Contemplative Life

At Plymouth State, there has been a recent interest in the idea of contemplative approaches.

Projects such as Contemplative Communities have been started based off the ideas of reflection, awareness, and mindfulness. If anyone wants to go further with these ideas, there is a new website called Contemplative Life that is designed to bring people together from around the world for contemplative practices. This is meant for people who feel isolated from people who don’t follow their practices or just to expand their network, but also, to help anyone interested in contemplative practice to find their group.

Jeff Genung, a graduate of Cornell University, is the co-founder of Contemplative Life and says that the mission statement for his website is connecting people and communities with transformative practices. Jeff was inspired by his own life experiences to have started this. His experiences caused him to be extremely interested in deep life from different perspectives. Through his journey he has found that “Through this work I came to realize that everyone is contemplative, but not everyone knows it. Moreover, everyone has mystical experiences but may not have recognized it at the time. The main difference of those that have an experience of mystery more continuously from those that have it periodically, is the presence of some kind of deep and sustained practice,” Genung said.

It revolves around five major parts, which are the heart, mind, body, spirit, and relations. Each part has different practices related to that topic. It lists many types of communities that are already have members helping and discussing with one another. It can be many different types of practices from yoga, to meditation, to general compassion. These are all relevant in everybody’s lives making it a beneficial tool to use.

The next step is to create a private social network. Right now, it is in beta so many parts of it are still in testing, but the main idea is for people to have a community life for their own practices. It will work like other social media where there is going to be forums and the ability to share articles and make posts that can be commented on. This will be for people to learn and figure more about different contemplatives and to share it with other people.

Millennials are what this website aims to attract, built in a way, making it easy to navigate. Giving them the ability to explore different faiths and practices that they can relate to even if others around them do not.

To find this website just go to www. contemplativelife.org.