Introduction to Mindfulness - Dean Amory

just somewhere else most of the time… I was trying to be
mindful of everyday things”
- “Some days I have wobbly thoughts, but I try to ‘let it be’ and just
come back to my breathing”
- “For the first time in my life I’ve noticed how nasty I am to
myself…”
The major portion of the first half of this session was given over to
25 minutes Yoga, followed by 15 minute sitting meditation (with 1-
minute breaks where we checked that people were doing ok)).
Emotions
We discussed emotions as being the body’s language for how we were
experiencing the world. Emotions were messengers that were trying
to alert us to something that was happening between us and the
world. We could disregard them or we could ‘invite them in’ and
listen to what they might be alerting us to. Our emotional reactions
can be very subjective and therefore do not always correspond
accurately with what’s happening in the external world, but they do
identify very accurately how we are feeling in ourselves and thus they
provide us with important information.
They are a more reliable source of information than our automatic
thoughts. And they can also be a good radar system, telling us when
something in our world isn’t quite right.
The problem for most of us is that we’re on auto pilot most of the
time and we don’t even notice what we’re feeling until our emotions
are so strong that they overwhelm us. Mindfulness teaches us how to
come off autopilot and take time to notice painful emotions as they
begin to gather force. And as one member pointed out, “if we don’t
listen, we can end up dead.”
We read and discussed Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” and I
offered to show DVD of Thich Nhat Hahn next week where he
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