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Posts tagged ‘Mindfulness’

Jul 22

Which Meditation Should I Do?

Choice is great when it opens up our world and brings us a sense of agency and freedom.

And… at times it can feel paralysing when we’re unsure which option – of the many – to choose. In meditation, I’ve certainly had the experience of dithering for so long about which recording to listen to that I lose the motivation completely (or the time slot), and end up not practising at all.

With time as our practice develops, we gain more confidence in knowing which practice will best meet our needs on any given day. And we might not always need to listen to a recording.

But then there are those times we just don’t feel sure what would be most supportive. Here’s a menu of meditations for those moments.

These are the same meditations I’ve shared on my main page, but organised by how you’re feeling, instead of by meditation type.

It’s not an absolute ‘prescription’ to be rigidly followed, but a few ideas to help get you unstuck.

This list includes some very short meditations of only a few minutes long – for those days when you’re especially busy, or just feeling resistant to meditating.

GUIDANCE NOTE:  These practices are devised to support stress reduction, but are not intended to address debilitating mental health conditions or severe emotional distress.  Do not listen to these recordings when driving, or when concentration on another task is important for safety.

WHEN FEELING SCATTERED OR STUCK IN ‘BUSY MIND’

Relaxing Into Body Awareness (22 mins) – a body scan meditation with a focus on meeting experience as it is, softening resistance and relaxing into ‘being with’ what’s happening, with greater confidence.

5-Minute Breathing Space – slightly longer than a standard breathing space, a short meditation to help re-establish mindful awareness.

Breathing With The Body (16 mins, Recorded Live) – finding a grounded presence through embodied awareness of the breath.

IF YOU’RE FEELING OVERWHELMED OR FRAZZLED

Basic Breathing Meditation (16 mins) – a short practice for bringing mindful awareness to the breath.

Basic Body Scan (22 mins) – a meditation inviting awareness to inhabit each area of the body.

Support Your Self (6 mins) – a short meditation to bring self-kindness into your day.

FOR DEVELOPING GREATER AWARENESS

Opening To All Of Your Experience (Recorded Live, 19 mins) – a gentle practice of ‘befriending’ – opening more fully to all the various aspects of our experience: the pleasant, the neutral and the unpleasant. Welcoming these in on our own terms can be empowering and help develop a broad, calm and stable awareness.

Mindfulness With Breathing (20 mins, Recorded Live)* – Establishing and maintaining contact with the breath, as felt in the body. Led on a practice afternoon for those with some meditation experience, less guidance than some of my other recordings.

Mindfulness With Feelings (22 mins, Recorded Live)* – A mindfulness with breathing practice, opening to a range of feelings, including energy and pleasant feelings. Allowing all experience to arise and pass, held in the container of the breath.

*These 2 meditations can be done ‘back-to-back’ if you would like an extended practice of 40 minutes.

IF YOU’RE FEELING TENSE

Calming Body, Heart & Mind (Recorded Live, 14mins) – a practice to bring kindness to difficult experience, drawn from the approach developed by Kristin Neff and Chris Germer – see their websites for more meditations.

Supported By The Earth (Recorded Live, 20 mins) – A grounding practice to encourage mindful relaxation. Guidance is given for lying down, so please adapt as necessary if you are seated. (Excuse the audio quality, I think I was lying a bit close to the mic!)

Imagining Compassion (7 mins) – connect with an image of a person, being or place that helps you feel supported, soothed and cared for.

WHEN YOU’RE SHORT ON TIME

Body Check-In (5 mins) – reconnect with embodied awareness.

5-Sense Check-In (5 mins) – drop into Being in the body.

Finding The Positive (5 mins) – taking in what feels good about the present moment.

You can find additional recordings on the Meditations page, organised in the following categories: Self-Kindness, Mindfulness With Breathing, Body Awareness and Short Meditations.

For personalised support with your meditation practice, I run mindfulness workshops and classes in Heaton Moor (South Manchester), and a Coaching Programme via Skype.

 

 

 

 

May 8

Slow Meditation: Releasing The Pressure

There’s a lot of buzz about Slow Living at the moment, and it would seem natural to look to meditation to support this. But I’m wondering how many of us fall into practising what I think of as ‘fast meditation’.

This post was inspired by a brief online exchange I had with Carl Honore: when I mentioned this sense of haste in meditation, he astutely noted that “people are in such a hurry that they even want to slow down fast”.

So thank you to Carl for writing his book In Praise Of Slow, and for prompting me to reflect on my own journey towards slow(er) meditation. I’m not sure I’ve totally slowed it down yet, but I’ve definitely eased a lot of the pressure I’d been inadvertently bringing into my practice.

