AGENDA

1- BODY SCAN

2- HOME PRACTICE REVIEW

3- COURSE REVIEW (In pairs; Whole group; Questionnaire)

4- MAINTAINING AND SUSTAINING PRACTICE (....)

5- CONCLUDING MINDFULNESS PRACTICE/BREATHING SPACE

THEME: Clarifying and embodying intentions. Maintaining and extending a more mindful and caring way of being requires clear intention and commitment to embody what one intends. It is helpful to link intentions for regular mindfulness practice to a personally significant value or positive reason for taking care of oneself.

AGENDA

1- Welcome everyone and gives Orientation
1.1 - Introduction in pairs and Groups.

2- Raisin practice and inquiry(Feedback, enquiry and discussion)

3- Body scan (Feedback, enquiry and discussion)

4- SETTING HOME PRACTICE: Body scan, Routine Activity "sensing your body doing it"

5- Ten finger gratitude practice

EVERYDAY PRACTICES: 10 Finger Gratitude "turning a fact into good"

KEY LEARNING
1- Waking up from Automatic Pilot

2- Attentional control

3 - Attitudinal dimensions of mindfulness
(curiosity, patience, care...)

KEY LEARNING
1- Another way of "knowing",
Experientially
2- How the mind creates meaning

KEY LEARNING
1- Attentional control and "coming home" through mindfulness practice

2- Bringing mindfulness into everyday life

SESSION CONTENT

1- Seeing/ Hearing Practice

2- Sitting practice (30-40min): Aware of Breath, body, sounds, thoughts, "open awareness"

3- Home practice Review

4- Recognising Reactivity: the Vicious flower

5- Breathing Space with compassion, to show how many Breathing space it can be used to deal with problematic thinking and behaviour characterize reactivity as outlined in the vicious Flower)

6- Mindful walking or Stretching

7 - SET HOME PRACTICE: Sitting practice; Breathing Spaces (regular and responsive)

8- Close with a 3-Step Breathing Space

EVERYDAY PRACTICES: Keeping body in mind when listening & Speaking (50:50); Experiences calendar; 10 finger gratitude; Daily Walking practice

KEY LEARNING
Recognising and allowing reactivity

Learning experientially how maintenance cycles play out

KEY LEARNING

1- Developing stability and spaciousness
2- Disempowering reactivity with allowing and befriending

SESSION CONTENT

1- Sitting practice (30-40min): body & breath, relationship with experience, exploring difficulty

2- Home practice review

3- Befriending practice and Enquiry

4- Guest house poem; by Rumi

5- Breathing Space: Each one steps out from automatic Pilot

SETTING HOME PRACTICE: Introduce the Random Acts of kindness exercise

EVERYDAY PRACTICES...

SESSION CONTENT

1- Sitting Practice (30-40 min): Awareness Breath, body, sounds, thoughts and thoughts/ feelings. Particularly noticing how we relate to thoughts that arise and practising stepping back from them (opening to the pleasant and beautiful)

2- Home Practice Review

3- Moods, Thoughts, Alternative viewpoints exercise (EG: Office reception Area OR XeStaff Room)

4- Responding skilfully exercise (??) "Responding skilfully" worksheet?

5- SET HOME PRACTICE: Responding skilfully worksheet + Breathing space as a "first Step"

EVERYDAY PRACTICES...

