What is the meaning crisis? with John Vervaeke
April 24, 2019
As always, thank you for being a part of the community! We’ve implemented a number of changes over the past couple months, so we wanted to fill everyone in on what’s new. 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 return donators: teacups, Sky, and Nineven. Special thanks to our newest Long-Time Supporter: Anthony A.
Thank you as well to the rest of our current monthly supporters: Agnosia, awendela, John, Philipp, soulhack, Sandy S., mind exploration, rustybikes, acidjames, Krish, Ronald, Sean, Zachary, and Rebecca W.
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.
Community Milestones
At the beginning of April, our Discord community reached 9,000 members!
Several of our members have also recently (and not-so-recently) reached impressive individual milestones: John (Aug. 27), BabyComeBack (Mar. 10), humblelittleowl (Apr. 20), and Anthony A. (Apr. 22) all achieved a one-year streak of tracking meditations using our custom bot, Bloom.
John also reached an incredible 100,000 minutes tracked on February 27th! Thanks to all of you for the inspiration!
Meditation Tracking Updates
We have made several small updates to our meditation tracking experience.
The grace period for maintaining a streak has been extended slightly to account for the largest possible time zone difference. Note that setting your own custom UTC offset is still a better solution, but streaks should no longer break due to time differences.
We have also added new meditation time (120k, 150k, and 200k minutes) and streak (1,825 days / 5 years) roles, as shown below.
Channel Additions & Changes
In March, we added #the hangout, a new voice channel for members who just want to hang out and enjoy casual chat. For access, grab the @hang out in voice chat role.
In April, we opted out of the traditional April Fool’s shenanigans and had Potato Appreciation Week instead. As part of the festivities, we asked participants to post potato-themed images in a new gallery-style forum channel. After the event, we opened #potato-love up to all community members.
For access, grab the @potato role or enable the channel in Channels & Roles. Be sure to read the Posting Guidelines before posting!
Finally, after almost one year of using forums for our #weekly-discussion, we decided to transition back to the standard text channel format. The ability to consolidate each topic into its own thread was convenient, but the inability to ping roles reduced visibility and participation. We hope this change will help revitalize our weekly discussions!
New Event: Weekly Body Scan Meditation
We are thrilled to be able to offer a new weekly group meditation! Every Thursday at 8 am Pacific Time, Sarah B. guides community members in a Vipassana-style body scan meditation. Sarah keeps her camera on for personal accountability and greater sense of connection. While completely optional, members are welcome to do the same.
Sarah B. joined our community in February and quickly became an active participant, answering member questions and inviting others to join her for her own daily practice. She also wrote a lovely review of our community, from the fascinating perspective of a media psychology doctoral student. We happily accepted when she offered to guide body scan meditations for the community on a weekly basis.
Sarah also guides body scan meditations in VR every Wednesday at 3 pm Pacific Time, using the ENGAGE platform.
Odds and Ends
We have made a number of changes to permissions.
Regulars (members who have a participation role of @Cypress or higher) can now access all role-locked voice channels: #🧘 meditate with me, #🧘🏻 meditate with me, #watch together, #the hangout, and #gaming.
To make ad hoc meditations and watch together events more accessible, all members are now able to see and join the #🧘 meditate with me, #🧘🏻 meditate with me, and #watch together channels. To speak, non-regulars will need to grab the corresponding role (@meditate with me or @Watch Together).
Finally, we have limited use of the new native polls feature to moderators and event moderators, and because voice messages can make moderation far more difficult, we have limited their use to regulars, with the exception of the #languages-and-cultures channel, where they can be useful for demonstrating pronunciation.
And that’s it for our May update. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to get in touch via @ModMail or /suggest!
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