What’s coming up in December, and our New Year Break
Plus new vaccine pass requirements
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Upcoming New Year break
With many people going to other towns or cities to be with loved ones, or enjoying a well-deserved holiday, One Mindful Breath will be pausing our weekly meditation sessions over the Christmas/New Year period, returning full of ideas and energy in 2022. Our last weekly session of 2021 will be on Wednesday 15 December, and we’ll be back on Wednesday 12 January 2022.
Get your vaccine pass ready
At One Mindful Breath we’re committed to ensuring that people who attend our in-person sessions feel safe and comfortable. Looking ahead, it’s foreseeable that COVID will reach Wellington eventually and we want attendees to be focusing on their meditation practice, rather than feeling anxious. To support the well-being of our community we will be requiring vaccine passes for all our in-person sessions, starting from our next session on Wednesday 8 December.
You will only have to have your vaccine pass checked once. Your name will be recorded and you won’t need to provide your pass again for future sessions you attend.
As a community, One Mindful Breath seeks to make meditation and dharma practice available to as many people as possible (that’s why all our events are free). If you don’t have a vaccine pass you can continue to attend our sessions via our Zoom livestream. You’ll find the Zoom details on the event page on Meetup and Facebook.
At this time we need to try extra hard to live with metta, that grounded, spacious friendliness towards everybody and everything, and be generous in our approach to fellow practitioners who may not feel comfortable in attending in-person sessions, for whatever reason. We need respect people on their personal choices or opinions in regards to vaccinations, and be slow to judge others who differ from us. We are very aware that vaccinations are one piece of the puzzle, along with the health and safety requirements we have in place, realising that there is no single silver bullet against COVID.
Coming up in December
One Mindful breath is a sangha (community) that explores the role of mindfulness in embracing the difficulties of life, letting go of the dictates of reactivity, experiencing the calm and clarity of spaciousness, and cultivating creative engagement as a way of being in the world.
All events are at the Wellington Friends Centre, 7 Moncreiff Street, Mt Victoria, Wellington. Doors open at 7.15pm and the sessions start at 7.30pm. For more details see our Meetup page.
Wednesday 8 December – Embracing the everyday sublime
As we deepen in a meditation practice we can start to see more clearly how the self ‘gets in the way’ through reactive habit patterns, or alternatively we start to see where it is possible to sense a softening of the tendency towards ‘selfing’ and enter a more creative and responsive mode of being. We can start to get out of our own way and grope towards what in some ways remains unsayable: the sheer mystery and wonder of being here at all, or what Stephen Batchelor calls ‘the everyday sublime’. In this session we’ll be exploring connecting our meditation practice to letting go of attachments and exploring the everyday sublime. We’ll also be meditating as a group.
Wednesday 15 December – end of year pot-luck!
Mark your calendar! To wrap up 2021 we’ll be celebrating with a light potluck. Bring something to share (sweet or savoury). We’ll be reflecting on the year and also doing a guided meditation.
What have we been up to?
November was another busy month for us as a sangha. The longer evenings, warmer weather, and an easing of concerns about COVID have led to more and more people taking the opportunity to come along to our sessions in-person. Attendance has been great!
Max facilitated his first session for OMB, leading a session on the subject of attention – how we can shift attention and how we can split attention. Max also led an excellent guided meditation! Alex led a session on embracing life through meditation in the face of our many digital distractions. Mithun facilitated a session on practising self-compassion as an antidote to shame and self-doubt and also explored the three components of self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness.
New ways to contribute to OMB
To make it even easier for people to donate to One Mindful Breath we’ve added the option of enabling paid subscriptions to our monthly newsletter. This won’t give any additional features or benefits over ordinary sign-ups, but is just another way to contribute to our community. We rely on the generosity of our community to keep our sessions going and to allow us to support worthy projects and causes, like our publishing house the Tuwhiri Project and the Secular Buddhist Network.
One Mindful Breath is a registered charity so if you’re a New Zealand tax resident we’ll be able to send you a donation tax receipt at the end of each tax year so you can claim back 1/3rd of any amount donated through signing up to the paid newsletter.
If you’d like to subscribe to the paid newsletter, see the link below.
https://onemindfulbreath.substack.com/subscribe