I've been puzzling with Wix about the problem of people not getting email confirmations for the bookings. Most people do get them, but a few don't. If you don't, it's fine: you can find the Zoom link in your Mindsprings account. Click the box below to see the walk-through... https://share.descript.com/view/MoJpb75RJfm Log on to your account on your computer then click My Bookings this will show everything you have coming up. Click on the one you want to attend and then on Zoom details. This will take you to the meeting. Or you can click the symbol to the right to copy it for later. The same thing pertains to the app. Click the My Profile button on the bottom right and then on bookings. Remember: • you do need to book each session individually to get the details. Each session has its own Zoom code. • you will need a valid Baobab subscription. (You can also check, cancel and control your subscriptions in your Mindsprings settings, as above.) The system gets confused if you have multiple subscriptions running. • Please check your spam box. You might get personal emails from @mind-springs.org but your server might be sniffy about automated emails from the same domain. So if possible 'whitelist' @mind-springs.org in your mail server settings.

https://share.descript.com/view/aPR2UMIBJDc The first teaching session of the 'new term' - September 2024 - and I was comparing Beingfulness, the practice we usually explore on a Monday, with the Abhidharma course my teacher Mingyur Rinpoche is teaching at the moment.

We had a good discussion in our last Thursday morning session before my trip to Nepal, which also brought to a close the cycle of teaching on vipassana-shamata: https://share.descript.com/view/vgJFxv1eSdV

Teri asked a question on Monday which chimed with my thinking about what meditation permits. Worth a listen: https://share.descript.com/view/U65ycpFJlj1

I wasn't able to record our session which I led from a service station on the A12 near Colchester last night. But we did have a good discussion about grief prompted by a question from Margaret. I re-recorded an audio version of my answer below: https://share.descript.com/view/LJeRsVFOlgo

This is an excerpt from our Thursday teaching, emphasising the Buddhist emphasis on recognising how we fundamentally misperceive reality. First, we only partially perceive and then we hazily generalise by conceptualizing. https://share.descript.com/view/Za1S2xSEBL2

We had a lovely session of shamata practice this morning and I read this quote from Trungpa’s The Path of Individual Liberation p 232 If you don't have a good relationship with yourself, you cannot understand the dharma, and your body and mind will not be properly coordinated. The practice of meditation helps you to coordinate your body and your mind. You realize that your mind can be directed to a particular effort, that your mind works. Through shamatha you are able to raise your mind to an adult level. Your mind does not jump all over the place whenever you try to do something. In this samsaric world, most of you have grown up physically, but psychologically you are very young. You can't concentrate. You can't eat even one good meal properly because your mind is constantly jumping all over the place. The basic message of shamatha practice is that your mind could be as adult as your body.

I don't know if you've noticed but I've added a search bar at the top of the Mindsprings main site. I'm hoping it will make it super easy to find what you're looking for as the site gets bigger. Please try it out and give me any feedback! 😀

I'm posting the teaching from early March which was explaining the shamata path using the old Tibetan teaching aid of the Elephant path. Here's the full teaching: https://share.descript.com/view/p5x3rKWNimY

Just given the members' library a bit of a Spring clean. I realised it was quite hard to navigate, so I've put all the guided meditations at the top with the SEARCH bar just above them, so you can search for subjects (beingfulness) or specific practices (polyvagal tuning) and it will turn up everything with that tag. Check it out here: https://www.mind-springs.org/members-library And please let me know if there's any other improvements that need looking at.

We've started a new cycle of teaching on Thursdays which is focusing on meditation practice - particularly the two flavours of shamata (Tibetan: shi-ne ) and vipashyna (Tib: lhak-tong). This balance of 'calm abiding' and 'special insight' is going to be our subject for the next month or so. Here's a brief explanation of these terms. https://share.descript.com/view/B85QRmiG2yN