Day of Mindfulness with BTC
It was a half day of mindfulness for me on July 26th, but beautiful and inspiring nonetheless…
In the morning, I meditated outside before heading out to Garden Grove for this special event. The meditation was powerful, but I don’t know if it grounded me fully. I still had trouble leaving my place in time and even got lost on way to event. I reminded myself that this was just the journey that we go through at times…to finally settle and calm the mind down. The phrase comes to me: “mind over matter.” Even though meditation is really a practice to release yourself from the ego mind…it also helps one focus his or her mind…so all the extra junk that’s in our mind…kinda flushes out…and we work from a more simplistic state instead of acting from the chaos that our mind usually creates…all the opinions, worries, fears that the ego mind creates…can go out the window. When I meditate, I’m so surprised by the peaceful state that my mind falls into…
When I got to the event, people were sitting very quietly and watching this movie called Baraka. I only saw a smidgen (small portion) of the movie, but the cinematography was gorgeous! I have to get the movie now via netflix..I just gotta!
The movie brought me into a peaceful state because there was a lot of nature imagery and the narrator’s voice of film was soothing and it was calming. I was happy I saw the film…even though when I sat myself down to view film, it was almost toward the ending credits.
I missed lunch but I heard it was wonderful and I got a taste of the food later in the day…yummy vegetarian food. During lunch, participants ate in silence and there was some discussion after two 15 minute meditation sessions (that I was honored to be a part of) about how when the group ate in silence…there was a savoring and appreciation of the food and the present moment!
At the end of the day, there was going to be a beach walk as one of the activities. The day went really fast! There wasn’t enough time to schedule in the walk…or so we thought!
A few of us stuck around…and lo and behold: Melisa, Christine, Sonali, Sukh and I got to run, skip, laugh on Main Beach in Laguna Beach. There was something very magical that night about us all enjoying the waves and sand that eve. I think mostly because we meditated pre-walk and partook in a wondrous day of mindfulness!
Thank you to the universe and my pals for this awesome day and eve! Namaste! :)
This was a pretty inspiring day for me — so much so that I had to track down the book that the excerpt on eating mindfully came from by Thich Nhat Han. Meditation for me is like taking time for some intense introspection, focusing on “the now.” This day was a great re-introduction to meditation, and it also gave me a new perspective on Be the Cause as a whole. Thich Nhat Han talks about how we each have seeds inside of us: they can be seeds of anger, violence, discrimination etc….and there can be seeds of compassion, love and hope. Being around you guys that night helped to water those good seeds. In fact, just doing what you all do to serve and enlighten others, helps to create this great community I’m thankful to be part of. I feel it helps to bring out the better parts of ourselves, while mindfully confronting those not-so-great parts.