Online-Only Events for the Urban Retreat

Loving Kindness - Blazing Like The Sun

Online-Only Events for the Urban Retreat

On Fri, 8 November, 2013 - 22:44

Candradasa

You may have seen in the program for the retreat that as well as hosting the retreat materials here, we’ll also be doing some online-only events designed to help bring awareness of the practice into that aspect of our daily lives. We can easily spend so much time online - it’s a challenge to find mindful ways to engage amid so much distraction! And, of course, not everyone is near a Buddhist Centre… So we’re interested in new ways to have a taste of what sangha means and we’d also like to develop resources that can help anyone bring more self-awareness (and, in that sense, more self metta!) into their web use…

Listen for daily podcasts (Monday-Friday - at least!)
Online meditation: 12th & 14th (Tue/Thu): 11am EST/4pm UK/5pm Europe/9.30pm India
Submit questions any time during the retreat for Vessantara by posting here or on Twitter (@buddhistcentre) using the hashtag #urbanretreat. Questions will be answered on the site and on Twitter on Wednesday and Friday (13th/15th).
Facebook Group live discussion: “metta in the face of world problems” (Friday 15th, 11am EST/4pm UK/5pm Europe/9.30pm India)
Follow us on Instagram (@buddhistcenter) - we’ll make an Instagram feed of pictures you pictures [at] thebuddhistcentre.com (send us) or post to this space of your Urban Retreat shrine/Buddha statue. (Unless you ask us not to!)

With apologies to those in the southern hemisphere who, we hope, will be sleeping soundly when some of these events are happening. We’ll be bearing you in mind though… See you online!

Tags:

urban retreat 2013, metta, loving kindness, maitri, compassion, Love, online, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, podcast

Responses

claire70 — Sat, 9 Nov, 2013 - 16:01

Hello Urban Retreat team,

It might just be me, but I am already feeling a little overwhelmed at the *amount* of materials there is to look at! And I can only see this getting worse as the week goes on (especially as I work full-time and am not sure how well I’ll be able to keep up). Is there some way of linking like materials together, or putting them in subfolders or something?? Eg. all the guided meditations in one place / all the reading matter in one place / all the foreign language stuff in one place / all the ‘notices’ in one place. At the moment I’m just scrolling through a big list of stuff (maybe I’m just doing it wrong?!), so have to search out what I really want at that moment, and also worry that I’m missing interesting things. Some way of getting a bit of a structured overview would be really useful.

Centre Team — Sat, 9 Nov, 2013 - 16:30

Hi Claire, thanks for this. I know what you mean!

When you arrive at the space we do show you the ‘latest & updated’ stream, which is a sort of über agglomeration of all the posts made to the Urban Retreat by anyone. Some people like this as a way of feeling connected with the broad flow of practice going on around the world, but for others it can definitely be a bit overwhelming. We provide a couple of separate streams to help you filter down to what you want to engage with:

retreat materials team posts (you can find these sub-menu items anytime under the big header image above).

And if you want to just see a particular kind of post you can also click the blue ‘filter posts’ button to the right of the sub-menu.

Hopefully that will help a bit with managing the ‘great stream’ of material on the site itself!

One other thing you can do is unsubscribe from receiving email notifications every time someone posts. If it contributes to feeling overwhelmed, click the unsubscribe link in any email or just hover over your name/picture top right of any page and click ‘profile’ then ‘edit’. Scroll down and untick the email notifications box. That way you can choose when to engage with the space and its content (which will still all be avilable to you as a retreat participant).

with metta,

Candradasa

claire70 — Sat, 9 Nov, 2013 - 17:14

Hi Candradasa,

Aha! The ‘filter posts’ button may be the answer. Thanks for the hint!

Have just enjoyed my first meditation with Vajragupta :-)

Claire.