Introducing new member

[Happy Buddha]

Dear all, I would like to take a few lines to introduce myself to other members. I want firstly to thank Gareth for inviting me onto this forum. I met Gareth at a talk I gave on mindfulness at Nottingham recently. It is a delight to see how much benefit he has received from practice and that he now shares it with others.

My name is Suryacitta (Username is Happy Buddha) and I live in Newtown Linford, Leicestershire. I run mindfulnesscic.co.uk a not for profit, Community Interest Company which provides mindfulness and compassion meditation courses and retreats to the public, the workplace, schools and healthcare, mainly in the Midlands.

I have been practising mindfulness since 1991 and I was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1999. However, most of my work is secular.

I hope to enjoy and learn from your contributions and share my experience of mindfulness with you all.

Look forward to hearing from any of you, be well and happy, Suryacitta

[JonW]

Hello Suryacitta.
By extraordinary coincidence I happen to be reading your book, Happiness And How It Happens, at the minute. Enjoying it greatly, I must say.
A warm welcome to this community.
All good things, Jon

[FeeHutch]

Hello and welcome to our community I look forward to sharing the journey with you.

[Happy Buddha]

Thank you JonW hope you enjoy the reading it a much as i enjoyed writing it...

[JonW]

If you enjoyed writing it half as much as I'm enjoying reading it, you must have had a ball.
All good things, Jon

[Gareth]

Hi Suryacitta,

Really great of you to join the forum; I look forward to our future discussions.

Mindfulness seems to give me untold optimism, I really believe that we can all come together and build something really wonderful here. Let's just get mindfulness out to people, because it is a truly wonderful and life-changing thing. I hope that one day this can be a charity, concerned with promoting mindfulness and assisting people with the practice.

It's nice to have an experienced practitioner around actually. Occasionally we get posts from people brand new to the practice who are obviously in a bad place. If you don't mind we might call on you for the best advice to give as you've been at this game for far longer than we have. I'll follow you on Twitter too - I'm @electrophile888.

[BioSattva]

Hi Happy Buddha,

I look forward to reading your contributions to the forum. It's great to have someone with so much experience here.

Your website and courses look very interesting.

Do you, or have you ever considered offering mindfulness classes for free? - Even just to break even without reinvestment potential? I think that would be a wonderful gift to the world.

Bio.

[Gareth]

Do you, or have you ever considered offering mindfulness classes for free?

Hopefully, one day, EM can become a charity which does just that.

[barbs55]

Hello again Suryacitta! Great to welcome you to our everyday mindfulness website. We also have a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Everyday ... 8794837291

I am currently attending Suryacitta's 8 week mindfulness course, so I can personally confirm the value of his teaching, and how useful his book is! I'd already done online mindfulness/meditation training through http://www.getsomeheadspace.com which gave me a strong foundation for practice, but I do agree that there are benefits in attending an 8 week course, and we should encourage people to do that if possible. It gives you a more direct experience of practice, and the personal contact with a teacher allows also the chance to ask questions (which is missing from the online courses) and why I was so pleased when I discovered the Forums here.

However, I have got so much out of the year I spent following the full Headspace course that I would also not hesitate to recommend that to people, and for lots of reasons, both practical and personal, many people will prefer the online courses. I think we should have a section on this website where we can list available courses, both regionally and the online ones, but I wonder if we need to have some sort of system where courses are recommended by people who have actually been participants and can vouch for their usefulness?

[FeeHutch]

A thread like that would be very at home in the mindful classes sub forum and totally agree with the idea of people recommending those they have attended in person or online. Great idea Barbara