#44 Utah!

I enjoyed an hour and forty-five minutes with forty-three other participants at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship in Utah,  an open, inclusive and non-denominational place with some Zen roots.  Their primary leader, Christopher Liebow, is on sabbatical, and draws his inspiration as a lay minister with the California-based Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism, another eclectic group, founded in 2011 by the son of Reverend Gyomay Kubose, himself founder of the Buddhist Temple of Chicago, a Pure Land center. 

We began with an invocation for the Sangha community to come together from their simple and elegant online practice manual.  I resonated with: 

Let the whole Sangha breathe as one body, 

chant as one body, listen as one body. 

Transcending the boundaries of a delusive self, 

liberating from the superiority complex, 

the inferiority complex, and the equality complex.....

An opportunity was offered for folks to chime in with any initial practice/life comments,  which I liked, usually discussion is reserved for the end of service.  One member told the story of how a man who lost his wife to suicide was simply hugged by another, an example of 'holding space,' without judgment, and another offered her practice of letting go of perfection and self-criticism. 

We read some more prayers and then sat silently for a half an hour, followed by a dharma talk from Matt Wright, lay leader on the topic of "Just Say Maybe."    Matt noted how our nervous systems are wired to avoid pain and hang on to pleasure (even sugar for example), and what a hard time we have saying 'Maybe there is something I don't see here,'  when it comes to causes and conditions that affect us.   He suggested 'Equanimity', or 'to stand in the middle of all this,'  vs holding on or pushing away. 

With Covid, for example, it may become clear how 'my demand on how things should be causes me suffering,'  we contract around negative things.   I know that my own underlying stress over Covid is a mountain of sorts.   We were invited to relax, to let go of the need to know, and to understand that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to be (very Ram Dass I think). 

Matt ended with some material from Rod Owens: 

“I have had to learn to invite my broken heart to dine with me at the table. It is meaningless to run now. My broken heart is not a judgment or a crime. It is a detailed record of how I have tried to meet the violence of the world with as much openness as possible.”

― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger