Week 8: The Rest of Your Life

“Once you are cultivating mindfulness systematically in your life, it is virtually impossible to stop…Over time, the practice tends to teach you what you need to know next. “  Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Even not practicing is practicing in a way, if you are aware of how you feel compared with when you do practice regularly and how it affects your ability to handle stress and pain.” Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

Life Practice:

  1. The eighth week is the rest of your life. The invitation is to continue to investigate and explore your experiences with curiosity.

  2. You are ready to make the practice your own. It may be useful to continue practicing just as you’ve established, for another week or so—to sense how it is to practice without the class—and then to assess and make changes.

  3. As you experiment, allow the combination of formal and informal practice to be supportive for you. Trust that you have become familiar with your needs and that you can determine what will be most supportive in any moment. As you continue to make time for practice a priority, do your best to avoid the kind of harsh expectations we sometimes employ when putting a new habit into place. There is a discipline to this—but it’s also much more. Keep exploring with kindness.

  4. When you fall away from the practice, be willing to re-enter by being mindful of what’s going on in your life: what are the barriers to practice and how can you reduce them? How can you continue to make your own needs a priority?

Resources for Continuing Your Practice:

  • The Center for Mindfulness at Brown University (where I completed my training) offers regular, online, free community mindfulness sessions. I recommend exploring their offerings to see if something works with your schedule.

  • Insight Timer (app for your phone or iPad) is another wonderful free resource.

Tips for Finding the Right Mindfulness Practice for Your Life:

There are many ways to practice mindfulness – short daily meditations, long daily meditations, mindful pauses, weekly or monthly meditation group meet-ups, annual retreats. Only you can discover what works best with your life.

  • Pauses: Life gives us many chances to stop, breath and refresh. Learn to respond to these opportunities.

  • Short daily: A 5-10-minute practice, once, twice or three times a day can refresh your awareness.

  • Long daily: 30-minutes once or twice a day can build regular stability that make the mini-pauses more powerful.

  • Weekly: Many groups hold a weekly sit and talk. It can be supportive to continue to sit and process your experiences with others. With so many online options available now, you can join a sitting group from anywhere and you can take a friend from anywhere with you!

  • Monthly: Doing something intentional once a month (12 times in a year) can make a big difference - perhaps a half-day of silence.

  • Annual/Semi-Annual/Quarterly: Extended periods of practice can be so helpful in reinforcing our learning and building our capacity. Take a look at your calendar and see if there is a time where you can include a longer retreat. Or perhaps you could join the MBSR all-day retreat for my next class (I will always send you an invitation to join).