This article appeared in the Irish Times the other day and I enjoyed it so much I decided to repost here, with a link to the book that the author, Dr Tony Bates, refers to in his piece. I hope you enjoy the article as much as I did. My phone alarm woke me with …
Befriending Your Mind, Befriending Your Life: Mindfulness and the Endless Adventure of Growing into Yourself, Jon Kabat-Zinn. This excerpt comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s keynote presentation at the Feb 2013 Bridging Hearts and Minds of Youth from the UCSD Center for Mindfulness at the University of California San Diego School of Medecine.
You are at a crossroads, sensing there are less worldly paths you can follow, paths that feed on profound inner peace, a more encompassing joy, ever-renewed freshness of vision and inspiration, a more rhythmic sense of quiet progression. There is, deep within you, a spring so pure, one cup of its clear waters will refresh …
The clutter of our lives binds us to the precious simplicity that surrounds us and within us. Too often we become possessed and imprisoned by the chains of our own accumulations. We live in fear of their loss; we evolve complex strategies to protect ourselves from failure and deprivation. This burden inhibits our ability to …
I have to confess that I struggle with the concept of ‘mindful parenting.’ There’s something a little unsavoury, condescending and saccharine about it. It may be a language thing, but it seems to me that buried deep and implicitly within the term, is the value judgement that tells us we should really be doing rather …
This post brings you up-to-date with the latest developments at Embrace Mindfulness. 8 week MBSR programmes This is the core teaching programme of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). In the course you will become more aware of the unhelpful thought patterns that can trigger and perpetuate stress, anxiety and low moods. With that awareness comes choice …
The BBC Breakfast Programme ran a report on the emergence of Mindfulness in UK schools as a means of reducing curriculum and exam stress amongst teenagers. For more information please contact The Mindfulness in Schools Project, the UK’s leading organisation in this field. The piece was aired on Wednesday 27 March, 2013
The article is written by Rachel Naomi Remen, one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, …
Mindfulness for Life Interviews Jon Kabat-Zinn on how we can access and move towards the felt sense of our experience by attending to what is present in this moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant, good bad or ugly. This video segment also gives some background to the choice of title of his first book, Full Catastrophe …
Jon Kabat-Zinn conveying the benefits of the 8 week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course and talking about “The Cultivation of Affectionate Attention”
In honour of John Kabat-Zinn’s forthcoming trip to the UK, I thought I’d post a series of mini-interviews that he recorded back in January 2013. If you want to see him in the flesh there are still tickets available to see him in London on the following dates. 27th March – International Mindfulness in Schools …
No matter how much spiritual practice, self-improvement, or therapy we’ve undertaken, there is one area where many of us still find ourselves challenged every day: self-acceptance. It seems all too easy to fall into the trap of judging ourselves as inadequate, finding fault with our achievements or our bodies, and believing our self-critical inner voices …
In this special edition of Something Understood, Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, considers what we now know about the nature of the mind and how an understanding of the mind is important in everyday life. He quotes from the teachings of Buddha and the work of the 11th century poet Milarepa, as well …
If you are feeling a touch depleted, down in the dumps or stressed at the moment, try taking a few leaves out of this book…..ooops sorry video!. It’s only two and half minutes long, but it is packed with charm and a fair bit of wisdom to boot. Some nourishment for the heart on a …
An engaging and entertaining TED talk on mindfulness by the irrepressible Andy Puddicombe, a former buddhist monk and the voice of Headspace, an organisation dedicated to demystifying the experience of meditation and getting as many people in the world as possible to take 10 minutes out of their day for the specific purpose of ‘doing …
This is a passage on meditation and the art of paying attention in a non judgmental way to all aspects of our experience, including the wanted and the unwanted. It first appeared in the website Awakin which publishes weekly readings from a wide range of wisdom traditions. The article is written by Gill Fronsdal and …
The sensory awareness movement was founded in the 1930’s by Charlotte Selver. She brought this practice to the United States in 1938, and shared it with thousands of students around the world for over 75 years. She died on August 22, 2003 at the age of 102 years old. As a pioneer within the Human …
The ability to acknowledge and honour our experience without judgement and return our attention to the breath is a key component of mindfulness practice and in many respects a rather exquisite form of letting go. Whenever we return our attention to the breath, we ‘let go’ of something (thought, feeling, sensation) that has taken us …
This documentary from Jon Kabat- Zinn, the creator of the 8 week Mindfulness Based Stress reduction (MBSR) programme, was made in 1999 to commemorate 20 years of work done at the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. Some 14 years later, the Stress Reduction Clinic has grown and expanded into the …
This practice is a wonderful example of how mindfulness helps us to see what we have learned to ignore through force of habit. In the modern world we tend to take light for granted, but before the advent of electricity in the early part of the 20th century, light was precious, even sacred. Instructions Expand …