Practising mindfulness can help you to reconnect the busy mind with body, find a sense of space, and respond more skilfully to stress and anxiety.
We are currently offering the 8-week Mindfulness for Life course on a pay-what-you-can/freely-given basis, and are passionate about making mindfulness-based life skills available to anyone who would like to learn them. Oxford Mindfulness Centre-trained and BAMBA registered. All of our teaching is currently online; our next 8-week course starts on 12th May 2021. Please get in touch via https://mindfulnessforlife.weebly.com/start-here.html to register interest and discuss whether this is right course at the right time for you. ‘…a truly life-changing experience for me. One of my reasons for coming was because I had experienced a lot of low moods and also wanted to find a way out of some recurring anxiety issues. The course has helped me in a new and liberating way.’ (recent course participant) Image: Michael Leunig
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I’ve been getting curious about anger…
How I feel anger when ‘things shouldn’t be this way’; ‘this is not fair’; ‘this is not right’. What pent-up anger or frustration feel like in my body. Anger is necessary. It provides motivation to take important action, if channelled skilfully. But I don’t always attend to it well. Then, like a forgotten pressure cooker, it can splurt out in unpredictable directions, causing collateral damage in the heat of a reactive moment. And berating myself for acting out on the anger then just heaps on extra suffering! This may sound familiar. It can really help to break down an experience involving anger into its component parts: what body sensations are here, what thoughts are present, what emotions, what urges? (This is a recurring theme of the 8-week MBCT course, and I have found it such a helpful tool in my life) Within an experience of anger there are thought processes. Behind these thought processes we may often find fear. Practising mindfulness can help us recognise reactivity and anger in the mind and body as it arises, and to then take a space to breathe. We can learn to shine a discerning, gentle light on the thinking behind the anger. What’s going on here? Is it helpful? What am I believing and is it true? Thoughts are not necessarily facts, and they are not who we are. If we practise becoming mindful of our thoughts, we can choose whether to follow them and how we respond to them. We can learn to bring compassion to our very human fears and reactivity, through compassion-focussed practices. We can make space for all emotions and respond wisely to what’s here, rather than beating ourselves up for experiencing the fear and anger that we share with most of humanity. So many uses for mindfulness in life… motivation to keep practising to help look after myself and others. Image: Inside Out, Pixar 'Don’t meditate to fix yourself, to heal yourself, to improve yourself, to redeem yourself; rather, do it as an act of love, of deep warm friendship to yourself. In this way there is no longer any need for the subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough. It offers the possibility of an end to the ceaseless round of trying so hard that wraps so many people’s lives in a knot. Instead there is now meditation as an act of love. How endlessly delightful and encouraging.'
~ Bob Sharples, Meditation: Calming the Mind |
AuthorI'm Claire - and I (re)learn something every day from practising and teaching mindfulness... Archives
March 2022
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