Category: mindfulness

by Kristine Enger

Walking on the beach early this morning, as the sun was rising, a lady was sitting cross-legged on the sand playing the guitar. As I walked past, I thought to myself, “what a lovely way to start the day, with some live music.”
I carried on walking, enjoying the soothing, yet somewhat repetitive 3 or 4 chords she was playing. I walked right to the end of the beach, and as I reached the fishing village, I turned back. Thirty minutes or so later, I again passed the lady with the guitar, and with some amusement noticed that she was still playing the exact same chords.

I pondered that in the meantime, I had enjoyed an exploration of the seashore, looked at shells and crabs, found a sand dollar, said ‘hello’ to a few early risers, moved my body, whereas she was in the exact same spot, absorbed playing the same repetitive chords.

In a flash of insight, I realised that most of us live our lives playing the same tune over and over. It is as if we keep reading from the same script, literally playing it safe by staying well within the confines of the tried and tested, the carefully orchestrated narrative that is our life.
“Be curious about life”, we teach in mindfulness, “go down a different road, explore a new neighbourhood”. What would happen if we said yes instead of no, took a risk even, you’ll never know unless you try, right?

This way, we won’t stay stuck, repeating the same melody over and over, but open ourselves to the next song… and the next … on the playlist that makes up our lives.

By Maureen Stols

dedicated to our Christmas Angel – Kimberlie 

By Helen Williams

Part 4 in a series on Conscious Relationships leading up to our November Conscious Relationships workshop. Read Part 1, 2 & 3 here: 

• Love & Heartbreak
• Codependency & Growth
• Conscious Communication as a Relationship Growth Goal

Conscious relationships = commitment to growth as an individual, as a couple, as a community where we are an addition to another’s life, but not the foundation on which it is built. Growth is the goal, both for ourselves, our partner and our relationship.

To know and to be known, to love and to be loved in return, to feel visible, safe, wanted, precious, special and to be able to trust this.  This is conscious connection, and this connection opens us deeply within ourselves to be able to be our highest best for each other.

It is the notion of deliberate intent, of being able to trust your own feelings, your intuitive sense, and to be able to communicate that freely to another and to know that you will be respected, secure and not held in judgment.

This, of course, requires an understanding of your own worthiness, your own specialness, in such a way that you come to know that partnership with the other is not to get this from them, but to live it within you.  Relationships become more conscious with the understanding that you are responsible for commitment to your own growth as an individual.  You first, then the other, then the relationship.

Mindfulness practice helps us to connect more authentically to ourselves, makes us aware of the inner voice of shame, blame and guilt, the voice of unlove we feed on in ourselves, and directs us toward a clearer sense of our own conscious connection within.

At Mindful ME we delight in the teachings of mindfulness as a vehicle for personal, relationship and community growth.  We see and experience this growth happening daily within our mindful community.

Come join us as we experiment with conscious connection in our daily lives.

Contact us here for more details or to book.

by Helen Williams

Part 3 in a series on Conscious Relationships leading up to our November Conscious Relationships workshop. Read Part 1 & 2 here: 

• Love & Heartbreak
• Codependency & Growth

Conscious relationships = commitment to growth as an individual, as a couple, as a community where we are an addition to another’s life, but not the foundation on which it is built.

Growth is the goal, both for ourselves, our partner and our relationship.
The opening sentence for many a couple session is, ‘’We are in trouble through lack of
communication’’. This oh-so-familiar phrase with a lifetime of pain behind it. Learning to communicate consciously is as much about learning how to hear, how to deeply listen and ‘’hold a space for each other’’ as it is about learning how to speak, to use words, body language and emotional wisdom.
Our fear of being hurt, being vulnerable, or revealing our shames and fears, means we have a lifetime of learning how to be defensive and offensive when we feel unsafe. I have long believed that we are conditioned into our defences from an early age and that it is completely possible to relearn new and powerful ways of communicating with each other. The experience of being really heard, really held, and really seen, and still loved, is one of our deepest longings and therefore also one of our deepest fears.

On Tuesday nights in November Helen will be running a series of workshops where we will explore some tried and true approaches, and some not so familiar, to make a new way of communicating available to us. To book your spot on our Conscious Relationships workshops contact us here. 

by Kristine Enger

As human beings, we feel confused from time to time. Some of us even spend chunks of our lives in a confused state. Perhaps there is a decision we feel we must make about a relationship, a job, or a certain path that we had hoped to take in life. A niggling feeling something is off with the status quo. We feel stuck, we want to move on, yet at the same time we cannot see through the fog, there is no clarity. We don’t know where to go or what to do.

As the frustration grows, we start questioning, when are we going to have clarity, how can we get out of this confused state that we find ourselves in?

We spend time and energy analysing the contents of our confusion, rummaging through the filing cabinets of our minds looking for answers based on past experiences. We run possible future scenarios on repeat, easily causing heaps of anxiety for ourselves. We scurry around, asking for advice from friends and relatives, looking for answers, a way out, a new direction.

There is a saying that if you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Could it be so that no action is required and we’re off the hook until the fog lifts, seemingly all by itself? Could it be so simple that we are just required to ‘sit it out’, that the answers will come, and the path will appear?

Some consider confusion to be a good thing. That ‘in between stage’, that precious time in between the old and the new, where you are creating a new normal for yourself that has not yet materialised.

Everything might still look the same in your life, the same home, relationship and job, yet it feels like you have left something behind. The shoe no longer fits. You are in the process of attaining a new level of being, seeing, understanding. A more expansive way of viewing the world and your place in it. A new perspective.

In mindfulness we learn how to fall in love with where we are right now, and that from there everything will come to us, including clarity and the solutions we are looking for.

So instead of wishing that things were different, we can learn to trust confusion, and really sink into it, and accept it. Even look forward to it, embrace it, as it inevitably leads us to something new.

Spending less time analysing the content of the confusion, we find that clarity arrives sooner. Grounded action and which steps to follow next, will inevitably become clear.

Confusion becomes an exploration of what is present.

by Helen Williams

This is part 2 in a series of blogs leading up to our Conscious Relationships workshop in November 2018. Click here to read Part 1. 

As we continue our exploration about conscious relationships, in preparation for the upcoming workshop in November,  let’s look at what being conscious in a relationship would mean.

Conscious relationships = commitment to growth as an individual, as a couple, as a community where we are an addition to another’s life, but not the foundation on which it is built. Growth is the goal, both for ourselves, our partner and our relationship.

Commitment to growth as an individual is often the first faltering point of a new relationship as couples tend to focus wholeheartedly on each other in the early days and often this means forgetting to caretake your own needs and becoming absorbed into your partner’s life agenda.  It also is a most convenient way of projecting your hopes, dreams, fears and wounds onto your partner instead of staying responsible for them yourself.  This often means becoming lost on your own pathway without even realising it.

Being an ‘addition but not the foundation’ on which the relationship is built, means investigating co-dependency, a topic close to my heart and one which often shines a light on a problem area bringing fresh clarity and insights.   Come prepared to learn ways of identifying co-dependency in your relationships and the impact of it. There’s much to explore here and many tools are available to navigate this tricky way of relating.

For more info on the Conscious Relationships workshop series click here. 

Contact us to book your spot for our Conscious Relationships workshop or to book a private individual or couple’s session with Helen. 

by Helen Williams