Sacred Rest: Realigning with Our Deepest Values (February 2023)
As a culture, we are resistant to the idea of “rest.” You may have heard the quip, “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” (And if we keep up this pace, that might be sooner than we think!)
In this Mindful Meet Up, we’ll examine our resistance to rest. We’ll explore the idea of sacred rest, looking at the spectrum of different kinds of rest we need. We’ll consider how sacred rest can allow us to access our true nature, our wisdom self, and how guidance from this sacred center can lead us to align more closely to our deepest values.
Using discussion, mindfulness practice and journaling, we’ll consider ways to access this sacred rest more frequently, making it an integral part of our lives.
Accepting Myself: The Path for Healing Ourselves and Our Relationships (March 2023)
In our culture, the idea of “accepting myself” might seem deceptively easy but there are many barriers to this process. Some are barriers that exist in our culture but many of the barriers are found inside of us.
Truly accepting ourselves has positive ramifications in healing ourselves and improving our relationships with others. And, paradoxically, accepting myself prepares fertile ground for making positive changes in myself in an atmosphere of love and compassion for this “human me.”
In this Mindful Meet Up, through discussion, mindfulness practices and journaling, we discover this path to healing.
Finding the Healing Path through Difficult Emotions (April 2023)
We all experience difficult emotions many times a day, ranging from a small irritation to deep grief or intense anger, and everything in between. Our understandable reaction to these difficult emotions is to ignore them, minimize them, distract ourselves with our devices, food, drink, sleeping, bingewatching – anything to escape the pain difficult emotions bring.
But as Robert Frost cautioned us, “The only way out is through.” In this Mindful Meet Up, we’ll explore ways through difficult emotions that will promote their healing. We’ll discuss titration and finding refuge when these emotions seem overwhelming. We’ll learn ways of befriending these emotions in order to hear the message they have for us.
Through discussion, mindfulness practices and journaling, we’ll uncover the road to healing our emotions and ourselves.
A Self-Care Recommitment (May 2023)
We’re all aware that self-care is a critical component in our physical, mental and emotional health, but it’s so easy for self-care to fall into the cracks of our over-committed lives. There is always someone or something calling for our attention to be cared for. Further, because we’ve been encouraged to prioritize others’ needs over our own, our commitment to self-care withers.
In this Mindful Meet Up, we’ll explore how we can recommit to caring for ourselves. We’ll examine barriers to self-care we might find either internally in ourselves or externally in the culture. We’ll consider the extensive research that supports self-care as a path to improving our own health and wellbeing while at the same time positively impacting the wellbeing of others around us. We’ll take time to consider ways we are currently caring for ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually and ways we could expand our self-care in those areas.
Compassionate Curiosity: An Antidote to an Unexamined Life (July 2023)
Socrates reminds us that an unexamined life isn’t worth living. Yet over time, we can become less open and curious and more entrenched in our judgments and beliefs about ourselves, others and life in general. We lose flexibility and creativity in this closed mind state. We stay trapped in our conditioned assumptions about ourselves and others and life.
Cultivating compassionate curiosity sparks our fascination with what’s possible in our life, decreases depression and fatigue, deepens our relationships, and increases our commitment to live our fullest life.
In this Mindful Meet Up, we’ll explore compassionate curiosity as an antidote to an unexamined life. Through discussion, mindfulness practice and journaling, we’ll experience compassionate curiosity as a way of unwinding our entrenched views of ourselves, others and our life in general.
Learning to Sing Our Own Song: Aligning with Our True Nature (September 2023)
It has been said that our only goal in life is to learn to sing our own song. The path to learning our unique song is through aligning to our True Nature, that in-born, always present, always available Essential Self, our Innate Intelligence. Our True Nature, to quote Thomas Merton, is the part of us that is shining like the sun. True nature is curious, compassionate, calm. It is a reliable source of wisdom and guidance in making wise choices about how we live our day-to-day lives.
Through discussion, mindfulness practices and journaling, we will learn the process of aligning to our True Nature and of asking that Essential Self for guidance in our day-to-day lives.
Thoughts: Help or Hindrance in Mindfulness Practice (November 2023)
The mind – what a conundrum. Both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the mind can be an ally in supporting our best actions through planning, strategizing, deciding, implementing. On the other hand, the mind can be a hindrance, filled with thoughts that are ruminating, depressive, circular, all consuming, running our lives without our being conscious of its impact.
In this Mindful Meet Up, through discussion, mindfulness practices and journaling, we’ll explore ways to enhance the supportive aspects of the mind while recognizing and managing the more unhelpful aspects of the mind.