3121 Fruitvale Avenue, Oakland, California 94602, United States
Call Ami at 415 840 6719
Why Ashram?
Many of us living in our 'developed' countries live lives that are filled with anxiety, frenzy, even discontent. We seem to have so much to do, so little time. Play, just hanging out, feeling at peace inside, with oneself and the world, seem almost impossible for us to achieve. We desire to be caring and kind but are too rushed to find time to practice it. So we attend mindfulness workshops, yoga classes, practice meditation, listen to 'easy' music on the radio. One possible solution lies right in front of us: Take a look at many of our elders, especially the very old, the forgetful and very forgetful: What have they learned to be so at peace?
Our Ashram community aspires to look at elders as our teachers who have much to offer us.
Elders teach us that we can look at life backwards. Rather than thinking that we only need to be successful materially, we are learning from our elders that success is also a psychological and spiritual journey. We learn patience, presence, relating, we learn that being with is as important as doing to. We learn that taking time to relate to others builds community and makes us feel better. We become more content. Feel more at peace. So much of the research today reveals that the way we are socially connected to others, how much of a community surrounds us, determines our physical and psychological, even our spiritual health.
The only control we humans have available to us is how we look at our world, how we view others. We can train our minds in such a way that when we 'see' elders we see beauty, wealth of spirit and experience, we 'see' a desirable way of being. Seeing a desirable way of being, we desire to achieve who they are, what they stand for. Elders are beings filled with equanimity, kindness and compassion for others and the world. Once we have trained our mindset, our viewpoint, in such a way, we will look at eldercare communities as learning communities where we younger in age can learn to be at peace with ourselves.
Eldercare communities thus become ashrams, psychological and spiritual learning communities for us to deepen our lives, to stay connected to our humanity, our spirit.
Why is this ashram model important? Without valuing what so many elders stand for: slowness, deliberateness, equanimity, relatedness, presence, care, and love, many of us will continue to be harried, ungrounded, deeply unsatisfied people searching for meaning and peace. And we will surely not survive this experiment in human consciousness as our adult values of material strive which places achievement in power, status and money above the elder values of connectedness and spirit, is simply not sustainable for us and planet.
All the wisdom traditions over the last 5000 years of recorded human history speak to at least one invariable truth: All is one and one is all or, in other words, as within so without, as above so below. It is not that we will find peace when everything falls into place. Rather, when we find our peace, everything else will fall into place.
The elder ashram is based on this time-tested truth and aspires to put this wisdom into practice.
Believing in Mind
Seng Ts’an
The great Way has no impediments;
It does not pick and choose.
When you abandon attachment and aversion
You see it plainly.
Make a thousandth of an inch distinction,
Heaven and earth swing apart.
If you want it to appear before your eyes,
Cherish neither for nor against.
To compare what you like with what you dislike,
That is the disease of the mind.
You pass over the hidden meaning;
Peace of mind is needlessly troubled.
It is round and perfect like vast space,
Lacks nothing, never overflows.
Only because we take and reject
Do we lose the means to know its Suchness.
Don’t get tangled in outward desire
Or get caught within yourself.
Once you plant deep the longing for peace
Confusion leaves of itself.
Return to the root and find meaning;
Follow sense objects, you lose the goal.
Just one instant of inner enlightenment
Will take you far beyond the emptiness of the world.
Selfish attachment forgets all limits;
It always leads down evil roads.
When you let go of it, things happen of themselves;
The substance neither goes nor abides.
If the eye does not sleep
All dreams will naturally stop.
If the mind does not differentiate
All things are of one Suchness.
When you fathom the realm of Suchness
You instantly forget all selfish desire.
Having seen ten thousand things as one
You return to your natural state.
Without meditation
Consciousness and feeling are hard to grasp.
In the realm of Suchness
There is neither self nor other.
In the one, there is the all.
In the all, there is the one.
If you know this,
You will never worry about being incomplete.
If belief and mind are made the same
And there is no division between belief and mind
The road of words comes to an end, Beyond present and future.
Seng Ts’an (d. 606) was a Chinese sage, the Third Patriarch of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism.
This passage is published in Easwaran’s spiritual anthologies, “God Makes the Rivers to Flow” and “Timeless Wisdom.”
Beginnings...
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First Steps towards Elder Ashram. The idea of following our ideals of support for our elders came from the deep wisdom traditions shared by the Eastern, European, African, and Native American Traditions
We began with a sketch....
We thought we needed to value elders for all that they have learned and experienced in life. Since so many of us younger children and adults are so often lost, we so much needed their way of being
This required of us an attitude of service, of looking at our elders as people who has something to give to us.
We asked ourselves: Who is an Elder? What is an Ashram? How would we like to age since ageing is synonymous with living? What do we mean by the Art of Aging? We are trying to answer
Like people, we are evolving with our ideas and practices. We are learning. We do know we want to support elders, want to integrate them in our lives, want to allow ourselves to learn from them all they have experienced and understood. This is our challenge and our aspiration.
About Us
Becoming an Elder
"As you become an elder, you change inside. With rank consciousness, your personal relationships become deeper. Your group and city are glad to see you coming. Issues and problems are not only to be solved; they are paths to community. Your community realizes that the way it deals with conflict determines history."
Arnold Mindell
Learning to live in Joy
Joy is the transformation of our suffering, not the escape of all we have to face.
MARK NEPO
Looking Inside
Your vision will become clear, when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung
About Us
Primer of Forgetting
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the
self; to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. --Dogen
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
To Begin With, the Sweet Grass