The next 8 week Mindfulness for Stress course will start next Saturday at the Leominster Community Centre, 9.30 - 12 noon.

​"A very helpful course which goes beyond stress management and looks at approaching life in general from a different perspective. Highly recommended, everyone should try this course"
​MB, Hereford.



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Often we do things in what is called 'autopilot'. We may be eating, driving, walking or washing up the dishes but our mind is elsewhere. We may be speculating, comparing, remembering, planning or in some phantasy or other. So the practice is to recognise this and then 'tune in' to what you are hearing, seeing, tasting, touching and feeling. Become aware of sensations now. Simple, difficult yet potentially profound as we can then begin to experience ourselves and life in a more immediate, rich and fluid way.

It seems that lots of us can be very self-critical. A small mistake, like a fast growing weed, can quickly escalate and grow in to another excuse for beating ourselves up or comparing ourselves negatively with others or some imagined ideal. Mindfulness suggests it is beneficial to begin to turn towards such criticism with kindness and curiosity as a way of ultimately disarming it. As always the emphasis is on shifting the focus of our awareness from the critical thoughts to the realm of the senses here and now. Asking ourselves what is happening in the body now? How is this anxiety or criticism manifesting physically through sensation. Reminding ourselves to breathe, indeed to breathe in to the areas of painful sensation. Doing this we can begin to discover how our experience is, in fact, fluid and changing, and it is often our thoughts that interpret experience as fixed or hopeless. This shift from the cognitive to the realm of the senses is a gradual training but in time, with appropriate practice, we can begin to transform habitual self-criticism to self-kIndness. I visited a local garden centre and noticed that they were selling a number of plants that are commonly called ‘weeds’.  But what is a weed? Commonly defined as a plant in the wrong place we can begin to discover that so called weeds may have a beauty and scent of their own. Perhaps they represent a neglected aspect or part of us that needs our attention and friendship.
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I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                        And nothing
happens! Nothing....Silence.....Waves......

_ Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

​by Juan Ramon Jimenez
                          

                         

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes., 
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

​by Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman barks.