A Brief History of our first 10 years

November 5, 2021

Around ten years ago when the Bhavana Community was meeting in my living room, one of the students who is the CEO of a local non-profit said to me “We need a slogan.” The consensus was that the phrase that I was using, “Integrating Psychology, Neuroscience, Buddhism and Yoga” didn’t have attractive vibes. Stiff, academic, and not catchy at all. She wanted something that would create interest and inspire action. The group agreed and over the next few weeks we tried on various slogans, playing with phrases, words, concepts etc. Eventually, we all settled on the phrase "

Practitioners of Mindfulness and Yoga

Cultivating Skills to Live in Harmony for the Benefit of All Beings.

The slogan has served us well over the last few years while the organization continued to grow. Throughout the development of this community, my aspiration has been to avoid being “the teacher.” I was most comfortable simply sharing what I knew from 40 years as a psychotherapist and from the dharma/dhamma classes, yoga training, and retreats that I have participated in over the last 10 years to develop my personal practice. That meant we all learned together. I have continued to avoid the “teacher” label and have promoted the movie Kumare as a reminder to be careful about giving any teacher too much authority. The sexual indiscretion scandals that have surfaced in all the religious traditions support caution about having too much confidence in a teacher. We are looking for role models, not gurus. What we offer are the skills of mindfulness and yoga.

One message from the Buddha’s teachings is clear, our best teacher is our own experience as we attend mindfully to it. Yoga practice brings the bodily layer explicitly into self-awareness practices. Mindfulness practices have the potential to teach us the whole path as we cultivate an awareness of the consequences of our own actions with guidance from the lessons of science combined with teachings from all the world’s sages, past and present.

The core of our community has been the two ongoing discussion and practice groups that meet weekly on Monday and Thursday evenings. The Thursday group started first. In 2011, I purchased a projector so that we could project computer driven videos on the wall in my living room. In the last 10 years, we have continued to meet on Thursday evenings weekly and have watched TED talks, dharma talks, complete programs from Tricycle Magazine and other leading teachers like Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, and Robert Wright. This group explores teachings from all the traditions that have grown out of the expansion of Buddha’s teachings to Southeast Asia, Tibet, China and Japan as well as the more secular teachings in the mindfulness tradition. Each of our meetings includes time to discuss and explore how we can apply the teachings in our lives. That group came to be known as the Dhamma Practice and Discussion Group to reflect the emphasis on both practice and discussion. Recently, I learned in a Zoom program from Bhanté Sujato that the Pali term for dhamma discussion is dhammasakacca and if I had known that at the time, I might have used that word even though it is a mouthful.

In 2015 Sharon Salzberg agreed to come to Wilmington for a week-end workshop in February of 2016. This event was the catalyst for creating a website and a non-profit organization to handle the publicity and financial details. The event was a brilliant success thanks to the efforts of a team of volunteers. You can see our picture on our calendar page by scrolling past the calendar. The energy from that event was funneled into the Monday Night group that started later that year.

The Monday Night group began with a study of the early texts (the Pali Canon) through a course from Tricycle created by Andrew Olendzki called Integrated Dharma. The Monday Night group came to be called the Sutta Study Group because the focus is on the early textual tradition including learning a few Pali words and comparing translations of suttas. Olendzki’s program was a little over our heads at the time, but I am so grateful for the exposure to the core teachings in one of their early forms. We have learned there are also texts that are comparably early in other Asian languages. We are currently working through a course on the Seven Factors of Awakening with Christina Feldman and Jaya Rudgard through Bodhi College and Tricycle Magazine, as well as a course on the Foundations of Mindfulness with Analayo from Wisdom Publications. If a course we take is designed in week-long sections, we usually spend a month digging deeper into the study material with discussion and supplementary materials.

We held our first Mindfulness expo at Halyburton Park in the spring of 2017 with many of the same volunteers who helped with the Sharon Salzberg project. We provided informational tables staffed by volunteers sharing the many ways mindfulness can be incorporated into the activities of daily life. We offered opportunities for mindful yoga, sitting meditation, mindful walking meditation and activities for children.

The next fall, 2018, when the Porters Neck Yoga Spa was closing, we were able to assume the lease and we converted it to the Porters Neck Yoga Co-op and Bhavana Community. Now we had a community center to offer courses in mindfulness and meditation as well as classes in yoga. In addition to offering ongoing yoga classes, we offered MBSR, the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course which has been the gold standard for mindfulness training for almost 30 years. We have also offered shorter, 4–6-week classes in basic mindfulness and meditation. We had just gotten a momentum going with yoga and mindfulness courses when Covid-19 started to spread into our community.

By March of 2020, we had signed up for a Zoom account and were offering the Monday and Thursday meetings virtually. Our discussion groups made the transition but not surprisingly, attendance at the yoga space dropped off and very few teachers and students wanted to be exposed to the risks of meeting in a public place. During the winter, we offered some of our yoga classes outdoors on the Astroturf belonging to the Children’s Cottage, a daycare center that is our neighbor, because they were closed as well. Cold and rain resulted in intermittent availability and some of our teachers also offered virtual classes to keep our rent paid. In July of 2021, we saw decreasing Covid cases and began to relax just before the surge of cases that came in August due to the Delta Variant. Today we are cautiously optimistic about adding more programs for both mindfulness and yoga. Thanks to a generous donation from a couple of yoga students, we were able to add an efficient air purification system and all of us have become accustomed to wearing masks.

Students are starting to come back to yoga classes and we are all looking forward to the next Mindfulness Expo which is scheduled for April 30 at Halyburton Park. If all goes well, we also have several community members that will be offering programs after the first of the year and the board has come together with enthusiasm for our next community project which is installing a labyrinth for mindful walking meditation. As our community has continued to grow slowly, the depth of our practice has grown. The seeds are planted, and we are cultivating, fertilizing, and watering them. We will continue to practice and wait to see what benefits emerge with our efforts.