How We Practice
Our practice may be easiest to define by first describing what it is not:
It is not denominational. Although our Dharma Teacher, Lisa Bright, is affiliated with Zen Buddhism, and the form of our meditation sessions derives loosely from Zen custom, we strive to make our practice accessible to people from any school of Buddhism.
It is not exclusive. We have no interest in monopolizing the spiritual or ethical development of our participants. We think it’s fine for our practitioners to belong to other congregations as well as our own. Nor do we have any quarrel with atheists. (Chris Bright, the Sangha’s President, likes to describe himself as a “spiritual atheist” in the hope, as he says, of making both the religious and the irreligious uncomfortable at one go.)
It is not “secular.” Lisa works to keep our practice within the Dharma, the formal Buddhist teachings. She tends to discourage a view of meditation that reduces it to a form of therapy. She does so not because she regards such attitudes as categorically wrong, but because she sees these very reductive attitudes—simplistic answers—as limiting one’s capacity for experience.
Finally, it is not prescriptive. We are not interested in telling people what to think, and we strongly discourage the common tendency to regard one’s teacher as a “guru.” We believe that heavy dependence on a teacher often prevents students from taking responsibility for their own spiritual or mental development. We think that skepticism is important in the cultivation of the mind.
So much for the negatives. Our practice has an important positive attribute as well: it is active. We place great emphasis on doing, rather than just sitting or ceremony. We encourage our meditators to extend their practice into our environmental work. We see this effort as an opportunity for enlarging one’s practice—and thereby, oneself. For more on this connection, read our Green Buddhism page.