Introduction to Mindfulness - Dean Amory

Exercise 7: Deora Core Elements of Training
source: The DEORA Mindfulness Program by TONY BATES and
FAYE SCANLAN for Headstrong, the National Centre for Youth
Mental Health
Excerpt of Chapter 2 - Learning to practice mindfulness: Core
elements of training within the 8-week Deora mindfulness program
“Time and again we miss out on the great treasures of our lives
because we are so restless. In our minds we are always somewhere
else. We are seldom in the place where we stand and in the time that
is now.” (John O'Donnohue, Anamchara, 1997)
Human beings find it very hard to be still. We are frightened of our
inner lives and spend a great deal of our energies running from
ourselves. One of the participants in this Deora program described
how having a bath was impossible for him. He simply couldn’t cope
with being alone with himself. If we are to achieve any kind of
friendship with ourselves, as we are, we have to find a way back to
being at ease in our own company.
There are many wounds that we carry in our minds and bodies, which
make it hard to come into a place of stillness where we connect with
who we are. Mindfulness meditation is a simple practice that allows
us to come home to ourselves and to rest in the present moment.
It teaches us how to ground ourselves and to achieve a perspective on
our thoughts and feelings that is liberating. We learn to see our
emotions as part of who we are, but not as the defining element of
who we are. Without the freedom that this perspective brings, we
have little choice but to behave in ways that shut out our inner lives.
Addictive behaviours are often an attempt to escape distress and
achieve an altered state of consciousness that feels tolerable, if only
briefly. Mindfulness gives us a different kind of freedom, where we
become able to connect with our experience, hold it in awareness and
consider more adaptive ways to manage our inner and outer lives. We
learn to cultivate a radically different relationship to negative
experiences through accepting them and seeing them for what they
are. Switching from avoidance and self-criticism to acceptance is a
key feature of mindfulness training.
119