Amethyst Foundation is the non-profit organization that provides the governance for our Foundation according to ourVision, Mission, and Values. Amethyst Retreat Center is the portal to experience living in a new way. It is the experience of the sacred in the everyday. It is touching True Self in the most profound way. Lotus Light Community is the Spirit of Love within and among us that brings us together for learning, living, and healing through respect, appreciation, and the loving awareness found within and beyond all religions, cultures, traditions, and ways of being that are rooted in love.
Although each aspect is known by a different name there is no separation and all work together for the benefit of the evolution of human consciousness to one of Divine Love – an expression beyond spirituality, religion or culture.
Don Kovacs continued the discussion by sharing our community Vision, Mission and Values statement. This was written down and shared as a distillation of a process of visioning that took place for over a year and a half through community meetings, a day-long retreat, weekend workshop, and informal conversations. Written early in 2013, it still resonates with what is happening and being lived right now. What follows is the Vision, Mission and Values statement with additional comments by Don on each point.
Lotus Light
Vision, Mission, and Values
Our vision statement is both what we believe and what we try to practice.
3-part vision; 3-part mission; 7 shared values
OUR VISION
We are committed to living in healing loving spiritual community:
o Where all spiritual paths based on love are honored
o And we share the light we've found with each other. We do this most truly in how we live.
o A love-based spiritual path will manifest that love, and will manifest joy, and peace, and patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness
o Where love and honesty are practiced in all things
o Both love and honesty are required. A loving honesty and an honest love. An honesty that seeks our mutual good.
o Love without honesty is at best a mutual admiration society; or it becomes a place where resentments smolder until things fall apart
o Honesty without love easily becomes destructive
o To practice love and honesty constructively requires wisdom, courage, and compassion
o Where healing happens and blossoms into appreciative awareness and giving back in loving service
o In spiritual community deep healing is happening right now and we receive it with great joy and gratitude.
o There is a flow of giving and receiving, a flow of faith and healing (which I still don't understand), and a flow of forgiving and being forgiven
o When we get in the flow together we become "evolutionaries"
OUR MISSION – is a threesome too
We are a center for healing, learning, and living:
o In a sustainable way for all living beings
o We often hike at the Kings Gap Environmental Education Center. We see Amethyst becoming an Environmental Meditation Center where young and old can experience the healing and spiritual power of nature.
o Living it, not just talking about it
o By practicing a healthy, simple, and local lifestyle that benefits the larger global community
o We celebrate with delicious, healthy food, and share the joy and bounty of growing food organically.
o This requires a sustained commitment from a lot of people
o By discovering and sharing our gifts of healing, teaching, and living
o We promote the healing of body-mind-spirit especially through living heartfully in tune with Spirit, the inexhaustible well of wisdom, compassion, and courage.
o We live-in-to our truth and our talents and our gifts day by day, pot luck by potluck, retreat by retreat, sangha by sangha
OUR VALUES
We cultivate a tradition and culture of:
o Trust and transparency
o We keep good financial records which are reported completely to the Board.
o We have nothing to hide and this keeps us safe
o Simplicity in living by expressing gratitude and experiencing joy rather than wanting more
o We practice a gift economy where everyone gives what they have to share to support and enhance the community, and we do it with a spirit of gratitude for the joy we find in sharing our gifts.
o True Self-empowerment because the future lies within, and our lives and our gifts matter
o We celebrate the healers and the musicians and the chefs and servers and the dharma teachers and the field and forest workers and everyone who shares the gift of themselves.
o We choose to be the change we wish to see in the world
o Showing love and compassion by sharing our skills, our resources, our time, ourselves
o We show up, we pitch in, we participate.
o Our gift is a free and seemingly costly love
o Solving human problems creatively
o We imagine what is possible and ask why not?
o We have everything we need to solve every human problem
o Living mindfully and choosing consciously to benefit ourselves and others
o We strive to live in a mind of love, gratitude, and deep awareness.
o Moment by moment we choose to live consciously
o Seeking and finding the Truth beyond religion and spirituality
o Love is a verb and a noun
o We seek to live the truth of love with wisdom, and with courage, and with compassion. We need all three.
Back in the 1960s and 70s we thought we could demonstrate against injustice and change the world. But now it's time to demonstrate for a new way of living, by living it. Let us be the demonstration of how things could be. Back then we thought we could change the world. Well maybe we still can.
Amethyst:
Being the Change
We Want to See
Together
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