What a balanced, gentle invitation to accept yourself just as you are while also growing throughout life.
“Each of you is perfect the way you are... and you can use a little improvement.” ~Shunryu Suzuki
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Many of us are tired of grappling with anxiety, overwhelm or a feisty inner critic.
And you may have noticed that going into battle with unwanted thoughts and feelings can often make them worse. Mindfulness-based approaches offer a radically different way of relating to these very human experiences, with kindness, curiosity and deep self-acceptance. But mindfulness needs to be practised gently and regularly for this new way of being to take root and unfold. >> Join our next 4-week course and learn to meditate in a supportive group space. >> Lots of opportunities to ask questions, dispel myths about mindfulness meditation, and share experiences, with the ongoing support of an Oxford Mindfulness Centre-trained, BAMBA-registered mindfulness teacher. >> Option to join our weekly practice group after the course to keep your practice going and deepening. Next course: online via Zoom; Fridays, 11.30am-12.45pm on 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th March Early bird rate of £50 until 18th February. Please get in touch in confidence if the costs involved would prevent you from participating. A book on mindful phone use gave me a month a year back! (check my maths below )
Our phones are designed to addict us but Catherine Price’s book, ‘How to break up with your phone – a 30-day plan’, gave me the focus to turn my smartphone from a temptation into a tool that I use far more consciously. Her book is succinct, hugely readable and full of mindfulness. ‘The problem isn’t smartphones themselves. The problem is our relationship with them. We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad. We’ve never stopped to think about why smartphones are so hard to put down, or who might be benefiting when we pick them up. Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself a chance to stop and think.’ ~Catherine Price In the words of Annie Dillard, ‘How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives’ What do you want to spend your attention and energy on? *As the pandemic took hold in 2020, I found myself scrolling social media and checking news apps a lot more than usual and this quickly became a new habit, or perhaps more accurately a compulsion. I’m sure I am not alone but I really didn’t like it. My settings showed I was spending more than 2 hours a day on my phone. Apparently, this is about average for Brits, although recently I read a BBC article claiming that people now spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on their mobile phone apps! Having worked my way through Catherine’s book, I’m now sitting at around 1 hour’s phone use a day and that feels a much healthier balance for me personally. By my reckoning that’s one hour a day that I have claimed back, so 365 hours a year. Let’s say I am awake and in fully functioning mode for 12 hours a day? 365 hours would equate to 30 ‘awake’ days. A month a year! I’m intent on choosing more consciously how I spend that time… Let Go (or ‘Six Words Of Advice’)
Let go of what has passed. Let go of what may come. Let go of what is happening now. Don’t try to figure anything out. Don’t try to make anything happen. Relax, right now, and rest. by Tilopa (translated by Ken McLeod) Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels Some more wise advice on the ‘New Year, New You’ front, from Oliver Burkeman:
- Don’t set goals too high - Be realistic about how existing obligations may get in the way - Be realistic about will power – it is unlikely you can magically triple your self-discipline levels overnight. Practising mindful awareness of your habitual patterns can help here though! Above all, draw on a core foundational attitude of mindfulness - A deep-felt practice of self-acceptance ‘The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am then I can change’ ~ Carl Rogers Drop me a line if you would like to learn more about mindfulness or join our guided practice sessions. Have you made any New Year resolutions this year?
Is there a particular habit you would like to change or make? Maybe you would like to meditate more regularly? Winter can be a tough time for making big changes, but if you feel the sap rising and the excitement of new beginnings, here is some advice I appreciated recently: ‘Goals are good for setting direction, but systems are best for making progress’ ~James Clear - Writing down your intentions is the first step - But what matters most is the system you put in place to help make your good intentions reality - So, focus on designing your systems – the changes to how you live your daily life, new processes and practices, a system of reminders, any barriers you need to remove, any regular input that you need from others… And according to James, if you put your systems in place and ENJOY working with them, good change will follow, perhaps in ways you weren’t originally expecting: “When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy” This falling in love with the process of living, rather than an ‘end goal’ sometime in the future, also strikes me as very mindful. |
AuthorI'm Claire - and I (re)learn something every day from practising and teaching mindfulness... Archives
March 2022
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