Question:

So, you’ve done your MBSR course and you’re looking for a way to continue and go deeper.

What can you do?

Answer:

Join the online OpenGround Book Club hosted by longtime meditator and teacher Pamela Lovell every other Monday night from 6pm-7.15pm.

Limited places are now available to discuss the next book, Ordinary Wonder – Zen Life and Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck.

The club will meet fortnightly from Monday, October 5 for four meetings fortnightly to discuss how the teachings can be brought to life.

Pamela has hosted the club since 2019, modelled on a book club she and a friend started after they met on a silent retreat hosted by MBSR founder Jon Kabat-Zinn.

“The point of the book club is to broaden your understanding of Buddhist psychology and also to bring an experimental attitude in applying them to your ordinary life – where the rubber meets the road. That’s the purpose,” she said.

“I feel like the teachings really come alive when you try to apply them – in the meditation practice but also in all the moments in life. That’s the lens that I put on it.”

Each meeting starts with a 15-minute guided meditation focused on the teachings to be discussed that week and is followed by a free-flowing discussion.

You are welcome to speak, but you might also want to just show up and listen.

“All we ask is for people to commit to arriving as best they can,” Pamela said.

The club provides a place for discussion that can be immensely powerful.

“People come up with the most amazing things that I would never have imagined,” Pamela said.

“It brings all these different perspectives that you wouldn’t get if you were reading at home by yourself.”

And because the emphasis is on bringing the teachings to life – to our lives – people often feel able to share their most important challenges – whether that’s a diagnosis, relationship issues or the daily obstacles that are a part of the human condition.

The practice of reading has long had its place in Buddhist traditions – which value listening to the ideas, reflecting on them with others in a discerning way, and putting them into practice in the meditation practice, and life.  This can lead to an integrated emergence of wisdom.

At OpenGround we say:  ‘Mindfulness meditation changes lives - because being human takes practice.’

The Book Club provides a space for you to put this kind of transformative practice into action.

Want to know more? Full details can be found here.

—William Verity