KEY LEARNING
Taking Skilful Action in the face of Challenge, nourishing ourselves and cultivating joy and flourishing

GATHERING THE SCATERRED MIND - The mind is often scattered and lost in thought because it is working away in the background, trying to complete unfinished tasks and striving for future goals. A scattered mind can lead us into distress and away from joy. In mindfulness training we are learning intentionally to step out of states of automatic pilot and to “come back” to the here and now. The body and breath offer an ever-present anchor that can reconnect us with mindful presence, gather and settle the mind, and ease us from driven-doing into being

THEME -In driven-doing mode we tend to “know about” our experience only indirectly, conceptually, often through thought and language. This means we can easily get lost in automatic and impulsive reactivity. Mindfulness of the body provides an opportunity to explore a new way of knowing: directly, intuitively– “experientially”. Experiential knowing is grounded in present-moment sensing of the body, and provides a way to relate in a more ‘de-centred’ way to sensations as just sensations, moods as just moods, and thoughts as just thoughts. Already, most participants will be experiencing some difficulties in their practice. These difficulties offer precious opportunities to practise letting go of thinking and to re-connect with the direct sensed awareness of the body

THEME -On automatic pilot, it is easy to drift unawares into “driven-doing” mode and reactive thought patterns that can lead us into, or keep us trapped in, patterns of unhelpful thinking, feeling and behaving. Habitual driven-doing mode also robs us of our potential for living life more fully. We can transform our experience by intentionally paying attention to it in particular ways. We begin to practise stepping out of automatic pilot by bringing mindfulness to eating, to body sensations, and to aspects of everyday present-moment experience that we might normally overlook..

THEME - On automatic pilot, it is easy to drift unawares into driven-doing mode and the reactivity that often maintains unhelpful patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. Habitual driven-doing mode robs us of our potential for living life more fully, because our attention tends to be caught in thoughts about the past and the future. It can lock us into habitual ways of reacting that tend to be self-perpetuating.
Through mindfulness practice, we can develop a ‘metacognitive’ awareness of reactive thought and behavioural patterns. We begin to practise stepping out of such patterns by paying attention intentionally, mindfully, to our embodied experience in the present moment. Through experiential learning about reactivity and the possibility of allowing instead of reacting we come to recognise and develop a more conscious relationship with such patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving (the R and A of RAIN). But the first key step is to recognise reactivity with a stance of allowing our experience to be as it is. This session is largely experiential, introducing several foundational mindfulness practices.

THEME: Relating more consciously to unpleasant and pleasant feelings and sensations – allowing things to be as they already are. This is a primary way of preventing the aversion and reactivity that add additional [“optional”] suffering to the unavoidable difficulties and discomforts of life and the attachment we often have to positive experiences that can create compulsive behaviour. We can disempower such reactivity by holding it in compassionate, mindful awareness and intentionally practising “allowing” and “letting things be”, just as they are, without judging ourselves or our experience, or trying impulsively to make things different. Such an attitude of allowing and acceptance embodies a basic attitude of friendliness and compassion to experience. This is a turning point, as all experience can be held in awareness with a sense of allowing that is supported
by the foundational attitudes. Befriending inner and outer experience can be cultivated both in ‘formal’ mindfulness practice and more informally within everyday life.

THEME -A mindfulness student asks the wise old master: ‘What is the goal of a lifetime of practice?” The answer comes back: “An appropriate response.” We free ourselves from the reactive driven-doing mode when we clearly see negative moods as passing states of mind, and negative thinking as the products of those mind states, and when we learn to hold all of these within a steady, compassionate awareness. It can be enormously liberating to realise that our thoughts are merely thoughts, even the ones that say they are not, and to recognise the contexts out of which they are born. This supports us in seeing situations more clearly, less clouded by distorting thoughts and beliefs. Clearer seeing increases the chances of discerning what might be skilful, appropriate responses.

THEME - Skilful action and taking care of ourselves in the face of challenge supports our well-being. Flourishing is supported by active engagement with what is important to us, what nourishes us. We can learn to respond to challenges by first learning to recognise our personal patterns of mind and then responding with intentional skilful action. After taking a Breathing Space, we can learn to take care of ourselves with acts that give pleasure or a sense of accomplishment, or provide a clear focus for mindfulness. We can cultivate our minds and bodies in ways that support joy and flourishing.

two wolves story (See MBCT-L Course Handbook) can be used to illustrate that we can powerfully shape our moments, days and lives by choosing which wolf we feed.