THE SEVEN PILLARS OF MINDFULNESS

NON-JUDGING: consists in taking the position of an impartial witness to your own experience. It requires that you become aware of the stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences and step back from it. This habit of categorizing into good and bad or positive and negative locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all. Tip: observe over 10 minutes how much you are preoccupied with liking and disliking what you are experiencing.

PATIENCE: it demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things unfold in their own time. Practicing mindfulness give us the chance to give time and space to our own unfolding. Why rushing to the next “better” moment when after all each one is your life in that moment.

BEGINNER’s MIND: practicing mindfulness means to take the chance to see everything as if it was for the first time and not allow our illusion of knowing prevent us from being present to our experiences. Tip next time you meet someone you know well try and see something new in this person.

TRUST: developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings is an integral part of meditation practice. Do not get caught up in the reputation and authority of your teachers. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.

NON-STRIVING: almost everything we do is for a purpose. Meditation not! Actually this attitude can be a real obstacle in meditation. Although meditation takes a lot of work and energy, ultimately it is about non-doing. It has no goal other than for you to be yourself. The irony is that you already are! Do not sit to get relaxed, enlighten or sleep better. Sit to learn to carefully see what is happening and accept it.

ACCEPTANCE: often acceptance comes after we have gone through intense period of emotion turmoil and anger. Doing that uses up our energy in the struggle instead of using it for healing and change. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when your vision is mot clouded by your mind’s self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudices.

LETTING GO: when we pay attention to our inner experience, we discover that there are certain thoughts, feelings and situations that the mind seems to want to hold on to. If pleasant, we try and prolong our experience, if unpleasant, we try and get rid of them. In meditation, we try to intentionally put aside the tendency to elevate some aspects of our experience and reject others.

As presented by Jon Kabat-Zinn in Full Catastrophe Living

About time

One take on time
...no time ...not on time ...too little time
...always less time ...no free time
...need more time ...short of time
...time for nothing ...overtime
...out of time ...time pressure

Time, time, time

TIME IS OVER !



An alternative one
....any time...much time...time for everything
...rich of time...time used...quite time
...save your time...use your time
...take your time...enjoy your time

TIME IS LOVE AND COMPASSION

Our website is online - About the background to get there

Since yesterday our website is online www.holisticdialogue.com. Preparing it was a real challenge. For me it was important that it would be in three languages to reflect our daily life (...our fourth daily language - Swedish - is not planned for the time being, :-)). For English and French that was ok. Then for the German version, we partly did it ourselves and partly got the support of a dear friend for both revision and translation, Vera (www.thing-online.de).

The next challenge was to select the information and avoid falling in a too big ego trip whereby we would list all we have been practicing and trained for while not necessarily being able to attach something concrete to this information. In this respect, the preparation process was a real cleansing process. It brought me a lot of focus and served as a practice of being present to who we are and what we actually do.

I went through quite of a process to be able to explain in writing what I understand personal development and distinguish it from what I understand of what a spiritual quest is. I will continue working with these two aspects and and expand and refine them as it feels important for me to have them explicited.

Looking forward to hearing from you !

Contemplation

A day like today I am happy I can recourse to my meditation knowledge and practice to come over what I perceive as hurdles. Knowing that I am not my thoughts and that I am responsible to choose the object of my focus are two very helpful insights. It is worth very much to me to be able to realise when anger or frustration grow in me that if I choose to follow them, I displace the center of my access to information from the still place within me to either the state of anger or frustration or to the event or person which served as pretext for me to get angry or frustrated. I move outside myself, outside the center of my inner peace to a place that I wrongly perceive being in me. Thinking this way help me reclaim the ownership on my feelings which in turn allow me to change them - and so in a split second.

Contemplating my anger not being my anger....
Staying at my center not moving to the center of anger....
Choosing to be responsible....

Praise - Internet - Mindfulness

Today was one of those days when the rythm slows and the mind has a bit more time to just be relaxed. I took the time to bridge building with a few people I was intuiting could be stimulating counterparts. One of these exchange of e-mail was with a person busy building a newtwork in German speaking countries for mindfulness activities following Jon Kabat-Zinn Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction model (www.mbsr-verband.de). Reflecting on the incredible support internet brings, I was listing for myself the support internet had brought me today. That reminded me that some 8 years ago I had written for a newspaper of my home town in France an article about the 'Village Earth'. I connected again to a more recent book I read called 'The world is Flat', very much worth a read.

Feeling blessed to be aware of the world of abundance I live in.

Zen circles

Working with reflection when taking pictures is very inspiring for me. Photographing the reflection of the these trees, combined with throwing a stone in the water to provoke ripples helped me realised the power of illusion and how much we leave in a world we have created with our minds. The trees look real, still they are only reflections, the circles are long lasting on the picture though they were just visble for a split second.

Much certainty to let go of when awareness grows...