Pillar 1 - Overcoming Overwhelm - Return to your natural state of rest and relaxation
Week 1 - Introducing concepts, learning to sit quietly without expectation, and get some rest!
Morning Practice
Learning to sit quietly, without expectation, desire, goal or condition is a foundational experience that we will build on throughout the course. It’s very simple, yet can be quite challenging to meet ourselves in this way. Here, I share with you a research project that normalises the difficulty with simply stopping and being with all of our experience. Rather than tell you it’s easy and you feel that something is wrong, I’m deliberately setting the bar very low: don’t expect anything from this experience. Keep going and do this every day and see what happens over the course of the week in terms of your relationship to this practice of simply sitting and being natural.
The Importance and Value of Body Sensing
When we pay attention to physical sensation, we build our capacity for presence. As our mind learns to come out of the past and future and tend to the sensations that are here in this moment, deep mental relaxation can take place. By learning to be with sensations, as they are, we develop our willingness to not choose and refuse, but to be with whatever is here. We are also training ourselves to ‘feel’ and by doing so, we have greater access to emotional intelligence. Along the way, we may become very deeply relaxed, and even fall asleep. Learn about why we are doing these practices, when might be best to do them, and what you might experience along the way.
Please take some time to engage with a body-sensing practice at least once a day. there’s a short 10-minute version, and a longer 30-minute option (with or without background sounds to support you going deeper) for sleeplessness, or just if you want to experience a really deep and profound restful state.
Contemplation exercise - Flipping Your Thinking
Take some time throughout the week to sit, reflect on and write about what is good in your life. Maybe have a cup of tea and ponder, specifically:
What are you grateful for in your life?
Who supports you and lifts you up?
Where do you like to go to feel peace, well-being, ease, and quiet?
Where - and with who - do you experience the feeling of belonging?
Who listens to you and allows you to feel seen and heard?
The aim of these contemplations is to build a selection of places, people, and experiences that come together to create an experience of well-being. We will be using these reflections in week 2 of the program in a very specific way, so it will be to your advantage to go as deeply as you can into answering these questions. Make some lists (if that’s your thing), ponder on the questions and keep building up this reservoir of positive relationships, activities, and experiences and you will sail into a deep experience of ease and relaxation in the practices that are to come next week.
