In my weekly blog, Heather’s Musings, I write about what has been happening in my life and how I am applying my mindfulness, compassion and insight practice to it. The process of writing the blog is often an opportunity for me to gain more clarity and recognise what is happening and I find it highly beneficial. My wish is that it is also helps other meditation practitioners who are on a similar journey.
The opinions and beliefs that I express in this blog are my own and do not represent the opinion of the Mindfulness Association.
Over the last few weeks every day feels like groundhog day (Actually, I recommend this as a great movie with Bill Murray for cheering yourself up!). I wake up, turn the electric heater on, press the snooze button on my phone three times to give the room time to warm up, get up, put something…
We have had a lot of snow and ice in January and more snow and ice so far in February and for at least the next week. Thankfully my MAHQ friends bought me some snow boots for my birthday at New Year. They have been well used! However, I have caught myself moaning quite a…
As this current lockdown progresses and the implications of the pandemic for our day to day life in the longer term become more apparent it is easy to become overwhelmed. As human beings we have a negativity bias which orients us to over-focus on threats and challenges and many of us may notice this in…
When Kristine joined the Board of the Mindfulness Association, one of the tasks she was passionate about was bringing our equality, diversity and inclusion policy to life. I have been very keen to support her in this work as I think it is important that we all walk our talk, rather than paying lip service…
I led the free daily sit on Friday evening and we did a practice using a mantra of ‘Body like a mountain, breath like the wind, heart of compassion like sunshine and mind like the sky’. At the end of the practice an interesting discussion ensued about anger and fear. A first participant shared their…
‘The only way to take care of the future is to be present now.’ This year has been a year of solitude and of connection for me. In January I moved into a remote cottage, on my own, after 20 years of living a happy family life. Then lockdown arrived in March. And I…
I spent some of my weekend writing about the three emotional system model, based in the Compassion Focussed Therapy work of Prof. Paul Gilbert. According to this model there are three emotional systems, threat, drive and soothe and they tend to be out of balance for most of us, due to our evolved brain, our…
One of the jobs I get to do is to come up with the monthly themes and phrases for the MA monthly calendar. Then I send them on to Lisa, who works her magic and creates the beautiful calendars. For Christmas I chose a theme of connecting at Christmas because often this can be emotionally…
Last week I led a five day compassion retreat as part of our Level 2: Responding with compassion course. It was intense, in a good way, and for many participants transformative. At the end of the course we had a sharing, which conveyed the significant switches of perspective that people had experienced, in particular a…