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… and no broken limbs! This Monday sees us moving the Beingfulness lens to our thoughts and mental formations (the 4th Field). And on Tuesday we’ll be completing our tour of Somatic Practice. And Thursday - fanfare🎺🎺- continues our Satipatthana exploration with the Seven factors of Enlightenment.

We've started a little mini-series of teachings on the Tuesday live session, where our focus is on using simple two-syllable mantras to calm the body-mind. People seemed to respond well, so if you'd like to come along, please book. Here's a taster from the Q&A afterwards: https://share.descript.com/view/xKlZBbjPkCL

Since it was Halloween, we did some practice that involved deliberately scaring ourselves. Deliberately going into the things that annoy, trouble us and swinging back and forth from a safe place into homeopathic doses of over-egged scare. (The Practice will be in the video library later this week) - here's my Halloween thoughts: https://share.descript.com/view/pKemEHE8iwg

Following a lovely exchange with Zana Frood in this morning exploration of the Noble Eightfold Path, we ended up talking about understanding right view (the first thread of the eightfold weave) as a fitting understanding of how reality works (i.e. through constant impermanence/emergence). This understanding then allows us to stop faffing with all the constituent bits of our existence (form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness = the aggregates in Buddhist jargon).

Click the image below to see the video message: https://share.descript.com/view/YQUpfRabq7B Hello. Just a quick note to you lovely members of the Mindsprings community. I am going away next week to Barcelona with Daniel for his 40th birthday. And I will be back the following week. So that is the 28th so we'll start, live sessions again on this Monday, the 28th. And on the 31st, we're going to start a new cycle of Buddhist teaching: We're looking at the four immeasurables, which will be at the later time of 8:00 AM UK time. So we're doing this seasonal switch. So slightly later on a Thursday morning. So the Monday session and that Thursday session, the morning sessions are both at 8:00 AM UK time. Slightly complicated, I think because the clocks go back. So if you're in a different time zone, you need to just be mindful of that. And also to let you know that, Let's just check the date. we're starting our book club. Looking at Mingyur Rinpoche's wonderful "In Love With the World" on the 6th of November. So this is in just in a few weeks time, and that's free, if you're a Baobab member, so many of you have that. Do come along. It's I think it's seven o'clock on Wednesday evenings for, I think we're taking six weeks up until Christmas. So I will send out an email and that'd be a page with some reading instructions for that. coming in the next few days. Anyway, just thought, I'd say hello. And, let you know, what's coming up in the next few weeks. And I hope you're very well. I've got a little bit of a cold, I think I might have had COVID actually, cause I can't smell anything. . Curious. Never had that before. But I hope you're well and healthy. And, enjoying the fall slash spring. If you're in Australia.

I would like to wish all you lovely mindspringers a very happy Christmas and an enlightened new year.

This morning was the Spring Equinox and I thought I'd post this extract from our Thursday session which had a decidedly Springy feel to it. https://share.descript.com/view/R8yzkwqrlpl

Here's the table that Ven. Analayo gives about the things that help us work with the different hindrances:

We were exploring the importance of 'emotional concepts' this morning. Emotions depend on a conceptual framework in the brain to have meaning. This is why it's so useful to have a richer vocabulary regarding our feelings. For example, the widespread experience of waking up in an inexplicably bad mood. It would be easy to pathologise this and see it as a personal failing or a terrible injustice. But when we know there is a word for it, then our emotional experience is validated and given meaning: MATUTOLYPEA (pronounced: mah-tu-toh-leh-PEE-a) “Dejection of the Dawn” Waking up in misery or a bad temper. From the Roman goddess of the dawn, Mater Matuta, and the Greek word for dejection, lype,

Here's a clip from this morning session, the first in our 8-week series looking at the Four Foundations of Mindfulness one of the most famous and influential meditation discourses of the Buddha. Please join us for the rest of the funfair ride - we're meeting every Thursday morning at 8am UK but if you can't make that, sign up anyway and we will send you a recording. It's an amazing text and I'm looking forward to unpacking it together. https://www.mind-springs.org/online-live