Reflection on the Past Week

The first week of mindfulness practice has helped you establish a foundation for ongoing mindful awareness. Perhaps you noticed how the mind tends to wander during meditation exercises, constantly engaging in internal dialogue and judging and evaluating everything. You may have also noticed how often you operate on autopilot throughout the day, and how bringing awareness to the taste, smell, and colors of the food you eat allows you to step out of autopilot mode and into an experiential mode of perception through your senses. The same applies to breath awareness or any other bodily sensation during guided meditation or in everyday life... simply anytime we become aware of them. Right now, for example, you are aware of the sensation of your feet touching the ground.

During the first week, you discovered which time of day suits you best for practice. Twice a day for fifteen minutes each has proven to be the most effective and least intrusive to our daily life. In six days, you will have completed twelve sessions.

Occasionally, you may find it almost impossible to find time for meditation. You may feel too tired or busy, which is understandable. However, remember that meditation is primarily meant to rejuvenate you, and it is during those days when it seems challenging to fit fifteen minutes of meditation into your schedule that it is most important to make time for yourself and meditate regularly.

Week Two – Keeping the Body in Mind

The next step on our journey is to deepen our ability to perceive our bodies and gain a better insight into the workings of our minds. 

The body is a key source of information about how we feel and how we are in any given moment. Often, we notice physical sensations, such as a tightening in the stomach, before we realize that something is not right with another person. The body is where the first surges of emotionally charged thoughts begin. 

If you want to understand the body's signals, it is necessary to first learn to pay attention to your body. To be able to do that, we need exercises that teach us to direct our mindful attention with kindness and patience to all parts of our body. Such an exercise is called "Body Scan", which we will be learning this week.

Such an exercise is called "Body Scan," which we will be learning this week. Let's now take a close look at this and other practices that we will be engaging in during the following week.

1. Body Scan

2. Appreciating a pleasant experience here and now

Maintaining an experience calendar is a valuable method to increase our awareness of the body sensations, feelings, thoughts, and impulses that shape our experiences, and to deepen our understanding of our relationship with them. 

The image below illustrates the 4 components of our experience and how they are interdependent. Each thought intertwines with a bodily sensation, an emotion, and a tendency (impulse) to do something. 

Often, especially when we're on autopilot and caught up in our thoughts, we perceive our experiences as undifferentiated "blobs." By intentionally directing our attention to the distinct elements of our experiences—sensations, feelings, thoughts, and impulses—we can start to "de-blob" and notice the specific details unfolding in each moment.

In order to practice the process of "de-blobbing" your experiences, you will be encouraged to record pleasant experiences throughout the upcoming week. By bringing mindfulness to these moments, we can simply be present with the experience as it is. In addition to noticing the sensations, feelings, thoughts, and impulses that constitute our experiences, you may also become aware of any reactions that arise in response to these elements. You might inquire: "What is the weather pattern in my body and mind, and what reactions do I notice toward this weather?" Remember, none of this is easy. It requires patience and persistence!

It is natural that for our ancestors to pass on their genes, they had to learn to avoid threats, assess them, and be vigilant. It seems that this biological inheritance has left us with a natural tendency to pay a lot of attention to what is wrong and what could be a threat to us. Noticing and dedicating time to what is pleasant does not come easily for most of us, especially when we are stressed or preoccupied. However, there are steps we can take to bring attention to the beautiful and fulfilling aspects of our lives.

It can be beneficial to simply internally acknowledge that something is pleasant, uplifting, or beautiful. It is much more powerful to pause and bring attention and appreciation to the details of bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, and urges that arise. By learning to "turn good facts into good experiences," we can deepen our appreciation and gratitude for these joyful moments. We increase the mental nourishment they provide us, literally filling us with uplifting emotions such as joy and gratitude that may be lacking in our busy everyday lives. The intention is for such moments to become part of your daily life.

To cultivate a positive appreciation for the little things in your life, you can give a try to a new practice called 10 Fingers of Gratitude.

Adapted from Mindfulness for Life (Bernard, Cullen & Kuyken, 2020: 11)

4. Keeping the body in mind while listening and speaking – 50:50 awareness

As many of us know, relationships can be a significant source of stress. Surely, we can agree that our difficult emotions often get triggered during communication with others, whether they are colleagues at school or work, or members of our family. It is precisely in communicating with others that we sometimes become highly reactive, forget about our bodies, and go straight into our heads to make the conversation go as smoothly as possible. In such situations, we literally live "in our heads." Or perhaps it happens to you that while listening to someone, you start to imagine what they might say next. It often occurs that we are not present with those we are talking to. For example, you may be having lunch with a colleague, and while they are telling you something, your mind is somewhere completely else. It's peculiar that this also happens with members of our own family, whom we care so much about. So, how can we help ourselves?

From our experience, finding an anchor in the body while communicating can be helpful. 

Imagine that your mind is a boat at sea, and you anchor it in the awareness of settling sensations in your own body. It's a place in your body where you feel stability and grounding. This anchor prevents our minds from drifting on the waves of thoughts and stories. That's why we call this exercise "50:50 awareness". It's a metaphorical expression of anchoring some attention in a chosen place in our own body while dedicating a portion of attention to the communication we are currently engaged in. In doing so, we practice mindful listening and conscious speaking.

While in Body Scan practice we have ample opportunity to anchor our awareness back to the body repeatedly, when it comes to listening and speaking, sustaining mindful attention can be difficult. Hence, in 50:50 awareness, our objective will be to cultivate the skill of sustaining mindfulness of the body while participating in conversations.

Deliberately cultivating 50:50 awareness in our interactions can be beneficial. This practice can be applied both with objects (less challenging) and with people (more challenging).

Home Practice for Week Two

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.