Coming up in November
Our community 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 3 November – Beginner's mind - introduction to meditation
There's no better way to build a foundation in mindfulness than meditating with others. Join us for a relaxed session and discover the benefits in a beginner-friendly environment.
Our Beginner’s Mind session teaches basic meditation techniques and is a great introduction to meditating in a group environment. The session is suitable for those who are new to meditation, while more experienced mediators will also find it beneficial. You can ask questions and the session is broken into shorter meditations to ease you into the practice. Feel free to refer friends or family who might also benefit from the session.
Wednesday 10 November – Attention shifting, attention splitting
In this session we’ll be attentive to our attention. Holding, maintaining and focusing attention can be one of the key challenges in our meditation practice. We’ll be practising splitting our attention and shifting our attention, noticing the limits on the information that comes into our conscious awareness, and practicing intentionally shifting our attention to where we want. We’ll also be meditating as a group.
Wednesday 17 November – Embracing life through meditation
In the modern world we’re surrounded by distractions that deprive us of the opportunity to face the low-level discomforts of being alive, like stress and anxiety.
Our meditation practice plays a central role in embracing life - we effectively train ourselves to be better able to handle stress, anxiety, sadness and reduce the need for self-numbing.
In our session on the 17th we’ll be exploring embracing life in 21st century Aotearoa, an environment where its never been easier to hide from life. We’ll be reflecting on the role of our meditation practice to help us stay present and connected with our feelings and thoughts.
Wednesday 24 November – The practice of self compassion
When you’re stressed, do you turn to self-compassion, or to self-criticism?
In this session we’ll talk about how self-compassion could be an antidote to shame and self-doubt and also explore the three components of self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness.
We will finish the session with a guided meditation.
New Zoom sessions!
It doesn’t look like Alert Level 2 will be lifted anytime soon and we’re keen to support those who would like to attend our sessions, but can’t be there in person or who live outside Wellington. From November we’ll be trailing streaming our weekly in-person sessions via Zoom. You’ll find the Zoom meeting room details on our Meetup page and Facebook event advertising for each session.
What have we been up to?
October was a busy month for One Mindful Breath and it’s been great to see more people coming along to our weekly sessions following the most recent lock-down and despite Wellington’s unpredictable spring weather. Alex ran a session focused on change and how our ingrained cultural responses to change often lead to frustration and distress. On the 20th of October Julia ran a session focused on exploring short meditative techniques that provide fast and effective ways to calm and ground yourself. Mithun ran a very interesting session on meditation with the RAIN technique which got a lot of positive feedback. Looking forward to November!
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 at the bottom of this email.
The Age of Distraction
Numbing. Is there a better way to describe the quality and sophistication of our modern distractions? With Netflix, videogames, Instagram, Facebook, 24 hour news and a constant connection to the internet via our smartphones, our ability to deprive ourselves of feeling and thought has probably never been so complete.
Our digital distractions are immediately accessible and can gently smother whatever unpleasant feelings we might be experiencing leaving us deprived of both our discomfort and the opportunity to face the discomfort head-on. If you feel slightly anxious you can just scroll mindlessly through Instagram for hours. If you feel unhappy you can suppress your ruminations through Netflix. If a party is ever so slightly boring then your smartphone is always there to absorb you. Indeed it’s possible to have an entire day of this - a life spent moving from one glowing rectangle to another. You might know people in your own life who cannot even sleep without YouTube running in the background, or a podcast - so that there won’t be single moment in the day without being slightly numbed to what’s actually happening right now.
Obviously digital distractions are hardly new but in the last 15 years the quality and accessibility of digital distraction has reached a point that our monkey minds are not terribly well equipped to handle. For most of it’s history the majority of TV was trash, frequently interspersed with advertising. The quality of available digital entertainment now has never been better or more diverse. But the real issue is availability - No matter how good a TV show was in the past, you couldn’t summon a episode on demand and watch it on the bus. Similarly, no matter how good a newspaper or magazine article was, you couldn’t read it in the middle of a friend’s party, but now we can pop out our smartphones and read news articles or blogs without anyone batting an eye.
When our habits are pointed out we can naturally get defensive, “So what if I watch a lot of Netflix or play videogames? They’re fun and I need the quick relief after a big day at work. Digital distractions don’t do any harm”. To our defensive reaction we could gently accept that our digital distractions might be harmless if we could balance them and use them skilfully in our lives. However, our beloved digital distractions are often designed for addiction and for monopolising our attention, making any real balance extremely difficult to sustain. We need to apply some self compassion and recognise that our minds are not really cut-out for sustained exposure to to such easily accessible, socially acceptable distractions.
So what is the harm of reaching this new apex of digital distraction on our practice of the dharma and our spiritual wellbeing? One of the most significant impacts of our digitally distracted age is on our ability to practice the first task set out in the Buddha’s first discourse: to embrace life.
The Buddha’s first discourse sets out the four tasks that begins our practice of the dharma (dharma practice is a question of tackling tasks). The four tasks are to:
Experience/embrace life – acknowledge and deeply understand and embrace the human condition, especially its inevitable difficulties
Let go of instinctive reactivity – the clutching and fantasising that these difficulties usually stimulate in us
See the stopping of that reactivity – experience the profound peace of mind that comes from this letting go, and
Act – respond, say, see, set a direction in our lives, cultivate a path – in which we work on the eight aspects of our lives set out in the eightfold path.
The first task, ‘Embracing life’ is the positive framing of the Buddha’s first task - ‘Dukkha is to be comprehended – totally known (pariññã)’
‘Dukkha’ is conventionally translated as ‘suffering’ but this translation doesn’t match the Buddha’s explicit list of what dukkha stands for: birth, sickness, ageing, death, separation from what we love, being stuck with what we detest, not getting what we want, and our overall psycho-physical vulnerability. No person can evade any of these experiences so this first facet of the fourfold task is about embracing our human condition. The way to nirvana, being those moments (however fleeting) of lucidity and serenity when we’ve freed ourselves from all reactivity, is by firstly embracing life.
However, fully embracing life is often easier said than done in our modern lives. We might even allow ourselves a little envy at how un-distracted life might have been in the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The comparative paucity of available distractions from dukkha would have made the first task a lot easier!
In the modern world, our digital distractions deprive us of the opportunity to face the low-level discomforts of being alive, like stress and anxiety. Moreover, they can distract us from the central challenges of life, numbing ourselves and dulling our deeper desire to find fulfilment and peace from within ourselves.
Our meditation practice plays a central role in embracing life - we effectively train ourselves to be better able to handle stress, anxiety, sadness and so reduce the need for self-numbing through digital connection.
In our session on the 17th we’ll be exploring embracing life in 21st century Aotearoa, an environment where its never been easier to hide from life. We’ll be reflecting on the role of our meditation practice to help us stay present and connected with our feelings and thoughts. Come along!