We are grateful to the Grand Master Dasira Narada for your Dharma and your sublime Grace.
Our heartfelt gratitude to Thay Co, our beloved teachers, who sustain us!
We appreciate all the Divine Dharma Meditation members for joining us on the 10th anniversary of the Toronto and Ottawa Meditation Centers.
Thank you to everyone at the Toronto Center for creating such a wonderful occasion for us to enjoy and remember.
So how does it feel to be a part of a center for 10 years? Very good! We also feel very relieved that we have survived so many tests and challenges. This has been a time of personal and collective reflection as we review with more clarity now. Here are just few of these reflections that we would like to share with all of you.
As we look back over the years, we can see that the evolution of our Center has gone through 3 stages of development. They are:
1. Getting started.
2. Getting established, which means surviving a lot of difficulty.
3. Beginning to thrive, grow and expand.
I. Getting Started:
What we have learned is that, those who start a meditation center sometimes are not the ones who sustain the center. People come and go from our discipline at any stage in their training, including the higher levels. We have all seen people take a Level 1 & 2 class and never return. We have seen some Level 2 members return for a short time or return intermittently, but eventually leave. The same thing can happen at Level 3. The seed of light is planted during the chakra opening at an initiation, but it does not germinate and grow, at least not this time around. But, nothing is wasted, it is all part of learning, but for these Level 1, 2, 3 students, in this lifetime, awakening will not be now.
We have learned that we need 4 things to be successful:
1. Karmic Affinity and belief / Faith in the Grand Master Dasira Narada, Thay Co and the Dharma.
2. Enough Virtue
3. Enough Merit.
If people do not have enough virtue and merit, when karmic debt is too heavy, the forces of darkness outside and inside can pull anyone back into being ordinary and suffering more.
4. A heart truly ready to open. This means being open to cultivate to help yourself and being genuinely open to help others cultivate as well.
We have found that if you do not have enough of these 4 things, that as an individual cultivator, you won’t last. As a group of cultivators, you won’t last long.
2. Getting Established and surviving difficulty:
As members in our Center took the training at Level 4, 5 and 6, this was a dangerous and difficult time in our Center with many tests and challenges. Everyone’s ego or small self became more activated. We now understand that this is a necessary and inevitable stage in cultivation. Members sometimes became competitive, jealous and arrogant. Sometimes members became more critical of others. Sometimes people just needed to be right about how to interpret the Dharma, be in charge or control the way the Center was being organized or managed. At our Center, we have learned that we all blow it and make mistakes. It is part of growing together. A big part of surviving this stage is to be forgiving, tolerant and patient with each other, especially when others have disappointed us or hurt our feelings. We use these situations to examine our own ego activation a little more carefully. We know from our experience that some members are very spiritually ambitious, going from one level to the next, they ultimately want more power and control for themselves. What we have learned is that a meditation center can fracture in 2 ways during this difficult 2nd stage.
A center can fracture from within and members leave the center and the discipline. A center can split off, as it fractures, members leave one center and form another. This second type of fracturing is not based on growth, expansion or geographical necessity as members enlarge. It can happen because of tensions and conflicts.
In our case, our Ottawa center fractured from within. Our center leader and her husband and a number of members left after Level 5 and 6. When our center membership shrank to a very small group, we did a few simple things to overcome the challenges. We made sure that we all meditated together every Friday night. The power and blessing of the Grand Master on that special night of the week, fortified us together as a group, and it supported our spiritual practices individually. We talked about the dharma, helped each other understand the teachings and share experiences. We realized that we needed to focus less on energy treatment techniques, and give more attention to meditation and understandings the Grand Master’s teachings. We also made sure that we kept our doors open to the public from 7-9 PM Monday to Thursday evenings. When there weren’t many patients, we treated each other and meditated. We supported each other through sickness karma, surgery karma, job changes, job loses, family deaths, relationship failures, marriage problems, problems with children, house fires and many other types of difficulty.
We have grown stronger and kinder as we continue to burn up karmic debt as individuals and together as a group. By focusing less on energy treatment as the starting point and end point, and more on the Dharma, we support and inspire each other’s cultivation. Energy treatment helps us get healthy, but virtue and merit keeps us healthy. We have gradually earned enough merit to change the karma of our center. We have weathered for better or worse the difficulties of this second stage. The test that Level 6 and 7 members have to surpass is to change their internal motivation. When there are no other levels of initiation, no new class to attend, if you are spiritually ambitious, what drives or motivates your spiritual practice? Is it still only about giving energy treatment? Is it about your high level status at the meditation center? Has your heart softened enough to the pain and misery of others? Are you able to support the spiritual evolution of new members or even mature members in a knowledgeable, caring way? As a Level 6 & 7 members, can you explain some of the information of the Grand Master’s Dharma correctly? Have you experience some awakening? Do you support the development of the discipline in some quiet ways? These are some of the things we aim to improve on now.
3. Beginning to thrive, grow and expand:
Our center is just beginning this third stage, we are finally beginning to thrive. The commitment from the core of the membership is established and has stood the best of time so far. The commitment to the work of the Grand Master, Thay Co, and to each other is there. Our focus is to continue to help others as much as we can. When our personal attachments to our careers and our ordinary lives are less important, it is easier to do a little more in our own center and also for other centers. We can help centers in our own country or aboard. We can also do a little more to help with some aspect of the evolution of the discipline as a whole. We now understand that our individual karma affects of our meditation center as a group. The collective merit that we earn as each of our centers develop will determine how much sublime energy the Grand Master and the Higher Beings invest in all of our centers and in the development of the discipline as we move forward.
Spiritual life has its ups and downs and challenges. Faith in the Dharma, the Grand Master, and our Masters Thay Thuan and Co Hai is essential. Real faith comes from direct experience. Many of us at the Ottawa center have unforgettable spiritual experiences during our chakra initiations. Others have had significant spiritual transformation during meditation. In our early years, we witnessed some amazing results from energy treatment. We have had the privilege of helping those embodies in living form and also those who are dying. We have helped some who are in between this world and the next. What can be more powerful than that to give us faith in what we are doing? These experiences inspire us to continue to follow the footsteps of our teachers, Masters Thuan and Hai no matter what. We have learned that we cannot navigate our way successfully on this journey without their wisdom, guidance and grace. People who think they can follow the teachings of the Grand Master Dasira Narada on their own are wrong. They are fooling themselves. It is just too difficult, for so many reasons. The purpose of anniversary milestones like this 10th one for the Toronto and Ottawa Divine Dharma Meditation Centers, reminds us to live in the present, appreciating our past and what we have learned, knowing there is much more ahead,
Thank you,
Lisa Dieu
June 7th, 2015 Toronto, Ontario Canada