A Year of Grateful Living (January 2025)
A brand-new year arriving. What might be the impact of making this “A Year of Grateful Living?”
Dostoyevsky said, “Man only likes to count his troublers; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” We are hardwired to count our troubles in the brain’s attempt to keep us safe. But in the process, we miss immersing ourselves in the plentitude of beauty and comfort that surrounds us.
Research has shown that incorporating gratefulness and appreciation in our lives increases our levels of positive emotions and bestows health benefits of better sleep, a stronger immune system, lower blood pressure and some relief from aches and pain.
In this Meet-Up, through discussion, mindfulness practices and journaling, we’ll explore ways to gently fold more gratefulness into 2025. Participants will be encouraged to share their methods of increasing gratefulness in their lives.
Resilience as Our Saving Grace (March 2025)
Life is full of challenges – that’s part of being human. Life throws us curve balls and pulls the rug out from under all of us from time to time. We can’t change that fact of our lives, but we can change how we respond to these inevitable roller coaster rides by increasing our resilience.
Resilience is considered to be one of the most critical qualities we can develop – the ability to bounce back, to reframe the experience, to pause and consider a helpful response to what occurred. Using discussion, mindfulness practices and journaling, we’ll explore ways to strengthen our resilience in ways that will soften and transform the inevitable ups and downs in this life.
Meditation: Am I Doing This Right? (May 2025)
Understandably, we’re always striving to do things right. Am I making this turkey right? Did I do the right thing in responding to my friend? Am I flossing the right way? Am I eating right? It’s natural that we’d want to do meditation right too.
But are we asking the right question? What if there is no right way or wrong way? No good meditation or bad meditation? Is there a way to shift and soften our approach to meditation that allows us to adapt our practice to support us as we are now, on this particular day, in this particular time in our life?
In this Mindful Meet Up, through discussion, practices and journaling,
we’ll examine how meditation practice can become our ally rather than
our taskmaster.
R.A.I.N.: A Compassion Practice for Difficult Feelings (July 2025)
This being human is intense. We have stuff coming at us all the time - our nervous system takes a beating throughout any given day. It’s part of our common humanity that we all experience emotional and physical pain.
Our natural reaction to difficulties is to either avoid them by distracting ourselves or denying them or beating ourselves up about them. But, as Robert Frost reminds us, “The best way out is always through.”
In this Mindful Meet Up, we’ll explore the R.A.I.N. practice as a compassionate way to meet and move through these challenges we face in a healing way. Using discussion, mindfulness practices, and journaling, we’ll discover a path toward a greater wisdom and ease for ourselves and, consequently, for others.
Befriending Impermanence (September 2025)
As the calendar moves to September, we begin once again to experience a shift in seasons and all attendant to that: school starting, vacations ending, weather changing, foliage fading. A tangible example of impermanence, a constant in our daily life.
Our neurobiology and our wish that things not change greet this shift with resistance and reluctance. Because impermanence is woven into the fabric
of our lives, what might we gain by befriending it?
Frank Ostaseski, author of The Five Invitations, says: Being comfortable with change is the key to living your happiest life. In this mindful Meet Up, we’ll explore how befriending impermanence can contribute to our growth and wisdom, increasing the richness of our lives. Using mindfulness practices, discussion and journaling, we’ll discover the possibilities and value of impermanence.
Settling and Seeking Guidance (December 2025)
Oftentimes as we begin our day or our week, our nervous system is unsettled and agitated. When we turn to the conditioned mind to consider what’s coming up that day or that week, both our unsettled nervous system and our conditioned mind seem unable to prioritize between more critical events and the more mundane. Consequently we just blindly work our way through our “to do” list with unfocused
attention, without prioritizing anything.
In this Mindful Meet-Up, we’ll experience a mindfulness practice that both allows the nervous system to settle and recalibrate and supports the mind in seeking spiritual guidance about focusing on what’s most important, orienting ourselves to aligning with our deepest values.