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Thriving Together: Nine Principles for Cocreating True Community - Softcover

Viafora, David

 
9781946764966: Thriving Together: Nine Principles for Cocreating True Community
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1946764965 ISBN 13: 9781946764966
Verlag: Parallax Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Seasoned community builder David Viafora pinpoints the nine principles that create conditions for joy and solidity in any community

Research over the last few decades reveals that our social fabric is unraveling as rates of isolation and loneliness continue to rise, climate crises intensify, and an individualistic worldview prevails. Is there another way to live? Where can we turn for guidance and hope in the face of such challenges? 

In this astute and empowering guide, David Viafora, a former Buddhist monk, points to community building as a fresh yet ancient and powerful way to face our most pressing individual, social, and ecological challenges. With precision, enthusiasm, and deep humility, Viafora draws from his own vast experience of mindfulness communities to offer inspiration and concrete guidance in growing thriving communities from the inside out. The nine principles Viafora uncovers for successful community—including Visioning, Service, Joy, and Reconciliation—are broad and easily applicable to our existing groups and relationships. Yet their potential to reshape the most basic elements of our life and friendships is revolutionary. With these nine principles in hand, we can cocreate another way of being—beyond isolation, individualism, and despair. 

In true community, we don’t have to face the difficulties of the world on our own. What we can embrace and heal as a community is far greater and more fulfilling than what we could ever achieve alone. Whether your aim is to start a new group, strengthen the community you already belong to, or explore what mindful community living has to offer, Thriving Together teaches us how to:

• Collectively create a vision to guide your community’s unique growth and purpose
• Strengthen the culture of joy, appreciation, and peace in your family or community
• Nurture vibrant, compassionate friendships as the foundation of community life
• Strengthen the muscles of reconciliation through simple yet powerful communication practices
• Embark upon meaningful service projects that nourish and heal both your community and others
• Protect your community by creating healthy boundaries in relationship to power dynamics
• Embrace racial healing as a path of compassionate and inclusive community building

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Viafora, LICSW, leads mindfulness retreats for educators, families, teens, young adults, and other groups in North America and Europe. He first ordained as a monk with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in 2005 and spent several years living in the Plum Village tradition monasteries before finding his niche in lay community life. David has founded several mindfulness communities across the US, including Greatwoods Zen in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he currently resides. David is a lay ordained member of the Order of Interbeing, the core community of the Plum Village tradition, and works as a licensed therapist for children, adults, and families. David identifies as a white-presenting Chinese-American cis man. Some of David’s favorite activities are drinking tea in the woods with friends, Sangha game nights, sober dance parties, and sunset meditations.

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INTRODUCTION

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.
Healing is an act of communion.
—bell hooks

Happiness is not an individual matter.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

There is hardly anything more appealing,
yet apparently more elusive, for humans at the end
of the twentieth century than the prospect of living
in harmony with nature and with each other.
—Robert and Diane Gilman

Nestled between lakes abundant with star lilies and within a rich forest of pine, beech, maple, poplar, oak, and birch trees, Morning Sun Mindfulness Community was built on the land of an abandoned quarry mine. In more recent decades, this land had been a hangout spot for target practice and beer drinking. Scars of the past remain: dilapidated machinery, a hollowed-out silo of crumbling concrete walls, rusty metal cables weaving in and out of the earth’s surface like a Chinese dragon statue, swaths of previously cleared forest steadily reclaiming their home, and the colored glass shards of thousands of broken bottles. Yet the mining also left something that the current inhabitants of this land enjoy. Huge sand deposits formed lakeside beaches and dune hilltops overlooking Blueberry Pond, where kids and families play, adults gather for retreats and days of mindfulness, and the entire community barbecues over campfires throughout the summer. Morning Sun has also become a refuge for humans to enjoy natural beauty as a nurturing background for mindfulness and meditation retreats. Every year, several hundred visitors from across the United States come to unwind, rest their eyes on the infinite shades of green, blue, and brown in the lakes and forests, and discover new ways of connecting to themselves and the world around them.

