A. April 2012

April 1 was the fourth anniversary of the founding of Play as Being. In addition to celebrations at the four sessions, there was a two hour party on the village lawn in front of Pema's House. No this is not a Toulouse-Latrec painting but a photograph by Bleu.

Theme Sessions

Around mid April some buzz began about having more theme sessions. It appears to have been first discussed at the April 14 13:00 session followed by another session on April 15 13:00. It was decided to come up with a weekly theme. It was decided that the theme for the first week, April 15-20 would be What Has the 9 Seconds Meant to You? The first of these sessions was held on April 16. It also was decided the theme would not be mandatory but would depend on whether everyone wanted to discuss it.

A list of possible topics was posted on the wiki.

The Second weekly theme, April 22-28, was What does equanimity mean to you and what are you trying to balance to achieve this blessed state?.

This Chronicler also slipped in a theme session on Using One's Own Tradition as a Resource. Sometimes in our exploratons it is easy to forget that there are many within our own tradition who have covered the same ground and have left descriptions of those experiences. Turning our back on our traditions is like the prverbial throwing out the baby with the bath water.

This theme, Using one's own tradition as a resources (for loiving and being), became the weekly theme for April 29-May 5.

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99 Days: After a two week hiatus, the third round of 99 days began on April 10 with some of the particpants setting themes for the coming 99 days or three months. The project for the 99 days was as follows at the theme session for the first two rounds held on March 31:

Think of something that you would like to do regularly, but don't do -- or not often enough, or perhaps you need to "restart your engine" with it. Starting whenever you like; do that thing every day for 99 days and add a comment to the wiki page for the day, telling about how it went.
You may do whatever you feel you need, but it should be something that you want to continue with, and it should be consistent over the 99 days. It need not be exactly the same thing, it would be OK to say "I will do one of my regular meditation practices every day before breakfast". However it should be pretty specific: "exercise" is too vague to keep you motivated for over three months.

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New Guardian: There were no new guardians in April