Online Mindfulness Sessions

This week's mindfulness practice is a focus on observing the senses, how we perceive our senses as we observe them. This is an aid to cultivating the practice of being in the moment. Be guided by the recording above in being present to the moment by being conscious of your senses.  It brings to mind the famous poem or song by e e cummings called "i thank you God for most this amazing day..."  depicted below. 

i thank you God for most this amazing

day for the leaping greenly spirit of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for

everything which is natural which is infinite

which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any - lifted from the no of nothing -

human merely being, doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

ee cummings

Sometimes it is easy to be generous outward, to give and give and give, and yet remain ungenerous to yourself. 

 But you lose the balance of your soul if you do not take care of yourself. 

 You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you. 

 You can suffer a desperate hunger to be loved.  

 You can search long years in lonely places, far outside of yourself. 

 Yet the whole time this love is right here within you – you have been blind to its presence.

 When you greet love, allowing it to come into your life, unrecognised dimensions of yourself are awakened and blossom and grow.

 You gain little glimpses of your true light, colours and contours. 

 You feel the inspiration of its mysteries and the wonder of its possibilities as you go out and embrace your life with kindness.

John O'Donohue

So Many Ways to Do It Right

This longing to get it right—
to not only find the right path
but to walk it
with grace,
without stalling, without stumbling.

But the forest is dark and deep
and the paths are many—
and I fall, and in falling,
I stop.

So this is what it takes
to notice the beauty of being still,
to see how staying in place, too, is a path,
how falling, too, is a grace.

How much easier it is to walk now
when I trust any path I’m on is the right one,
even this one where I fall,
even this one when I don’t move at all.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Do try this online guided mindfulness practice from this week which provides the rationale for why the mind needs a rest and shows how bringing attention to the moment can do just that!

The time for the online guided mindfulness practice for May will be 07:30 every Wednesday. The session is 20 - 25 minutes. 

The recording above is very beautiful as it is recorded by the late Thich Nhat Hanh who was an incredible mindfulness teacher and practitioner.

If you are interested you can access it directly below by copying the link and placing it in your browser. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62F0Y6PKes

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl

Join mindfulness practice to slow down your mind sufficiently to notice the space between stimulus and response. 

Anxiety and the breath 

September recordings on guided online mindfulness practice

Thank  you for joining the Mindfulness Practice this evening. We were guided by Dr KristIn Neff's meditation on self compassion. Insert the url below into your browser to follow it. 

https://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/LKM.self-compassion_cleaned_01-cleanedbydan.mp3

It is such a time of pain and stress for everyone but we all seem to leave ourselves far behind in terms of compassion. This practice guides us to be more self compassionate and less judgemental of ourselves. It is phenomenal the healing power of self compassion. 

There are a lot of resources available for mindfulness practice out there but there is one which also provides exercises on self care and that is Dr KristIn Neff's 

Self-Compassion Guided Meditations and Exercises

There are twelve guided meditations, one or two in video but most downloadable as mp4 or mp3.  

The emphasis is on self -compassion - the key to overcoming much of our burnout and related issues. 

The exercises cover the following eight areas. 

1. How would you treat a friend?
2. Self - Compassion break
3. Exploring Self -Compassion through writing 
4. Supportive Touch 
5. Changing your critical self talk
6. Self - Compassion journal
7. Identifying what we really want 
8. Taking care of the caregiver

Please check out the site. 

“You can’t outrun your pain. You are strong enough to face whatever is in front of you. Medicating your pain will only bring more pain. The only genuine shortcut life offers is facing your feelings. They won’t kill you. Feelings are your soul’s way of communicating. Pain is trying to teach you something, and if you don’t listen now, it will speak louder and louder until it is heard."

— Jewel in Never Broken (p. 377)

Seth Godin speaks about “a practice” that keeps you on track and it goes like this:

The poverty of our intentions, if you wake up in a bad mood, if you hit a speed bump, if you get a bit of negative feedback from someone who is just a bystander, it’s super easy to spiral out of control and to determine that maybe you should take some time away or that what you’re working on isn’t really important enough. In those moments, you are not the best version of yourself but you’re still yourself. If you have a practice, you get through them. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/seth-godin/

Before starting your practice, read the words below from Mark Nepo on uncovering ourselves. 

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.

 Mark Nepo, 1951–

 In The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

Mindfulness: a technique to bring our attention into the moment

If we give our full attention to the task at hand we are more productive and able to assimilate whatever content we are presented with.  Very few of us can do this most of the time and certainly even fewer of us, all the time. The reason for this is that we live in a very stimulating world and we are bombarded with competing demands on our attention constantly.

These demands for our attention are physical, emotional and mental. Every single stimulus passes through our limbic system before it reaches the relevant part of the brain that will describe what it is we are sensing or in other words – decode the stimulus. The limbic system is highly sensitive to our breath and intimately tied to our emotional well- being. It is a gateway to the rest of the brain and if it is in equilibrium we are in a better position to respond optimally to whatever we are confronted with.

Mindfulness is a way to bring about equilibrium. It quietens an over active mind and brings about an awareness of being in the present; to live moment by moment. This does require practice, but the beauty of it is that you can do the exercises anywhere and the benefits are immediate.

There are many ways that you can approach mindfulness. One way which may appeal to you is to do a free online course which you can complete in your own time. Monash University offers such a course. It is not intrusive, it is not prescriptive and it is grounded in the latest research. I recommend it.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/mindfulness-wellbeing-performance

Below is a very worthwhile read from Dr Craig Hassed, one of the conveners of the course and a Professor at Monash. The article gives you an overview of mindfulness, its benefits and some exercises to get you going. 

I also include an audio file from our own Mind Matters resources which you may find useful. It takes you through a process of quietening the mind by starting with the demands you make on yourself to achieve.