MINDFUL LIVING PROGRAMS IN APRIL

With Spring starting this week in the Upper Valley, we begin to anticipate running sap, blossoming of plants and flowing of frozen waterways. The other blossoming we welcome is the start of 2 more mindful living groups. The Managing Chronic Conditions Mindfully program (MCCM) is what I call the little-brother of the CORE program we began in February. That program is intense and demanding, exploring the breadth of the PARA skills, as we call them. The MCCM is shorter, more practice-focussed and light on reading and self-study. It was developed to concentrate on the acquisition and cultivation of mindfulness or attention, the first A of PARA. It responds to the needs of many former participants who struggled with chronic illness and had less developed reading and study skills.
One of the groups will be held in Pembroke at the RMML Centre, the other will be in Cobden, using the well-known “badge” of Change Your Mind, the program that started it all for us about 12 years ago. Both are daytime groups and both share the same material and format. It will be interesting to see how effective a lighter version of this training may be. It’s heartening to see that, even after 12 years of program delivery, there remains an interest in using non-medical, non-pharmaceutical interventions like mindful living to address chronic health conditions. 

yours mindfully,
Ray

MINDFULNESS AND THE NET

I have been working through an exciting new book in preparation for the Taming Our Digital Lives workshop on the 21st. The book is The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by American tech observer, Nicholas Carr. He is stirring up considerable debate around the transformation of our lives into digital, or at least digitally-constrained existences. It particularly resonated with me because of the way he distinguishes Net-based activity as being structured around superficial (in a good way) activity which can  collapse into mindless distractability and that part of our lives which needs to be open and reflective, even contemplative.

It drew my attention to the many ways I experience distraction when online. Just as a test, I loaded and reloaded a typical page without attending to the content and was sharply aware of how many built-in distractions there are on a typical page. It is an exercise of will, usually a failure to sustain any firm attention for more than a second or two.

Contrast this with my recent experience on a midnight beach in Cuba. I drew a chair into the surf and sat, just above the waves and did my sitting practice staring at the gentle shimmering of the full moon.  Even allowing for my ADD-ish tendencies, I was aware of the drive in my senses to jump around, looking for new information, links, video, clickables and so on. Since then, I’ve been deliberately reining in my usual unrestrained Net activity to re-set more of the mindful, contemplative mind I need.

mindfully,
Ray