--- ai_generation_date: '2026-09-20' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2021-01-01' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/12691/20210101-Nikki_Mirghafori-IMC-happy_hour_heart_aspirations_for_the_new_year.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Nikki Mirghafori speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/229 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: 'Happy Hour: Heart Aspirations for the New Year' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12691 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: Xbr673YJG08 imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04' title: 'Happy Hour: Heart Aspirations for the New Year' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbr673YJG08 --- # Happy Hour: Heart Aspirations for the New Year - [Nikki Mirghafori](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/229) _This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._ ## [Happy Hour: Heart Aspirations for the New Year](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12691) Hello, hi! Welcome to 2021. As we transition into a new year, we can consider it as just a concept, and yet, let's take advantage of this concept of renewing our heart, renewing our intentions, renewing our aspirations for practice and for connection. It's a really nice time. Many people connect with New Year's resolutions at this time, and there's a lot I can say about that—how to do them, how not to do them—but one thing that I think would be lovely for us to consider connecting to is our values and intentions. In fact, I taught a half-day earlier today that some of you were at, and one thing that folks appreciated was bringing up and reconnecting with values important to us at this time. To reconnect with them, to honor them, to see them. What I'd like to do for today is to bring up a list of values. I will put a link to it in the chat, and you can also find this list on my website. I invite us to spend a couple of minutes reading over this list to see what one, two, or three values really speak to us right now, really move us. These values might be ones that we feel in ourselves right now or ones that we want to incline our hearts and minds more towards in the new year. If you still need more time with the list, raise your hand so I can get a sense of how many people need more time. Okay, take another 30 seconds. And again, you just need one or two. It doesn't have to be perfect, and this is just a practice. You can always come back to this list. ## Guided Meditation The invitation for the practice that I'd like to lead tonight is connecting with your highest intention, with a value that really speaks to you, as a way of greeting yourself and greeting this new year of 2021. I'd like to leave a lot of silent practice time tonight, especially at the beginning when we're sitting and connecting with our breath and with our body to really settle. I invite you to relate to these not from your head, but really from your heart. Because this is, after all, Happy Hour, and this has to do with heart practices: mettā[^1], gratitude, and the various Brahma Vihāras[^2]. How can we really connect with our values from our heart, from our devotion? Not from a place of, "Oh, I should be more practical," but from love, an attraction, an honoring, a beauty. That is how I'd like to invite us to relate to these values. I'd like to invite you to get into your meditation posture. If you need to, move and shift. Arriving with the breath. The breath moving throughout the body. Being received and relaxing. Softening each part. Whole body landing and just receiving the breath. Inviting the mind to settle, the heart to relax in this moment. Appreciating, embracing silence. Soothing, comforting, settling. And then when thoughts arise, just as at New Year's there's confetti—all the colorful, attractive pieces of shiny paper do land on the ground, they settle—invite them to settle, to drop, to land. Let the space of your awareness be spacious and clear. Open with each breath. Now I'd like to invite you, if you would, to connect to a quality, to a value. Maybe a quality of the heart that we've been putting together over the past days, weeks, and months that you aspire to continue to cultivate. You feel its value and its beauty in your life. Let your heart connect to its goodness. Or maybe it is something from the list that refreshed your memory that this value is important to you in your life. Whatever it is, bring this aspiration into your heart center, the middle of your chest. Holding it dear. Imagine it is actually already a part of you. It's already here. In fact, I'm going to ask you, if you would, to place one of your hands on your heart center, the middle of your chest, as if you're connecting with this value, with this beauty, with this goodness. Really connect with it: "Yes, I see you. I sense you. I feel you. You're important to me. You are so important to me. I value you." And as you connect with this goodness that's already here, there is a wholesome desire for its deepening, its further cultivation, for it to spread through your life, your heart, to serve you and others in the world. Let it be a connecting with the glass half full, not empty. Not, "Oh, I fail in this way and that way, and I don't have enough of it." This is not the time for that. Right now, you can choose what perspective to take. You can choose how to incline your heart. Choose to see the beauty, the goodness that's already here. The desire for this value to continue to grow. Just breathing with this goodness. Letting it resonate, not thinking about it. As if dropping a pebble into a pond, keep dropping this aspiration into your heart, to your body, letting it reverberate. Every time you drop it in, it is as if you were breathing this value in and out of your heart. Breathing it in, breathing it out. See your heart growing in its strength, in its connection to this goodness. It washes over you, engulfing you, filling the whole space of your heart, your body, and beyond. Rest in this value, in this goodness. It's not so much that it's yours, but it's expansive, as if it were a cosmic hug. This value hugging you, holding you, embracing