Meditation teacher Reggie Ray observes that when meditative traditions are adopted into contemporary cultures, they can take on the flavour of the dominant values of that environment. I recognise this from my own experiences.

When I’ve practiced in settings informed by ancient traditions, I noticed myself trying to get on the fast track to peace, growth or wisdom. I swapped chasing the goals of consumer culture for those of the meditative path: trying to master more complicated meditations, or get enough experience to go on increasingly intense retreats. There was a definite sense of trying to get somewhere, and as rapidly as possible.

Like many people, I started my meditation journey with an 8-week mindfulness course. Eager for change, I don’t think I realised that it was just a starting point – two months seemed like a long time, and if someone had told me that meditation is a path that can unfold over many years, I’m not sure I’d have given it a go in the first place. So the courses are a great place to start, to ease us into meditation. And it’s also really helpful if we receive encouragement to see the practice as an ongoing one, with no particular end point.

For me, meditation is about being with life more deeply. Bringing a sense of hurry to meditation can echo how we rush through life itself.  As is often pointed out, the ultimate finish line we are racing towards is death. We can think of meditation as a journey, but as Pico Iyer explains, it’s ‘an invitation to the adventure of going nowhere’.

As we become more present to our embodied experience, we reduce the urge to constantly be somewhere else – in our thoughts, in the meeting we’re having next week, in the situation we screwed up yesterday, or in our fantasy future of ‘I’ll be happy when…’

I’ve been reflecting on how my own practice has developed over the years, shifting from quite a driven pursuit of trying to get somewhere, to something slower, more relaxed and somehow more deeply sustaining.

In the beginning, I needed to feel held by structure in meditation. I felt motivated and supported by having a weekly plan to do say, a 10-minute practice every day, following the guided recording. Meditation was so different from my usual mode of being that without these resources, I’d have abandoned it pretty quickly.

I did notice however that if I clung too tightly to structure, I started evaluating my performance, putting pressure on myself to ‘succeed’ in meditation. This success might look like practising daily in an unbroken run, or sitting for longer periods, or achieving a particular quality of awareness. I might look for evidence of results, to see if my meditation was paying off.

When this pressure got too much, my practice would lapse: it felt too hard, so I’d fall off the wagon for a while. And always, to start back up again, I’d need the wisdom of going slowly, to ease myself back in without putting high expectations on myself, or on the practice.

I’d remind myself that it’s fine to start with 5-minute practices, or to return to them if that’s more workable. I’ve found that five minutes of true presence is more restoring than slogging through half an hour just so I can tick it off my list, or give myself a gold star for achievement.

At one point, I noticed I’d become attached to a particular breathing meditation because I believed it would unlock the secrets of ‘advanced’ practice, and that was creating a sense of impatience. So I gave myself permission to go back to my beloved self-kindness meditation, which always feels less like making something happen, and more like deepening an ongoing relationship with myself.

I also began to explore some of the slower somatic meditations (which means body awareness). As I let go of goals and speed, I discovered I could access a ‘deep listening’ to the body which is subtle, but somehow restorative and transformative.

Somatic approaches tell us that the nervous system needs to go slowly, as it adjusts to gradual shifts – it may even reject fast changes by becoming overwhelmed. Going slowly is another way to bring self-kindness to the practice. As with all learning, it’s a balance between expanding your comfort zone, and not pushing yourself too hard and too fast.

I’ve also eased the sense of pressure by gradually letting go of some of the structure, as it began to feel natural to do that. Once it felt more familiar to spend time just sitting still, and noticing the constant flow of thoughts, emotions and body sensations, I found that I didn’t always need the guidance of a recording, or a particular focus of meditation, like the breath.

Eventually, the meditative qualities of awareness and presence began showing up in my daily life more, and so the line between ‘life’ and ‘meditation’ started to blur. Where I felt this shift most strikingly was in my experience of family holidays. While hanging out on the beach for a week with my husband and our son, I was dropping into the same meditative state I’d had a taste of on retreats – but without the hours of daily sitting meditation.

All my experimenting has helped me to build a practice that supports me and feels appealing, from day to day. Not measuring my progress has also meant I’ve learned to embrace every meditation experience as valuable, even if I don’t enjoy each session, or feel calm & thought-free. Without those expectations, there’s room for a whole dimension of aliveness that I was cutting myself off from, in the pursuit of something different.

I didn’t get to these experiences of meditation quickly, at all (I’ve been practising for over 10 years as I write this). Reflecting on the value of slowness in this practice, I’m so grateful that I’ve stayed with meditation even through the periods of wondering whether anything much was happening.

My journey has resulted in a huge amount of personal growth, and brought me to a much deeper sense of peace – but only because this process has unfolded slowly, over a period of years. And I’m still in that process. Now that I’m discovering the quiet thrill of being fully alive, I’m in no hurry to get to the end.

