Dear Friends, If you’ve ever been to a meditation retreat you know that a retreat is generally not the blissed out experience that popular culture leads us to believe it is. What we learn though by spending anywhere from a …
Work Retreat Jan 17-20
Mark Nunberg will be leading a short work retreat next week and is looking for two others to join him and the few others who will already be at the retreat center. He’s looking for folks who have already been to the retreat center …
Weekly Email 1-13-22
Dear Friends, For some time now I’ve been formulating a practice aspiration for each new year. Sometimes it’s been to develop a particular parami – patience and renunciation have loomed large – and sometimes it’s been an intentional phrase such …
Weekly Email 1/5/2022
Dear Common Ground Community, With the change in the pandemic landscape that the omicron variant is precipitating, we thought it’d be a good time to communicate again the values and logic that underlie our COVID protocols at the center. We …
Weekly Email 12/21/21
Dear Common Ground Friends, I am guessing that we all experience both the juiciness and the suffering arising from our human tendency to relish in “gotcha” moments. I am pointing to our habits of attempting to make ourselves feel more …
Weekly Email 12/21/21
Dear Sangha, It is a difficult, exhausting, beautiful time to be alive. The Omicron variant is gaining on the Delta, hospitals are again overcrowded and health care workers depleted, and we seem stuck in an ongoing cycle of vaccines, masks, …
Weekly Email 12/14/21
Dear Common Ground Friends, This Sunday afternoon we are holding a community Zoom gathering to honor and celebrate Shelly Graf’s hiring as Co-Guiding Teacher of Common Ground. This marks the most important evolution in Common Ground’s 28-year history and a …
Weekly Email 12/7/21
Generosity of All Beings For some of us this is a season of giving. When we focus on giving gifts to others, we sometimes forget the generosity of all the beings whose “giving” we depend on. Use your imagination to …
Weekly Email 11-30-21
Dear Friends, Sitting in the Dark Solstice: In just a few short weeks, the night will be the longest in the northern hemisphere. For most of us, when we get out of bed in the morning, it is still night …
Weekly Email 11-24-21
Dear Dharma Friends, Like many of you, the Thanksgiving holiday can be a time for honest reflection that includes honoring the abundance of goodness in and around me, as well as aligning with the truth of harm that is caused …
