This week was our final class in the four-week Exploring Meditation course.
And we started the class by taking a moment to reflect on how we have progressed. We have now had 20+ days of meditation instruction and personal practice .. or have we?
It is timely to remind ourselves that in learning meditation, we can come to class, hear, read, digest and question .. but have we done the ‘practice’ .. has meditation infiltrated our lives, into the hurly-burly frantic multi-tasking world in which we all live?
To help us on our journey, I always suggest that when starting any meditation, we take a moment to silently connect with our intention. In this way we remind ourselves of our reasons for meditating and this is when the heart and mind connect!
“In my meditation practice I seek .. peace, calmness, knowing ….”
In our class tonight we took a peek into the world of Mindfulness in Daily Life practices. When we are walking, eating, working, listening, breathing .. we can also be incorporating ‘living mindfulness’.
These daily life Mindfulness practices are nothing more mysterious than developing our ability to pay attention to our immediate experience .. learning to overcome our pre-occupation with past and future, cultivating our ability to see clearly what is happening in our lived experience of the present .. and find a way to do so without judgement, resisting or clinging.
Mindfulness is being acutely aware of the present, keeping the mind fully absorbed in the task of the moment.
We started with a series of Meditative Exercises that when put together give us an opportunity to extend our meditation .. we started with a mindfulness of listening practice, then moving to a mindfulness of movement practice, a mindfulness of body then two (ever subtler) mindfulness of breath exercises.
After a few Q & A we looked at some further Mindfulness of Movement exercises that come from Tai Chi and Qi Gong traditions .. holding our attention to the myriad of sensations and feelings found within the body. These are great practices in themselves, also before a seated meditation, since we spend most of our life living only in the ‘head’ .. completely forgetting our physical body .. the calf muscles, the lips, the thighs …
We reflected that in meditation we shift .. from the outside world to the inside world .. from the thinking mind to the sensing mind.
You can view each of our earlier class here Class 1 , Class 2 and Class 3
Our next Exploring Meditation (4-week course) starts 6th October in Brighton (Melbourne, Australia) CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE