Overview

What does it involve?
This course involves an eight-week programme of structured learning in classes and at home which will include:
- mindfulness meditation training
- body awareness and relaxation exercises
- exploration of patterns of thinking, feeling and action
- brief lectures and discussions
- individual feedback and support
- commitment to daily homework practice

Over the course of 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.

What is mindfulness?

Origins of the programme

Who is it for?

What does it involve?

How does it work?

Letting go is powerful

The importance of practice

 

We will be using lots of different strategies to develop this mindfulness.

Firstly, we will help you to establish a routine of spending some time each day by yourself formally practising mindfulness meditation. By choosing to engage in this practice you will learn how to cultivate deep states of relaxation and well being. You will learn both sitting and moving meditations.

You will also be learning how to bring a moment-to-moment awareness to your everyday activities, and developing techniques of engaging in a creative - rather than reactive - way 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.

Through these means, we will be learning how to accept and embrace the full range of experience that life 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.