Diverse Together

What brings us together

What brings us together at RIM is simple, and it is shared: learning and practice. Our aspiration is old and it is large: to suffer less, to see more clearly, and to love more capably. To be free of what burdens the heart, and to help others be free of it too.

So we practice, releasing what gets in the way of our well-being and our innate goodness, cultivating what nourishes them, and letting the benefit reach past us, to the people we love and the world we share.

Wisdom and compassion are the heart of it. The old word for a community like this is sangha, one of the tradition’s three refuges: a shelter we create by practicing in it together. That shared aspiration is our bond.

Many kinds of people

Everything else about us differs, and we are glad it does. This community holds different generations and backgrounds, different beliefs and politics, different reasons for walking in the door.

Difference, in a room like this, works like medicine. Another life is a way of seeing beyond our own, and each person who joins changes what the whole community can understand. Whoever you are, you add to both: to the aspiration we share, and to the diversity that deepens it.

And not all of it can be seen. We differ in temperament too: some of us at ease in any gathering, some quiet by nature, some unsure that belonging to a community is something we can do.

That is diversity as well, and a sangha needs all of it. No one here will ask you to speak, share, or be anyone in particular. Come learn and practice in the way that fits you. Presence is enough.

Room to grow

Practice will ask all of us to grow. It will never ask you to become someone else. What grows is authenticity: ourselves, more fully, held more lightly.

The same is true of this community. We do not claim to have arrived at some ideal of diversity. There is no final version of a community, any more than there is of a person.

Everything alive keeps changing, and on this path that is good news. So we are always becoming a community where more people can feel fully at home. Come as you are, and help us become it.

A welcome we keep together

The teachings here are shared without dogma, for people of every race and ethnicity, gender and orientation, age, ability, income, political affiliation, and spiritual tradition, and for people of no spiritual tradition at all.

We name these because naming matters, and because some of us have been made to feel like visitors in rooms like this one. If that has been your experience, come and see. The seat was already yours.