The Lay Community
of Saint Benedict
Mindfulness
Mindfulness sessions with Clare Morgan
Thursdays at 10am in St Scholastica
To join us for a taster session, please register first with Clare at
Click to join zoom meeting...
Why not join us for one of these stand-alone sessions one Thursday? Some members of the community have been coming most weeks since Chris Walker invited me to offer some mindfulness back in April 2020 and others have been coming much more occasionally so just get in touch with me if you want to see whether you think it might be for you.
What is Mindfulness?
As I said in my article for Listen (above) , mindfulness is really just about being alive and knowing it. It’s about approaching life with openness, eagerness, and without preconceptions, with what we might call a ‘beginner’s mind’. It’s about bringing a friendly curiosity to our experience: investigating it with kindness, not trying to change what’s here. This is something that came easily to most of us as small children and so mindfulness is about re-connection, rediscovery, coming back to the wellsprings deep within us. It is a way of being rather than merely a good idea or a clever technique and it has its roots in ancient meditative practice.
It was when Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School tapped into both Buddhist tradition and new discoveries in neuro-science to initiate the eight-week course: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in the late 1970s that things took off.
“Mindfulness” he says “means paying attention in a particular way:
On purpose,
in the present moment, and
non-judgmentally.”
In this country, Kabat-Zinn’s friend, Professor Mark Williams set up the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and, along with two colleagues, developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and both his book and those by many others, not to mention all the courses, apps, and webinars on offer, have helped to popularise mindfulness in recent years.
Mindfulness, therefore, can be described as being more fully aware of your own experience in the present moment in a non-judgemental way.
There are four vital strands to this definition of mindfulness:
1. awareness,
2. experience,
3. the present moment,
4. and non-judgement
This all sounds quite straight forward and indeed, at one level, the practice is very simple. At another level, however, it can be very challenging really to wake up to the full sensory qualities of the present moment and to bring an open, non-judgemental awareness to our experience. This is where the big emphasis in mindfulness on kindness, both towards ourselves and others, comes in.
To hear Professor Mark Williams talking about the potential mindfulness has to help us reclaim our lives and create a happier a more caring society, go to this YouTube link.
To hear Jon Kabat-Zinn talking about some key mindful attitudes,
go to this YouTube link:
To find out a bit about my background in mindfulness,
go to my website:
To read some participants feedback on the mindfulness sessions I am offering, go to the Spring 2021 edition of Listen (see above).
To join us for a taster session, please register first with Clare at cm.mindfulness@gmail.com
‘The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.’
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Those attending the mindfulness group with Clare
have requested this half-hour guided body scan....
Breath-Based Body Scan
