There will be no Thursday meeting on 29 th December. We will resume on Jan 5th.
Also no first of month all day Saturday meeting in January.
The bodyscan is a very important practice – you might say the core practice introduced by the MBSR program. There is quite a good free guided bodyscan here:
“…When Trungpa Rinpoche came to the West and was teaching in the early days in Vermont at what used to be called Tail of the Tiger (now Karme Choling), he used to tell the students: “Just sit and let your mind open and rest— let yourself be completely open with an open mind, and whenever you get distracted and find yourself thinking— in other words when you are no longer fully in the present and are carried away— simply just come back again to resting your mind in an open state.”
“..The key to mindfulness is not so much what you choose to focus on but the quality of the awareness that you bring to each moment. It is very important that it be nonjudgmental–more of a silent witnessing, a dispassionate observing, than a running commentary on your inner experience. Observing without judging, moment by moment, helps you see what is on your mind without editing or censoring it, without intellectualizing it or getting lost in your own incessant thinking.
It is this investigative, discerning observation of whatever comes up in the present moment that is the hallmark of mindfulness and differentiates it most from other forms of meditation. The goal of mindfulness is for you to be more aware, more in touch with life and with whatever is happening in your own body and mind at the time it is happening–that is, in the present moment. If you are experiencing a distressing thought or feeling or actual physical pain in any moment, you resist the impulse to try to escape the unpleasantness; instead, you attempt to see it clearly as it is and accept it because it is already present in this moment…”
Jon Kabat Zinn
Welcome to Larne Mindfulness Group. We meet every Thursday in Drumalis Retreat Centre, Larne at 7.30 pm. Our practice is mindfulness meditation roughly along the lines of MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) pioneered by Jon Kabat Zinn in the US.
We also have an all day meeting from 9.30 am to 4.00 pm every first Saturday of each month.
