Articles and blog posts written by team members, tutors and supervisors of the Mindfulness Association about how they bring mindfulness into their lives.
Last weekend was our 10th anniversary celebration and I felt that the celebration manifested some key qualities of the Mindfulness Association: practice, presence, common humanity, compassionate messiness, kindness and joy. Qualities that Lana has captured beautifully in her documentary ‘Swimming Upstream: Ten Years of the Mindfulness Association’ that was premiered at the weekend. I am…
My heart is full. I write this in a fully mindful and awake state still feeling the buzz of the Members Weekend coursing through my body – it’s an energy thing, not from the coffee I had this morning but it feels similar! and I feel such gratitude flowing out from my lamp-lit heart; the…
Recently I have become aware of activities that I do that become a complete immersion, away from my habitual, incessant thinking patterns. Anything that is powerful enough to enable me to become totally present and not drown in my ruminations about the past, worries about the future and self-criticism comes along like a sigh of…
Life at the moment feels a bit like a dream, with the days falling through me. I have been practicing a lot because we have been facilitating the MSc year end retreat. This is great, as Choden and Kristine are co-facilitating. This means that when I am not teaching myself I get to…
Yesterday, I taught for the second time a one-day workshop for mindfulness teachers about teaching mindfulness online. I am teaching it for the third time on Sunday 24 May. One of the issues I address on this workshop is our expectations and assumptions about teaching mindfulness online. A couple of the assumptions we explore are:…
In our mindfulness training we learn how the mind has a tendency to be negative. Rick Hanson calls this a ‘negativity bias’. He explains how negative thoughts stick to the mind like Velcro, and yet positive thoughts slide off like Teflon. Over evolution, our minds were trained to react to threats more than opportunities. Rick…
Us Brits are famous for our stiff upper lip and like many of us, I have been holding it together with as much optimism as I can muster through these weeks of lockdown. However, any emotions we are feeling need space to move through us, or else they get suppressed, they fester and then they…
My dear auntie Jean in London has been sending me photos of rainbows she encounters on her daily walks; rainbows drawn on the pavements, pinned in windows and hung on gates; a spontaneous phenomenal creative response to the personal, local, national and global crisis we find ourselves in. The images themselves appear as symbols of…
I hope that you are all faring well as we settle into our fifth week of lockdown. I am curious about how adaptable we humans are and how many of us have now settled into a new more limited routine of life, with its pleasures and hardships. I have had many unexpected lessons in impermanence…