Spirituality: Helping Our Mind and Spirit
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Once peoples basic needs are met, oftentimes even before, they begin to contemplate their purpose and how to attain true happiness and fulfillment in life. This search for fulfillment can take the form of pursuing career success, wealth, experiences, travel, intellectual gain etc. Although these things can be rewarding, they don’t provide the lasting happiness we seek which can only come from within. Spirituality helps us discover this lasting happiness so we are no longer looking outward to the world to fulfill us. Instead, due to the joy we discover within, we look to serve the world outside rather than take from it. We work to promote spirituality by supporting temples, monasteries, and meditators as well as creating our own programs to teach meditation and mindfulness from a young age.
What We've Accomplished
Yokoji Zen Center was founded in 1982 by the renowned monk Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Since 1995, Yokoji has been functioning as a year-round Zen Training Center for residents and non-residents under the direction of the abbot, Tenshin Fletcher Roshi. It is one of the most respected Zen Training Centers in the Western World, regarded so by Japanese and Western teachers alike. Additionally, multiple members of the RNP foundation have attended sesshin (retreat) and/or stayed for some time period doing residential training. We’ve found our time spent there invaluable. For all these reasons we are proud to have donated 10,000 dollars to the center for them to continue the amazing work and teaching they are doing.
“ServiceSpace is an organization run entirely by volunteers. We leverage technology to encourage everyday people around the world to do small acts of service. Our aim is to ignite the fundamental generosity in ourselves and others, creating both inner and outer transformation.
ServiceSpace was conceived by volunteers, was built by volunteers, and is run by volunteers — all for the benefit of volunteers. Our projects range from a daily positive news service, to an acts-of-kindness portal, to a gift-economy restaurant. Regardless of the endeavor, we act in concert to create service opportunities for each other and to support each other’s service journeys.”
We find the work being done and the movement being created by Service Space to be paradigm shifting. Oftentimes philanthropy is seen from a top-down approach – donating to large organizations that then help the people they serve. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach, few have tried and executed a bottom-up approach like Service Space – encouraging simple acts of kindness in every day people to create large change in the world through an accumulation of seemingly small gestures of love.
In order to support the work being done and the unbelievably selfless people of Service Space the RNP Foundation has donated to support the living costs of one of their volunteers and for the living costs for a man who was involved with service space to live his dream of being able to focus completely on his meditation and become a Buddhist monk.
Ongoing Projects
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Upcoming Projects
This project is the meeting of our education and spirituality pillars. As long time meditators Amar Patel and Naina Patel of the RNP Foundation along with yoga teacher Christine Mcbride will be teaching mindfulness and yoga at the juvenile hall in Bakersfield. Mindfulness programs actually show the most significant results in children who are from high stress, poverty stricken, violent environments so we hope this program will be helpful at juvenile hall.
The lessons consist of a short mindfulness meditation at the beginning and end of school every day along with a session consisting of mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises, and yoga once or twice a week. Along with students, the teachers will be taught these techniques as well so that they will be able to have sessions with their students independent of us. The teachers will also be taught some “informal” meditations methods IE cooking meditation, dancing meditation, walking meditation, to deploy on their classrooms as they see fit.
