Bob Stahl from Mindfulness & Healing

Become more connected to your body and mind through mindfulness meditation. The body has its own intelligence, and our history can be found within our own skin, flesh, organs, bones and being. The body is the storehouse for all our memories and learnings, through our thoughts, feelings and experiences.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• What is mindfulness
• Mindfulness as a way of life
• Mindful breathing
• Mindful check-in
• Body scan
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Perception plays an important role in health and wellbeing. It’s all in how you see things. Our challenge is to break free from the box of our limited perceptions and see from a wider perspective. At times, our beliefs can be self-limiting and imprisoning.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation, mindful breathing and the body scan
• An investigation on perception — is it a stick or a snake?
• How to work with physical pain
• How to work with Illness
• More on bringing mindfulness into everyday life activities through S.T.O.P. (Stop, Take a Breath, Observe what’s here in body and mind, Proceed being present)
• How to calm and steady the mind and body
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

We live in a world of change, as evidenced by the weather, the seasons and our aging bodies. Understanding how to more skillfully navigate our moods, thoughts, emotions and senses (sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations) can help us live a more peaceful life. It’s important to clearly see how and why each moment can be either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. When not attended to — when we are not being mindful — these moments can catapult us into reacting in ways that don’t support our wellbeing.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Introduction to the sitting meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• Bringing mindfulness to pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feelings — and not getting so caught up in them
• More effective coping strategies for working with physical and emotional pain and illness

This session is devoted to exploring how patterns of reactivity impact us. As humans, we can become creatures of habit and live life on automatic pilot, which can have a decidedly negative effect. We’ll explore how reactivity affects our body and mind. It’s not the stress, but how we react to it that makes all the difference.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• Bringing mindfulness to habitual patterns
• How reactive patterns affect your sensations, thoughts and emotions
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Viktor Frankl says, “Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space, and in that space, lies our freedom to choose.” We will explore this “space” and the difference between mindless reactivity and mindful responding. Reacting, versus responding, can often fuel habitual patterns that can have a detrimental effect on your thoughts, emotions and sensations. Conversely, when you become mindful, you may see that you have a choice, that you can respond in a more constructive way rather than react in a non-productive or even destructive way. We’ll explore how the practice of mindfulness transforms old patterns of reactivity.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• The difference between mindless reactivity and mindful responding
• Bringing mindfulness to habitual patterns and responding to them in a much more constructive way
• How to have a broader and wiser attitude when meeting life’s challenges
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Bringing mindfulness to the way we communicate is one of the most important things we can do to bring more peace into the world and to ourselves. Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The way we relate to one another can foster a sense of belonging, trust and love, or can lead to separation, fear and hate. This session will offer mindfulness practices to cultivate deeper listening and more mindful speaking, which will seed greater understanding and deeper connection into our relationships.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• Using mindful response rather than mindless reaction
• The satisfaction of being heard and understood when you talk with another
• The rewards of listening deeply to another and offering the gift of your empathic heart
• Loving kindness meditation
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

In this last session, we’ll look at what we take in, in the form of food, media and the world, and how it affects us physically, mentally and emotionally. We’ll also explore mindfulness as a way of life, and what we can do to support our mindfulness practice upon completion of this course. We’ll discover that we are at the beginning of a mindful journey that can help foster our wellbeing and sense of peace throughout our lifetime.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• A greater awareness of what you take in and how it affects your body and mind
• Resources to support your mindfulness meditation practice
• Loving kindness meditation
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities