I picked up Google Glass, which is essentially a smartphone that you wear on your head, on July 6. I’d made a pitch to Google in order to get Glass, saying that I wanted to explore it as a tool for teaching meditation and mindfulness.
The timing in some ways wasn’t great, because I was working a second job at the University of New Hampshire over the summer, teaching personal development and study skills to teens from low income families. And when that seven-week stint was up I had a heck of a lot of catching up to do back at Wildmind.
But one of the things I did do with Glass while teaching at UNH was to use it to record some guided meditation sessions I led with my teens. You can’t actually record just audio on Glass, so what I’ve done here is to take a video and strip out the audio.
I’ll be posting more about my adventures with Glass now that I’ve caught up.
A word about the quality. I was teaching in a large room with constant noise from the air conditioning and from the fan of a projector. So I had to talk much more loudly than I would normally do, and you can also hear the machine noise in the background. But here’s the recording, which is 12 minutes long.
The meditation starts with a brief body scan and then turns into a lovingkindness practice. It uses an approach that I call “loving gaze,” which is a quick and easy way to evoke a sense of kindly, caring, compassionate attention.
I was able to get Google Glass thanks to many generous donors who covered the costs involved. (Although I won a competition in order to become a Glass Explorer I still had to pay for the device.) One of the most generous donors was Adrian Lucas of Sassakala Microfarm. I’ve visited Adrian’s microfarm in Florida, where he gets an amazingly bountiful crop from a vertical hydroponic farm with a tiny footprint, and it’s very impressive. In fact, Sassakala catered a retreat I led in Florida this February, and the veggies were delicious.
Sassakala’s aims are:
- to show kids where real food comes from
- to encourage you to take control of your health by growing some of your own food at home
- to show you how much fun it can be to cook beautiful, healthy meals for yourself from the food you grow
- to show you that it’s not only possible but also amazingly rewarding to put food on the table that came from seeds you planted and nurtured yourself
- for you to grow your own food
Please visit Sassakala at Sassakala.com