“Do you make regular visits to yourself?” Rumi

Learn how to ride the waves, and build balance & stability, clarity & freedom.

Mindfulness meditation emerges out of 2500 year old practices from Asia from the Buddhist tradition. These practices give us a means of finding healing and freedom in the midst of our life as we find ourselves now. 

We start where we are, with what is already here in the mind, the body and the heart. First, we create some steadiness by focusing the mind on a point in the body, usually the breath. Then, when we have some stability, we expand to be with whatever is arising from moment to moment. We learn to get curious about what is already here: we learn to listen to ourselves, to the wisdom of the body and to the emotions so we can come back into balance and respond skilfully to the situations that life presents. The Buddha taught that life is the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows and freedom is possible here and now in this body, in this experience. It is not so much what we are experiencing that is the problem but how we are relating to it that keeps us stuck in the same patterns of thinking and behaving. 

Mindfulness meditation practice offers a different way to practice relating to ourselves and all we encounter. Instead of avoiding or clinging on, we can notice the fear or desire and offer it a deeply kind listening attention, creating space between what we are experiencing and our subsequent action. We can begin to notice everything is constantly changing, nothing is fixed. We can begin to be with our experience with a lot of respect and understanding without perhaps needing to do anything about it. (However sometimes skilful action is entirely called for.) This practice is a way to meet the beauty and the pain of life so you can engage with it as fully as possible for the short time we have to be alive. 

Much like surfing, this practice invites us to show up to what life is presenting, with as much strength and courage as we can muster, to meet the mysterious flow inside us and in all of nature.