Mindfulness Practice
Mindfulness is a practice that helps develop our capacities of concentration, awareness, compassion, insight and emotion regulation. For all of us, emotionally charged moments and dynamics can challenge our equilibrium and general sense of well-being. Mindfulness helps to develop greater self-awareness and understanding of our body’s cues. It increases our ability to sit with and tolerate challenges, freeing us to bring our best selves to the moment. Once ‘practiced’ this becomes a most valuable life resource.
Mindfulness helps us develop a very deep capacity to concentrate and experience whatever is happening in the present moment – without judgment or analysis, helping to quiet self-criticism, build self-acceptance and clarify internal conflicts. The mindful stance is centered, calm, aware, compassionate and non-reactive; an ideal stance for all of us when facing challenges in our own thinking or in relationship with others at home or at work.
Mindfulness accesses a place of awareness from which we observe, notice and feel what is happening inside us, as well as between ourselves and others. This embodied self-awareness helps to integrate mind and body, strengthens our observing ego and gives us a practical tool to regulate our emotional responses. Mindfulness expands our ability to self-soothe and to tolerate anxiety and other intense emotions that come with change.
Mindfulness meditation practice can help us understand through direct personal experience how much of our internal suffering is self-created. We experience moment-by-moment both how we make things worse for ourselves and how we can bring ourselves relief. In this way, mindfulness can help loosen the seeming automatic, fixated and rigid aspects of our ‘way’ of seeing and being, offering us healthier resources and opening up to us new choices and responses.
The Small Group Mindfulness Practice Experience
How do we keep from being triggered and activated in these trying economic times? How do we sit with our own fears of income loss and financial uncertainty, and still interact in a positive way with our family, friends and associates? How do we endure setbacks, personal losses, and challenges others experience that impact our lives and sense of wellbeing? An enhanced capacity to hold uncertainty and anxiety and to stay centered and grounded enables us to meet challenging times well. Mindfulness skills help develop embodied self-awareness and emotional resilience; it also builds a capacity for regulating anxiety, stress and intense emotions that accompany uncertainty.
Designed to introduce and practice mindful awareness, this recurring small-group practice provides a hands-on, personal experience of the transformative power of mindfulness. Both conceptual and experiential, we will focus on your own personal growth while enhancing your effectiveness with others. Time will be set aside to address questions and individual concerns. Regardless of your degree of experience, you will gain a personal understanding of how mindfulness can help you develop myriad skills:
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The ability to concentrate, focus and be in the present moment
•The ability to hold powerful emotions, self-regulate and reduce anxiety
•The ability to notice and tend to your internal reactions
•The ability to be present in an open, non-judgmental, and compassionate way toward both yourself and others
•The ability to tolerate and sit with “not-knowing,” uncertainty, confusion, paradox and change
There is no pre-requisite for this training, and no previous experience with mindfulness is required. This is about growing our freedom and ability to tolerate uncertainty, increasing our skill in positively influencing our world and enjoying our lives moment-by-moment.
