As always, thank you for being a part of the community! We have a handful of exciting updates from the past couple 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 return donators: rudra, will-o’-the-wisp, teacups, and awendela.
Thank you as well to the rest of our current monthly supporters: Agnosia, Peru S., m sea, Nineven, Philipp, John, Ronald, Sean, Anthony A., Zachary, Sandy S., mind exploration, rustybikes, acidjames, Krish, Candace, 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 Member Milestones
On August 25, John achieved a two-year streak of tracking meditations using our custom bot, Bloom, making him the first community member to receive the 👽 role! Thanks for the inspiration, once again, John!
We would also like to congratulate Stargazer on being the newest graduate of our free four-week mindfulness course! Great job, Stargazer!
Curating Your Experience
With almost 10,000 members and over 60 public channels, the Meditation Mind Discord community can be overwhelming if you don’t curate your server experience to fit your own needs. Since not everyone is a Discord expert, we’ve created a new article to guide you through the process of doing just that: Curating Your Experience.
The article features a short video overview, created by community member Sarah B., which you can also view below. Thanks, Sarah!
Bloom Bot Updates
We have made some exciting updates to our community’s custom bot, Bloom.
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Meditation Challenge Stats
We have added challenge stats for those participating in our monthly and/or 365-day meditation challenges.
Just use the /challenge stats command in #meditation-tracking. The command defaults to stats for the monthly challenge. Use the optional "challenge" parameter to display stats for the 365-day challenge.
Stats include total and average time and sessions for the challenge period, and current and longest streaks (all-time), as shown below. Streak stat visibility honors individual tracking customization settings.
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Longest Streak
As part of the above update, we added longest streak calculation. We have also implemented this stat into the /streak command, as shown below.
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Personal Bookmarks
Yes, bookmarks! Community members can now bookmark messages for their own personal reference.
To add a message to your bookmarks, right-click or long-press any message and select the Add to Bookmarks command from the Apps context menu. Specify an optional description in the pop-up dialog, or just click submit.
To view your bookmarks, use the /bookmark list command. To remove a bookmark, use /bookmark remove and specify the bookmark ID*, which can be found in the bookmark list.
*Note that the ID is not a valid link. This is a workaround to make IDs selectable on mobile clients. To get the ID: long-press, copy, paste, and then remove "discord://" from the beginning.
Because bookmarks use database resources, regular members are limited to 20 bookmarks. Unlimited bookmarks is a perk for our subscription-based donators. Support the community with a subscription on Ko-fi or Patreon.
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Starboard: Multi-Image Embeds
Our starboard now supports multi-image embeds! Previously, when a message with multiple images was added to the starboard, only a single image would be preserved. Now, up to four images will be visible in the embed. An example with two images is shown below.
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Course Enrollments
Bloom now handles enrollment and withdrawal for our courses. This was previously handled by Dyno, but the commands were confusing and responses were via DMs, which would not be delivered if the member had DMs turned off.
Now, just use /course join or /course leave to enroll or withdraw. The commands can be used in any channel where the user can send messages, and an ephemeral (private) response will be shown in the channel where the command was used, as shown below.
The commands currently default to the Mindfulness Course. When more courses are added, the optional "course" parameter can be used to specify the course you would like to join or leave.
New Event: Buddhism Book Club
Join Sarah B. and fellow community members to learn about and discuss the noble eightfold path, the path taught by the Buddha to achieve freedom from suffering. Participation is open to all, Buddhist or otherwise.
Members meet every Friday at 4 pm Pacific Time to read and discuss On the Path: An Anthology on the Noble Eightfold Path drawn from the Pāli Canon by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, which is available for free online. For those who can’t attend in-person, Sarah uploads recordings each week to help everyone follow along: On the Path Book Club.
New Channel: #self-care
In late August, we added #self-care as a place to share acts of self-care to celebrate oneself, build positive momentum, and motivate others to do the same!
Odds and Ends
Did you know we maintain a Google Calendar of official server events? You can always visit our Community Events page to view the calendar, but you can also add it to your own Google Calendar using this link (learn how), or to other apps using the iCal link.
We have updated #practice-guide to make it much more readable, especially on mobile devices. We also added a short RAIN meditation, guided by Tara Brach, to the examples of meditation techniques for beginners to try.
Farewell, Nero. We have kicked our music bot. The reason we added Nero was because it was one of the last music bots to support YouTube links, but no more. YouTube has blocked Nero’s IPs, so we said goodbye. Guided meditations can be streamed using the Watch Together activity, or directly by sharing your screen.
And that’s it for our September update. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to get in touch via @ModMail or /suggest!