Caring For Ourselves And The World Enjoying Conscious Wellbeing

Lesson 1 gives an overview of the course of conscious well-being. We will then ask "who am I?" A good way to explore this is to notice our habits. Our habits show who we really are - rather than who we like to think that we are. Meditation is a good way to discover our habits: When we sit down without having to do anything, our habits will play out. This is a good starting point for cultivating what benefit us and limit what does not. You will get tips for setting up a practice for noticing your habits through the week - both in meditation and outside. As an experiment you will be invited to reduce input and discover new sources of happiness.

Lesson 2 helps you explore your deeper values. There are many ways to talk about values and I point to a couple of research that has looked at values globally. I then talk briefly about my perception of the values of caring, fairness, wisdom and freedom, and help you identify some of your key values. We will use a variation of mindfulness with breathing to explore this theme.

In lesson 3 we explore the heart and our emotions. It is our emotions that run our lives and our habits, and not as most people think - our heads. So what do we feel? And how do we respond to grief and joy or pleasure? Our response to grief and joy will determine how open we are to live in accordance with our deeper values. This in turn will condition how openly and creatively we engage with life. We will end with a version of meditation on loving kindness (metta bhavana).

Lesson 4 is about imagining how you could live more in accordance with your values, and finding ways to do that. With a growing awareness of our habits, feelings and how we live our lives, there will also emerge impulses to change. This may start as private dreams of what we could do, and sometimes we start talking about it. This is usually met with objections, either from ourselves or those around us. Rather than listen to or brush the objections aside, I invite you to match them with your deeper values and see if you want to listen to them - or not. Then you start living in accordance with your deeper values. We will explore this with a guided contemplative meditation. I then invite you to experiment with this in your everyday life until the next lesson. Good luck ;-)

Lesson 5 broadens out the horizon to connect with all living beings so we can relate to them based on our values. You may already have experimented with contacting another human and noticed how that went. Now I invite you to connect with other living beings – potentially the whole earth, or Gaia as it is sometimes called. We will look at how we can feel held and protected, and how we can hold and protect others. We will do this with a variation of the meditation on loving kindness (metta bhavana) which includes touching the earth and being touched by the earth. This can be a strong practice triggering deep sorrows, or traumatic experiences. If you are aware of such traumas or are in active therapy, you might want to talk about this with a therapist before the lesson. If something comes up during the meditation, you might want to stop half-way to give your whole being plenty of time to digest and integrate this new learning. You can come back and complete the lesson later. I then also recommend speaking to a friend or therapist about what you experience. If you have no one to turn to send me a message.

In lesson 6 we will look at how we can manifest what we have explored in this course - and enjoy it! One way to do this is to look to our heroines and heroes, and learn from and be inspired by them. If you don't know of any - find one or several heroes or heroines! This can be real people or fantasy figures. It can also be abstract symbols or sounds. To live in accordance with our values the values must find expressions. If we make a beautiful little 'alter' or 'shrine' with a symbol of our value(s) on it, it can serve as a reminder and inspiration. If we keep this 'alive' by adding to it, changing it, beautifying it, it will nourish our desire to manifest this in our life. If we then make small changes to express these values in our daily life, and sit down in front of our 'alter' to reflect on and enjoy the effects of this, we are creating a positive spiral in our life that will bring us deeper and deeper into what we value and how we want to live our lives. This is a deeply satisfying process and what Anna and I call 'conscious well-being'. We will explore this with an open imaginative meditation. If you have questions about how to do this, don't hesitate to ask questions or get in touch. Good luck ;-)