As always, thank you for being a part of the community! We have a number of updates from the past few months to share with everyone today. If you’re not already a member of our online Discord community, please join us today!
Table of Contents
Thank You to Our Donators
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the following new and repeat donators: Kaz, will-o’-the-wisp, and teacups. Special thanks to our three new long-time supporters, Nineven, Peru S., and m sea, and new community guardian, Sandy S.
Thank you as well to the rest of our current monthly supporters: Agnosia, awendela, rudra, John, Sean, Anthony A., Sarah B., mind exploration, rustybikes, acidjames, Krish, and Candace.
Meditation Mind operates 100% on donations, so this community would not be possible without you. See a full list of present and past supporters here, now with our long-time supporters and community guardians featured more prominently.
Community Milestones
On May 29th, we reached an incredible 45,000 hours of meditation tracked using Bloom!
Since our last update, three more members have achieved a streak of two years, earning the 👽 role: BabyComeBack on March 10th, humblelittleowl on April 20th, and Anthony A. on April 22nd. More recently, on July 3rd, will-o’-the-wisp achieved a one-year streak, earning the 🐉 role.
And finally, on February 27th, John earned the 🔥🔥 role, awarded for tracking a total of 150,000 minutes—another server first for John!
Our New Server Tag
Server tags have finally rolled out to all guilds and we now have our very own: 💛kind. Kindness—both toward oneself and others—is a core value of our community, and we hope our new tag will help spread a little more kindness throughout Discord.
The server tag is available to all community members, regardless of Nitro status. Find out how to set your server tag here.
Please note that the tag does cost us three server boosts. If you have a Nitro subscription and have any unused boosts, please consider using them on us. We have fallen to level two, rendering some of our emoji and stickers unusable. Thank you!
Guidelines and ModMail Changes
We have made two small-but-important changes to our community guidelines.
Rule #6 now reads: Keep server nicknames, tags, custom statuses, and avatars/pfps appropriate. We changed “SFW” to “appropriate” to indicate that these elements must be in alignment with all community guidelines. We also added server tags. Due to their high visibility in chat and the member list, both tag content and the server info they link to must be in alignment with our community guidelines.
We have removed our previous rule #5, which asked members to avoid unsolicited DMs unless the recipient had the DM-friendly role. This rule was created before users could manage their own per-server DM privacy settings. Now that this is possible, we ask that members be responsible for their own DM privacy, as we generally prefer to avoid moderating behavior outside of the server. Learn more about DM privacy settings and Message Requests.
Please note that spam, scams, and other solicitation are an exception and we ask that you continue to report these to server staff.
Until recently, the best way to contact staff was by sending a DM to the ModMail bot. While ModMail remains functional, we have replaced it with Tickets. In addition to DM support, Tickets provides the /new slash command for opening a new ticket, which is much easier and is not affected by individual DM privacy settings.
Bloom Bot Updates
We have made some exciting updates to our community’s custom bot, Bloom.
You can also change these settings directly by using the new /customize vc command. In addition to enabling or disabling meditation VC tracking, you can also specify how you would like to receive tracking notifications when using anonymous tracking: private thread (default), direct message, or not at all.
Optionally, specify the collection (choices shown below) from which the random sutta is chosen. By default, up to 500 characters of the sutta are displayed, to limit screen space required by the command. However, when the visibility option is set to private, up to 3,500 characters will be displayed.
New Guided Meditations
After a very, very long wait, the recording of our special event with Henry Shukman is now live on our YouTube channel. The video can also be accessed from our Guided Meditations page, along with downloadable, audio-only versions of both the full event and the guided meditation only.
The Guided Meditations page also features a new guided meditation from Sumit, and another from guest teacher Eve Verne.
Eve is a mindfulness trainer and facilitator, the founder of Deep Resilience – Applied Mindfulness, author of Emotions are like Farts (a mindfulness book for children), and an RYS 200 certified yoga teacher. She will be joining us twice monthly, every 2nd and 4th Wednesday, to lead a guided meditation.
New Partner Community
Neurofields is a space to study nervous systems at all levels, from molecules and cells to neural networks, and everything they give rise to, such as cognition and behaviour. We aim to unite curious minds, passionate learners, and seasoned professionals in an academic environment enriched with carefully selected resources and channels for various branches. As a mindful and inclusive community, we encourage thoughtful discussions, mutual respect, and the pursuit of knowledge in a supportive atmosphere.
We are happy to welcome Neurofields as a new partner community, as of January. (Click the image or name above to join the Neurofields server on Discord, or visit the Neurofields website here.) The owner, WizzY, is a dedicated meditator and a long-time member of Meditation Mind, and the community features channels for contemplative neuroscience, as well as general mindfulness, making it a perfect fit.
Thank You to Our Community Sit Hosts
We currently have three consistent daily (or almost daily) group meditation events that are hosted by members of the community. These events are a massive contribution to the community and would not be possible without these dedicated hosts: Nineven, TheWiseOrganizer, will-o’-the-wisp, and BePresentWithIt.
While she is no longer with us, it was Sarah B. who initially established the momentum for these events—just one of her many contributions to our community.
Thank you so much to our hosts, and thank you to those of you who show up to take part in these group meditations. Your participation is a gift, to yourself and to others.
Odds and Ends
We would like to congratulate Randōmnesş on being the newest graduate of our free four-week mindfulness course! Over 370 people have now enrolled in the course. All course material can be accessed via Thinkific or within our Discord community.
All voice channels now require the @Grasshopper role or higher to speak. The requirement was lower in meditation VCs to allow newer members to use voice when organizing group meditations, but this has proven unnecessary and the discrepancy was confusing to some, so it has been removed.
We also removed the @hang out in voice chat role. It was largely unused, and since significant participation is now required to receive voice permissions, the option during onboarding was potentially misleading.
And that’s it for our July update. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to get in touch via @Tickets or /suggest!