If you liked this blog, you might also like:

Quitting The Quick Fix: Mindfulness as a Lifelong Practice

3 Things We Can Unlearn To Boost Mindfulness

Keeping The Flame Of Mindfulness Alight

My collection of Meditations includes some short ones of around 5 minutes.

Pico Iyer’s TED talk The Art Of Stillness, and his book by the same name.

Feb 8

How To Bounce Back From A Mindfulness Lapse

Old habits die hard, so the saying goes.  And even though I’ve been practising mindfulness for a number of years, this is still true.  I’m just more aware of those habits!

Like the urge to push uncomfortable feelings away.

I’m sure some of you know what I mean.  That old familiar feeling you don’t like starts creeping up on you (in my case feelings of anxiety or sadness), and before you know it you’re in full-on problem solving mode.

How can I get rid of this feeling?  What meditation will make it go away?  Whose podcast of wise words can I listen to so I can find the mysterious ‘answer’ to stop myself feeling this way?

But here’s where the mindfulness steps in.  I’m not totally lost in this automatic habit.  These days, I notice myself doing this.  I recognise more quickly when I’m caught in that seductive agenda of trying to control how I feel.

In these moments I’m reminded that I don’t actually need to find some new trick or perspective.

I just need to re-visit something I’ve learned many times before.  That taking a mindful approach means turning towards these awkward, uncomfortable feelings.  It means exploring them with curiosity and responding with kindness.

Mindfulness doesn’t remove discomfort so that we’re ‘fixed’ and never feel it again.  In this human life, we’re going to keep on experiencing the unpleasant, the difficult and the challenging – alongside what’s beautiful, moving and enjoyable.

I’ve heard it said that mindfulness is a process of re-minding yourself.  During a meditation we may need to re-mind ourselves to come back to the breath – 20 times, or a hundred times.

And so it is in life that we constantly re-mind ourselves to respond to our experience with kind attention.  Often this means turning towards what we’re really feeling, so we can let it be felt and flow through.  The alternative is to get seduced into trying to fix the unfixable, or try to ignore it.

Those times when we find ourselves caught in old patterns aren’t a sign that our mindfulness has lapsed or failed.

When we see our old patterns playing out and can notice – in the midst of that very difficulty – what’s really happening, we’re being mindful in the most courageous of ways.

So the next time you notice an old habit kicking in, try not to give yourself a hard time.  Instead, celebrate this moment of awareness and bravery, which has brought you back to mindfulness.

Sheila Bayliss runs wellbeing classes in Heaton Moor, South Manchester, and offers personal workshops by Skype.

Aug 30

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Reclaiming Our Natural Wellbeing – Part 2

In part 1 of this post, I considered how we’ve become disconnected from our embodied experience as human beings.  The more that modern culture has prized (and praised) a ‘left brain’ approach to living and learning, the more we’ve lost touch with the wisdom of our right brain/body.

By contrast, research on hunter-gatherer people suggest that they are more ‘whole-brained’, or I might say ‘whole-bodied’.  People who’ve lived with and studied the few remaining hunter-gatherer cultures have shared some fascinating insights into a way of life that appears to support better wellbeing than we enjoy in contemporary western culture.  So what might happen if we were more connected to our right brain/body? (When I use this phrase, I mean the whole body).

We might add less stress to our experiences. The thinking mind can be a great tool, when it’s the right one for the job. But when we have an unpleasant experience, we often add an ‘extra layer’ of difficulty with thoughts that escalate our distress. This is sometimes called ‘discursive thinking’ in the meditation tradition. If we can stay with our experience in the body, the difficulty tends to pass through quicker and with less suffering. (This is often taught in mindfulness courses).

We might be more present-moment oriented. Instead of constantly thinking about what resources (money, possessions, relationships) we need to store up for the future, we might concentrate more on what we need for just now. Of course it may still be important to provide for the future. But perhaps we can balance this by inhabiting trust, and by having more modest ambitions. If we have fewer wants, these are more easily satisfied and we are more likely to enjoy the wellbeing of being happy with what we’ve got right now.

We might enjoy work more. I was fascinated to read that in a hunter-gatherer culture that still exists today, they don’t have a word for ‘work’. They cheerfully get on with a range of necessary activities, but they don’t label any of these separate tasks as ‘work’. This seemed to mirror a discovery I made myself about not labelling activities as work – I found it really liberating, as it began to erode a belief I’ve picked up that work has to feel hard and unpleasant if I’m doing it right!

We might stop chasing ‘happiness’ as a goal. In our culture, we seem to have created a mythical destination called ‘happiness’ that once reached, we can dwell in permanently. But in reality, we all experience a constant flow of feelings that arise and pass. Being able to enjoy present-moment feelings of joy or peace, without trying to nail them down, is to experience true wellbeing. I reflected more deeply on this in an old post Finding Happy Ever After – Right Now.

We might feel more whole, more fully human, and more at ease with ourselves. Research tells us that suppression of emotions reduces wellbeing rather than improving it. I’ve seen the enormous value of self-kindness practices in helping people to re-connect with these cut-off parts of themselves, and the confidence and resilience that then emerges. I’ve learned in teaching these practices that our right-brain imaginative capacities are a huge ally in accessing this capacity: often people feel unsure about how to connect with self-kindness, and then discover that in using their imagination, they can find a creative ‘way in’.

We might be more peaceful. In my own experience, the more connected I am to all parts of myself, the more I can connect with others peacefully, without the need for defensiveness or control. I find it fascinating to reflect on the escalation in human conflict since we started farming and separating ourselves with territories that we need to defend. For me, the concept of the Love Mode vs Power Mode is really helpful, which I touched on here.

We might regain our connection to the earth and halt some of the damage that we’re doing. I’m by no means innocent of engaging in non-eco-friendly practices, but my awareness is growing of the ways I can reduce my own impact on resources. Perhaps if we collectively felt more connection to our environment, some large-scale care for it might become possible.

As to how we find our way into these changes… I’ve known for a while that meditation helps the right brain/body to come back online. I haven’t just read the theory, I’ve experienced an explosion in my own sensitivity, curiosity and creativity (all ‘right-brain’ traits) as my meditation practice has become more established. And of course I’ve witnessed the journeys of people who come to my classes.

I suspect that the practice of meditation helps us attain more balance by calming down the left brain that wants to be constantly figuring everything out verbally. In the meditation space, there is more room for the wisdom of body sensations that we are usually cut off from. It’s not a quick path, but it’s one that (I believe) can gradually lead to healing and wholeness, not just for ourselves, but also for the natural world that we are a part of.

If you want to explore meditation, you can find my recordings on this site under Meditations

Aug 5

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What Is Mindfulness?

I’m often asked the question ‘what is mindfulness?’.  I don’t believe there is one definitive answer to this question.  What you’ll find here is just one possible answer, based on the way I have received and share the practices of mindfulness and self-kindness…

Mindfulness means being with our experience in a gentle, accepting way.  When stressed, we have a tendency to be stuck in our heads, thinking and problem-solving.  With mindful awareness, we learn to inhabit our direct, sensory experience in the body, and this gives us more choice in how we respond to difficulty.  Through learning to be with all of our experience – even the difficult parts – we build emotional confidence.  I share mindfulness with a strong emphasis on kindness and compassion (including self-kindness, which is extremely powerful in helping us cope with difficulty).

What are the benefits?

Research shows that mindfulness reduces stress and improves wellbeing.  I can personally say that it has helped me feel much more calm and positive in the face of many life challenges. Mindfulness isn’t a quick fix, but it does have profound & lasting benefits when you make it a habit.  

So how does it work?

Mindfulness is practised by engaging in regular meditation.  But it may not be what you associate with the word ‘meditation’.  There are sitting practices that can be done while being guided.  These include focusing on the body, the breath or feelings of kindness.  There are also ways to bring mindful awareness to whatever we’re doing, and this all counts as meditation.  Over time, meditating regularly starts to have a positive impact on how we are generally.  It’s a bit like training to get fit: when practised regularly, it has a cumulative effect, re-wiring the brain to create new neural pathways.  Although practising meditation will greatly enhance the benefits, it is possible to start becoming more mindful of your habitual responses by using mindful awareness tools in daily life.

What’s the best way to learn?

Most people find that some guidance is helpful initially via a class or course of some kind.  This can be especially helpful if you think you’re ‘no good at meditating’.   Being able to access regular sessions helps with motivation to keep your own practice going.  It can also be useful to connect with other people who are learning. You can get CD’s or downloads with guided meditations to listen to at home.  My recordings can be found on the Meditations and Mini-Meditations pages of this blog. 

If you’re not quite ready for regular meditation, but you want to develop a more mindful response to worry, stress and overwhelm – you can still learn to live more mindfully in everyday life.  I share ideas on how to do this in my Monthly Tips posts.   Although it’s true that sitting meditation enhances the benefits of mindfulness, you can also develop your own set of tools that can be used whether you meditate or not.

Are all classes the same?

There are different types of courses and classes.  My approach is helpful for stress, but is not intended to provide support for debilitating mental health issues.  If you have been diagnosed with (or suspect you may have) a mental health condition such as depression or an anxiety disorder, you can ask your GP about a referral to a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy course (MBCT) – this is different from the classes I offer. 

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