mindfulness
guidance
The main purpose of visualization practice is to purify our ordinary, impure perception of the phenomenal world by developing “pure perception”. Everything we experience, big and small, will always lead to disappointment because we perpetually forget that everything we perceive is a product of our own mind.
The main purpose of visualization practice is to purify our ordinary, impure perception of the phenomenal world by developing “pure perception”. Everything we experience, big and small, will always lead to disappointment because we perpetually forget that everything we perceive is a product of our own mind.
What is Mindfulness?
When we look around us we frequently see a world in crisis, from the pressures upon nature itself to the human realm, our work, our relationships, our sense of making meaning and creating purpose in life. Our life energy often feels stretched and the impact of technology seems to drive the pace and intensity yet higher still.
My own thinking about mindfulness evolving over 25 years explores the tensions between various polarities – the individual self vs the collective world, consciousness vs neuroscience, science vs intuition, reason vs imagination, matter vs spiritual. In our many-layered suffering, we turn to the search for some soul-medicine, something to help us restore our wearied being.
Mindfulness – the capacity to deploy our attention, embodied in the present – offers us a point of integration, a means to recalibrate and restore our bodies and minds, to root ourselves in our own centre, and to vision and enact our higher and deeper capabilities, ideally in service to life, in a spirit of compassionate openness.
We neither make reality up, nor is it just out there. We midwife experience into existence. The attention we give to nature, the way we approach it, determines what we find. It is a reciprocal process. Through our experience we change what is there and vice versa. Everything is reverberative. Reality is constantly coming into being. Reciprocity is a profoundly important idea.
Iain McGilchrist
Author of The Matter With Things
Benefits of Mindfulness
For your body
- Boosts immunity
- Helps manage chronic pain
- Decreased levels of stress
- Improved quality of sleep
- Improves lung capacity
- Builds stronger bones
- Improves cardiovascular function
For your mind
- Calms the mind
- Enhances brain function
- Improves cognitive flexibility
- Support working memory
- Helps change negative thought patterns
- Fosters resiliency and mental discipline
- Increased creativity
For your spirit
- Restores child-like wonder and joy
- Increases empathy and compassion
- Increases self-awareness
- Enhanced sense of meaning and purpose
- Decreases emotional reactivity
- Improve relationship quality
- Increases work fulfillment
How does Mindfulness work?
The embodied experience of mindfulness includes our breath, supporting our body, constellating our multiplicity of sensory and perceptual experiences, moving with a realm of mental processes, opening to the reality of our embeddedness in the web of all things, all expressions or effulgences of life.
It is as if there is a lotus with a spread of open petals. One petal is our capacity for mindfulness, another our compassionate nature, another our way of proceeding ethically, and so on. We are the whole flower, each petal at once – the scent and perfume, the colour and the form, the stems and leaves, buds and thorns, and down into the roots themselves and their interactions with the soil, the mineral nutrients, the sunshine and the rain. All of it in endless conversation, circulating. And as Thich Nhat Hanh so pithily put it ‘no mud, no lotus’.
I have often found that to achieve this an inversion of our ordinary perceptions is first necessary. It is not so much, as we might think, that we must acquire or win for ourselves this missing element, mindfulness, but rather that what is asked of us is a kind of unmaking, an unwinding of the compacted conditioning overlying our innate and never-absent natural mindfulness. Like clouds obscuring the sun and the clear blue skies, our conditioned body-mind, out of loyalty and familiarity, becomes itself the very obstacle to the experience we yearn for, an unconditioned and liberated Self.
So here we are, learning to practice directing our attention to each parts of our Self as needs be, regulating body and breath, emotions and thoughts, inner and outer relationships, living life as our whole Self in the fabric of All That Is.
Experience your unconditioned and liberated Self
Experience your unconditioned and liberated Self
My own work with mindfulness extends over twenty years, from teaching meditation in schools, universities and prisons, to running retreats and offering talks, trainings and full mindfulness courses for the general public. Throughout this time working with mindfulness materials as they grew (especially to include contemporary insights from neuroscience and psychology) and within my own practice, I have been drawn especially to the energies available to us at the meeting point of our creativity with our calm centre.
All individual sessions are for 60 minutes at USD 120 per consultation.
For group sessions, please contact me for further details.