As the afternoon and evening wore on in the UK and US, I was still asleep. I'd set my alarm for 5.30, leaving plenty of time to work out was happening in the Mindful Life Discord channel and help anyone out who might it. I actually woke up at 3 am when one of the standing stones in the front deck dislodged in the rain and slammed against the front deck, doing a quick meditation to calm my beating heart. I woke again at 5.15, got into the channel - and everyone was there, waiting. Poor old @digitaldan was locked out entirely and I was the only one who could fix it. Eek.

@bewithbreath calmly led us through a beautiful meditation, starting with focussing on things we can be grateful, shifting to anapana (focussing on the breath) and finishing with metta, a loving kindness meditation. After that, the mike opened up and everyone was welcome to come in and ask questions or to talk about their experience. It was lovely - most people felt so appreciative and loved the opportunity to sit in a shared energy, even though we were on other sides of the world, from Saskatchewan to Portugal to Australia to Great Britain to the US. As @vincentnijman observed, there was something a little surreal about it - how could it be that he was meditating in a tent in his sister's garden in Portugal at the same time as me in Victoria, Australia? But there was also something incredible about that too, just knowing that others were right with you, with the intention to help each other focus on breath and learn a thing or too about the process.

The cutest and funniest thing was @consciousangel crashing into the room just before metta. She'd accidentally left her mike, being a Discord newbie, and there was a loud song that just burst into the silence that made me rush for my phone to see what the hell it was. Poor Vincent was distracted by @bewithbreath's mike feedback and a toad outside his tent, and @porters wasn't in her usual meditation space so felt the distraction of the computer in front of her and the need to fix the problem. I found out later that @immarojas thought it was just a really long silence and nearly fell asleep - turned out that she had kicked herself out of the channel inadvertently. At one point in the discussion afterwards @bewithbreath disappeared entirely, prompting @vincentnijman to worry that Brexit had wiped the UK off the map, but @digitaldan chimed it to assure us he was still there in Northumberland, so it was all good. I had such a giggle that I've had a smile on my face all morning and am still half lmao as I write this.

We all agreed we'd get used to this new way of meditating! There's a great deal of power in the shared experience, and to set a habit too. I loved waking up to meditate, because I often leave it to the evening - @vincentnijman found it interesting to meditate at night, when he usually does it in the morning.

It was awesome to be able to chat about answers to questions too - what's the right way to sit in meditation? What do we do with these distractions? We're hoping that all of you feel comfortable enough to ask a question that's been bugging you in your home practice so we can all chew on the answer.

There's some kinks that I know now to sort out - to not let anyone have permission to mike until AFTER the meditation, to make sure that all member roles are given permission, and to teach @bewithbreath where that push to talk setting is. All this should get rid of most distractions, so we don't feel the need to fix or look at our screens for a solution - @porters, you can then turn your back on it completely!

I shifted a little bit of steem from my personal account over to Natural Medicine this morning so I could set up SBI payments to all attendees - like the breath, SBI just keeps on coming! I'm also delegating a little more because I just felt so aglow - it was moments like this, and an ability to serve the Steem community like this, that got me going with @naturalmedicine in the first place.

We're looking at doing a weekend session too and maybe alternating the Wednesday times week to week to suit the various time zones. We're also really open to any meditation teachers who might like to run a session one week - we learn a lot from different teachers and so many of you have good things to offer. I might even be tempted to overcome my shyness and run a meditation session too - but that might take more coercing.