By Molly Rice, Oakland
Refuge Recovery East Bay started around 2014 with one meeting at 924 Gilman St: a punk rock venue and collective in Berkeley, CA when a group of folks got a pre-print copy of the book, meeting formats and meditations. It really was a case of concurrent evolution that happened about a year later. The Tuesday group popped up, the Loka Yoga meeting started, and the Thursday group at CDRP. We eventually all met each other, and that’s when we all became the Brady Bunch…
We now have 10 meetings in Oakland and Berkeley including 2 on Saturday and 3 on Sunday. There are more than 44 in the Bay Area. We established a men’s meeting and a women’s group on Saturdays, an LGBTQAA group on Friday evenings and a kid-friendly and dog friendly meeting on Sunday afternoons. We started an Intersangha group for the Oakland meetings (and Gilman, hence East Bay) to help stabilize the infrastructure: particularly around running meetings in hospitals and institutions, and ordering books, pamphlets and literature, and creating new relationships with local institutions for additional spaces.
We have grown quickly and continue to do so. What has really worked for us so far is that we are a close sangha: we hang out together. We meet up for coffee before meetings, we go get sushi after meetings, we replace meetings with potlucks when we lose spaces, we roll to ATS together. We are working on using our Intersangha to regularly order literature and pamphlets, and creating mentors within our community to support our growth. It’s really helpful that we have a meeting every single day, but even when we didn’t we rolled to ATS and AA meditation meetings together. We announce where we are going to be at every meeting. And we are hella easy to spot in a crowd.
If you want to know when and where and how hard we’re going to sit, please check out:
Check us out at: http://refugerecoveryoakland.org/