Weave - Unforced Understanding

Author

Aaron Gabriel Neyer
July 06, 2024

Welcome to the Weekly Weave!

Woven Web is a community rooted in Boulder Colorado and reaching beyond, with a deeply held vision for a more connected world. We seek to find greater harmony between technology, society, and nature through facilitating communication and understanding and developing systems for connection.

In this Weave

  • Unforced Understanding

  • Coming Up in Community

Thank you Adam for filling in for me last week as I was away in a meditation retreat, and thanks for all that you have done to help bring this organization to life, and for your grace in passing me the reigns and trusting me to bring us to the next stage of our journey. It’s a blessing to see all that you’re doing helping people reconnect to their ancestry and navigate death more gracefully. We can’t understand what it means to be alive without fully including death.

Weaving Words - Unforced Understanding

If real change is to happen in our world; if we are to truly witness and participate in the emergence of a more connected culture, it will have to happen first through our understanding of ourselves. Which begs the question, how do we go about understanding ourselves? Our conditioned view of understanding typically involves thinking very hard, utilizing effort and intellect as a way to come to some certainty around a specific topic. This may work in certain contexts, but when it comes to understanding ourselves, it seems that excess effort and intellect are more likely to distort our vision rather than clarify it.

It seems to me that understanding is not a process we can force, but that it has to come through our honest inquiry and genuine desire, and that it emerges not through taking the sword of the intellect to ourselves and cutting ourselves away until there's nothing left, as many spiritual traditions propose, but rather through keeping an open mind as we live our lives, being who we are. I don't see a way of understanding ourselves that doesn't involve being ourselves. And as we understand what it means to be alive through actually being alive, being alive becomes a far richer experience.

By fostering a community and a culture of belonging and of honest communication, we give space for folks to experience being themselves in relationship, which allows for a far more natural unfolding of our own beings and our own understanding of what it means to be alive. As we move through this upcoming week, let us reflect not only on what it means to be alive, but on how we are helping to cultivate a context that supports that understanding unfolding for ourselves and the world around us.

Coming Up in Community

This coming Sunday (7/7) at 9am at Kelly’s Barn in North Boulder, Dragon Lake Zen will be hosting their community practice. There will be another practice next Sunday (7/14) as well. This is a really beautiful zen community that a number of Woven Web folks are part of, and we’d love to have you join us for practice.

Next Friday (7/12) at 8am at Kiln Boulder, we’ll be co-hosting another Mingle & Moments with MindfulYourBusiness, Changing Work Collective, and Conscious Entrepreneurs Summit. Use code WW for a discount when you register and if cost is still prohibitive then reply to this email and I can make sure you can join.

More events:

Thanks for tuning in. Reply to this email and let us know what you’re thinking and how you’d like to engage with community. And forward this email to someone who you’d like to participate more in community with!

See you in the web,

~ aaron gabriel & woven web