This week @ Beaches - a special guest

Hi all.

This week
This week @ Beaches Sangha we have a special guest coming to give a talk...Winton Higgins. Winton was an important part of bringing Beaches Sangha to life, having given regular talks and led sutta study with us for the first 6 or 7 years. This week he's making his only appearance at Beaches for 2018 and he'll be giving a talk called "Confidence without certitudes in dharma practice'.

Winton is also a walking wikipedia, and in all the time he taught regularly with us, we never managed to find a question he didn't know the answer to....so if you have any questions at all on anything dharma-related, please bring them along.

The program
I also want to let you know that there'll be two breaks in the sangha program this year. One for 3 weeks in July, most of which is due to hall maintenance by the council. The other is a winter break from mid August to the end of September, largely because I'll be off racing in Europe. 

With only 3 more Thursdays until the first break, I very much hope you can make it this week to welcome Winton and contribute to our always-vibrant questions and discussion.

A sangha resource for next year
It's apt that Winton is with us this week because he is involved in a project to produce a workbook for Stephen Batchelor's most recent work: After Buddhism. He and some others have a Kickstarter project going to fund the production of this resource. 

I've made a pledge of $125 from our sangha, which means we'll receive some of the workbooks when they're done. Assuming Beaches Sangha continues to 'dependently arise' next year, I'm thinking we can use these after we finish our sutta study. 

We don't actually have much in our bank account at present, but enough to make this contribution without jeopardising our existence (in the short term anyway). If you'd like to support our Sangha in this act of generosity, please feel free to contribute some extra to the sangha basket this week.

Hope to seeya there.
LL