<aside> 🕰️ Archived newsletter
This is a past issue of the newsletter, and therefore may have references and commentary that are no longer accurate. This website is iterative and evolves week on week, so just keep that in mind. The latest newsletter is at the top of the homepage, here. Happy reading!
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<aside> 🥰 Happy Father's Day everyone, for those of you in Australia! I am personally blessed, and so grateful, for my own wonderful and generous father. I hope you all can make time to recognise and appreciate the father figures in your own lives.
Love you, Dad - you're the best.
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Hi all! Hope you're still finding reasons to smile ☀️
The first week of spring is here! As if right on cue here in Melbourne, the weather really seems to have turned towards sunny and clear, which is a welcome reprieve from all the cold weather we've had here in the tail end of winter. It also makes the precious time we're allowed to spend outside all the sweeter (COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in Victoria currently limit us to 1 hour of exercise outside, once a day, within 5km of our homes).
Aaaand, today also marks one month - 5 issues - of this website and newsletter. How time flies! A warm thank you again to everyone who's provided me with their feedback and comments - greatly appreciated. I'm proud of what content is here so far, and happy with how things are shaping up so far.
Stick around! A lot of stuff behind the scenes that will be surfacing soon.
Speaking of which:
I was really hoping that by tonight I'd have a significant amount of work to share with you within the Meditation feature category. And to be fair (to me?) - a lot has been done therein! Alas, I still have to keep this behind the curtain for one more week, as there's so much foundational content required there that's cross-dependent, making it a little 'all-or-nothing' as opposed to something to be rolled out gradually. Nearly done.
I can still tell you what I've been doing though! This week in particular I've established a significant amount of infrastructure that will be helpful there, such as:
There's a lot of terminology, jargon, and foreign words in the world of Buddhism, meditation, and Contemplative Fitness. And while for the most part I will endeavour to keep things accessible, and to avoid unnecessary abstractions and jargon, undoubtedly there is necessary and useful jargon/terminology.
As such, I've written a lot of foundational pages and entries in this glossary, which will form a very useful centralised database of explanation and commentary that I can link to from other pages.
This will ultimately make things more readable and accessible, as 1) I won't have to repeat myself, 2) those who already know the terminology won't need to read what they already know, and 3) those who don't know what something means can click-through to learn or get a reminder, where I've explained things in laymans terms as best I can.
A lot of my work over the past few days has been filling out the pages in the glossary. This is because my style here is expositional as opposed to strictly definitional. Trust me, this is a good thing. Part of my motivations here are absolutely to make things clearer and more approachable for people.
Although I'm on the wordier-side, when it comes down to proper recommendations I will happily defer to much of the same literature, teachers, and resources that I've found useful, myself. As such, there ought to be a repository here to compile the requisite list of authors, books, apps, etc.