Tag: Mindfulness

Upcoming Events Summer months

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The extra time we can have in the summer months gives us an  opportunity to deepen our Mindfulness practice. It is a good idea to consider doing a short retreat or workshop to help you apply the ideas and practice more fully to your everyday life. Although we do not have too many possibilities as English speakers in this part of the world,  there are a number of  events occuring this Summer which you may like to consider.

As I have mentioned before, we are extremely fortunate that James Baraz, one of the best-known meditation teachers in the U.S., is coming to give his Awakening Joy Workshop over 4 days from August 4 – 7.  This excellent interactive  workshop is a gentle way to deepen your practice as it is not as intensive as some of the other possibilities which are usually run in complete silence. It will be held in the lovely setting of the Kientalerhof Centre in the Bernese Oberland. You can download the flyer here: Awakening Joy Flyer 8 April upload

It is always good to keep an eye on the website for the Meditation Centre in Beatenberg. I see there are still places available for the 8 day  Vipassana  (Insight) meditation retreat, starting on August 13th.  However, this is only open to meditators who have already some experience in silent retreats.

A bit further afield, some people who have completed the MBSR Course in Geneva have attended retreats in Gaia house in England. You can find a link to their website on the right hand side of this page. They offer a number of weekend or longer weekday retreats, all in silence. For example, there is a short  retreat entitled “Living With Illness” from Monday 22nd August to Wednesday 24th August, which may be of interest to those dealing with illness or working with those close to death.

I will post more details of other possibilities as they come to my notice.

Roots in the past 3: The wound of the heart

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It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.  The core psychological wound, so prevalent in the modern world,  forms out of not feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. It damages our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis for valuing others.  I call this the “relational wound“ or “wound of the heart.”

There is a whole body of study and research showing how close bonding and loving attunement — what is known as “secure attachment”— have powerful impacts on every aspect of human development. Secure attachment has a tremendous effect on many dimensions of our health, wellbeing, and capacity to function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression, how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.

John Welwood

Noticing the space around

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Most of our suffering comes from habitual thinking. If we try to stop it out of aversion to thinking, we can’t; we just go on and on and on. So the important thing is not to get rid of thought, but to understand it. And we do this by concentrating on the space in the mind, rather than on the thought.

Our minds tend to get caught up with thoughts of attraction or aversion to objects, but the space around those thoughts is not attractive or repulsive. The space around an attractive thought and a repulsive thought is not different, is it? Concentrating on the space between thoughts, we become less caught up in our preferences concerning the thoughts. So if you find that an obsessive thought of guilt, self-pity, or passion keeps coming up, then work with it in this way — deliberately think it, really bring it up as a conscious state, and notice the space around it. This way, we begin to have a perspective on the impermanent nature of thinking.

Ajahn Sumedho

Roots in the past 2: Suffering has an internal cause

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Suffering comes from how the mind interacts with pain. Because your mind is conditioned by past life events, when it encounters an experience it perceives as painful or unpleasant, there is immediate and direct suffering that is far greater than the actual discomfort of the situation. The increased discomfort happens in your mind, not in the actual experience. This means suffering has an internal cause, and you therefore have the ability to affect how much you suffer – you can dance with life and be a partner in how your life unfolds. With mindfulness of the cause of suffering, what is unpleasant simply remains unpleasant, even though it is not your preference.

Philip Moffitt, Dancing with Life

Sunday Quote: Reflections after welcome rain

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The body endures the storms of the present only,

the mind those of the past and future as well as the present.

Epicurus

How the world reveals its beauty

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If we look at the world with a love of life,

the world will reveal its beauty to us.

Daisaku Ikeda