Mindfulness for Stress

My Mindfulness Experience - Midway through an 8 week course.

I have been engaging with Mindfulness Training for 4 weeks now and for a practice that is so gentle it is proving to be quite transformative for me.

I started the Mindfulness Training hoping to manage stress and anxiety more effectively. I didn’t really know what to expect but the course sounded interesting so I decided to give it a go.

I am finding that the breathing meditations and the movement meditations are helping me to be more aware of my physical self and to feel physical sensation more fully, much the same as I felt naturally as a child but something that as an adult I had lost touch with.

Now, when I am being Mindful I feel more alive in my adult body.

I have to admit that I don’t always enjoy the heaviness of the sensations that I experience especially during the Mindful Movement practice but, with the same token, in feeling the sensations they also remind me that I am a physical human creature that just ‘is’ as well as a thinking/doing being. For me, that thought in itself is calming and quietens my mind!

I am learning that in feeling sensation I am able to manage my emotional and thinking state to a greater degree than I did before. This awareness seems to be allowing a space for me to distinguish between a reaction and a response.

Mindfulness is also teaching me to be gentle and not to judge myself harshly when I fall into habitual ways and that it is my choice not to dwell in unhelpful thoughts or to allow negative thoughts to multiply.

Somehow life seems very subtly sweeter and simpler…

Samantha Norris