Introduction to Mindfulness - Dean Amory

A member responded to the above account with the observation that
she wasn’t so much cradling the feeling as “linking arms with it,
going down the road with it, not holding it.”
One of the team summed up the message we were giving as “it’s
holding something still rather than letting the puppy take you for a
walk”. This message wasn’t completely clear and some people felt
confused.
Once again, clarity came from within the group itself. The challenge
as somebody described is “to find your way back after you’ve been
taken for a ride”. And someone else added: “It’s about stopping, if
you go with it it’s like a snowball. It gets bigger and sucks everything
in its path. For years I felt lonely, I was hurting…. It’s to hold it, to
accept it. At home I get a belt of ‘you’re lonely’ or ‘you’re an eejit’…
it’s about getting up off the chair… if it hurts feel the hurt: Is it just in
my heart or is it in my legs or my body? It’s to feel the pain, not to
jump up and run away. At the beginning I thought they were all off
their heads (when they told me to ‘feel the pain), I thought ‘I’ve been
feeling it for years!’ but then I stopped. I felt the pain. It was
everywhere. In my heart, my head my legs… now it hasn’t come back
for a long time. For years I had been making my problems bigger and
bigger and the pain was getting bigger and bigger”.
Yoga followed and the energy within the group rose steadily. Session
ended with a very quiet and deep sitting practice. Increasingly there is
less need to provide guided instructions for mindful meditation and
people have become very comfortable with silence.
Post session analysis:
The team felt we needed to make sure to remove extra chairs when
members fail to show up. This allows people to sit more closely
together and helps build cohesion. Given that it became obvious very
early on in the group that their energy was low, it might have been
wiser to abandon the agenda momentarily and ask the group what
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