Monday Meditations

Aro Ling Cardiff is a virtual Buddhist Centre and you can join our activities on-line. We believe that a daily practice of meditation is as important as healthy eating and regular exercise.

Meditation, yogic song, and a short teaching or reading
at Aro Ling Cardiff via Zoom 

19:00 - 20:30 every Monday (UK time)

Zoom Meeting 

ID: 85249620913
Passcode: 640389.

Details of yogic song practices can be find on the ‘practices’ page of this blog.

Sessions are led by Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin who have many years experience of meditation. 

This weekly group is rarely cancelled, but there will be a notification on Facebook if it is.

You may find the extract below from an article that appeared in the Western Mail of interest.
The Aro gTér Lineage also offers a free on-line meditation course delivered by weekly emails. Details about this can be found at Aro Meditation.

Have you had your 10 a day?

We are encouraged to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables—5 portions a day—to benefit our health. The physical body however, is only one aspect of ourselves and our emotional and mental health is often left unaddressed. Practising meditation for at least ten minutes every day can benefit our emotional and mental state, and enable us to maintain a healthy mind.

Our usual experience of mind is a continual stream of thought, each tumbling one over another. We fill our lives with conceptual stimuli and are also constantly bombarded by intellectual input. Even when we do have quiet times in our lives we tend to fill them up – we take our radio with us on a picnic; we listen to music while we walk through the park; we switch on the television when we have nothing else to do; we text, twitter, network on social media, and explore the internet on our mobile phones.

If we do have quiet times in our lives we may find that it makes us feels strangely uneasy. We find just being alone with ourselves without any external distraction oddly unsettling. Somehow we feel insecure with nothing to think about or look at or listen to. We continually reach out for entertainment, distraction and familiar territory to help us feel safe in the world. Unfortunately there are inevitably times in our lives when there is nothing to entertain us and when the circumstances of our lives seem to threaten our sense of security – such as times of loss, unsought change, and confusing or conflicting interpersonal interaction. Our response to these circumstances is usually self-protective and often aggressive.

Through meditation we can learn to become comfortable with not-doing. We can learn to simply be alone and quiet with ourselves without the need to grasp at the entertainment of our mind or our environment. Through not-doing we can learn to let go of the impulse to continually seek relationship with people and things to support our view of ourselves. We can learn to let go of the need to try and organise our lives to be how we want or expect them to be in order to be comfortable, and discover that we can in fact be comfortable with things exactly as they are – whatever that might be.

Letting go of thought is not an easy practice – it is frustrating, sometimes dull, and often challenging. It requires long-term application to reap results, but a daily commitment to the attempt will eventually allow the discovery of not-doing, of mind without thought – and then our relationship with mind can become more spacious and creative. If everyone had their ten a day—practised ten minutes of meditation every day—the world could slowly change for the better, becoming more peaceful, tolerant and happy.