Listening to Tara Brach's inspirational and soothing talk on 'Genuine Acceptance' today.  Acceptance is about being with what is here.  Not our story around it but the embodied present moment experience.  So mindfulness is our pathway, our tool, to be with what is - the bodily experience of the unpleasant: the sensations and emotions. The resistance and how that feels in the body. Mindful awareness helps us to feel the experience of the 'fight-flight-freeze' reactivity.  To sit in that space. To acknowledge and be with what is here. This is how acceptance is not passive and is not about…

  Inspired by Tara Brach talk: Happy for No Reason, Part 2.   "When you go to a garden do you look at thorns or flowers? Spend more time with roses and jasmine" -Rumi Awareness is the intention of mindfulness practice. And working with what is there is also part of the moment and the practice. We know now of the 'darkside' of neuroplasticity: our biological negativity bias primes us to pay most attention to threat and danger. Unaware  we allow that bias to become the habit of mind. Awareness invites us to tune into those habitual patterns: we notice the mind's…

  Reading Sylvia Boorsteins's: Don't just do something, sit there - I am inspired to remember the value of periodic retreats. Paraphrasing Sylvia and integrating with my own ponderings: So why practice 'in seclusion' rather than 'in the midst of life'? On retreat, we are freed of the usual diversions and distractions.  There is no place to hide.  We open to the possibility of knowing ourselves a bit better. Really we practice seeing how things are rather that how we are. In our day to day lives we complicate our moments, spinning up elaborate productions and the mind becomes confused and fatigued.…

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/07/are-you-trying-to-escape/   How often have we cried out this lament about our fledgling mindfulness meditation practice? I know I have. I still get overwhelmed, get sucked back into autopilot habits of reactivity of overworking, overthinking and over critiquing. 'It's not working' - I can hear the whisper of judging mind in the background - and it quickly spirals to inner critic who laments  'I'm no good at this'. When we practice, we learn the intention of mindfulness is simply awareness. Accepting what is here without the need to change it. So today I welcome the 'it's not working' thinking since it may…