Mindfulness Courses

Mindfulness  ·  Mindfulness Courses
Starting a year of mindfulness events as our culture adopts and changes a traditional practice

My first mindfulness event of the year will be on Saturday 27th January in Wynns Hotel in Dublin. It’s at 11am and runs for two hours. Most of my events are in the mornings, and I have found that this time is popular – maybe mindfulness people are larks!

An intriguing change
I’ve noticed an intriguing change in the people attending my courses. When I began to hold public courses, perhaps ten years ago, the audience was mainly made up of people already interested in pursuits such as meditation and yoga. Today, most people in the audience have heard of mindfulness and want to know what it’s about but they are not necessarily already practitioners of meditation or yoga.

To me, this is a fascinating sign of how widespread the interest in, and curiosity about, mindfulness has become. It is no passing fad but is becoming part of our culture in the same way that the 19th century enthusiasm for physical exercise as a character building activity continues to have an effect in the 21st century.

‘On the go’ mindfulness
As mindfulness becomes increasingly adopted in our culture, it will change – it must because our culture in the West differs so greatly from the Buddhist or Buddhist-influences cultures in which mindfulness has been cultivated as a practice for more than 2,000 years.

For instance, the use of quite short, ‘on the go’ mindfulness practices which I have been advocating and teaching for years, is now become far more common and the belief that mindfulness requires lengthy meditations (which most people are just not going to do) is receding into the background.

Mindful chefs
I’m really interested in watching the changing applications of mindfulness in our culture. Just one example comes in an Irish Times report by Marie Claire Digby: Chefs doing the Msc in applied nutrition at the Institute of Technology Tallaght (near Dublin) were introduced to mindfulness as part of the course and several of them included mindfulness in their research topics.

What an interesting development and an illustration of how we are grabbing mindfulness with both hands (but with full awareness!) and adapting it to our needs.

And the attendance at my events of people with no previous history of meditation is a part of that development.

As they did last year, my events this year will take me to the four corners of Ireland and I can’t wait to get started.

18/01/2018

Mindfulness Courses
Well, that was fun … touring the country with mindfulness.

I’ve almost finished my autumn/first-half-of-winter mindfulness tour with two dates left close to home (Dun Laoghaire on 10th December and Dublin on 16th December. Since August I’ve been to Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Galway, Malahide. Mullingar, Naas, Navan, Tallaght, Tralee, Limerick, Sligo and Waterford.

It was great to see full houses at almost all of these venues (I had to put up the ‘sold out’ notice a few times). About half of those who came had never practised mindfulness before and I hope that, for them, the two-hour events were the start of something new and beneficial in their lives.

I will be back to most if not all of these venues next year and will post the events here and in the Daily Bell.

23/11/2017

Mindfulness Courses
Mindful Living Course Story

How getting lost on the Hill of Howth – not to mention a ’99’ – led to the Mindful Living course

Mindful Living Course Story

Image from walkingroutes.ie

The Mindful Living course owes its existence to me and my family getting lost on the Hill of Howth.  Howth, if you don’t know, is a beautiful fishing port north of Dublin city, easily accessible and well worth a visit. Whenever I go to Howth I feel I have actually been somewhere, that I have got away, even though it’s a fairly short journey on the DART, Dublin’s suburban railway.  The Hill above the port is a popular walking area for organised groups and for, well, disorganised groups like mine.

Actually, I’m lazy about walking the Hill, preferring a stroll around the port followed by fish and chips or a seafood chowder before I return to the real world. But on this particular Sunday about three or four years ago,  we decided a family walk on the HIll was called for. The day was sunny and breezy and as we walked we had a beautiful view of the sea.

Then we managed to get ourselves lost and we ended up on a road that led to – nowhere?

Actually no. As we found out after half a mile of wandering, it led to a shop that sold ice cream. There, we learned we had another mile or so to walk into the train station. By consensus, we stopped for ice cream.
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The idea for the Mindful Living course came to me when I was sitting on the wall outside that ice cream shop tucking into a ’99’ which, in Ireland (and the UK too), is a plain ice cream cone, with a bar of Flake chocolate stuck into it. Good, healthy, nutritious food.

Mindful Living Course Story

Image from popartuk


I knew people get a lot of benefit, as I do, from shorter mindfulness practices and techniques that can be built into one’s day. So why not, I wondered as I polished off my ice cream cone, create a course of about six weeks in which I would teach people many shorter exercises as well as discussing mindfulness from many points of view? A course that could also be informed by my experience of human psychology arising from my studies in that field and from my work in counselling and psychotherapy?

Topics could include well-being, health, cultivating calm, how mindfulness contributes to relationships, self-compassion, and bringing mindfulness to the workplace, along with insights into how mindfulness works with the brain. It would have to be helpful both to beginners and to people who already practice mindfulness. People would have to feel the benefits in their own lives and would have to know how to continue to develop mindfulness in themselves after the course ended.
By the time I’d finished my ice cream cone and got on the road again, I had decided on the basic structure of the Mindful Living course as it exists today. That might seem very quick but I believe many of these things are worked out at a sub-conscious level over a long period of time and just need an opportunity to emerge.

Mindful Living Course Story

Wynns Hotel Dublin where the course is held next
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We normally start by spending a few minutes on a short mindfulness practice. Following the discussion mentioned above, we do a new mindfulness exercise and then I make my presentation. That’s followed by a discussion and another mindfulness practice. Sometimes, of course, the discussion takes a completely different direction to the one I have planned, but it’s always around aspects of mindfulness that are of interest to the group.

The first thing people notice as the course goes on is how often we lose our awareness of the present moment. That’s important because the better you get at spotting you have wandered off, the more often you come back into the moment. As awareness grows, people find that they are mindful more often and that they experience the rewards in lower levels of stress, greater calm and a greater sense of well-being. They learn to keep their head when encountering relationship and work difficulties.  They also learn to enhance their appreciation of the positive, life-giving aspects of the day.

They finish the course knowing many mindfulness exercises and with a practical knowledge of how to apply mindfulness in their lives.

I guess getting lost on the Hill of Howth and stopping for that ice cream was worth it after all.

08/09/2017

Mindfulness Courses
Wisdom on a blouse in Bologna

Spotted in a shop window in Bologna recently, I think this slogan does a great job of capturing the idea of self-compassion which to me is a core aspect of mindfulness. It’s also a theme of my online self-compassion course, True Friend. The course, introduced at the start of this year, is back in September.

08/07/2016

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