Weekly Metta Circle Starting Thurs 30th January

Dear Friends,

Just to let you all know that we'll be starting a weekly Metta Circle next Thursday, meeting 7pm till 8.30ish in Bishop Lloyd's Palace on Watergate Street.  It'll be a weekly training in cultivating a mind of love through metta meditation, and clarifying the natural intellgence of our heart through guided discussion.  It's rooted in the Buddhist teaching of metta, both in the Theravada and Mahayana approaches, and the way I'm structuring the circle draws on my experience in Sufi Circles too.  The existing Metta Circle in Leicester, now coordinated by Mark Baverstock with the help of Rowan, already combines Buddhist Metta practice with some Sufi dancing each time.

The weekly Circle will be one part of gradually developing a Chester Metta Society as a beacon of love and compassion, attempting to create a small social entity where a culture of love and openmindedness prevails.  To that aim, I've also begun a process of Facilitator Training for anyone who wants to help coordinate activities, to reflect deeply in our life on the place of love, and develop confidence in our own and other peoples' voices as carriers of love.  Three of us are beginning this training on 25th January (Burns Night!), studying texts together which explore the human capacity for love from a Spiritual, Philosophical, Biological and Psychological Perspective.

I hope to launch too a biannual ejournal of metta practice, inviting people who train with us, and guest writers, to contribute essays, stories and poems on the theme of metta... more on this as it develops!

The Chester Metta Society will be the main social focus for my own work here, giving something people can get involved with, join, and help organise. I hope that gradually other people will run it completely, and I can hand over the reigns to them, like in Leicester already.  There will also be other activities linking to the Zen Peacemaker Circles too - a monthly Street Circle will continue, bridging the cultural space between the Metta Circle and Zen Peacemakers practice, and there'll be other workshops and I hope social projects in the mill as time goes on...

With love,

Ashk olsun!

Chris