The MindLetter first posted on 25/09/2026. Written by Dr Kitty Wheater. Dear all, Autumn is with us, and term is underway... There are some places remaining on my student and staff & PGR mindfulness courses starting next week in the Chaplaincy - do book soon if you are hoping to join. For this week's MindLetter, I write a little about the Chaplaincy and lunchtime mindfulness sessions, via oases and Katherine Rundell... Campus is bustling: students, bikes, parents, dogs, and skateboarders take to Bristo Square. Herculean staff host quantities of registrations, welcome events, fairs, and inductions. Flyers, doors to myriad opportunities, seemingly float down from the sky: Academic Skills? Tea Society? Plants? Large amounts of burger and halloumi are consumed at departmental BBQs. Emails fly, and breed in corners. Somehow, we emerge from the pre-sessional tunnel of preparation, logistics and anticipation, through the vortex that is Welcome Week – and now everybody is here, and it is almost October.After the melee of Bristo Square, the Chaplaincy’s aged electric doors usher newcomers into quiet. ‘This is an oasis,’ said one discombobulated student this week, in the calm of the book-lined Resource Area, where sofas sit outside my office and free tea and coffee can be brought up from the kitchen downstairs. In the lunchtime mindfulness sessions I teach, students and staff alike drop in somewhat shellshocked. ‘Grounding,’ they say when I ask what they are needing from today’s practice. ‘Calm.’When I think of an oasis, I think of Cheryl Strayed in California in 1995, stumbling amidst scorching desert upon Spanish Needle Creek, in which to wash her dust-streaked legs. I think too of Jenny Odell’s Oakland Rose Garden, her advocacy of what she calls the ‘third space’: a haven of birds and bugs – or simply books and sofas – in which minds are freed from profit incentive or productivity stricture. These spaces work on us differently from mechanical logic; their effect cannot be demanded or bought. They are offered lightly, provided in the original meaning of the word, which is to foresee a need.What need is this? In creek or garden or meditation, we seek respite from the scorch and overwhelm of our proximate world: cool water on sunbaked limbs, and quiet for buzzing heads. People come to mindfulness classes with tiredness, or internal agitation; perhaps something less defined, a vague sense of existential dread, or numb automation. These times and spaces are not a dropping-out, because we cannot stay in such places forever – nor would we wish to. In Odell’s account of the ‘dropping out’ of the 1960s, most of the communes were impermanent, their structures and members alike ultimately confronted with worldly entanglement. Cheryl Strayed had a trail to hike, and each of us here have some sense of purpose or desire that draws us from sofa, yoga mat or cushion back into the hustle.Yet some fundamental rearrangement of our internal furniture takes place in those moments that we take apart. It is by sifting through layers of noise, in quiet, that we hear what is salient; in respite that our minds and bodies can metabolise our recent efforts; and in stillness that we discern more clearly what must move. Call it repair, or simply change: something is different, afterwards, for having gone there.It is, perhaps, a dropping-in, a visit to a place whose existence endures beyond our stay, one that is both apart from the world and yet also a part of it. The texture of mind one encounters in a meditation practice – bubbling with or snaggled by thoughts, weighty or light with energy and mood – is invariably a microcosm of its features in the flow of everyday life. People come to a drop-in session as much to give space to what they know is there, as to escape from it for a short while; to put words to that vague sense of unease, or attune to the feeling beneath the numbness.In this way they’re not so dissimilar, meditation and life. Alongside oases, reading Katherine Rundell’s third book in her magnificent Impossible Creatures trilogy has me thinking about archipelagos, those clusters of islands on shared geology. In Rundell’s Archipelago of mythical creatures, glimourie – the magical life force that runs through all living things – spreads through water, soil and air. Disrupting or sabotaging the Glimourie Tree at the heart of the world causes the force to recede, but there are sites too where it emerges most acutely, where it revives and sustains.It is by dropping in to these places that we sense beneath the island, find the creek or the garden, land in the goodness of our own beating hearts and minds. Whether your glimourie is love, faith, or curiosity, may you drop into its strength in the coming days, somewhere it has been – quietly, self-evidently – all along.Warm wishes for this cool weekend, Kitty Drop into the Chaplaincy for tea and coffee, to read or rest, study or charge your phone, meet friends or colleagues, or eat your lunch. Find us in Bristo Square from 9.30am each weekday. Mindfulness lunchtime drop-in sessions run in the Chaplaincy Mondays, Tuesdays (online) and Fridays, 1.10-1.50pm. This article was published on Friday 25 September 2026
