Mindful Friends
Sunday Meetup 2023
All dogs and puppy minds welcome!
Join Zoom Meeting (2023): https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85864968677?pwd=YVFJMENmZzQ4RnhIbU5QQWt5UzBJZz09
Meeting ID: 858 6496 8677
Passcode: 437222
When: Every Sunday
Time: 07:00 AM Pacific Time / UTC -7
December Sunday Meetups: Anxiousness & Anxiety
As we near the end of 2023, our Sunday Meetup sessions in December will focus on managing anxiety during the holiday season. While this time is typically associated with good cheer, holiday magic, and joy, let's face it - it's not always as idyllic as a Hallmark movie. Research suggests that December can get pretty stressful with all the time constraints, added responsibilities, and increased expectations. And, to top it off, many of us grapple with seasonal depression during one of the coldest months of the year. So, taking care of our well-being becomes even more crucial. Let's chat about navigating this together in our upcoming sessions!
Join us, as we collectively take a mindful pause, applying tools to help alleviate anxiety during this peak period. Together, we'll delve into the following topics:
Investigating and Understanding Anxiety: Mindfulness provides a unique opportunity to comprehend and respond to anxiety more skillfully, enabling us to "listen" to our anxieties with greater awareness.
Guided Breathing: Discover and practice the progressive muscle relaxation technique—a proven method to alleviate overall symptoms of anxiety.
Crafting a Joyful and Peaceful Holiday Season: Approach the year's end with a clear mind and a grateful heart, fostering a holiday season filled with joy and self-care.
This month Mindful Friends will be virtually meeting up on December 3, 10 and 17 and then closing down for the holidays. Wishing you all peace, love and joy this holiday season and looking forward to seeing you again for our first 2024 Mindful Friends Sunday Meetup on January 7, 2024!
*Click here to view the slides, which have the links to the weekly meditations we do together.
April Roundup:
Monthly Roundups (click on images above)
Click on the images above for a summary of guided meditations and breathing exercises we practiced during the Sunday Weekly meetups. Plus checkout the share-worthy mindfulness articles, posts, books, videos, and other digital content submitted by your mindful friends. These are tools mindful friends have come across and found useful or interesting in their own practice and something you may want to consider trying or adding to your mindfulness toolbox. Sharing is caring - let us know if there is a practice or resource you have found on your mindfulness journey you would like to share with the rest of us and send details to mindfulmomentinfo@gmail.com.
Origin Story: Mindful Friends Sunday Meetup
A group of individuals from all over world enrolled into the MBSR online 8 week certification course. This course essentially took place over 2 1/2 months including the pre-course meeting, orientation, and one-day silent meditation retreat.
Everyone had their own reasons for signing up for the class and along the way, there were great discussions and learnings in the main group room as well as the smaller room breakout sessions. Life happens and some folks had to drop the course to continue it at another time, but in the end, there were about a dozen of us from the U.S. (with representation from across the time zones), as well as classmates from across the globe including cohorts dialing in from Asia, EMEA, and Latin America.
Our last MBSR online class meeting was on Sunday, December 18, 2022. We then received our certificate and badge for completing the course on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) on December 19th. Our beloved MBSR Instructor, Piero Falci polled the class about sharing contact info and staying in touch.
There was interest from the group to continue to meet with our fellow MBSR cohorts for a safe space to continue exploring mindfulness practices, ideas, and more. We kicked off our first Mindful Friends Sunday Meetup on Sunday, January 8, 2023 and have been meeting every Sunday ever since. Recently participants have expressed interest in opening up Mindful Friends and excited about growing our community with friends and family members of the original MBSR cohort as well as other fellow Peiro student alumni.
You are all invited! We looking forward to connecting with you at an upcoming Mindful Friends Sunday meetup. As Piero has reminded us, "Our practice is not selfish. We do not practice for ourselves alone. Our practice benefits the entire world."