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THE SEVEN PILLARS OF MINDFULNESS
 NON-JUDGING: consists in taking the
position of an impartial witness to your own experience. It requires that you become aware of the stream of judging and reacting
to inner and outer experiences and step back from it. This habit of categorizing into good and bad or positive and negative
locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all. Tip: observe over 10 minutes how much you are preoccupied with liking and disliking what you are experiencing.
PATIENCE: it demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things unfold in their
own time. Practicing mindfulness give us the chance to give time and space to our own unfolding. Why rushing to the next “better”
moment when after all each one is your life in that moment.
BEGINNER’s MIND: practicing mindfulness means to take the chance to see everything as if it was for the
first time and not allow our illusion of knowing prevent us from being present to our experiences. Tip next time you meet someone you know well try and see something new in this person.
TRUST: developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings is an integral part of meditation practice. Do
not get caught up in the reputation and authority of your teachers. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only
hope is to become more fully yourself.
NON-STRIVING: almost everything we do is for a purpose. Meditation not! Actually this attitude can be a real
obstacle in meditation. Although meditation takes a lot of work and energy, ultimately it is about non-doing. It has no goal
other than for you to be yourself. The irony is that you already are! Do not sit to get relaxed, enlighten or sleep better.
Sit to learn to carefully see what is happening and accept it.
ACCEPTANCE: often acceptance comes after we have gone through intense period of emotion turmoil and anger.
Doing that uses up our energy in the struggle instead of using it for healing and change. You are much more likely to know
what to do and have the inner conviction to act when your vision is mot clouded by your mind’s self-serving judgments and
desires or its fears and prejudices.
LETTING GO: when we pay
attention to our inner experience, we discover that there are certain thoughts, feelings and situations that the mind seems
to want to hold on to. If pleasant, we try and prolong our experience, if unpleasant, we try and get rid of them. In meditation,
we try to intentionally put aside the tendency to elevate some aspects of our experience and reject others.
As presented by Jon Kabat-Zinn in Full Catastrophe Living
Mindful yoga: what is
it ?
Uta’s classes are starting again in January, in particular the mindful yoga classes. Why calling it mindful yoga? The idea is to make explicit that the practice is not only targetting
the physical level but that is also include the mind/body connection. It also refers to the attitude cultivated in the classes
which is dedicated and focused attention on the practice.
Mindful yoga is a wonderful opportunity to focus on our inner reality, being able to feel
through the body the richness of human life. It develops the ability to change perspective from an outer driven life style
to an inner driven dynamic and use our potential at all levels.
A regular practice fosters concentration, physical and emotional balance and a sense of personal mastery.
About time
 One take on time...no time
...not on time
...too little time
...always less time
...no free time
...need more time
...short of time
...time for nothing
...overtime
...out of time
...time pressure
Time, time, time
Time is over !
 An alternative one....any time
...much time
...time for everything
...rich of time
...time used
...quite time
...save your time
...use your time
...take your time
...enjoy your time
TIME IS LOVE AND COMPASSION
Internation Peace Day / Thursday 21 September 2006 INTERNET INFO
UnitedNations http://www.idpvigil.com/index.html
The text of the resolution and a list of all the groups
around the global taking part
Gaiafield http://www.gaiafield.net
This site also gives some background for other events of the same nature. Among other things a beautiful 7 minutes
slide show displayed in a meditative motion allowing you, simply by watching, to be PEACE.
The United Nations resolution designating September 21 of each year to be dedicated to Peace
is one of the many elements that show how much intentions matter. Before being a reality any situation has been once a dream,
a thought or an intention. This is true for the most tragic as well as the most beautiful achievements of humanity.
At the United Nations, many groupings like the Mindfulness
at Work exist and are supported by the higher instances, secretary general included for the last 40 years. They gather
in very deep respect for all creeds, spiritual practices and absence of practice, simply convinced in the bottom of their
hearts and souls by the most profound goals of the United Nations.
Remembering that the founding fathers of the European Union were animated by identical goals as those of the UN, the
remarkable thirst of both entities for peace and unity render their brotherhood/sisterhood even more obvious. If
meditating is not your thing, you may nevertheless decide just to concentrate on the intention held by thousands of inviduals
world wide on Thursday 21 September, even for just a minute.
