A photograph of the magnolia tree in the garden of Great Meeting in Leicester, after our initial meditation we walked silently on the paths in the garden amongst the spring flowers and the fading light of early evening.
Our topic for discussion was an article in the Guardian newspaper about the recent visit of Jon Kabat-Zinn to the UK and his talks with the NHS and with the Government. Jon teaches mindfulness, his approach is presented as the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme. He says in the article that he wanted to translate the Buddha's central insight,mindfulness, into a language that anyone could grasp. He has stopped calling himself a Buddhist; this is about being human, he says. Jon also says that even if mindfulness is used by bankers and by soldiers to improve their professional skills, he says, it will also nurture the innate compassion of their humanity. Needless to say we had plenty to talk about in our discussion !
We also started to talk about Enneagrams if you wondered what it was, an interesting topic in itself.
The Enneagram of Personality (or simply the Enneagram, from the Greek words ennea [nine] and gramma [something written or drawn]) is a model of human personality which is principally used as a typology of nine interconnected personality types.