you. You feel its goodness in your heart. It's not so much yours; it's bigger than you. Keep breathing, connecting with it, breathing it in, feeling it all around. Imbuing your heart, you imbued in it. This goodness, this grace, this beauty that moves through you, has moved through you, and you invite it to move through you. It is bigger than you. As if you make offerings of yourself. You make offerings of your heart, your thoughts, speech, and actions on its altar, dedicating, devoting your heart to it, to its goodness and beauty. As you serve this value, it serves you. Serving the world in a way that, who's serving whom? It's goodness multiplied. Goodness seeing its goodness, gazing at itself and gazing back. Just letting yourself be breathed with this value, with this aspiration for goodness. Seeing perhaps how this goodness can grow in you. It could just be symbolic, this light shining through you and bringing more goodness to your life and touching the lives of others. Whatever symbolic imagery works for you, invite it. You can be creative as long as it's supportive. And for the last moments of the sit, let your heart again connect, acknowledge, and see its own calling. For your heart to bow to its calling, its aspiration in the new year. And for you to bow to the wholesomeness of this intention, honoring the beauty of this intention, and appreciating yourself for having shown up. You showed up in this moment with intention, with your highest aspirations, appreciating self, other, and the world. Thank you for your practice and for showing up. ## Community and Co-Creation Being the beginning of the year, a special time of the year, I want to make sure we have plenty of time today for really connecting in community. It feels like a really precious time to share our beauty, our intentions, and to hold each other witness. There's so much beauty in letting it be witnessed by others, and letting yourself witness others. So with that, let's head into our small breakout groups now, and we'll leave time at the end for coming together for sharing. _[Breakout rooms commence]_ Welcome back everyone. What I'd like to invite us to do is fill out a word cloud together with our intentions and aspirations. It's just a fun visual way. I put a link in the chat where you can enter three aspirations of your heart, and you can enter them multiple times. _[Participants fill out the word cloud]_ Great, we have 15 entries! And more entries are coming, and it rearranges itself, so beautiful. It just warms my heart to see some of these qualities we've been practicing together. Compassion, kindness, commitment, self-care, courage, gratitude, generosity, non-harm, love, acceptance, joy, trust, abundance, collaboration, mindfulness, resilience, empathy, receiving, mettā, fairness, interdependence, nourishment, optimism, respect, curiosity, humility, ethical action, freedom, creativity, peace. It is so heartwarming. The way a word cloud works, whatever is mentioned more times gets larger in the image. So many votes for compassion, mindfulness, kindness, non-harm. This is so lovely. Thank you for doing this little co-creation together. ## Failures of Kindness Given that mindfulness, compassion, and kindness are really shared aspirations coming up, I want to share one more thing with you. I have an app that many of you might know called WeCroak. It's a mindfulness of death contemplation app, and it sends you a reminder five times a day that you're going to die. I love it as a way to realize my time. Many of you already know that I teach mindfulness of death—it is one of my passions. I'm actually going to teach a daylong at the end of January, so any of you who are wondering what mindfulness of death is like, come and check it out. Anyway, not only does it remind you that you're going to die, but it also gives you beautiful quotes to reflect on. A few days ago I got this quote that stopped me in my tracks, especially given that it's the new year: "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness." I find that really powerful, by George Saunders. The idea is, if you're looking back at your life from your deathbed, what might you regret the most? ## Q&A and Closing I've shared a lot tonight. Well, you've shared a lot with the Mentimeter[^3] word cloud that we co-created together. **Participant:** Where are you teaching the meditation on death? **Nikki:** It's at Spirit Rock, and all the information for everything that I teach is on my website. Well, I see it's 7 o'clock. Oh, Kim has a question. I'm happy to stay an extra couple of minutes if that would be helpful. **Kim:** I don't know if this might be of interest to other people too. I wonder about equanimity. I have appreciated in Happy Hour how in the meditations that you lead, I've felt mettā in my body and I've felt compassion. I'm wondering, is equanimity something that we could be led to feel? I mean, is that a thing? **Nikki:** Yes, absolutely. You can definitely feel a state of equanimity throughout the body, mind, and heart, just as you can feel mettā and compassion. Now that you said that, maybe I'll spend the next few sessions practicing equanimity! Because I think it's a beautiful practice that maybe we don't have enough of at Happy Hour. You've planted the seed. Equanimity, here it comes! Thank you all for showing up, for practicing, for showing up with the beauty of your heart, your intentions, your aspirations, to support yourself, others, and the world. May your aspirations for cultivating beauty, goodness, love, compassion, kindness, and all that you shared tonight be a cause and condition for your waking up, and the waking up, goodness, and freedom of all beings everywhere. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free. Thank you everyone. --- [^1]: **Mettā:** A Pali word meaning loving-kindness or goodwill. [^2]: **Brahma Vihāras:** The four "divine abodes" or sublime states in Buddhism: loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), empathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). [^3]: **Mentimeter:** Interactive presentation software used to create word clouds and polls. Original transcript said "MTI meter", corrected to "Mentimeter" based on context.