A Mindful Week #22
Your weekly dose of mindfulness, creativity & insight. Curated by Nikolas & the Art of Meditation team.
Your weekly dose of mindfulness, creativity & insight. Website / Blog / Club
01 Art
Sometimes it really pays off to just send a cold email. Thats what the New York City Ballet experienced, when they approached Sofia Coppola if she would be interested in collaborating. A few steps down the road - we find a fascinating short here directed by one of the most fascinating female directors of our times (start at minute 8).
02 Climate
Interactive Climate Science: The folks from MIT university bring us this well designed overview over what we know and don't know about climate science.
03 Vibes
Explaining the cultural moment of Vibes: What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. My friend, the writer Alexi Gunner, explains the cultural moment of vibes in this essay. Alexi and I looked for artists embodying this shift to “capturing vibes”. We settled for photographer Sam Youkilis, whose poetic intelligence of the everyday you might enjoy.
04 Entertainment
Saturday Night Live: And now, every conversation with people you haven’t seen since quarantine started (starring Elon Musk)
05 Creativity
Nicholas Britell's Scores — for “Succession,” “Moonlight” and “The Underground Railroad,” among others — suggest whole new ways of writing for film and television. Here is to one of the most daring and talented young voices of music.
06 Music
World Journey Spotify Playlist: A musical journey to far of places. An ode to emotions and language we all have in common.
07 Quote
Quotes that inspire us and make us think.
If you haven’t joined the club yet.
08 Meditation Club
In our Art of Meditation Club a dream team of meditation teachers and coaches support a community of mind explorers in their quest to living an examined life.
This week at the Mind Club
09 Weekly Letter and Meditation
The demands of a perfect static “work life balance” often feel impossible to achieve when you aim high: Remember the times when your life’s passion demanded you to be fully dedicated? Or those periods when your relationships took all of your attention?
Frantically grasping for “work life balance” may not even bring us any good. The ideal of a perfect balance of work and life is a stressful thing. Instead of finding balance - we often feel paralysed facing our inability to bring the impossible to a perfect symbiosis.
Is there a better way to think about balance?
A healthier way to look at the quality of our life is to look at the three relationships that make or break a fulfilled life. The poet David Whyte calls them the three marriages:
They are our life’s work, the relationships with our loved ones and the relationships with ourselves.
So what if instead of thinking of achieving a static balance, we would reorient our thinking on the quality of relationships instead? Relationships sometimes demand time and dedication, other times they just flow and open up space in other domains:
At times, the full dedication to a cause or passion is necessary for a deeper quality of relationship with your life’s work.
Other times, your loved ones need all the care they need, while the rest of the world needs to wait.
And even more importantly, if you fail to nourish the relationship with yourself - through retreats, self-reflection and distance - you won’t find depth, wisdom and fulfilment elsewhere.
Each of those relationships demands hard work, reflection and at times full dedication. Yet, if we miss out in finding depth in either of those relationships our quality of life goes down the drain.
The meditation of the week focuses on the most important relationship of your life - the relationship with yourself.
This week’s mental training is centred on cultivating your ability for self-enquiry. The method is usually more used by advanced meditators, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t benefit from this mental training earlier.
Wishing you a great week,
Nikolas
10 This Week in our Club for Curious Minds
On Mindful Monday
Nikolas will invite you to use your imagination in a meditation inspired by modern mindfulness icons.
On Zen Tuesday
Former Zen Monk René will introduce you to meditations and insights from old wisdom traditions.
On Loving-Kindness Wednesday
Hannah will explore the self-healing power of training compassion and loving/kindness practice.
On Deep Mind Sunday
Sascha will offer a space to deepen your meditation practice.
Workshop on Sunday
Each sunday our coaches and Meditation teachers will host a workshop that will help you life an examined purposeful life.
This weekly mail is available online or you can subscribe to it here: