Introduction to Mindfulness - Dean Amory

Another learning was the need to introduce Yoga much earlier on,
probably from the opening session. Due to the unavailability of our
yoga teacher until week 3, we were not able to introduce this
component of the program until the group was up and running. One
participant reported that he didn’t feel he “got what the whole
mindfulness thing was”. As he put it: “Mindfulness seems a bit farfetched.
It seemed like the people who were doing it were so far
ahead and they were just trying to dumb it down for us… they could
have talked more about how they started, their own difficulties in
doing it and what helped…it would be great if you could get an
addict to teach it”.
Our hope would be that through this report, the concept of
mindfulness will be brought alive, off the pages of text book
definitions, by conveying the participants’ own experience of
practicing mindfulness, of their struggles as well as their gains.
One thing that definitely came through is that it’s not easy. In the
words of one participant “there are days I’d rather sit and watch grass
grow than listen to my own breathing”. We would hope that their
words and their stories will go some way to ‘de-mystifying’
mindfulness for people who may be interested in participating in
future. In addition, we would hope that some of the participants will
eventually go on to train in mindfulness themselves and teach future
programs. Two of the participants were exploring the possibility of
going on a mindfulness retreat in Plum Village at the time of the
follow-up interviews which was encouraging in this regard.
The impact of mindfulness that was most relevant to this group is
that it taught them to be less afraid of stopping and being with their
experience, however easy or difficult it was, in the here and now.
Participants described in various ways how they had learned to stop
running form the present, through distractions of one sort or another
and to simply be with themselves. They discovered their reason for
running was a fear of being overwhelmed by some feeling they had if
they were to acknowledge its presence. However, they discovered for
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