Senses
Senses are precious
tools in the practice of mindfulness. They are major channels to access information. Untill
we turn our attention within, the information we are mostly aware of is mainly located outside ourselves. Senses unite the
world without to the wolrd within.
Everyday it is said that we subject ourselves to 2 millions different
information. Take our faculty to taste. How much are we aware of the number of ingredients we
eat a day ? If you take a very simple food like bread. We make a package and think that bread is one food. Now if we look
into the composition of bread, we should add up all its components, the cereal(s) it is made of, salt, yeast, water,
etc. This is true for every food we absorb. There is so much we eat without knowing anything about its composition and
preparation, in particular in processed food and foo surved in canteens. In any given day, there is so many different
sorts of food we absorb. Sound wise we are also very much stimulated between household sounds including TV,
human intereactions, engines and machines or radio and music sounds. Depending where you live, the sense of smell
may be more or less stimulated. From perfume to industrial smell, from alive beings to artificial products, the diversity of
smells is very broad. Taking the sense of touch, this is probably the less activated
into today society. Once clinically dead, the sense of touch is said to be the last quitting our body. Sport, mindful
physical practice and also massages help refining the way we access information via the touch and our body in general.
In addition, our mind browses between 45'000 and 60'000 thoughts a day. This is quite of an
intense amount of information, that the mind would have to process if information was not being filtered. For survival reasons,
we limit the intake of information ideally to a mangeable amount. At times, when we feel overwhelmed by information, it is
simply beacause our filters are over stimulated and do not function properly any more, then some sort of information jam build
up in our system and we start building stress and blokcages.
A very essential aspect of mindfulness is to come out of the
auto-pilot mode and choose proactively which information you want to focus on and receive input from.
Learning to come to our senses, differentiating them, getting targeted or spontabeous input from them is directly improving
our life quality and increasing our freedom of choice. Moreover, with some practice we also help our senses to receive more
information from within and ultimately we can support them to relax and let go of their initial function of channelling information.
Then maybe we start to meditate.
Senses are one of the means to experience the unity between the world without and
the world within.
 Zen circles
Working with reflection when
taking pictures is very inspiring for me. Photographing the reflection of these trees, combined with throwing a stone
in the water to provoke ripples helped me realise the power of illusion and how much we
leave in a world we have created with our minds. The trees look real, still they are only reflections, the circles are long
lasting on the picture though they were just visble for a split second.
Much certainty
to let go of when awareness grows...
Valérie S.
Mindfulness
and stress from work
We have observed that in the business environment the most common reason why people start with
meditation practice is related to the need to calm down and organise a space and time of stillness.
Commonly, the stress release time is left to holiday periods and week ends. The normal case is
that from Monday to Friday people run from one commitment to the other, if they have a family they also have to take care
of the household. When the week end comes, they need to rush to do some shopping and feel very tired to undertake any other
activities that would give them a feel good effect. On the contrary, the rest of the week end is often spent sorting material
things and doing ‘nothing’, which often equates to watching TV.
If one goes for the model of building more and more space to release stress on a regular basis,
ideally daily, a real transformation happens. From the outset many people report
that arranging for stress release in their calendar is actually more stressful than putting up with stress as it means that
they have squizz other issues and run even more to attend for instance a stress reduction class. There is some truth in this perception for the first few weeks when one is in the transition between a
stressful life without space for relaxing to a healthy life rhythm comprising space for releasing tension.
One of the main gain from taking time to practice meditation, no matter its form, is that in a
record time you gain so much distance to what happens in your life that all of a sudden you realise how much more time you
have at your disposal than you ever perceived before. Indeed, a major consequence of heavy stress, accumulated over time without
being released, is to make people loose their ability to have a reasonable grasp on time.
When
a person is stressed or overwhelmed by the quantity or difficulty of the work to be performed, the natural reaction is to
think and speak a lot about this situation. At times, some people end up spending more time thinking and speaking how much
work they have to do then it would actually take to do it. The reason for this situation is the fact that the person has lost
not only the necessary distance to appreciate the reality but also has no more access to his ability to size reasonably the
importance and urgency of a given piece of work. Taking some time out on a daily basis helps incredibly much to regain distance
and enable to access again one’s own resources
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