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“LISTEN”: Meditate and Work to Create an Empathy Society

Now, in the time of war in Ukraine, our local WCCM community decides to create the project for the helping the refugees. We have very many people here who escaped to Western part of Ukraine from war. We’re trying to help them with all necessary. So we decided to create the funding for help from our community. The other important thing is that people can learn more about our community, for example that the meditators don’t just “sitting and do nothing”, but also can radically change our consciousness and our way of relating to others – we can find ourselves in another and provide an active help. And people can learn more about the vision of our comminuty in this difficult but transforming time. We want to be heplful not only in spiritual and psychological way, but also at the practical level. This is how we can now share the fruits of meditation – see the Christ in everyone and make contemplative and active dimensions of our consciousness One. We would like to thank all members of the community who contributed to our foundation. For us, it was you who became the best explanation of the meaning of the theme of the year of our community – a form of unifying consciousness that manifests itself here and now.

The great mystics teach us that “all humans are one human”. This vision of a unified society is the fruit of contemplation. Our project, being an active continuation of meditation, has three main directions that correspond to the three dimensions of a human being and the humanity – bodily, mental and spiritual:

“LISTEN embodied” (humanitarian aid)

The idea of the first direction is very simple and natural; it appeared to us in the first days of the war. A brief description of this direction was the direct fruit of meditative practice. We named it this way: to pass meditation in the way of practical compassion. As daily meditation takes us beyond our Self – to othercenteredness – the first thing we can do in times of war is to share food, medicine, and supplies with those in need. During the war, we gained important experience of the fruits not only of the practice itself, but also of the community born of this practice. This is the incredible help that many meditators from all over the world have given us. Therefore, today we have an amazing opportunity to transfer help to those who need it in Ukraine on behalf of this community, this unifying consciousness.

From a practical point of view, our activity in this direction looks like this. We are looking for people who are now coming from the war zones to the Western part of Ukraine and who are in dire need of food, medicine and money. We mainly search for such people through online platforms related to our community and through personal contacts of members and friends of the community. After we receive a request for help, we purchase the necessary food or medicine kit, pack it in a box, which we label with several stickers with the name and addresses of the Сommunity, and also put in each box a set of flyers and booklets talking about meditation and Сommunity. We also ask people we help, if possible, to record short videos with words of gratitude and take photos with the help received. Some people send us their stories and words of gratitude to the community, based on which we plan to make an English-language blog here, to share the news of our foundation. Interestingly, some people who received help contacted us again and said that they had begun to use meditation as a personal practice, for stress therapy. We keep in touch with such people, help them in their personal practice and talk about how they can share the practice with others. We hope that this simple work of transferring Community help to those in need will be the beginning of a new phase of Сommunity growth in our country.

In the following publications, we will talk about other areas of the fund’s activities.

The team of the WCCM-Ukraine center
Maria & Albert Zakharovy

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