I'm so delighted to have been invited along with my friends Kai and Shokti to look after the Queer Dome at this year's Buddhafields festival in July. We are creating a safe and welcoming LGBTQI+ space to meditate, chat, hang-out and make friends in the middle of this great Dharma-inspired festival - the "Buddhist Glastonbury". As part of the offering we're going to be hosting some workshops showcasing queer dharma teachers, practioners and thinkers. So I'm reaching out to this lovely community to ask if. you can think of anyone in the UK who might be a good fit for this? Sadly, we don't have the funds to fly people over from around the world, so it's folk in the UK or who are already visiting the UK this July. Put your rainbow-coloured thinking caps on please! All suggestions in the comments below - preferably with a contact/website as well. We're looking for the whole spectrum of queer spirituality - trans, bi, gay, lesbian, POC, the disabled community. Anyone who fits into the rainbow!

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).

I was saying this morning that the Satipatthan Sutta is like a fractal pattern. The more you focus in, the more details emerge. The classic illustration of this is the Mandelbrot Set below: Or in zooming detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b005iHf8Z3g

I thought I'd start updating folk about the stuff happening in the coming week with a little video after the Monday morning session:

… 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.

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

For the first eight weeks of 2025, we're using Thursdays to explore one of the ground meditation texts of Buddhism, the Satipatthana Sutta. This is the core text from the first collections of the Buddha's teachings (the Pali Canon) which, in its own words, describes how meditation can be the direct path for the 'overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, the end of physical and emotional pain', in other words, the path to Nirvana. It's a long text, and Pali literature is full of extensive repetition. So I'm attaching a variety of translations here. And Bikku Bodhi's translation is the one we will be using most: https://suttacentral.net/mn10/en/nyanamoli-thera?lang=en&reference=none&highlight=false You can download it here: @rachelrawlins also pointed me to this beautiful translation (abbreviated) by Thich Nhat Hanh: https://plumvillage.org/library/sutras/discourse-on-the-four-establishments-of-mindfulness This is Ajahn Thannissaro's translation (from Access to Insight): https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.010.than.html And this is the Jotikka / Dammaninda translation: And here is the link to Ajahn Amaro's discussion of the text: Chapter 1 – General Aspects of the Direct Path (part 1),https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yiD3sHyvUdl955aJ875is?si=94088fe96d3141e3

Please do book your sessions for the Monday, Tuesday and Thursday classes. You need to book each class you come to as each one has a unique Zoom code. And if you'd like to sign up for the first time and get the Baobab membership then please use the code Meditate2025 to get that deal.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! I have written and spoken a lot about how the News Industry does not mirror reality and that one of its main drivers is to make people anxious and watch more news. This is why I am an avid support of Reasons to Be Cheerful and Positive News, two excellent outlets of what has been going right. So please take a moment to look at the Positive News' round up of 2024. Not to make us complacent - but certainly to give us hope! https://www.positive.news/society/what-went-right-in-2024-the-good-news-that-mattered/

Here's an excerpt from last nights Fighting Festive Frazzle session, outlining some Dos and Don'ts for your mental health this Christmas: https://share.descript.com/view/4QirAOwFBDS

You're very welcome to join us at 6pm UK time tomorrow (Tuesday 17th) for our annual exploration of Christmas stress and how to use meditation to mediate the worse bumps and bashes. You don't have to subscribe for this one. Just click the link at 6pm UK: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87201743901

I'm super excited about the upcoming Power of Emotions weekend coming up in a few days. I'm busy putting the finishing touches to my slide shows and trying to get my emotional ducks in a row. I think it will all come together for Saturday! It promises to be a really rich exploration of our emotions. But have not fear (!) it won't be a cry-fest or encounter group. What's exciting is having new ways of understanding affect and emotion and how it unspools in our day-to-day life. Don't be afraid of emotions! They're the powerhouse of a life well-lived. As site members you can still access the Early Bird discount (£50) if you use the code Emote50 at the checkout. Hope to see you on Saturday.

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,

Johanna asked me to publish some of the talk we had yesterday - on Bonfire Night in the UK and Election Night in the US - about how we navigate these big global events with an open heart. So here it is: https://share.descript.com/view/tQugrMCxcro

We started a new 8-week cycle of Buddhist exploration at 8 am this morning - looking at the "four immeasurables" of loving kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (uppekha). We began with a meditation, exploring the atmosphere of our own minds. Are we irritated, grumpy or unkind about the phenomena of our mind? In the discussion, we looked at the aversion many of us in the West have about wishing ourselves well... Here's a snippet from that discussion: https://share.descript.com/view/Orbwpz0ql1z