Awareness / Mindfulness

A facilitated community of three people (forming a triad), for a 10 week program with readings, practices, sharing, feedback, listening and gaining tremendous insights into oneself.  An intimate relationship with openness and vulnerability to express what longing to say, hear what the heart is open to hear and expand perceptions to move through difficult challenges. For more information go to www.teamup.co.  

Awareness (Mindfulness) means to pay attention to what’s happening, on purpose, in the present moment, and to do so without judgement.   The ability to be in the present moment and start savouring all the fullness and magnificence in life.   When we are mindful, we bring our complete attention to the present experience as it unfolds.    Awareness also guides us to being non-reactive. It offers us these precious moments of pause before we would say or do something unskilful that we will regret afterwards. Essentially, it gives us more conscious choice. 

By paying attention in a certain way, we can switch off our so-called autopilot mode, in which we often go through life unaware of what’s happening within and around us. Our auto-pilot is the collection of all our belief systems, behaviours, tendencies, and habits that we play out when we are ‘just being who we are’. When we don’t deliberately stop, pause, and reflect before speaking or acting, we generally will default to our programmed personality. 

Living on autopilot not only means that we miss out on a lot of the richness of life, but we are also more likely to be stressed.  Stress and autopilot are linked because when we are on autopilot, we are much more likely to act out unhelpful or even damaging patterns of behaviour. In other words, we react instead of respond to challenging experiences in our life. Awareness helps us to become aware of these habitual patterns and gives us a choice to change how we relate to challenging experiences. It’s not about taking stress away or hoping to live a life without any stress, but rather fundamentally changing how we relate to the things we experience.

On the other hand, many of us spend much of our time living in our heads. We live in a kind of virtual reality consisting of thoughts and inner dialogue, and thoughts tend to relate either to the past or to the future. Awareness (Mindfulness) helps us to learn how to return to the present and to what’s actually happening rather than our perceptions of what’s happening, which are often inaccurate. We practice it by cultivating greater somatic awareness — that is, awareness of the body, because the body is always in the present moment.

Ultimately, the more we practice Awareness and observe the changing nature of experience, the more we may begin to sense that what we previously thought of as being tangible and solid, such as our sense of self, is actually quite transitory and ephemeral. We may begin to understand what lies beyond objects arising in awareness such as sensations, thoughts, and emotions. We may begin to experience awareness itself.  This is an extremely significant moment in practice and in life, when we start to experience ourselves as something greater than what we observe plus the labels we have taken on and our sense of being the observer.

In Awareness, attention generally focuses on one object (such as the breath, sensations in the body, thoughts, or emotions), exploring it with a sense of curiosity and interest. Another way Awareness can be practiced is through open monitoring, where no particular object of experience is selected and there is an openness to all that is unfolding within awareness. Here too, however, as various objects pass through awareness, attention is often paid to each object in a narrowly focused way.

Increased awareness helps to lower stress and allows you to experience more appreciation and joy for those things that are already present in your life. That by itself is wonderful and can really enrich your life.

Sustaining the Changes

Following the meditations and attunements of the workshops there are always questions, new experiences not had before, new perceptions, etc. …. which is why I offer to each participant a complimentary discussion, explanation, coaching session of 1 to 1.5 hours. This can be done through phone conversation, email, or zoom.

The participant can continue with the coaching sessions via zoom, on an on-going basis as necessary. The fee for these sessions are $50 per additional hour.