Evolving out of the Mindfulness Network and the Conscious Living Network, the Mindful Living Network aims to enable members to motivate one another to live mindfully and to encourage the RSA to engage with mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions globally. This April, we hope you will join us to reconnect and revive this Network with the global Fellowship. Find out more about our vision for the Network looking ahead, and opportunities to how to get involved.
What is mindful living?
Like ‘sports’ is a catch-all term for physical fitness, ‘mindful living’ is a catch-all term for any kind of awareness practice that is embedded into daily life. Mindful living practices can include volunteering, singing in a choir, faith-based practices, group fitness, and of course meditation and mindfulness-based interventions such as breath practice and stress reduction techniques.
What does this network do?
The RSA’s aims of a ‘regenerative mindset’ and regenerative approach to life invites those of us engaged with mindful living to reflect on ways in which, “the world is built around reciprocal and co-evolutionary relationships, where humans, other living beings and ecosystems rely on one another for health, and shape (and are shaped by) their connections with one another…[these aims] recognise that addressing the interconnected social and environmental challenges we face is dependent on rebalancing and restoring these relationships. This way of seeing the world is far from new. It has a long heritage, woven through cultures, indigenous wisdom traditions, philosophies, religions, and communities around the world and across time.”
As a proactive network, we are open to ways to sustain our practices, share our experiences, and to grow our knowledge and skills by learning from each other. In alignment with the RSA’s aims, we support and encourage activities that highlight and create necessary social change and disruption to a status quo that sustains inequity. We are committed to inclusion, diversity, representation, and equal access to change.
How can this network support you?
In line with the RSA’s guiding principles for regenerative thinking, restoring, and replenishing, we invite our network members to start from the ground up. How might the natural environment, geography, and our local communities inform our experiences of living mindfully in the current context of environmental concerns. In what ways can we bring mindful living to explore and illuminate our own blind spots, particularly with respect to social justice. How might we build and increase our capacity for reciprocal, iterative approaches to learning and embrace mindful living projects and practices as catalysts rather than end points? How does this philosophical change in approach affect the quality of our efforts as individuals and as a network? How can we take a ‘nested’ systems view of success and consequence?
Our aim is to support all Mindful Living Network members to explore the RSA’s Design for Life approach and to encourage cultivation of an experimental culture and the creation of space for questioning assumptions and interrogating structures and dynamics of power.
Most importantly, the Mindful Living Network invites deeper considerations of our interior life, how we think, reflect, and communicate, and ways in which this inner work shows up in our lives and relationships with others. Regenerative design involves an evolving outlook, and invites us all to work on ourselves, our mindsets, our behaviours, as much as the infrastructure, institutions, services, and products in our external world.
Follow the links below to join the Network, and attend their virtual introductory session:
ONLINE EVENT: Virtual introductory session
DATE/TIME: Saturday 22 April 2023, 11:00am – 12:00pm BST (Online via Circle Live)
RSVP HERE
Sign upto the Network mailing list here
Engage with the Network, and follow regular updates on their Circle homepage here