Souls of Sangha: Igor & Madison Limansky

Q: Igor, how was it for you to have Lower Light’s beginning be in your living room? 

Igor: Tom (McConkie) and I have always shared meditation and talking about practice together. When we ended up moving in together in 2011 into this apartment, he started getting a lot of people talking to him about meditation and so they just started meeting right here. For me it was interesting because I was working on the Obama campaign as the Utah State Director and so my whole world was consumed by that. Every little bit of time was spent working. To be able to come here on Wednesday nights and not think about work and to actually have a moment with friends and community, I started understanding community organizing and what was happening around me with a greater sense of purpose. It was really a sustaining force in my life from the very beginning. 

Q: How has your practice help shape your relationship? 

Madi: I feel like we have similar tools that we are using to communicate or to handle something challenging, even if we aren’t great at it, we are able to come back to the same framework of presence. Even last time when you guys were going to come over for this interview and we were feeling overwhelmed with a conflict and had to cancel. It was really nice to recognize that we needed that time to dive into it and it was comforting to know that we could be honest with you guys and you would understand. I don’t know if we would have handled that situation the same way if it wasn’t for our practice.

Q: What does living in community mean to you right now? 

Madi: I guess for me as I am getting older, I’ve noticed that a lot of my relationships are one dimensional, like the people I work with or family members or people who I go out with or girl friends who i’ll have occasional lunches with. I feel like living in ourcommunity, there are so many dimensions to our relationships. We can witness one another in so many different moments in our lives, not just fun friend time, but also really challenging things that are coming up. I appreciate a community that I feel so supported by and also that I feel I can support in those same ways.

Igor: I grew up moving around a lot. I went to 4 different high schools, 3 different junior highs and 4 different elementary schools. Even though we didn’t stay in one place, we ended up coming back to the Salt Lake/Holladay area. I guess I felt like this was my home. I started working in politics and noticed that most people take the itinerate political route, so they get a job on a campaign in Nebraska, get a job on a campaign in Ohio, and then they go to D.C.. It was really early on that I knew that that wasn’t at all interesting to me. I wanted to be here, in a place where I felt I had roots, in a place that I felt had a sense of what community was. That’s kind of been my focus for a while and Lower Lights has really put a fine point on what it means to support one another and to create community. It reminds me how important it is to bring my whole self to everything I do and that I need to listen to others to help encourage someone to be their whole self. I really can’t imagine living my life without that.

Q: What is a gift you have received through practice? 

Igor: Something that sticks out to me is the concept of equanimity. Just giving myself radical permission to feel what is going on and acknowledge the truth of what is happening. I’ve had a lot of conflict with my family and with my mom. I remember being with her when she was in a paranoid state and feeling the kid in me getting angry and wanting things to be different than they were. I have a clear memory of repeating to myself, “equanimity” and allowing that word to be a guide to ask, “what am I feeling now?” I remember that as soon as I had done that, everything changed and I could feel myself relaxing into more space to feel. The ability to put that word into action and feel it change the situation through acceptance, lightened the intensity. That is a specific situation, but it happens much more regularly as I spend more time in community and spend more time in practice.

Madi: I can think of a lot of examples, the one I’ll talk about, which I can’t talk about without crying, is when a dear friend of mine died… I was confused and I carried a lot of guilt. We weren’t in a good place in our friendship when he died. Feeling like I’d never had the chance to reconnect with him before his passing was really hard for me. Growing up in Utah at every funeral, they are like “be happy, they are in heaven, everything is fine.” I just always have had a hard time with death because everyone around me has a certainty with death and I have felt alone in my confusion. Being in a community that could hold me in all of that and not give me any answers and encourage me to keep asking questions really changed the way I processed and am still processing his death. 

Q: Is there anything left unsaid that you’d like to share? 

Madi: I am feeling just so sensitive right now. I am just really aware that this is the room where we grew our sangha. I’ve done a lot of healing in this room.

Deseret News Coverage on Lower Lights Sangha

You can read the full article, here

NPR's Weekend Edition: In Salt Lake City You'll Find Mormons who Meditate

Listen to the latest coverage on Lower Lights Sangha. NPR's Lee Hale writes about our Lower Lights and its potential impact in our local community.

RadioWest with Doug Fabrizio: A Conversation with Thomas Wirthlin McConkie

Listen to the latest interview on KUER's RadioWest. Doug interviews Thomas about his upbringing, his relationship with Mormonism, and how development plays a role in navigating faith crisis. Listen here

Souls of Sangha: Andrea Barlow

Q: So, really as one the first students of sangha, tell me how it all started?

I met Thomas in the back of a limo going to a wedding, which is one of my favorite stories. He was so bright, so full of life. I was immediately like, “Who is this? I’ve gotta talk to this guy.” So we spent the whole wedding with another mutual friend, just really connecting. Thomas mentioned he had just come back from China and was headed out on a weeklong silent retreat. And I was like, “What? What?”  That was a completely brand new concept for me. So I asked him to tell me more about meditation and he said, “I would love to. Would you be interested in sitting with me sometime?” So we started sitting together. Once a week he would come over and we would sit, and he would give me guided practice, and I would give him chocolate to make it worth his time. He was always the most appreciative recipient. I was so lucky to have that foundation to my practice. It was soon after that that Tom moved into his new place and we started sangha on Lincoln Street. There was no stopping it at that point.

Q: What are the shifts you noticed in your practice? How has your practice evolved?

Great question, for one thing I’ve developed a deeper nature practice; more appreciation and love for nature, and that’s something that really sustains me and gives me life. In nature - when I’m present to nature - I feel like everything is okay. I can hear, see, and smell so many layers of beauty, and that comes back to me throughout my day. Also, in my business life, in my corporate world, I’ve noticed that I can sit in challenging conversations and work with difficult situations and be okay. I don’t go straight to my worst habits after something challenging and a lot of those negative coping mechanisms have evened themselves out. On a personal note, over the past ten years, I have lost a lot of weight. And practice has given me a new understanding of what that addictive quality was. Mindfulness helped me smooth out the rough corners. I definitely had a disconnect with the religion I grew up with; with mindfulness practice, I was able to find harmony there. In a lot of ways my path hasn’t been traditional, but I credit mindfulness for making me okay with that. I still experience sadness and uncertainty, loneliness, but I’m okay with all of those feelings.

Q: What does your practice look like these days, what is alive for you these days?

What is coming up for me more and more is how precious this world is and how fleeting and fragile it might be. My responsibility is to consume as little as I can, to give back and to take joy. In a way, minimalism. I’m learning to be okay with consuming and needing less, and finding fulfillment in what is already here, all the time.

I do sit daily and that’s important; my practice is with me in motion throughout the day also. If I have a value or goal, mindfulness creates a framework or structure to make that possible. With it, I move through things more fluidly and it’s so much easier to accomplish something when the action is fluid! So, I can do more, achieve more, when I’m mindfully involved.

Q: What is the importance of community for you? 

I don’t know if other people feel this way–but it’s like when I least want it, that’s when I need community the most. And somewhere in me is an extrovert that gets in to the group and connects and it feels like I’m contributing. There is a beautiful yin yang quality to group. At times it pulled me out of a rut, it nourished me, it revived me–it kept me in the practice. We talk about the Buddha, Dharma and the Sangha in mindfulness practice. The Buddha being the self and self-practice, the Dharma being the words and the beautiful language and instruction, which I find with books, podcasts, magazines, and online materials–but it’s the sangha, the community, that I believe holds all of it together.

Photography by Ann Whittaker