“If you don’t have a vision you’re going to be stuck in what you know. And the only thing you know is what you’ve already seen.” Iyanla Vanzant
I would like you to take a minute and remind yourself of why you started practicing, even if you are very new to this tradition or the spiritual process more generally. Why are you here, on this website, reading this blog post? What brought you here?
What was it that made you turn towards the deeper questions in your life? To ask, as the Buddha did, what is the way out of this endless round of difficulty/suffering?
Or maybe your pull was more mysterious? Did you feel you are following a deeper, more ephemeral intuition, as if a whole new world has opened up, sometimes in an instant, but you have no words to describe it, just a feeling to find something that resonates more truly with this? What was it?
{Insert your own pause for reflection}
No matter what your answer, we probably all have one thing in common, we “saw/felt” something in our lives, as if something broke through and grabbed our attention, and we knew we needed to follow this up. In that moment we had a direct, immediate and intuitive communication with reality, whether it was through a joyful or painful experience in our life. This is the beginning of the path, the path of vision and ultimately, if we keep walking (even if it's sideways or even seems backwards at times), this leads us to the path of transformation, and awakening.
At this moment in time for the Glasgow Buddhist Centre, we as a sangha (community of practitioners at all different stages of this journey) are moving into the next stage of this collective path of vision, continuing to follow some deeper, less clear perhaps, intuitions, to mine what is between us, as we listen for the voice of truth/reality to emerge.
In this vision-ing process the spiritual leadership kula has designed, there are several stages. We started with our dreams. We wanted you to go big, no holds barred. There were several events for us to keep up the dreams, and the dreams came. We heard about communities, businesses, new centres with glass windows, co-housing, models of funding, of wanting to engage in our broader communities more directly, and more. See here for the fullness of our collective dreams.
The next step on our journey together is to find where we each are personally. What is your personal vision for yourself and your practice? A community is a network of individual practitioners working towards a collective vision, and to know where we can head collectively, we need to know where we are individually.
So we are running several events for finding our own personal vision statements. We will look at our values, what is important to us personally, and create our own mission statements.
Then we put all those visions together and see what is emerging between us from them. Where can we stretch and grow collectively? Where is the energy to conserve? Where is the energy to innovate and create? As a community we need all of us working together and bringing our own personal visions to the table, to create a beautiful feast.
Please join us for this next step of our vision-ing process on one of four sessions (max 15 people per session) either September 9th or 11th
Look forward to seeing you there!
Pasadini
PS - Click below for a visual of the whole process we are undertaking to get to our next iteration of the Glasgow Buddhist Centre
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