisterhood.

From the story I plan on telling as part of the Tangible Hope concert event:

I remember a time a few years ago when I was standing in a long security line at the LAX airport – I had just spent a month on a retreat at a monastery in our tradition in southern CA, so I went from this beautiful, sequestered and quiet environment to a place that was decidedly quite different. As I was standing in the security line, I had the wonderful insight that I didn’t feel as though I had left a lovely setting with my extended sangha and was now tossed into a hectic and unpleasant environment with grumpy strangers; I had simply transitioned from one sangha to another: from my monastery sangha into my air traveling sangha! This insight allowed me to interact with the space and the people around me in a different way – a way that was more open, friendly, caring, and kind. So, when I look and operate through the lens of sangha I experience it wherever I go, all around me – I carry it with me and I actively create it.

If we are truly invested in building sangha – aka spiritual community – then we must practice to envelop it fully into our lives and not relegate it to just our own beloved circles consisting of those whom we share most closely and are most comfortable with. The true spirit of sangha building must be all inclusive; this is the only way we can serve as agents of change in the world and continue beautifully into the future.