Deepen Your Meditation Practice With Poetry

In this opening session we discuss what mindfulness is, how studies of mindfulness have grown dramatically in the past twenty years, and we highlight some of the main health benefits of mindfulness. In the meditation practice and poetry, we focus on meeting our experience with kindness and acceptance and making space to welcome our experience—both the pleasant and the unpleasant.

In this session we focus on cultivating peace here and now. We highlight how peace is always possible when we open wholeheartedly to what we are experiencing. And peace can only be experienced here and now—not in the future or the past. In today's practice we work with the breath as a focus in meditation to help us be here—and come back to when the mind moves into thought.

In today’s session we discuss the metaphor of the journey as a common theme in spiritual practice and how mindfulness is a key skill in helping us move from stress and suffering to greater freedom. In the practice we focus on meeting our experience as it is and deepening awareness and kindness. We practice cultivating present-moment awareness and coming back when the mind wanders—and the poems remind us that our practice is a journey and that we can find peace and joy whatever the conditions.

In today’s session we discuss two kinds of awareness—the first focused on an object (like breath or a mantra--a word or phrase that we repeat) and the second, an open receptive awareness where everything—sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts, tastes, smells, images—can come and go like clouds passing through an open sky. In the meditation session, we practice cultivating an open, spacious awareness, being aware of different experiences and letting them come and go without resistance or clinging.

In today’s session we discuss why it is wise for us to open to and allow ourselves to fully feel what we are experiencing—in accepting our experience, we go beyond it; we’re not ruled or controlled by it. But when we resist our experience, our very resistance keeps what is painful present and likely to return, perhaps in a new form—what we resist persists. In the practice and today’s poems, we focus on working mindfully with difficulties and challenges in meditation, meeting them with kindness and acceptance.

In today’s session we discuss the important role that our attitudes play in cultivating mindfulness in meditation and in daily life. We focus on the attitudes that support us being present in meditation—particularly, acceptance, kindness, and curiosity—and practice meeting our experience without resistance or judgement and with kindness.

In today’s session we explore four guidelines for mindfulness meditation—‘it’s like this’; ‘pay attention’; ‘welcome the guests’; and ‘come back’—as a support in mindfulness practice. In the meditation practice we use these guidelines to help cultivate kind awareness of our present-moment experience and come back when our attention moves into thinking.

In today’s session we discuss how mindfulness is a training of the mind and that thinking is in no way a problem in mindfulness meditation. If we can recognize when we have been lost in thought and come back to the breath and to the body, each time we do this we are strengthening our capacity to be present and creating new and more helpful pathways in the brain that are more supportive of awareness and ease. In the meditation practice we focus on opening to our experience, meeting what is here with kindness and acceptance—and coming back when the mind moves into thought—beginning again in any moment.

In today’s session we discuss how stress is a natural part of life and if we can experience the symptoms and expressions of stress mindfully, and let these feelings and sensations come and go, then we can come back into balance after a stressful experience. Mindfulness is a key way of working with stress—helping us to stay grounded in our direct experience rather than in the stories in our mind. We focus in the meditation on working with stressors when they arise in meditation or in daily life.

In this final session we explore the practice of self-compassion, which can be a powerful support, particularly when we are working with difficulties. Self-compassion has three key components: 1) self-kindness—being gentle and understanding towards ourselves rather than critical and judgmental; 2) recognizing our common humanity—feeling connected with others rather than feeling isolated and alienated; and 3) mindfulness—holding our experience in balanced awareness rather than identifying with it or avoiding it. In the meditation practice we cultivate self-compassion, using phrases and inviting the arising of kindness towards ourselves.