Getting Through Hard Days

We all experience difficulties in our lives. We have hard days filled with loss, pain, threat, work, health and relational issues, and overwhelming societal and environmental challenges. How can we move through these difficult days with a bit more mindfulness and care? In this course we will practice mindfulness tools that you can mix and match depending on what works, what struggle you’re in and what’s happening inside you. You can use one practice or use all of them. Some are shorter ‘pocket practices’ that you can incorporate in the small moments in your life, some are longer for your more formal practice or at the end of the day when you want to decompress. We often try to find a solution to our difficulties through our minds, which at times can be helpful, however our bodies and hearts have so much to contribute to our way through our challenges. Join me in this trauma informed, somatic-based course to fill your toolbox with helpful skills. I look forward to engaging with you in the course classroom!

Lección 1: Acknowledgement

In our first session we will learn skills of ‘acknowledgement’. Many of us have to put on the mask that “I’m ok, I’m handling this, it’s not a problem, I’m fine.” In fact, we often are not fine! Acknowledging the truth of how we really are can actually feel liberating! By noticing and naming what we are going through can actually down-regulate the emotional intensity by bringing some horizontal integration between our right and left hemispheres. We will also talk about the importance of titration and end with a simple compassion practice.

Lección 2: Somatic Awareness

We live our lives through our body and our body’s story is really important. In the midst of stress and challenges many of us disconnect from our bodies, ignoring important signals and adding more physiological load by eating poorly, not sleeping enough and not moving in an endless loop of dys-regulation. In today’s lesson we will turn our kind and curious attention to notice how our specific challenge or stress is impacting our bodies and learn skills to be with our sensations with openness.

Lección 3: Tending And Resourcing

We typically take better care of our family, friends and co-workers than we do of ourselves. Tending and resourcing ourselves is especially important when we are going through difficult times. We will work with the inquiry question “What would be most helpful right now?” and do a practice on embodying our resources.

Lección 4: Belonging

Everyone on our beautiful planet suffers. The Buddha recognized this human experience thousands of years ago. Yet, when we are struggling, we often feel isolated and alone. And worse yet, we abandon ourselves by ignoring our body cues, not listening to our emotions and getting distracted by social media and external drama. Today’s class will focus on a “just like me” practice and a “coming back home to ourselves” practice.

Lección 5: Impermanence And Compassion

The nature of life is impermanence. Everything is changing all the time. The weather is different, changing by the hour. Our bodies change, pain changes in its intensity over time. Emotions come and go and certainly thoughts arise and fall away. The difficult time you are going through right now won’t always be the same. In our last class we will explore the experience of impermanence and end with a compassion practice for ourselves and others.

Reviews

Great micro course with some excellent tools. Really found the “of course” and “just like me” practices particularly helpful. Thank you!

Thank you for this beautiful course! Your words, energy, and guidance taught me about how to treat ourselves in hard times. I am grateful for this course 🙏 ❤️

Thanks from my heart for this course. Was so helpful.
May you be well, may you be happy

Thank you for this wonderful course! This is a resource I will keep going back to. Your wisdom and words always soothe!❤️

Thank you Bhanu for this beautiful course. The practices that you teach are so healing and at the same time so straightforward. They have such a deep impact every time I use them. 💚

Thanks Bhanu Joy. As always, this course was very supportive, especially while I'm 2 weeks into grieving the sudden passing of by best mate- fur baby.

Outstanding little course chock full of truly useful tools for when difficult feelings arise. Wish I could give this ten stars: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you Bhanu - such wisdom offered for enduring those hard days. I found this course to be compassionate, nuanced, practical and gentle - all at once!

Bhanu shares her deep understandings of what it is to be human. This is for everybody. Learning that our body is our first port of call to enable us to heal ourselves, brings the healing we need to forever change the course of our lives.

Wonderful course! Very helpful and comforting in difficult times.