Eighteen months into this new Masters degree course I thought I would add some of my own reflections to those of our students on this course, after our second year retreat at Samye Ling. If you want a life changing course – go for this course. It’s been amazing – the sense of growth from…
Patient: Doctor! I feel like a pair of curtains Doctor: Pull yourself together! This week a blog appeared out of an insight I had after I sat mindfully unstitching and then stitching some curtains. I saw how the mind tried to steal my bliss by making up a story to make me feel bad. But…
This month let’s practice seeing our world and our place within it with fresh eyes. Perhaps our fresh eyes will bring fresh ideas of how to engage with our world. We don’t have to aim for grand heroics, small is beautiful! Our Engaged Mindfulness course is running again beginning in September. This calendar gives you…
One of the areas of interest to the Mindfulness Association and the wider mindfulness fields is Engaged Mindfulness. By this we mean applying our mindfulness meditation practice to how we may feel about the state of the world on a social and environmental level and exploring ways of contributing positively through compassionate action. So, what does…
I started practising Mindfulness in 2016 to help me deal with corporate stress. I continued my Mindfulness journey by studying with Mindfulness Now, eventually gaining my mindfulness teaching accreditation at the end of 2019. Even though I had been studying for a few years, I still felt like I was at the beginning of my…
In the wake of the pandemic overall there are lower levels of mental and physical wellbeing. Levels of stress and anxiety are being exacerbated by worries about the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine and ongoing environmental degradation. In an aging population with less access to the NHS many are living with chronic…
Secular mindfulness began in the clinical realm with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which was developed in the early 1980s by John Kabat-Zinn in the US for people experiencing chronic health conditions. This inspired the development of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) in the mid-1990s by Mark Williams and others within the UK as an…
I did the members teaching this week on this topic of living without regret. To prepare for it I looked at some research on this topic. Research by Gilovich et al (1995) looks into what people regret most in their lives and why, and indicates that mistaken actions generate more regret in the short term,…
We are in the process of developing a new course called ‘Living Well to Die Well’ and as part of this process I have been looking at the evidence base for compassion meditation in relation to the process of dying. This is in relation to the person who is dying, the bereaved and also those…