It’s that time of the week when we check in with Jane and see how she has got on with this week of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course that she is taking part in:
Hello again everyone, well having got ‘cocky’ last week and said that I had found it pretty effortless to incorporate my mindfulness meditation into each day; I’m afraid I have to report a very different experience this week!! However I was assured that this is how it goes with mindfulness practice, you have days or weeks where it flows and similarly days or weeks where you resist or forget to add it to the day. The trick is not to be critical of your self for this but to notice and resolve to do more the next day or be more aware the next week.
Basically I had a hectic few days after the course session last week and before I knew it I had got to sunday without having done my mindfulness meditation practice. Interestingly though, what made me remember was the fact that I could tell I was starting to feel more anxious again and I was starting to think more about the future and spend less time in the present. I know that the objective of mindfulness is not to make difficult feelings go away but to change your perception of difficult emotions or thoughts. However a very useful ‘side-effect’ of my meditation practice has been that I notice I feel anxious less often. So having noticed that I was feeling different and less resilient, I made the commitment with myself to get back into my daily practice after my blip and it feels great to be back in the swing of it and the discipline of it. This week we were able to chose which meditation we wanted to do each day so that felt quite liberating as well and you start to take responsibility for your meditation practice and have the freedom to do the ones you like, rather than just doing what you are invited to do.
I also noticed that I put a lot of informal mindfulness into practice at a work conference I went to this week. I was quite nervous about going to the conference and meeting lots of new people so I made sure that I kept checking in with what I was feeling in my body when I was talking to people and taking a breath or two at regular intervals during the day. My mind was also wandering at times during the workshops and I was pleased with how many times I noticed it had wandered and was able to pull it back to what was happening there and then.
The session this week was as interesting as ever. We looked at the activities in our daily routine and went through the list of activities and classed them as either ‘Nourishing’ or ‘Depleting’ to our wellbeing. It was very surprising to see how on weekdays, the focus can so easily be on depleting activities. It can be very worthwhile to do a ‘stock take’ at the end of each day to check how nourishing or depleting the day has been so that you can maybe redress the balance the next day. To do this we need to make sure we know the things we find nourishing, such as going for a walk but as a result of the hectic pace of life I find a lot of people including myself, might have lost sight of the things we enjoy. Note to self!
Thanks again Jane for the detailed account of your experience with MBSR this week. Sounds a tough but developmental week!