I was listening to a podcast when walking today. I don't always listen to podcasts while walking, in fact very rarely but today, a lazy Sunday afternoon, at least it got me off the sofa. The podcast was with Claudia Hammond, award winning broadcaster, author and psychology lecturer at Sussex University. She was speaking on why kindness is the new superpower you didn’t know you had and how kindness can be in many forms: from really listening to somebody and giving them our full attention, to speaking to strangers in a supermarket queue to volunteering.
This then got me thinking about community which is our theme for this month. Over the past few years we've all been reminded about the importance of community and social connection. I mused on the different communities that are in my life: my family, my friends and their extended families, my daily morning meditation group, the people I meet regularly in the coffee shop, children I’ve taught, teachers and parents, and more recently the wonderful British School of Meditation community. It felt like a beautiful spiderweb. It was expansive, inclusive and full of love and kindness. If this spreads out further, we can see the whole world as our community.
Then I thought how good it would be if every day I actively practised finding ways to be kind to my community. I think we actually do this very naturally but could I go further? Do more? Anyway that's what I was left pondering when I got back from my walk!
One area that Sarah, Catherine and I were passionate about giving attention to when we became the co-owners of the BSoM is our community of wonderful graduates. We wanted to do more. So we're very excited to be launching our app later this month. We hope that this is something that you’ll enjoy using and we’ll be adding more content and bonus features over the next few months. We’re also launching our podcast and featuring our graduates’ enterprises on our social media. So do let us know if you’ve something coming up that you’d like to showcase.
Our hope is for this community to become a really vibrant and exciting place to share our knowledge and understanding with each other.
Having a community makes everything much better! Being part of a community is very life and soul affirming and we look forward to deepening our community together with you.