Dear Friends,

With the close of the year upon us, we reflect back on how we came together as a community to deepen our practice in the face of challenging times.

Just before the world shut down because of the pandemic, we built out a brand new studio space for our practice and celebrated the opening with a potluck of food and drinks, followed by a special meditation of sitting, singing, and readings. It was a joyful evening. Then in March we closed the doors and our Wednesday sangha community started an outdoor walking meditation. Eventually all our Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sanghas moved to online.

While it took some time to adjust to not being together in person, we were delighted to see people from across the country and the world - as far as Hong Kong - join our online practice. We have often observed the blessing of all the people who would not have necessarily found the practice and / or our sangha if it we hadn’t moved to online. We are considering continuing to offer an online practice once we are able to meet physically again.

We also needed to move our annual 3-day retreat in April to Zoom. Our retreat committee worked together to reconcile refunds and pare down the agenda to create an online experience that still felt spacious and welcoming. Being mindful of Zoom fatigue, the one-day retreat incorporated long breaks. Valerie Brown led our retreat beautifully and we are looking forward to our online retreat with Valerie on April 10, 2021.

As part of OHMC’s response to the pandemic, we dedicated the month of May to the practice of generosity. This meant each Monday night sangha theme in May was related to generosity.

We also wanted to offer to be a second body to another community: Latina cancer patients/survivors and their families, who are supported by Nueva Vida (New Life), a local charity.

All donations to OHMC throughout the month went to Nueva Vida. In total, we raised $4000! Plus OHMC gifted $500. You can read more about our generosity program and Nueva Vida's thank you video message here.

In June, after the rising of the catastrophic events including the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we released a statement of our commitment to practice in situations of injustice, and invited Valerie Brown to lead our sangha and speak about how to fight injustice without hating. It was a much needed dharma talk, and we are so grateful to Valerie for all she has done with our sangha this year.

In September, we invited our community to our first Annual Meeting to discuss evolving OHMC’s organization structure to provide a stronger base for our expanding sangha.

This revised structure was influenced by feedback from our sangha survey, several conversations with other similar sanghas, and the wishes of all to have a more inclusive, welcoming, and transparent community. The new structure centers around a new group called the Care Taking Council (CTC). Most sanghas in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition are guided by a Care Taking Council.

With our priority being to maintain our practice, we have been slowly transitioning to this new structure and are taking care to ensure we all feel a sense of spaciousness and compassion. You can read more about our new structure here.

We offer the mindfulness teachings in the spirit of the Buddhist principle of dana, another word for generosity. Dana, a donation coming from the heart, is what has supported the teaching of mindfulness for thousands of years. None of what we do would be possible without your generosity.

Please consider a tax-deductible end-of-year donation to Opening Heart Mindfulness Community. Your donations will help to offset operational costs (e.g. website, email, and rent) and allow us to offer partial and full scholarships to our annual retreat for those needing financial assistance. We are a completely separate entity from Circle Yoga and received no financial support from them or any other organization this year.

2020 OHMC highlights

❤️ Meditation sittings

We sit together over Zoom every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Every week, a member of our sangha volunteers their time to facilitate sittings on Monday evenings, Wednesday mornings and Friday afternoons. Our Monday facilitators provide a description of their topic, which is posted to the topic page of our site every Friday and sent via email to our subscribers every Sunday morning.


❤️ Guest meditation teachers

An Nghiem (Sister Peace)

Brother Chân Pháp Lai

Hai An (Sister Ocean)

Kaira Jewel Lingo

Samantha Rise

Valerie Brown

❤️ Communication outreach to our community

1981 email subscribers

489 followers on Facebook

367 followers on Instagram

52 mindfulness topics written by our Monday night meditation facilitators (published so even those who can’t attend sangha in person can make the readings a part of their practice)

❤️ Trainings offered to the sangha

In January, the Five Mindfulness Trainings Transmission several people from our community received the trainings from Thich Nhat Hanh’s niece, Anh-Huong Nguyen
 

We invite you to join us and be a part of these events and more in the coming year. Again, we ask for your support. 

DONATE TO OHMC HERE

Wishing you calm and ease as we head into the new year. 

Questions, comments, suggestions?

All are welcome to reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you!