Wednesday 10 January 2018

Welcome to Sangha for 2018


Hello, and welcome to 2018 everyone! I hope you've all had a lovely holiday season. Beaches Sangha resumes its meetings this Thursday 11th January.

Over the past couple of months, your SOG (Sangha Organising Group) has been working on a schedule of topics for this year that we think will be engaging and educative. We've chosen 4 types of sessions that we'll rotate through each month. They are:

1) Sutta study: we'll be studying a book which contains 16 important suttas from the Pali canon (the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha). If you'd like to join in, you'll need to get yourself a copy of The Basic Teachings of the Buddha by Glenn Wallis. We'll start this in February.

2) Speakers: we've already got a number of speakers booked for the year and are waiting to confirm several more. A couple of them are open to suggestion in terms of topics, so if there's a topic you'd like to learn about, let us know.

3) Open discussion: we had lots of this last year and people found it really valuable. It's where we discuss how the dharma can help in our real life, day to day situations.

4) Wild card: prepare to be surprised - it'll be different each month. We have everything from sound meditation in the garden this week, to  poetry nights, our favourite podcasts, star gazing, and lots more. These nights are where we'll use creative ways to open to the dharma.

Click here to see what we've got lined up for you so far. We're starting this week with sound meditation led by Sylvie. Weather permitting, we'll do this outside in the garden.

Your SOG for this year is me, Selena, Sylvie, Renata and Kate. If you have any ideas for topics or for sangha generally, please do speak to any one of us. I'd also like to say a big thank you to Betsy who has looked after the program every year since Beaches Sangha started 9 years ago. Thank you so much Betsy. I've been there for all 9 years of it and I appreciate it very much. A thank you also to Florence who, although we didn't see much of her, was our Treasurer last year. 

I hope to see you this week for the start of a new year of sangha wonderfulness.

Warm regards
Lenore

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