Spirituality
After fifteen years of hard corporate living and growing business success, I was fortunate to wake up to the realization that something was out of balance in my life, and from there to stumble clumsily into meditation.
I spent the next couple of years of engaged in a home-based and individual spiritual practice, accompanied by extensive reading, and then started to look for a community and a teacher. I was fortunate to find the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston, its abbot, who became my first teacher and a man who was central to major positive changes in my life. Under his guidance my practice grew, and in 2008 I was ordained a priest in his lineage. At around that same time I started to become involved in Interfaith activities, and this led to expanded opportunities for personal growth.
In early 2011 I was one of a group who left the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and surrendered our association with Taiun-san's lineage to start up an independent Buddhist group called the Red Clay Sangha. While remaining closely alligned with our Soto Zen heritage, we are also very open to other traditions and to inviting other teachers to visit. Above all, though, we are intentional about building community and personal ties among our members. I find this practice lighter and at the same time richer than my prior experience, and also find it conducive to expanding my role in Interfaith, which includes participation in weekly contemplative meetings, monthly educational and advocacy meetings through the Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta, and regular intensive opportunities for interested people to experience first-hand the faith practices of others. In this last context I am one of the contributing authors of Sacred Space: Explore the Sacred Spaces of Five World Religions.
My Buddhist practice at the Red Clay Sangha is the home where I ground my own meditation and spiritual study, but the broadness of Interfaith and the friendships I've developed there are an increasingly important part of my everyday life and its overall direction, and this expanding spirituality is one of my life's great blessings.