Last Saturday Hèlen A. Vink of Miksang Contemplatieve fotografie organized another Miksang Contemplative Photography Practice Day in Zandvoort aan Zee. Practice days are open for anyone who has followed at least one workshop with her, otherwise you have no idea what it is all about. Last Saturday she combined yoga and meditation with the practice of contemplative photography for the first time.
It was a small group of three practitioners that had gathered and we all knew each other from former contemplative photography workshops. We each had our own goal to come that day: two of us were curious about the effects of meditation and yoga on our contemplative practice and the third (Henneke van de Wateringen) was actually teaching the yoga part. For her it was the first time to teach yoga in combination with Miksang contemplative photography. So we had a lot of firsts today.
We started off the day by talking about where we were on our contemplative photography path: do we practice it daily, do we have our camera on us a lot, are we available to our world, do we see a lot and if so/not what do we see? We could freely share where we were, without judgements or negative thoughts. We were also aware that the current was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, and that felt kind of special. We took a moment to celebrate that.
We also shared 15 of our photos of the last weeks that we had selected previously to arrival.
After sharing our experiences we had a meditation for 30 minutes in the Shambhala tradition led by Hėlen: eyes cast downwards but not entirely closed and focus on our breathing. Continuing the meditation we remained seated on our mats and did some easy yoga excercises to slowly start up our bodies. After about 10 minutes of those excercises we went outside to a little patch of grass where we practiced some simple standing yoga postures. It was more like tai chi: easy movements that could also be done by people without any yoga experience to warm up our bodies and to get the energy flowing.
With the presentation of our photos, mediation and yoga the morning had passed away for the most part and we became hungry so we slowly walked our Miksang walk to one of the beach restaurants for lunch. The photo above and the one directly below are taken during that little walk.
Lunch was great: we all ordered fish and chips and had lots of fun with Hèlen trying to capture a selfie with the four of us (photos not shown). Of course that is not all about contemplative photography, but it was all about capturing a moment and all the fun we had while doing that.
At the end of the day I was wondering how I could keep my equanimity in discourse with others, because that is the whole point of meditation isn't it? That is a question which will probably take a while to figure out.
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| Hėlen checking the selfies on her iPhone |
Hėlen encouraged us to keep on photographing during the whole day, including in moments like lunch and dinner. In this way we'd learn to keep our awareness open all the time.
Like I said, the restaurant was on the beach. After lunch I hung around the boulevard for a while to see what was going on. The three pictures below I took from that area.
The rest of the pictures I took on the way back home. Hėlen gave us about an hour to roam around freely and an hour to select 20 pictures, 20 of our freshest moments. Below are the rest of my pictures of that day.
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| colourful spades |
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| empty flower buckets |
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| bright purple lavender |
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| love padlocks |
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| reflection of a white grid in a red car |
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| shiny curtain |
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| three brooms in a row |
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| two flowers and the street |
I hope you appreciate my images of the practice day. I had an amazing day filled with lots of tranquil, fun, fresh perceptions, love and friendship.
