How does it work?
Over the eight-week program, you will be learning a number of key skills that allow you to tune into and become aware of your experience in the moment.
Firstly, you will be establishing a routine of spending some time each day by yourself formally practicing mindfulness meditation. By choosing to engage in this practice you will be learning how to cultivate deep states of relaxation and well-being. You will also be learning how to bring a moment-to-moment awareness to your experience, and then apply this awareness so you can respond - rather than react in habitual ways - to everyday life situations. This becomes much easier to do when you are regularly practicing the formal meditation each day.
The course will provide an opportunity for you to examine and reflect on the patterns of your own mind, feelings and actions, and to gently interrupt patterns of self-criticism and unhelpful actions.
We will be learning how to accept and embrace the full range of experience that life inevitably brings - pleasurable, joyful and expansive experience as well as painful conditions in their various forms - worry, anxiety, tension, impatience, anger, grief, sadness and even despair.
Moving towards these conditions with an enquiring attitude, rather than trying to hold on to them, or to escape or avoid them, can bring some surprising and refreshing results.
"When we commit ourselves to paying attention in an open way, without falling prey to our own likes and dislikes, opinions and prejudices, projections and expectations, new possibilities open up and we have a chance to free ourselves from the straitjacket of unconsciousness."
Jon Kabat-Zinn
"Wherever You Go, There You Are"
