At our recent membership weekend I ran a taster session with my friend and dietitian Michaela (Ki) James about the new Mindfulness Based Healthy Living Course that we have recently developed. One element of the course is Mindful eating and so I thought that I would review the research on Mindful eating and Mindfulness and…
Hi There, welcome back to my Mindful Futures blog! Over the weekend I took part in my first ever mindfulness course, the level one being present. I really enjoyed myself, admittedly more than I was expecting to. I think my dog also quite enjoyed it, she spent the first day sat by my side snoozing…
Mindfulness + Wine = Winefulness? I don’t think so! I like a glass of wine. Or two. And sometimes it’s three. Mindfulness and wine. Hmm, not sure. This week I have decided to focus on wine, or I should say the lack of it, as my mindfulness practice. The Famous Buddhist art of Not-Doing! A…
I have been asked to write my blog this week on the topic of how meditation works. To begin with it is important to bear in mind that this whole field of research is in its early stages, much of the research methodology has weaknesses, and there is much more work to do before we…
Simple family exchanges are where I exercise my Mindfuness practice. Isn’t that just exactly where it’s all happening? Mindfulness has helped me so much with this unravelling which is a truly messy affair and takes a while, well, like forever, and I am deeply committed to that. The more I practice, the more I go…
This weekend I was away with a friend and we had an interesting discussion about the amount of free will that we are able to exercise in our day to day lives. My feeling is that we think we exercise far more free will than we actually do and that the main advantage of training…
This week my own challenge is to try to focus. I have an important document to write by next week. And I have this blog to write. I was going to write this blog about the document called “Initial Thoughts” I have to write next week because I thought it might help me galvanise my…
TRAINING TO TEACH MINDFULNESS – THE MBLC RETREAT I don’t really want to be a teacher, I said, as I applied for the course. Fear was pulling me back, but something stronger was pulling me – compassion to share all this with others. Facing fears in the MBLC Teaching retreat, accepting, meeting and looking deeply…
It was as if a window suddenly blew open and the sky outside the mind came flooding in. My childhood shriveled to a close, thread of smoke that rose and touched a cloud — or the cloud’s replica adrift on the slow river of thinking — and disappeared inside it. In that dark water, a…