Reflection on the Past Week

During the first and second week of mindfulness practice, you familiarized yourself with the basic principles of mindfulness and learned foundational exercises focusing on body and breath awareness. You may have also become more aware of how our minds automatically and constantly evaluate things, how quickly our thoughts change, and how we engage in certain activities without giving them full attention.

You have been introduced to exercises that help stabilize our often scattered minds and enhance our ability to concentrate on the present moment. Through these practices, we learn to cultivate patience, kindness, and curiosity, which are essential aspects of mindfulness. By integrating these approaches into our exercises, we establish a strong foundation for our minds to become more stable and focused, even in moments when we are not intentionally striving for it. Alongside informal practices like the 10 Finger Gratitude Practice and 50:50 Awareness, they form the basis for establishing and developing mindfulness in our daily lives.

You may have also realized how challenging it is to incorporate new things into your life and find time for them, especially when they don't have an immediate impact on our struggles and life dissatisfaction. We would like to encourage you to continue with the practice despite these challenges. Mindfulness requires the same effort as learning to play a musical instrument.

One of the biggest misconceptions about mindfulness training is the idea that the goal of meditation is to stop thinking, to be thoughtless. However, that is not possible in reality. Our minds continuously generate a stream of evolving associations. Thoughts trigger emotions, and vice versa. Paradoxically, this stream is even more pronounced when we try to do nothing and simply relax. Behind this paradox lies the activation of the "default mode network" in our brain, which is a neural network that activates during periods of rest. We can call it the "baseline setting" of our mind, where our learned and natural habits of automatic reactions are stored. It is active, for example, during daydreaming. The metabolic activity of our brain is even 20 times higher when we are at rest than when we are engaged in, for instance, solving a mathematical problem.

Don't lose heart – striving in terms of clinging to results is not the essence of mindfulness. On the contrary, it involves friendly and healthy effort to incorporate self-care into our daily routine. Invite the attitude of non-judgment and self-kindness back into your practice again and again.

It is necessary to persevere and trust that things are as they should be. The good news is that mindfulness can be practiced in many different ways and adapted to various lifestyles. Finding time for formal meditations is important, but it's worth reminding ourselves that mindfulness can also be practiced within everyday routine activities.

Adapted from Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Williams & Penman, 2011: 111-133).

Introduction to Week Three

Week Three – Gathering the Scattered Mind

The meditation exercises we practice every day help us develop a more stable attention that is infused with the attitudes of genuine interest, kindness, and patience towards our experiences. 

During the third mindful week:

• we will begin to intersperse our days with moments of stopping, resting, and focusing on our anchor (breath, sensations of feet touching the ground, sitting, hands). We will learn the Three-Step Breathing Space, which, with regular practice, will help us manage stress and disengage from automatic patterns and reactions of our mind.
• We will also incorporate elements of mindful movement based on very simple stretching exercises into our practice. Although these exercises are very simple and undemanding, they will allow you to explore your physical and mental boundaries and observe your reactions when you reach these boundaries, thereby further connecting the mind with the body. You will gradually learn how sensitively the body responds to unpleasant sensations associated with excessive focus on achieving a goal, and you will begin to notice how tense, angry, or unhappy you are if things don't go as you would like them to. 

You will learn to perceive your body as a "radar", a powerful and important early warning system that allows you to prevent problems before they fully unfold and become unstoppable. 

When we rely solely on thoughts and do not feel our body, which is the source of emotions/feelings, we can quickly get hurt or fail to recognize an unpleasant sensation that warns us of danger. An example could be ignoring uncomfortable pressure in the stomach when we take on additional obligations and later regret bitterly what we promised. Being in good contact with the sensations in our body is preventive because it informs us in time about what is approaching.

1. Mindful Movement

• In the first week, we familiarized ourselves with meditation Mindfulness of Body and Breath. From the awareness of the body as a whole, we narrowed the beam of attention to the breath. 
• In the second week, while practicing Body Scan, we shifted the focus of attention from one part of the body to another. 
• This week, we introduce a new meditation, Breath and Body, in which we will start with a tightly focused attention on the breath and then expand the attention to encompass the whole body. We will explore that our attention is like the lens of a telescope, where we can bring a certain part of the body very close and examine it, and conversely, when we choose, we can expand it and encompass the entire body. We recommend continuing this exercise after mindful movement. It turns out that after consciously stretching the body, we perceive it more easily, and the experience of meditation can have a different dimension.
  

2. Mindful Walking

Another opportunity to move mindfully this week is a practice called Mindful Walking. Create your own "mindful" pathway at home, school, or work, about 5-10 meters long. Walk along it every day, back and forth, for 10 minutes. Notice the sensations in your feet or perceive your body as a whole.

3. 3-Step Breathing Space

This technique is the golden thread of this program, as it can be practiced truly anywhere, it is very short (even just one minute), and effective. The breathing space it provides gives us an opportunity to step out of autopilot and connect with the present moment.

Home Practice for Week Three

Please do not distribute or reproduce this work without the permission of the authors.

This program was created with the kind permission of Professor Mark Williams and the Oxford Mindfulness Center, who allowed us to use their materials as sources. It is a unique integration of the original program by the mentioned authors and our clinical and theoretical knowledge and skills.

Bernard, P., Cullen, C., & Kuyken, W. (2020). Mindfulness for Life: A Handbook for the Course. Oxford: Oxford Mindfulness Center.

Williams, J.M.G., & Penman, D. (2011). Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World. London: Piatkus.

Světlák, M., Linhartová, P., Knejzlíková, T., Knejzlík, J., Kóša, B., Horníčková, V., ... Šumec, R. (2021). Being mindful at university: A pilot evaluation of the feasibility of an online mindfulness-based mental health support program for students. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.581086.