May 8
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'. 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.
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.
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?
As a wellbeing coach and mindfulness teacher, I don't just share from the theory of mindfulness, but from my own experience too. Here's my own story about how mindfulness and self-kindness transformed my relationship with anxiety - from outright war, to acceptance and befriending.
Mindfulness is everywhere right now, isn't it? And I do worry that it could be turning into yet another thing that people feel they have to achieve. But life for most of us is hard enough without that burden. I'm beginning to prefer to use the word 'awareness' - it doesn't seem to carry the weight of expectation, there's more room for not getting anything right.
