Our reflection this Sunday will come from M+ Member and Cohasset resident Bill Burnett. Bill will share a little of his story and how the Mindfulness Plus community has made a meaningful impact on his life over the past three years. Here’s a little about Bill

Bill Burnett has called Cohasset home for more than 25 years, where he and his wife, Sigrid, raised their twin daughters. A former NCAA All-American swimmer, Bill is the founder of the Cohasset and Nantucket Triathlons and has spent much of his career bringing people together through sports. He's also a business owner, swim coach, and a big believer in the power of positivity and making meaningful connections with others.

Another word to describe Bill is maximizer.   Bill enjoys working with something that someone else has made and brightening it up, adding something of his own and getting it to work better than it did before.  It’s a special kind of generosity to add something without taking away; to add “your” value yet to not make it “your own.”  M+’s website is compelling and sharp because Bill has made it so.

Bill generously offered me something at our very first meeting, and my reaction almost sunk our friendship before it started.  The adjective maximizer comes from the CliftonStrengths assessment, a tool that has meant a lot to Bill.  Toward the end of our conversation, Bill told me about this assessment tool and suggested I might find it helpful.  Before Bill could finish his sentence and right before his eyes, I morphed into a paranoid neurotic.  I’d recently had a bad work experience involving a personality test, and so Bill’s natural warmth and good nature, refracted through his particular suggestion, felt like the fires of the Inquisition.  I was burning up.

I think I asked Bill if someone from “the community” had “put him up to this.”  I sensed that if I took this personality test, I would be exposed as unfit and unwell, and that I might be banished from the South Shore.  Bill surely thought I was crazy, and I suppose I was, having lost all sense of perspective.  He kindly hung in with me (he’s a maximizer, after all) and I quickly realized I was projecting a strange personal fear upon this lovely human being and his straightforward suggestion.  After cooling down, I took the CliftonStrengths assessment and gained some very helpful insights about myself.  (I highly recommend talking to Bill if you’d like to learn more for yourself…)

I don’t know what Bill will share on Sunday morning.  I’m 100% certain the experience of hearing him will be helpful, enlivening, and good.  Though it is a risk of openhearted curiosity that something might happen we weren’t expecting, that what we imagined would be helpful doesn’t feel helpful at all.  Mindfulness practice creates safe and welcoming space, and in this space we can keep our hearts open to whatever comes up.  We can hold and explore the differences between “helpful” and “unhelpful,” and not just write off new ideas because they’re unfamiliar or seem like something that hurt us before. Mindfulness practice helps us take good care of ourselves and of each other.

I hope this Sunday’s gathering will be especially helpful, as we face the particular uncertainties of Election Day.  May our practice help us extend lovingkindness to all going on in our communities and in our world at large. 

Come sit in the beautiful Beechwood space, enjoy live music (harpist Brent Woo returns), and connect with supportive community.  Bring a friend!

— Jonathan