A Centre: how?
The lifestyle
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THE RESIDENT COMMUNITY at the Centre will make the practice of mindfulness its lifestyle and what it has to offer to the Centre’s guests, giving them the opportunity to experience it.
Relational life inside the community will be founded on mindful communication (based on the capacity to listen deeply and express oneself constructively and lovingly). Mindful communication will also be the means with which tasks will be assigned, decisions taken and the inevitable conflicts resolved.
Another important aspect directly linked to the practice of mindfulness is a simple lifestyle in which joy and fulfilment derive from a deep contact with life, not from a lifestyle of consumption that increases the suffering of others beings and of the Earth itself.
Overall, the Centre aims to adopt an ecologically compatible model of community life, for which the experience acquired over the years from the Intersein Centre will be valuable:

“At the start of winter a new heating system based on wood pellets was installed; this represented a large step towards a mindful relation with the world’s natural resources. The cooking is vegetarian and is for the most part based on the use of organic whole foods. Despite the growing number of people at the Centre, a recycling system is used that still permits the Centre to produce a quantity of waste no larger than that of a normal family. Leftovers from the kitchen and garden waste are used to make compost, in summer the hot water is produced by a large solar-panel heating system, and at the end of 2004, a new biological plant was installed to purify waste water.”

(from the 2006 Intersein Centre brochure)