I returned on Sunday from my first Gaia House retreat (Origins and Applications of Mindfulness) taught by Christina Feldman and John Peacock. The experience has made a deep impression - having the gift of so much time to practice guided by very special teachers, spending our days in companionable silence, with a sense of great spaciousness and time slowing down. And the discoveries.
Back in the 'normal' world two days later I see how quickly we can become sucked back into the usual habits and driven behaviour. I set myself a mission (an 'intention') of carrying with me, day upon day, as much as possible from the four days at Gaia House. I discovered on Sunday evening that I had brought a little physical piece of the place with me when a purple feather from the duster I used in my work period to de-cobweb the house fell out of my sock (?!)
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Today I remembered a time on my first 8-week mindfulness course, as we gathered for a full day of practising together. I had quite idiotically hit my head on the floor the night before while playing with the boys, and had a corking headache. I'd had a disturbed night's sleep, I was in pain, annoyed, upset and worried that I was not going to be able to cope with the practices or 'get the most' from a day I had been looking forward to.
I confided in our teacher, describing the ridiculous circumstances in which my head hit the wooden floor ('all my own fault'), my tiredness, head pain and accompanying worries about what the day would be like in the face of this. He kindly but firmly told me to ditch the story of how the pain had come to be. He then suggested that as I practised I could focus on the sensations rather than 'pain', go to an anchor of my choosing (the breath or a grounding part of my body...) and hold the sensations of the pain in my hands, with gentle care and curiosity. As I practised and tried this for myself, I cradled the pain sensations in my hands, stepped back and was able to observe them fluttering, pulsating and always changing. I had been adding "optional suffering" to my experience of pain, bracing against it, striving to push it away, dwelling on the story, angry with myself and the situation, and feeling only more tense and wound up because of this. I will never forget what I discovered for myself that day about another way to relate to unpleasant experience - through a few wise and timely words from our teacher. From Jon Kabat-Zinn's foreword to Teaching Mindfulness by McCown, Reibel and Micozzi. At once motivating and sobering (but mostly the former)...
'No one ever said it was easy to be a mindfulness teacher, or practitioner. In many ways, it is the hardest work in the world, just to be present for a moment, and open-hearted. 'Hopefully you will become intimate over time with classroom moments of not knowing what to do, what to say, who your students are, and what or who you are, and yet be willing to sit/stand/be/move in the not-knowing and reside in the present moment in full awareness — with an agenda (since you are the teacher) and with no agenda (since you are the teacher), and no attachment to any outcome, yet with the intention to be of service and the aspiration that everybody’s suffering in the room will be honoured and held in awareness, without any attempt to fix anything that you think might be broken. The invitation for yourself is that you are, together with all the classroom participants (who are equally as wise and beautiful and worthy as yourself), co-creating or “enacting” or “allowing” the mindfulness-based curriculum to emerge, and trusting in that emergence moment by moment as you rest in awareness — an awareness that is intrinsically boundless, spacious, luminous, empty and kind.' Breath awareness practice (from 'Guided meditations for love and wisdom' Sharon Salzberg)...
Noticing mind wandering, observing my thoughts and letting them drift away like birthday balloons, coming back to my breath as an anchor, over and over again. As the guidance came to a close: 'Remember that in letting go of distraction the important word is gentle. You can gently let go, we can forgive ourselves for having wandered, with great kindness to ourselves. We can begin again.' Some lovely stuff on cultivating gratitude here: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/gratitude
Mindfulness is sometimes referred to as appreciative awareness. I don't tend to make resolutions but this New Year I've started an 'I am grateful for...' calendar, to encourage me to notice and appreciate what makes me happy. Last year we had a family grateful jar but didn't manage to make it a daily habit, although the boys remembered and engaged with it from time to time. My husband thinks this is super cheesy, but I'm convinced of the benefits of inclining our minds in this way so my calendar is on the fridge for all to see, to encourage me to keep appreciating what I have, and hopefully others too... A peer on our Foundational MBCT teacher training course had encountered a question during a guided meditation - 'What does it feel like to be aware?' As we talked about this we shared the observation that sometimes it can feel pretty unpleasant. I notice this in my weekly pilates class when I pay attention to the burn of my muscles as I repeatedly push my body to work - and I sometimes find that it is a kind choice to let my mind wander away from this moment. I notice and actively choose to daydream. If I later notice that I am caught up in ruminating on something unhelpful then I can choose to bring my attention back to my breath and the sensations in my body.Through mindfulness practice I am getting better at noticing where my mind is and choosing what is most wise and helpful for me to focus on in a given moment. And if I can be aware of my awareness then I can actively choose to protect myself if what is here right now is too painful or unpleasant to be with. This is not 'avoidance', but rather acting with wisdom and compassion. Awareness, and the awareness of awareness, opens up the possibility of choice.
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AuthorI'm Claire - and I (re)learn something every day from practising and teaching mindfulness... Archives
March 2022
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