Over the last several years, the land has been steadily transitioning back to its essence—a quiet forest refuge where deer and moose roam. Beavers thrive in this habitat, and wild blueberry bushes encircling the lakes offer dessert to shy black bears on quiet summer afternoons. For over five years, Morning Sun Mindfulness Community was my home, wilderness refuge, a source of inspiration and support in my mindfulness practice and life learning, and an avenue of service.
Together, the resident members guide programs and retreats year-round with the aim of creating a more mindful and compassionate society for ourselves and future generations. I’ve learned that building a residential retreat center in a pristine forest that both protects and nourished by the wilderness cannot be accomplished by one person or even a few individuals. Ecological sustainability needs a healthy and thriving community of people who work harmoniously together so that the land and her guests can flourish as one.

Building the Dream

Morning Sun began in 2009, when Fern Dorresteyn and Michael Ciborski, both meditation teachers who had lived and studied extensively as monastics with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, planted the seeds of mindfulness and community living on the rolling forest hills of the Catawba or People of the Dawn Land, commonly known as New Hampshire. Over time, as Morning Sun residents, we dedicated ourselves to realizing this shared vision of building a retreat center where hundreds and eventually thousands of people would come each year to train in the art of mindful living and receive the blessings of its gorgeous forest and wetland habitats. Through a hodgepodge of fundraising, one resident with construction genius, an enthusiastic crowdfunding video, a small village of wholehearted volunteers, and boundless inspiration, we scraped together enough funds to buy most of our materials. And then, with limitless gratitude for our mindfulness practice, we subsidized construction labor with our own hands.

Aside from building sheet and pillow forts in my childhood living room or working on sketchy tree houses as a kid, I had never done any construction. What made it possible for a scholarly social worker and meditator (that’s me) to get out on the construction site every day? We’ve heard the old adage, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Where there’s a collective will, the way is even stronger! Each day, a community force energized me through the challenges of construction like a river carrying me through a canyon. I found myself climbing up ladders (big ones!) with a nail gun in one hand and plywood in the other, hauling forty-pound bundles of tile to the roof, cutting out sheetrock, screwing in ceilings, nailing in bamboo flooring—basically becoming a full-on construction worker. We tiled the roof from dawn to dusk under blazing summer rays and nailed in wooden siding around the building amidst the snow and frosty winds of late winter and early spring. No matter the season, the work was dirty, sweaty, and exhausting. Just as importantly, it was invigorating, challenging, and fun to be out there working together as a tribe. We were building the temple of our beloved community with our own hands and it bore our signatures.

At times, our physical and emotional energy felt sapped by the intensity of doing construction in between offering multiple five-day summer retreats. The more challenging it was, the more we leaned into our community practice. We encouraged each other to attend morning meditation sessions before construction, often took moments to pause, breathe, smile, or laugh between tasks, and rested while eating lunch in mindful silence together every day. We encouraged anyone who was feeling overly tired to care for their body and mind by lying down for a nap outside or taking five for a tea and dark chocolate break. When our spirits were low, even when things seemed beyond busy, we still made time to gather in a circle and share appreciations for one another’s brightest gifts of time, presence, and generosity. This simple act repowered our spirits almost beyond belief. On days off, we practiced being as lazy as possible. We frequented a hidden river spot to lounge on sun-heated rocks, swam with our kids in the small rapids, picnicked from noon to sunset, and completely forgot about lifting anything.

Building our retreat center taught me a lot about construction, but most of all I learned about building community. There’s an often-quoted African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I would like to add to that wisdom: “If you want to go joyfully, go in friendship.” There are some things, and some distances, that we can’t or wouldn’t want to cover alone. We need the power and momentum of trustworthy friends and a loving community to accomplish our most important, far-reaching dreams.

The Great Need for Community

When practiced in community, mindfulness strengthens bonds of acceptance, appreciation, empathy, and joy between close friends and loved ones. Mindfulness is the living awareness of what is happening within and around us at each moment, in a spirit of curiosity and compassion. Everyone has this innate capacity, and we can strengthen it both within ourselves and within relationships through sustained practice. Mindfulness helps us access the living intelligence
of our own body and mind, grow our capacity to face suffering with both gentleness and fierce compassion, understand and transform the roots of our difficulties, open our eyes to the many wonders of life, and dwell more happily in each moment. Voyaging even farther on the path of mindfulness, we discover a profound interdependence with other people, all life on earth, and even the outermost reaches of the universe—and we realize we are less separate and more connected than we ever imagined.

Practicing mindfulness depends on the guidance, motivation, and relational support that...

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Verlag
Parallax Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1946764965
ISBN 13 
9781946764966
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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